After Xerox copiers were invented in 1959, a few trickled into the Soviet Union. The regime immediately mandated each had to be registered with the KGB, including a copy of each copier’s unique “fingerprint.” That way those using the machines for samizdat – self-publishing – of dissident materials could be identified and sent to the gulag. The Biden regime is seeking to impose something similar with his Executive Ukase on gun control.
I have a chronic reluctance to get up before dawn to perch myself in a tree-stand at first light in the middle of deer season, but, as I faced the final week of hunting, my sloth yielded to an insatiable venison-jones which drove me, regardless of moon phase or feeding schedule, temperature or precipitation, to go out early every morning of that final week, shivering in wind and rain, before work hoping for the arrival of a doe into my kill zone.
The first time I personally witnessed cowardice at high levels was upon the occasion of the first edition of The South Was Right being introduced into my high-school library. In 1993 my father and I joined our local Major John Pelham Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Jacksonville, Alabama. It was at a meeting of that camp that I spoke with a man (whose name I cannot recall) who told me he was a past principal of my school. He spoke to me about a new book by a pair of Louisiana twins that was a scholarly and...
History is bunk, said Henry Ford on a famous occasion. His sentiments were echoed, as Forrest McDonald reminded a conservative audience, by President George H.W. Bush, who would anyone who lost a political squabble with him with the phrase, “He’s history,” as if to say that they were without significance.
Americans seem divided on the British Royal Family. Hollywood adores Mr. and Mrs. Markle, while many populist conservatives complain that their antics should remind us why we rebelled in 1776. Looking for sanity in such a debate may be a futile exercise, but….
Greeks were not squeamish about discussing sexual matters, though their degree of frankness depended upon circumstance and genre: What could be said in a comedy or put on a vase was not the same as the treatment of sex in tragedy or religious sculpture.
At present Lithuania is a tiny Baltic country wedged between Latvia and a small Russian enclave on the Baltic and Poland, with Belorussia on the southeast. There are 2.8 million Lithuanians plus another 200,000 Lithuanian-speakers outside the country, a population about the size of Dallas if the suburbs are included.
The world is full of bad news, and most of it does not require a dedicated chronicler to record and analyze. So one reads, for instance, how the music department of Oxford University announces that musical notation has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past” and is “a slap in the face to some students,” while “musical skills should no longer be compulsory” because the current focus “on white European music causes students of color great distress.”
A Brief Chronology of later Roman History with a few quotations and citations added as the weeks go by….
In preparation for the Summer Seminar on the age of Boethius, Stephen and Dr. Fleming discuss the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. This podcast is available to Gold and Charter subscribers. For the chronology, please see Chronology post on the website.
