The German word for “German” is “Deutsch”, and in America, “Deutsch” got misconstrued as “Dutch”.  The so-called “Pennsylvania Dutch” or Amish and Mennonite communities are not Dutch – they are German. In the late 1600s and early 1700s – during the Nine Years War [1688-1697] and the Wars of the Spanish Succession [1701-1715] – […]

  Been thinking about the furor surrounding a certain song about “small town” ethics and vigilante justice. I hate to dignify the singer by naming him – it surely only adds to the magic algorithms which magnify his presence on social media, while swelling his head and bank balance.  But, like a fish rising to […]

  Sally Shields was born in South Carolina in 1821, one of many children born to an enslaved woman and her so-called “owner”, a man named William Bryant Shields. Details are sketchy, but some form of human bond must have slowly developed between William Shields and his “consort”. Within a few years, Shields felt compelled […]

  A kingpin of commercial American evangelicalism named Pat Robertson died this month. People born after the Boomer generation can probably not imagine a time before tele-evangelism, and its unholy trinity of The Bible, money, and politics. The reason for churches being exempt from various taxes goes back to ancient times, and stems from the […]

  By the end of the short-lived Klondike and Alaskan Gold Rushes of the late 1890s, the far northwest of the North American continent had been changed irrevocably. Over 100,000 prospectors had swarmed like a plague of locusts over the Yukon Territory and Alaska, bringing everything from pack animals to industrial river dredging machinery with […]