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…
So one of the things I do in my “free <cough, ahem> time” is a podcast on Renaissance English History. I’ve been doing it in spurts for several years, and it’s a chance to learn new things as I research topics and episodes. On my Bucket List is getting three advanced degrees – an MBA,…
Recently I went to a LA Chamber Orchestra talk on the history of Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, a work that is famous for throwing out the rulebook of the concerto form (and also having some bits that sound so much like Chopin, it’s eerie). The conductor mentioned a term I hadn’t heard before – Diabolus in…
The Bipolar Chronicles are my series of personal posts about being recently diagnosed as having bipolar disorder (which I thought was a nasty case of post partum depression) and now being on three psychotropic drugs, and figuring out what I need to manage that, and be a mother to the miraculous awesome Hannah Zen, and…
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…
So something personal about me is that I’m dealing with a diagnosis in May of being bipolar. I had thought I was dealing with a nasty case of postpartum depression, but in fact, it is actually bipolar disorder. So now I’m on 3 regular meds (I worked so hard to have a natural childbirth, and…
I’ve been watching the Trial of Richard III on youtube – there is no end to the geekiness. What, you might ask, is the Trial of Richard III? Let’s start at the very beginning… 1480’s. Wars of the Roses. Medieval England is in shambles as one family has been tearing itself apart for several decades….
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’m a big fan of baroque music that doesn’t require a lot of thought and concentration. The equivalent of somebody like, say, James Taylor. He’s soothing, and nice to have on while you’re reading or something, because he isn’t very demanding. He’s going to Carolina and you don’t need to know much else other than…
I recently watched a few episodes of my Favorite TV Show Ever, Great British Railway Journeys; a trip from Brighton to Crystal Palace. I first heard the words Crystal Palace used together in a sentence when my voice teacher lived at the Crystal Palace train stop in south London. Yes, I spent a year singing…