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On this Day in History September 20th – Let’s Visit Georgia, Azerbaijan and Central African Republic!

One of the aspects of my job at Lippincott Jacobs the I really enjoyed was making maps to be included in various reports. Typically, they were environmental maps showing the soils, geology, or the drainage areas on an around the area of a proposed project. To develop these maps I used several various GIS software. The point is that I love maps and geography, I like to know where places are in relationship to me and the rest of the world and it really upsets me when people, like my wife, don’t know or care where countries are located.I know it doesn’t really matter to your everyday life, but I just like that it is important as a citizen of the world that you know where countries are!! With that said, as I was looking through the various anniversaries and holidays that are observed around the world today, I thought maybe that’s a way to get a little geography in this blog. So here goes.. read more

Civil War: September 14, 1862 The Battle of South Mountain – Rebels Hold, Lee retreats, McClellan dawdles!

Fox’s Gap at the battle of South Mountain, MD. Sunday, Sept. 14, 1862

Yesterday I wrote about Barton Mitchell’s discovery of Special Order 191 concerning Robert E Lee‘s troop movements during his Maryland Campaign in 1862. The discovery of the orders provided information to Gen George McClellan, then commander of the Union Army allowing him to locate and pursue Lee’s troops. Lee had divided his troops and sent the troops under Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws to western Maryland to capture Harper’s Ferry. To continue his pursuit McClellan’s troops and stop McLaws and Lee. McClellan’s troops had to cross South Mountain, which is the name for the extension of the Blue Ridge Mountains into and through the western portions of Maryland. There are three major gap’s through the mountains. From south to north they are Crampton’s Gap, Turner’s Gap and Fox’s Gap. read more

On this Date in History – Corporal Barton Mitchell finds Robert E Lee's Special Order 191! Did he save the Union??

Sometimes the course of human history is latered by the actions of men and women that are well-known to us, and then

Copy of Lost Order displayed at Crampton’s Gap, Maryland.

sometimes the person is someone who no one knows or little remembers. On September 13, 1862 Corporal Barton W. Mitchell,of the 27th Indiana Volunteers, part of the Union XII Corps, became one of the later. On that date, Mitchell discovered an envelope with three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper at a campground recently vacated by Maj. Gen. D. H. Hill, a subordinate of Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Mitchell realized the significance of the find and gave it to his Sargent John M Bloss. The papers went up the chain of command along the way an aide to Brig. Gen. Alpheus S. Williams…. read more

On this Date in History – Corporal Barton Mitchell finds Robert E Lee’s Special Order 191! Did he save the Union??

Sometimes the course of human history is latered by the actions of men and women that are well-known to us, and then

Copy of Lost Order displayed at Crampton’s Gap, Maryland.

Can We Save Our Country From the 1% ?- Support a Constitutional Amendment to End Citizens United!!

Since I have been writing this blog one of the things that I have been crying for is to tax the rich.It is time that we have to start fighting for the lower 99% of America. Time for us start leveling that playing field. Time to start rebuilding the middle class. Time to start giving people back an American Dream to shoot for. But you know what, the rich don’t care because according to many ……

The class war in American politics is over. The rich won.

There are no two words in politics I hate hearing more than “class warfare.”
You’d think I’d like the term. For the last seven years, I’ve been researching class and politics in America. Class warfare should be my thing. But it’s just a huge lie, a metaphor used by elites to cover up the fact that they’ve already won. The simple fact is you can’t have a war when there’s only one side. And right now, one class of Americans is almost entirely locked out of our political institutions. read more

Finally discovering why "Colonel" is pronounced the way it is!! Leads to Gallagher and I Love Lucy!

The other day when I was writing about Dorothy Parker I found an article of her quotes at Mental Floss. While I was on the site, I saw this article on

“Colonel” Klink

the sidebar Why Is ‘Colonel’ Spelled That Way?.

English spelling is bizarre. We know that. From the moment we learn about silent “e” in school, our innocent expectations that sound and spelling should neatly match up begin to fade away, and soon we accept that “eight” rhymes with “ate,” “of” rhymes with “love,” and “to” sounds like “too” sounds like “two.” If we do sometimes briefly pause to wonder at these eccentricities, we quickly resign ourselves to the fact that there must be reasons—stuff about history and etymology and sound changing over time. Whatever. English. LOL. Right? It is what it is. But sometimes English takes it a step too far, does something so brazen and shameless we can’t just let it slide. That’s when we have to throw our shoulders back, put our hands on our hips and ask, point blank, what is the deal with the word “colonel”? “Colonel” is pronounced just like “kernel.” How did this happen? From borrowing the same word from two different places. In the 1500s, English borrowed a bunch of military vocabulary from French, words like cavalerie, infanterie, citadelle, canon, and also, coronel. The French had borrowed them from the Italians, then the reigning experts in the art of war, but in doing so, had changed colonello to coronel. Read more read more

Finally discovering why “Colonel” is pronounced the way it is!! Leads to Gallagher and I Love Lucy!

