What would happen if Donald sent thugs to try to make the judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals an offer they couldn’t refuse? On Saturday, a federal judge in Washington […]
Dark thoughts about Donald and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
Wilderness worth getting lost in—a review of Lance Weller’s “Wilderness”
No Civil War battlefield offers a writer more metaphoric possibility than the Wilderness. Not only was the Wilderness a virtually impenetrable second-growth forest—“the dark, close wood” and “one of the waste places […]
Telling History vs. Making Art: Fictions and Histories
Final part of a series “[H]istory and historical fiction,” says historian Paul Ashdown, “are alternate ways of telling stories about the past.” In that context, Ulysses S. Grant spoke more truth than he realized […]
Telling History vs. Making Art: Communicating “the incommunicable experience of war”
Part seven in a series “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war,” Oliver Wendell Holmes says at the beginning of Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War. Burns could not have picked a more […]
Telling History vs. Making Art: Killer Angels, real and fictional
Part five in a series. In my last post, I began to discuss Michael Shaara’s aesthetic choices for constructing The Killer Angels as he did, and how he adopted a Lost Cause-interpretation of Robert E. […]
Telling History vs. Making Art: “Frankly, my dear….”
Part three in a series As the horn section carries Max Steiner’s score from its overture into the sweeping, now-iconic strings of its main theme, Gone With the Wind opens with haggard-looking slaves returning from […]
Telling History vs. Making Art: The ways we remember the Civil War
Part two in a series “We may say that only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born,” wrote Robert Penn Warren during the Civil War’s centennial; “or […]
Lincoln captures the humanity of American greatness
One of the things I’ve found most remarkable about the Civil War is the physical change that overcame President Lincoln during his time in office. The distinguished, thoughtful lawyer from Illinois who […]
Telling History vs. Making Art: An upcoming series at S&R
Introduction to a series As part of my doctoral work, I recently did some work that focused on Civil War literature. I use “literature” in a broad sense to cover fiction, nonfiction, and […]
A beautiful, despairing journey with a coal-black horse
There’s a kind of myth-making happening in Robert Olmstead’s novel Coal Black Horse. Published in 2007, I had the chance this past week to journey with the horse once more, and it was […]
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