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1853: William B. Greene at 34
In 1853, William B. Greene had resigned from his position as pastor of a West Brookfield church, but had not yet settled himself in Paris, where he would stay until his return in 1861, at […]
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Homeland Security: now we see what we’re paying for
[ezcol_2third] Perhaps the hardest thing to take about the botched federal response to Katrina is that it was largely perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security. Since 9/11, we’ve been encouraged to believe that the […]
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“Taking Responsibility”
These days, even Dubya may be guilty of a little strategic Bush-bashing, what with this strange admission of “responsibility” for delays in the Federal response to Katrina. And it is a strange admission: “And to […]
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A New Two-Front War?
[ezcol_2third] Now that Hurricane Katrina has probably killed thousands of Americans and threatened our oil supply, I suppose that we can expect the Bush administration to formally declare the War on Mother Nature. This unprecedented […]
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Finding, and losing, Bessie Greene
I spent my research time yesterday reading a regimental history of the 1st Mass. Heavy Artillery, and was pleased to be able to confirm that the wife and daughter of William B. Greene had visited […]
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William Greene’s Small World
I haven’t posted much recently because the research for the chapter on William B. Greene suddenly blossomed into the makings of a book on its own. So I’m running with it, and hope to have […]
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New Alchemists and Ocean Arks
Nancy Jack Todd has recently written another book, A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design, a brief history of the work of the New Alchemy Institute, Ocean Arks International, and recent research […]
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Evolution? Ah, What the Heck. Teach the Controversy.
But teach it well! I’ve been reading a lot of new responses to the attempts to get “intelligent design” included in science curricula. There’s obviously a lot of concern out there that students will no […]
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On Why You Can’t Beat a (Real) Book for Research
Something wasn’t looking right. It certainly seemed unlikely to me that the scholars of transcendentalism, who, after all, have been mining a very small body of texts for a very long time now, could have […]
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Just a bit more on Greene and Transcendentalism
Philip F. Gura has a useful article, “Beyond Transcendentalism: The Radical Individualism of William B. Greene,” in a collection called Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Mass. Historical Soc., 1999), edited by […]