Not long ago I went to a military park located in the middle of a fairly good-sized city. I arrived bright and early, and as I headed into the visitor center, I noticed a couple walking their dogs along the trail. I didn’t really think anything about it.
After seeing the exhibits, I hit the trails [...]
Archive for April, 2009
On using battlefields
Posted in Historic Preservation, History and Memory, Museums and Historic Sites, tagged Battlefields, historic sites on April 30, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Threatened places for 2009
Posted in Historic Preservation, Uncategorized, tagged 11 Most Endangered Places 2009, K-25, Manhattan Project, National Trust for Historic Preservation on April 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Speaking of the Manhattan Project—and because I badly need to restore some gravitas to this blog after that last stunt—check out the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of the 11 Most Endangered Places for 2009. This year’s list includes the Enola Gay hangar at Wendover, Utah.
A lot of other Manhattan Project sites are in [...]
You will believe a Taft can fly
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Watchmen, William Howard Taft on April 27, 2009 | 9 Comments »
My good friend Dustin, a longtime comic book aficionado and fellow sojourner on numerous historical road trips, leveled this challenge in a comment to my last post: “Extra Credit: combine Dr. Manhattan and William Howard Taft. Show your work.”
Fusing America’s 27th President with Watchmen’s blue-skinned, nuclear-powered superhero is a tall order indeed. A tall order, that is, for a lesser [...]
Who watches the Watchmen? Maybe public historians should.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged museums, public history, Watchmen on April 26, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Sometimes public historians can find instructive lessons in unlikely places. Take Hollywood, for example—an industry not known for either intellectual sagacity or scrupulous adherence to historical fact, but one that’s got the art of transferring messages pretty well covered.
When you’re dealing with the past, you’re dealing with different worlds. All your assumptions have to go out the window—assumptions [...]
Trivial Pursuit
Posted in Abraham Lincoln, tagged Abraham Lincoln on April 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The buzz used to be that Lincoln had Marfan Syndrome. Then it was chronic depression. Now cardiologist John Sotos is telling us that Lincoln had something called multiple endocrine neoplasia, type 2B, a rare genetic disorder that leads to cancer.
Sotos is the same guy who diagnosed President Taft with obstructive sleep apnea. Apneos, a company that specializes in sleep [...]
The view from Rocky Mount
Posted in Museums and Historic Sites, Tennessee History, tagged Rocky Mount Museum, Southwest Territory on April 21, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Last time I related the results of the weekend’s successful TomTom field test, and promised to post one of my historic site reviews for the destination. It was one of those Tennessee frontier museums that I’d intended to visit for a long time and had just never gotten around to seeing. I’m pleased to report that [...]
Historical Touring with TomTom
Posted in Museums and Historic Sites, Uncategorized, tagged TomTom, heritage tourism, historic sites on April 19, 2009 | 4 Comments »
There are few things I like more than a good historical field trip, but I’m cursed with a poor sense of direction. Hence my recent interest in automotive GPS navigation systems.
It’s something I’ve resisted for a long time, because I’ve got a Luddite streak a mile wide. I was the last member of my generation [...]
It’s just a flesh wound
Posted in Civil War, History and Memory, History on the Web, tagged Black Confederates, Civil War on April 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The historical blog world being a rather small community, I assume that most of the people who are reading this already know that the debate over those elusive black Confederate soldiers has stirred up again. Check out Civil War Memory and the Old Virginia Blog if you want to jump in.
The black Confederate proponents remind me of some [...]
We might eventually be sorry about the whole slavery thing
Posted in Civil War, History and Memory, Tennessee History, tagged Tennessee slavery apology on April 14, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I’m a little embarrassed. There’s a political to-do here in my home state of Tennessee involving historical memory, and I didn’t even know about it until Dimitri Rotov pointed it out via this post.
We’re trying to decide whether or not we’re sorry about that whole slavery and Jim Crow business. Evidently we’re not sorry yet, but there’s [...]
Civil War ship in inland Georgia
Posted in Civil War, Museums and Historic Sites, tagged Civil War navy, National Civil War Naval Museum on April 10, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Here’s a nifty outdoor exhibit for you. Last weekend the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, Georgia unveiled a full-scale replica of the USS Water Witch, a blockader captured by a Confederate raiding party near Savannah in 1864. The story of its capture is one heck of a tale—check out the account on the NCWNM’s [...]
