Somewhere around the house there is a battered paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s “The Greek Way,” a concise summary of the Greek contribution to Western civilization that I read as a sophomore in college.
Articles with History
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Photo by Vinicius "amnx" Amano on Unsplash
Occam’s razor
In the introduction to my book Skeptics and True Believers, I defined two frames of mind.
"A Day Dream" by Edward John Poynter (1863)
Saving souls, saving lives
I have been reading Judith Flanders’s biography of the Macdonald sisters, four Victorian women best known for having married or mothered famous Victorian men.
Robert Hooke's drawing of a flea from “Micrographia” (1665)
Microscopes and lucky charms
For anyone interested in the history of science, London and its environs are a living museum. Perhaps only ancient Alexandria — the city of Archimedes, Euclid, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Eudoxos — came near to approaching London as a center of scientific creativity.
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Scientists also lifted our perception of life
This was my third or fourth visit to Westminster Abbey, although the first in almost three decades. I stood in line to buy my ticket of admission with some misgivings. I remembered being disappointed on previous visits, but could not remember why.
Part of the shovel collection at Stonehill College • Photo by Casey Bisson (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The current era is defined locally
In a park in West Bridgewater stands an old iron anvil. A plaque on a nearby forge-stone reads: “And here before the Revolutionary War […] Captain John Ames, began the manufacture of shovels with a trip-hammer set on this stone.”
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The gray areas save the world
Let me speak for gray.
Los Alamos, New Mexico • Photo by Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In ideal town, bomb’s toll lingers
Until the fires hit last week [in May 2000], this town slumbered in post-atomic anonymity, stuck away on a quiet, wooded plateau on a shoulder of the Jemez Mountains, 30 miles northwest of Santa Fe.
“Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru” by John Everett Millais (1846)
Two diplomats of the IQ wars
Some nations are rich, others are poor.
A statue of Thoreau at Walden Pond • Photo by Chris Devers (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
An unvarnished look at Thoreau
In recent years we have seen a spate of books on Henry David Thoreau — his writings, his life, and the landscape in which he lived. The best of the lot is David Foster’s “Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Harvard 1999).”