On 10 May, 1819, John Quincy Adams received in the mail a parcel he had been expecting. He was living in Washington, D. C., and was serving as Secretary of State to President James Monroe. What Adams wrote in his diary about the contents of that parcel tells us something about him and about how to [...]
In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin recalled that after leaving his apprenticeship at his older brother’s print shop in Boston and moving to Philadelphia, young Franklin wanted to become the best printer in town. To pursue that ambition, in 1725 he sailed from Philadelphia to London to learn from some of the best printers in the business. [...]
Ten years have gone by since Betty Groff passed away. In her eighty years, she became a treasure in Pennsylvania, and she received attention in national magazines, newspapers, and television shows. What got her such notice was her dedication to the foods associated with an ethnic minority, the Pennsylvania Dutch. In this context, Dutch refers not [...]
Fifty years ago premiered Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon. Based on a novel from 1844 by William Makepeace Thackery, it depicts the misadventures of a young rogue from Ireland. Lyndon’s exploits include military service in the British army and seeing combat against the French at Warburg, in what is now western Germany, during the Seven Years’ [...]
One of my old Classics professors used to say that he never understood why anyone writes novels. He would explain, “If you’re writing a philosophical novel, why not write philosophy, and if you’re writing a historical novel, why not write history?” For him, someone wanting fantasy or adventure had an ample supply with works like Homer’s [...]
In the last year of his life, while worn down by illness, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed two operas and a Requiem Mass. One opera was an esoteric comedy, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), and the other was a serious piece set in ancient Rome, La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus). Mozart (1756-1791) has become [...]
In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America that as he traveled through America, “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” adding that he first read “the feudal drama of Henry V” in a log cabin. While what could be called the natural habitat [...]
William Shakespeare wore his king’s livery and paid good money for a coat of arms and the title of Gentleman. Also, he retired to his rural hometown and made sure he was buried inside his parish church. Implications from these basic facts seem clear: a conventional, churchgoing man, a respectable pillar of the community. Yet, for [...]
In 1755 Samuel Johnson published in two stout volumes his Dictionary, one of the first such endeavors for the English language. An erudite curmudgeon, he then turned his attention to the plays of William Shakespeare. By 1765 Johnson had published prefaces and notes to each of the plays appearing in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s comedies, [...]
Ever since the early 1960s and Robert Bolt’s play and film, A Man for All Seasons, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1473-1530) has entered the popular imagination as a menacing villain. Whether portrayed by Orson Welles in 1966 or by John Gielgud in 1988, Bolt’s version of Wolsey was of an elderly and devious man trying to [...]