The other day when I was writing about Dorothy Parker I found an article of her quotes at Mental Floss. While I was on the site, I saw this article on

“Colonel” Klink

the sidebar Why Is ‘Colonel’ Spelled That Way?.

Political Thoughts…End the Police Shootings… there has to be a better way!!

The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri is one in a seemingly endless string of white police officers using excessive force on African-Americans. Maybe it will be the one to wake us up, and help us put an end to this practice, but more than likely that’s just wishful thinking. Right now there is just too much, dare I say hatred, for people of color in America, brown and black, that has been fueled by the political right! That political right has waged a successful war not only against poor people of color, making them out to be the “takers” in our society, but also in making the left, those who fight for equal rights for all regardless of skin color, sex, or sexual orientation, the cause of their problems. That the programs that were created by Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” are the ones that have trapped people in poverty and taken away their will to work and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Well, I would say that it’s the captains of industries fault. They are the ones that shut down the manufacturing plants and outsourced good paying jobs, they are the ones that destroyed the unions and took away people’s hopes and dreams of a good paying job and left gaping economic black holes in our inner cities! Hell, they’ve even rigged the election system and drawn election district lines such that areas that would elect a Democrat in fact elect Republicans and now are attempting to take away the right to vote through voter id laws!! read more

This Day in History – August 22, 1893 Dorothy Parker was born – what a woman she was!

: (l-r) Art Samuels, Charles MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott

Born on this date August 22 in 1893, was one of the wittiest people ever, Ms. Dorothy Parker! Here’s some background on Ms Parker for those of you who don’t know her and considering she died in 1967, that may be many of you! From Wikipedia:

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist. read more

Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power – Now We Know!

After several months, yesterday I finally finished Seth Rosenfeld’s terrific book Subversives – The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power.
usually when I ‘m reading a book like this and I then pick up other books while reading it, I most time don’t go back to the book. This book an exception the book is just so good and the story that it tells about the FBI and the student protests at the University of California so much a part of my past that I couldn’t give up! While I was at the University of Florida (1970-1974) I was involved in two campus demonstrations one concerning black enrollment and studies and the other an antiwar demonstration after the announcement of the mining of Haiphong Harbor, etc nether approached the violence that was seen at Berkeley!
Subversives is a fascinating book based on over 250,000 pages of FBI files, whose release the agency spent over a million dollars trying to stop, it took Seth Rosenfeld over thirty years to get the files released, but the fight was worth it. Subversives tells the story of the FBI’s program to combat the student protests not only at Berkeley but throughout the country. The book chronicles the story of the FBI’s surveillance, infiltration,planted news stories,poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists all revolving around the Free Speech Movement and other protests at the University of California , Berkeley!
The book centers around the intertwining of the lives of Clark Kerr, the liberal Quaker President of the University, Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement and Ronald Reagan, former actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild and future President of the US. While we all knew that the FBI was keeping track of leftist radicals during this period I don’t know if anyone knew the extents of the agency’s actions, beyond J. Edgar Hoover’s inner circle!! Since I was young and not that politically active in the early to mid-60s a lot of the action in the book was new to me, I particularly unfamiliar or forgot the fight and protest that arose around People’s Park. What really struck me about Reagan was how the events of these early years shaped his actions as President.
Here’s some praise for the book…..
“Subversives is more than a documentary history it has the insight that comes only with relentless reporting. This book is the classic history of our most powerful police agency and one of the most influential political figures of our time secretly joining forces” – Lowell Bergman investigative report for The New York Times and Frontline
“Subversives will shock even those who have become used to the national security state and its excesses. With this book,Seth Rosenfeld restores the California tradition of courageous muckracking of Lincoln Steffens, and the sharp indictment of the powerful that we associate with Jack London.” Ishmael Reed author of Juice! and Mumbo Jumbo.
If you are someone like me who lived through the sixties and seventies this book will bring back a lot of memories and maybe bring back some of that old fire. The actions of the police and government officials during this time should be studied because as we watch the action in Ferguson, Missouri, the police are responding in much the same way as they did back then, and you know what they say “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” Let’s hope not! (Book 20 for 2014)! read more

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