Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
This blog is meant to be a sort of curated Museum of Heather’s Mind/What I would sell in a store of my Favorite Things. And if we were creating a physical space with all my favorite things, there would definitely be a corner devoted to Anne of Green Gables. When I was about 9, I…
This week I finished One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson. I first discovered Bill Bryson with his Notes from a Big Country column he wrote when he returned home to the US after living in the UK for 20 years. I had only lived in the UK for two years, but I also found myself…
I’ve been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism about, well, Roosevelt, Taft, and journalists (as the name would so cleverly imply). Doris Kearns Goodwin was actually my university’s commencement speaker the year I graduated, though I don’t really remember much about it except for…
I’ve been reading The Men Who United the States by Simon Winchester, a history of the US told through the elements of wood, metal, water, fire, and air, which is an interesting lens through which to view history. The wood chapter, for example, was all about when wood was the primary material; the homes the early…