Printing Pretty

For the first several centuries of Latin writing, nobody put spaces between the words, and nobody had the slightest notion of "formatting text." It took roughly two thousand years, a goldsmith, and an unreasonable number of word processors to reach the point where you can express yourself through, not only words, but in the way the words look on the page: how the letters are shaped, how the lines are spaced, and how the whole text can comprise an attractive and communicative whole.

Myths That Turned Out To Be True

Scholars are supposed to keep an open mind. But scholars are also human, and humans love the comfortable story—the one where we already know what's real and what isn't. So when somebody shows up waving a dusty artifact and claiming the fairy tales were true all along, the establishment tends to react the way cats react to baths: with hissing, claw marks, and eventual, grudging acceptance.

The March of Progress

I recently learned that, although I had heard of the "Iron Age" and the "Copper Age", I had thought they occurred in the reverse order that they did. And as I explored that, I learned that each time a new age was entered because of new technologies, while it caused major upheavals in what had been fairly stable times, each one offered new advantages that, ultimately were found to outweigh the disadvantages. Consequently, these major advances—from stone to copper to bronze to iron to electric to nuclear to digital to artificial intelligence…each new step, when viewed from the perspective of now, has a sense of inevitability about it. In every case, opponents to the new technologies fought tooth and nail against them, only to quickly end up irrelevant, or dead (like so many of today's—well, yesterday's—anti-vaxxers).

Just So

These essays were written several decades ago by my then-mother-in-law, Agnes E. Steinberg. She asked me to type them for her, and then to try and market them. In spite of the high quality of writing, it was not an easy market for nostalgia and I was never able to place them.

Except for the photo of Agnes, none of the photographs you see here were hers; they are, however, carefully chosen from public domain photos of the period.

Agnes, who was a little girl at the turn of the century, had a remarkable ability to observe and to describe what she saw. I'm pleased and proud to be able, finally, to give these writings the exposure they deserve.

Human Origins

At first glance, it might seem odd that we've been presented with only two accepted theories as to the origin of humankind: Special creation by a deity, or unguided evolution as a natural law. (Is there really so much of a difference?)

But…what if…there were a third option?

The Pope, the Cats, and the Perfect Storm of Death

We like to imagine the Black Death as an unstoppable force of nature, a medieval hurricane of germs sweeping across Europe. And yes, poor sanitation, cramped cities, and the general lack of germ theory all played their part. Fleas thrived in straw bedding, sewage ran in the streets, and people bathed about as often as comets appeared. In other words, the stage was already set for disaster.

Cecelia's Memoirs

I didn't grow up like most Native Americans. It was more like the Waltons. Our families followed more to the French. We are French, Ojibwa, Cree, Micmac and Swedish from my dad's side. I even know French card games used in gambling in Canada.

Book Burnings

There's been a lot of talk lately about burning books. Specifically, a Christian extremist, Terry Jones, threatens to burn copies of the Qur'an, the Moslem holy book. (He can't spell it correctly, but that's the least of our concerns.) This has come on the heels of an uproar over an Islamic Community Center proposed to be built a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan. Both issues are clearly matters of freedom of speech and religion; but have been characterized as something legal to do, but not necessarily wise to do. So I thought it might be interesting to ponder the significance of book burnings in general, and how that significance has changed through the years.

Seeing The Future Through The Eyes Of The Past

People love to imagine what the future will be like, and some of those people are writers who commit their imaginings to paper. In the year 1900, one of these people was a mystery writer named John Elfreth Watkins, who wrote a piece for the December issue of the Ladies' Home Journal entitled "What May Happen In The Next Hundred Years". As is typical in such articles, he got a lot of things wrong. But he also got a surprising percentage of things right! And, for today's post, I thought it would be interesting to look at his predictions, place them in the context of his times, and compare them to the reality.

A Pope I Like

I just finished Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel, The Gripping Hand, a sequel to the science fiction masterpiece they wrote 18 years ago, The Mote In God's Eye. Both books were very good (the first a little better) but today's blog post isn't about either book. It's about a short verse on The Gripping Hand's last page, from poet Alexander Pope's An Essay On Man.

Beyond the Edges of the Map

I was in a Catholic school; so there was a vague understanding that, at the beginning of the world, there had first been Adam and Eve and sometime after that, Rome and Jesus (who hadn't gotten along well). But then there was Columbus, with an origin point of Spain, and the world suddenly blossomed into the United States and things really started happening. Yes sir, Americans invented everything worth inventing, and everyone else in the world wanted to be just like us.

Freedom

Independence Day does not celebrate "God and Country." It celebrates "Independence," specifically, the independence from Great Britain declared by the American colonies in 1776.

Bring The Broom Along

1882 was far from the world of Lois Lane. It was considered "unseemly" for a woman to use her private name in public. Elizabeth Cochran's editor chose "Nelly Bly" from the Steven Foster song. We don't know if Elizabeth took her cue from her namesake's broom, but she got busy cleaning up Pittsburgh by inventing investigative reporting.

LGBT Rights

I am a gay man. After spending the first 44 years of my life deeply closeted (and miserable), I finally came out to my friends and family in 1995. And, as a natural-born activist, I then decided to do what I could to help my fellow sexual oddballs to realize that being gay is no sin, and is nothing to be ashamed of. To that end, I began studying gay and lesbian history. And my feelings and conclusions about that history are what you'll find in this section.