Tag: history

I think a few Commandments got broken here…

Well, well, well.

It appears that the Greens, the “Christian” family that owns Hobby Lobby, the same lovely people who think that there are one set of laws for them and another for everyone else when it comes to employee healthcare, may have gotten themselves in some hot water with the Federal government.

You see, with their billions of dollars, they have been building quite a collection of historical artifacts associated with the Bible: some 40,000 items, including the second-largest collection of Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which are unpublished (can’t have any more of those “funny” Gospels floating around now, can we?) And a huge number of Jewish scrolls, including many that survived the Nazis and the Inquisition.

It turns out that some of the items in their collection may have been acquired under, shall we say, murky circumstances.

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Two judges cause much celebration

I haven’t been able to do a lot of writing here on the blog lately.  It’s been a combination of having a very full schedule and not sleeping well.  I am working on trying to fix the part about not sleeping well.  The full schedule will start easing off a bit after October 10th.   I will probably post more about that in the near future.

In the meantime, I wanted to say something about two stories in the news that are related to the title of my post.  One is in regards to civil rights, the other is in regards to one of New England’s favorite athletes.
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A big story of Massachusetts maritime history is coming to the movies

I don’t know what it is, but something about the sea fascinates me, and has for most of my life.  Maybe it’s because the sea has played various roles in my family history – some big and some small.  Maybe it’s because ships captured my imagination as a little boy the way trucks or cars or airplanes do for most young boys.  For years as a kid, my favorite “souvenir” I would get from my trips to the Cape or Martha’s Vineyard was one of those little wooden ships, usually a fishing boat of some kind, that you find in local shops.  And I have been reading books about New England maritime history for years.

So anyway, it turns out that early next year there is a movie coming out based on the Michael Tougias book The Finest Hours. 

Continue reading “A big story of Massachusetts maritime history is coming to the movies”

Charleston, the Confederate flag, and the Civil War

It has taken a while for me to process everything that has happened in the past couple of weeks. And truthfully, I am still processing it.

Never, in my life, would I have predicted that the discussion to get rid of the Confederate flag once and for all would begin in Charleston, South Carolina.

The same place where the Civil War began, all those years ago.

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The two different kinds of apocalyptic fiction

The first is the kind that I read and/or watch.  Stuff like The Walking Dead comics, or Mira Grant’s awesome Newsflesh trilogy of novels, or movies like Deep Impact, and even video games like Left4Dead 2 and Fallout 3.  I guess the thing I find most interesting is seeing how people adapt. It’s compelling drama.  And while I find it entertaining, it does have a certain amount of practical value if it makes emergency preparedness a little less dull, as even the CDC has discovered.

Then there’s the other kind.  The kind that makes seemingly ordinary people lose their minds, because they think it’s real.

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It’s official – we broke the record

After the light snow we got last night, it seems that Boston has officially broken the record for most snowfall in a single season.  Our current snow total is now 108.6 inches, beating the old record of 107.6 inches from the winter of 1995-1996.  Here in Boston, they began keeping records of snowfall in 1872.

Thankfully a lot of snow melted in the last couple of weeks, so the new snow hasn’t really done a whole lot to make anything worse.  But as the snow melts, it is revealing all the garbage and other stuff that got buried in the massive piles.

Ah, spring.

-Geoff

Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass aka give the people what they want

Much of the world seems to be celebrating Valentines Day today.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually celebrate the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre aka the Mob war in Chicago.  I have also been known to wear all black and express my affection to my Spirit Animal, St. Grumpy Cat.

Today I’ve chosen a different tack.

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MLK and cultural appropriation

As a historian, and as someone who grew up in the South, I can’t help but shake my head at how a generation after the tumult of the 1950s and 1960s, we as a society are still struggling with virtually all of the issues that Dr. King fought against.  Don’t get me wrong, we have come a long way, even in my lifetime, but that progress still doesn’t mean that we live in a “post-racial” society.

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A Beautiful and Storied Ship, Part Three

I have been meaning to put up the rest of the photos from my tour of the USS Cassin Young, but I just hadn’t been able to get around to it yet.

View from the fantail
View from the fantail

So here are more of the photos from the tour, in no particular order.

Continue reading “A Beautiful and Storied Ship, Part Three”

#BlackLivesMatter & #NoBoston2024 – The intersection of money, race & power

Anyone who isn’t a moneyed plutocrat in the very tiny ruling elite here in Boston – Marty Walsh, John Fish, Charlie Baker, and Shirley Leung, I’m looking at you – likely understands that yesterday’s announcement that Boston “won” the USOC nomination for the 2024 olympics is a Very Bad Thing.  The Boston 2024 group has existed for about a year and, chaired by Fish, has been trying to essentially shame the populace into believing that if we do not do this thing, invite the world to come here for a 3 week-long party 9 years from now, we’re provincial losers and that Boston isn’t fit for the world stage.

To put it bluntly, the people at Boston2024 are liars.

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