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One Year Anniversary!
March is our one-year anniversary here at the Historic Present. So it’s a little American history of our own!
To celebrate, I’ll let you know that we’re about to start a series on the Salem Witch Trials–still a complicated and confusing episode in our history, but at the same time, not the final word on Puritans [...]
Happy New Year 2009!
I wish I had something historical to say about this, like “the Puritans didn’t celebrate New Year” or “during the Civil War there was a New Year truce,” but I have nothing, so this post will be unusually about the present day.
Oh; well, I can mention the fact that March 1 was New Year’s Day [...]
More Puritan myth busting at American Revolution
Brad Hart reviews an interesting study of Puritan (and other colonial American) sexuality at American Revolution. I agree that it’s hard to study colonial sexuality when only the most sensational of situations (court cases, executions) were recorded for public posterity, but there’s certainly work to be done combing through the journals and other records we do [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Union or slavery?
I was rereading David Potter’s timeless book The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 and thinking about how it sounds to us today to read that some Americans valued union over abolition.
It sounds awful. It sounds like cavilling, cowardice, inhumanity, and loathsome empty-headed pseudo-patriotism.
But that is because this is not 1850, or 1858, or any point antebellum. It’s [...]
Mitchell and Webb present history
One more Mitchell and Webb while I keep working!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )More Mitchell and Webb history
I am in the thick of research on the American Puritans and the Thirty Years’ War, so for the moment, here’s another video from That Mitchell and Webb Look. It’s American history, technically!
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