In 1911, John Muir published his diary from 1869 and called it My First Summer in the Sierra. On 2 August, 1869, he recorded an odd experience. In the afternoon, while on a mountain called the North Dome, he “suddenly, and without warning” was “possessed with the notion that my friend, Professor J. D. Butler, of [...]
One word often used to describe Thomas Hoving was “brash.” A former U.S. Marine who earned a doctorate in art history from Princeton, Hoving (1931-2009) served as a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then, from 1967 to 1977, as its director. A self-described “publicity hound,” Hoving’s self-promotion included a memoir, Making the [...]
Whenever debates flare up over what should be taught in American schools about America’s past, a dusty old book comes to mind, Mary G. Kelty’s Other Lands and Other Times. Published in 1942, its subtitle, Their Gifts to American Life, indicated that it would put America in the context of continuity with a great past. It [...]
It was the first full day of summer, a balmy Monday morning as more than a hundred people waited outside the county courthouse in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Their ages ranged from early twenties to well past retirement. Silently they stood there until the doors opened at 8:30 and deputy sheriffs guided them through security screening. Then it [...]
In the mid-1950s, John Hancock insurance ran full-page magazine advertisements featuring famous people from history. In 1955 one of those ads focused on Francis Parkman. “He brightened the dim record of our past,” the ad began but conceded that “a lot of people today don’t know about” him, although they ought to, since “there is so [...]
As George F. Will turns eighty, it bears noting that just as Whig writers in the eighteenth century learned their craft by studying the essays of Joseph Addison, so, too, have American conservative writers honed their writing skills by reading the columns of George Will. While Will’s authorial elegance and insight have been influences on many [...]
Beginning in the 1980s, apparently starting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and then extending to dozens of cities, appeared unusual graffiti, Toynbee Tiles. A kind of mosaic, these so-called tiles tend to be bits of linoleum embedded in the asphalt of a city street. While the creator of the tiles remains unknown, the text of each tile always [...]
Seventy years ago, an annual Christmas tradition began, a one-act opera in English, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. Less well-known is Menotti’s opera from three Decembers later, a three-act parable suitable also for Easter, The Saint of Bleecker Street. Its plot is simple: Annina, a young woman in New York City’s neighborhood of [...]
Three of the four Gospels tell us that right after John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for forty days of testing by Satan. It seems a far cry from what one might expect from a hand-clapping, alleluia-shouting inspirer like the Holy Spirit: upon the heels of a joyous [...]
A leaden sky shielded London from the winter sun as I kept my appointment with Casper Gutman Antiques. Still in business after more than a century, it sits tucked away on one of those dead-end side streets not far from the Diogenes Club. With their customary courtesy they were letting me consult their founder’s private collection [...]
