I recently discovered the excellent and informative blog Georgian London by Lucy Inglis, and am enjoying it enormously. She recently posted this brief memoir of one man’s Battle of Waterloo, that of Colonel Frederick Ponsonby, a 32 year-old career cavalry officer, and the brother of Lady Caroline Lamb. He was part of the charge of …
In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino has just published an excellent account of the Pecora Hearings, the shorthand name given to the hearings of the Senate Banking Committe in February 1933, during the waning moments of the Hoover administration. The hearings were named not for the committee chairman, the well-motivated but less-than-charismatic chairman …
My cousin Stephanie Bauman sent this to me. It’s a kind of a test (an ungraded one) that evaluates if you’re really from Baltimore (or, to be more precise, if you’re really from Baltimore and from a certain era–mostly the 1950s and 1960s.) You could only buy a Volvo from Michaelson Motors on Reisterstown Rd, …
In the day’s most astonishing story, Kevin Sieff of The Washington Post reports that “A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War — a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause …
Thanks to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, some truly ridiculous blather by Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a man whose name is bruited about as a potential Republican nomination for president, has been exposed for the noxious nonsense that it is. Barbour. who is 62, recently gave …
My latest assignment has me working for Mr. Joe Plumeri, the chairman and CEO of the Willis Company. Have you ever heard of Willis? Neither had I, until this relationship began. Turns out Willis is a venerable British insurance company, now approximately 175 years old. Mr. Plumeri is an astute and charismatic businessman from the …
Yesterday the New York Times reported that in November, the University of California will publish the first three volumes of the 500,000 (!) word Autobiography of Mark Twain. The opinion is that this will restore acid to a writer who has come to be seen as “’Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who …
Sorry to be so late to the party, but I was reading something the other day that placed Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell‘s discussion of slavery and Virginia and the Civil War of a couple of weeks ago in particularly sharp relief. You’ll recall that as a sop to the Sons of Confederate War Veterans, McDonnell …