In the thousands of names and dates inscribed on the walls of Virginia’s Grand Caverns I see a giant puzzle, a sort of tapestry of American culture, two hundred years in the making. Some names, dating as early as 1808, were engraved in the form of type-set letters, the red walls carefully scarred to reveal […]
One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes is “A Stop at Willoughby.” In case you haven’t seen it, or don’t remember, this episode features a New York City white collar worker who steps out of the train into a late 19th century town. In typically Twilight Zone fashion, his visit to this lost place is […]
I served as a volunteer for the Capon Bridge Founder’s Day festival. Mostly I just handed out surveys for the West Virginia Humanities Council, but this required me to attend all of the history events, which I probably would have done anyway. Here are a collection of photos from the event.
(I know what you are thinking: what an unoriginal article for a blog post. There must be hundreds of articles online with the same title.) The internet has the potential to magnify new historical discoveries. A new piece of evidence or a new theory can quickly leap from historical journals and magazines into popular social […]
I’m starting a podcast about local Hampshire County, West Virginia, history, partly to educate myself about my new home region, but also with the goal of increasing historical consciousness for community building. I believe that awareness of history is central for overcoming problems of social alienation and disregard for the local environment. Join me in […]
A follow-up to my blog post of August 26. The owner of the Hall House sent me a few more pictures of the bricks, and it appears to me that they are of consistent color with the white brick produced at the Zeeland brickyard in the 1870s. The images below show the brick in detail, […]
A few years ago, I came across a book with a curious title: The Truths of History:A Fair, Unbiased, Impartial, Unprejudiced, and Conscientious Study of History. The author tries to one-up Fox New’s “fair and balanced” motto, but of course, labelling yourself “fair” or your views “unbiased” does not make them so. First of all, […]
When I bought my house a year ago, I inherited a barn full of old materials. Some of these I suspect came from a house that stood on the neighboring property from between circa 1840 and 1920. The house is a bit of a mystery because there is almost no sign of its existence. The […]
It is now twelve years since I published my first book, Veneklasen Brick, and I’m excited to still receive questions and comments about the book a few times a year. This week, a man in Michigan contacted me to ask for more information about a house that he has recently purchased. For some reason that […]
For whatever reason or reasons, I never had a history teacher who mentioned numismatics, the study of old coins, as a legitimate historical pursuit. Coin collecting falls into the category of antiquarianism, that pedantic collecting and assembling of old things. For the different between history and antiquarianism, I can recommend the works of Arnaldo Momigliano. […]
