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Children’s Books about the American Revolutionary Period
Close up of militiaman with musket at Lexington Green. Picture Books 1. Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George? by Jean Fritz. Tells the story of King George III from childhood with an emphasis of...
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Finding Ulysses
Ulysses Found by Ernle Bradford. When you have sailed the Mediterranean at the age of nineteen with the Odyssey in your kitbag, and when you have come back of your own volition, to the same sea in...
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Daring the Wind and Waves: Three Library Book Picks
We’ve had a bunch of nice books out from the library, but these three stand out from our recent haul. Though to be honest they were my favorites, not necessarily the children’s, but they were...
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World War I Books for Children
Finding good books about the First World War was a bit of a challenge. Our local library didn’t have anything on the shelf at all. I had to go online and request some titles from other libraries in our...
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From Flood to Fenians: A poem takes us for a ride
Bella reads from The Harp and Laurel Wreath A little Tuesday evening dinner-time rabbit trail. (One of the boys asked how often we end up looking things up during dinner, the answer: quite often. We...
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The Invention of the “Middle Ages”
School of Athens, Raphael I came across this snippet about the invention of the Middle Ages in today’s reading, one of those things that immediately lit up a dozen different connections in my brain:...
View ArticleHistory is the best medicine for a sick mind
“I am aware, too, that most readers will take less pleasure in my account of . . . early history; they will wish to hurry on to more modern times and to read of the period, already a long one, in which...
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Ancient Mysteries, Lost and Found
Somehow my online reading this week seemed to be forming a thematic cluster: mysteries of the ancient world. So I’ve curated for you a collection of articles that all wanted to talk to each other,...
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Sigrid Undset on Misunderstanding the Middle Ages
Walters Book of Hours, Above: Flagellation; below: Annunciation to the shepherds, Walters Art Museum(via Flickr “People of the nineteenth century showed in fact a quite extraordinary degree of...
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Chronological Snobbery about the Middle Ages
Unicorn and Griffin, Ruskin Hours, France ca. 1300 (Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig IX 3, fol. 98v) We’ve been reading Men, Microscopes and Living Things, which is a sort of history...
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Musing about Ancient Textiles, with some Interesting Links
Terracotta lekythos (oil flask) circa 550–530 B.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Deirdre Mundy is musing about Penelope and the shroud of Laertes: ” I started wondering about the economic value of labor...
View ArticlePicture Books for Ancient History
This is still incomplete, but I have been meaning to publish it for ages (it’s been sitting in my drafts folder for over a year) and I keep getting distracted and not finishing it. So, here it is with...
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Gettysburg July 2019, Day III
On Wednesday we got up and had another camp breakfast of eggs and bacon. Taking time to cook breakfast and do the dishes after did mean that we didn’t hit the road until after 9. So we didn’t much...
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Stumbling Stones
Stolpersteine in Rome, via Madonna dei Monti 82via Wikimedia Commons Stumbling Stone Not really a stone. A little bronze plate the size of a cobblestone, flush with the pavement. No one could trip over...
View ArticleQuarantine and Cultural Memory
Today I’m thinking about quarantine and cultural memory. On our road trip to Pennsylvania we listened to Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome. In the novel the children we met in Swallows and Amazons, the...
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Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace
I’m reading a beautiful picture book today that I picked up from the library: Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace, an autobiography by Ashley Bryan, Renowned Artist,...
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