Rosalie Jean Willis. Wedding day. January 1955. Just a young sixteen-year-old girl from West Virginia, charmed by a charismatic young man first christened “Charles Milles Maddox” – Charles taking his mother’s surname rather than that of his biological father Walker Henderson Scott. Charles would go on to become a “religious leader”, better-known by the […]
I’ve never run a survey or metrics check for figuring-out the average age of my readership. I do not know the average age of my podcast listeners. So just in case a large segment of BWWW‘s audience is too young to be aware of it, when I was a child it was still illegal […]
About 16 million American men and women served during WWII. Of these 16 million, about 1 million were African-Americans. Nearly half a million were Hispanic- or Latin-Americans. Including indigenous Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipinos, and other ethnic minorities, perhaps 1 in 7 service members were from what would be considered a “non-white” background according to […]
Years ago, my amateur interest in genealogy began to morph into “Big Data Genealogy” as a way to investigate American history and ethnicity beyond my own immediate family. Part of this project then became about attaching notes and mini-biographies to the people being investigated. Were they on the wrong side of the law? Did […]
Just a reminder of the ridiculous and messy internal contradictions which make-up American identity. The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Christian Socialist named Francis Bellamy in 1892. Yes, you read that right. A socialist. “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with […]
Do you really like history? Do you like it in an abstract sense, or when its hot breath is on your neck? Is American history about “important people” chopping-down cherry trees, signing declarations, and declaring wars? Or should history be about the very real, and much more numerous (and mostly forgotten) common people who […]
As someone who tries to be a reasonably humble human being, I much prefer writing a social critique when it applies to an idea rather than a person. When a person in the public eye shares an idea or notion, and that idea or notion is inaccurate or downright wrong, it is […]
Our most recent episode, “Pre-Deliverance, Part 3” was the first time we saw over 1000 downloads within a couple of days of being released. This growth gives the lie to a widespread belief in some quarters that there is no audience for long-format history programmes. As the writer/producer of “Before We Were White”, I […]
How apt that the tool most commonly used by millions of smart-asses to leave millions of smart-alecky comments on social media is called a smartphone. The unambiguous use of the word “smart” to mean “intelligent” is rather recent. The word “smart” actually has its roots in the Old English “smeart“, which finds its source […]
Our total genetic inheritance is of course determined more or less equally by the genes carried and passed-down to us by our parents, and by extension, ALL of their ancestors, men and women. Most of the DNA we inherit has been shuffled or “recombined” as it was passed-along, making us a mixture of our […]
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