(Harvest of Sorrow
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Robert Conquest, call your office, please.
Thursday, April 30th, 2015Random notes: April 22, 2015.
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2015You know, I’m a little tired of this geocentric crud. Why just “Earth Day”? Why not a day for each of the other eight planets as well? I’d try to organize “Pluto Day” on March 13th, but that’s too close to Pi Day. Maybe Neptune Day on September 23rd?
Edited to add: Mike the Musicologist responds.
It’s not Earth as in the planet. It’s earth as in dirt. Or the element.
We need Fire Day, Wind and Waters Days.
Or maybe just an Earth, Wind and Fire Day. But then people would call for a Kool & The Gang Day. Imagine the furor when Average White Band Day is celebrated.
As I told Mike, I’m not sure I can get into Earth, Wind, and Fire Day. But Parliament Funkadelic Day? I’m there.
Serdar Argic, call your office, please.
Stolen bourbon. And anabolic steroids. That seems like an odd mix.
Happy Patriot’s Day!
Monday, April 20th, 2015Enjoy your day off, folks in Massachusetts and Maine. (Hi, Weer’d!)
In other news, it seems that I am now 50 years old. I’m trying to make some time to work on a longer post about childhood memories, nostalgia, and the gun I bought in Tulsa, but things are so busy (gun show this past weekend, followed by dinner, followed by more kicking around on Sunday, etc.) that I’m not sure when that’s going to go up. I’m hoping that I’ll have more time this week to blog in general, but that post is going to require some photography…
Obit watch: March 31, 2015.
Tuesday, March 31st, 2015Robert L. Hite passed away on Sunday.
Lt. Col. Hite was one of Doolittle’s Raiders. He was captured by the Japanese after his plane ran out of fuel and the crew bailed out over China.
Obit watch: March 27, 2015.
Friday, March 27th, 2015This has been covered elsewhere, but I did want to highlight the NYT coverage of Richard III’s reburial.
I wish I could have been there.
Giggle. Snort.
…
I’m just going to leave these links here.
The Daughter of Time
Obit watch: February 19, 2015.
Thursday, February 19th, 2015Dr. John P. Craven, a hugely important figure in Navy history.
Dr. Craven shows up frequently in the many recently published histories of the US Navy during the Cold War. His own book, The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea
Oliver Sacks is dying. I don’t want to write this obituary now; I plan to wait until I have to.
Obit watch: special Hellcats Over the Pacific edition.
Monday, February 9th, 2015Alex Vraciu passed away on January 29th, though his death does not seem to have been widely reported until this weekend.
Mr. Vraciu shot down 19 Japanese planes in eight months, and destroyed another 21 planes on the ground.
More:
Random notes: January 15, 2015.
Thursday, January 15th, 2015Obit watch: Phil Africa, “a high-ranking member of the Philadelphia-based black-liberation group Move”. You may remember MOVE from the 1985 Philadelphia police stand-off and bombing. Phil Africa was not involved in that, as he was already serving time for killing a police officer in the 1978 shootout.
I’m just going to take a wild guess here and suggest he was wearing body armor because HE DIDN’T WANT TO GET SHOT!
(Oh, and for the record: both the gun and body armor were stolen from a sheriff’s deputy.)
Neat story:
Some more detail here and here. (Interestingly, at the time I’m writing this, that story is the most-read one on the WP website.)
Obit watch: December 19, 2014.
Friday, December 19th, 2014Mandy Rice-Davies has passed away at 70.
Ms. Rice-Davies, you may recall, was one of the central figures in what became known as the Profumo Affair. In brief, she was a roommate and friend of Christine Keeler, who had brief affairs with both Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet intelligence agent. This was quite the scandal back in 1963.
After action report: Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Monday, November 17th, 2014I’ve sort of hinted at this, but now the full story can be told.
Mike the Musicologist and I went on a road trip to Oklahoma the weekend of November 8th.
Blogger, with occasional tank.
Friday, November 7th, 2014
Hey, if Lawrence is going to do it, I’m going to do it. (Though technically mine is not a selfie.)
Edited to add: Okay. This is absurd. The photo imported off the phone and into Shotwell in Ubuntu displayed upside down using Google Chrome and the WordPress interface. I flipped it 180 degrees using WordPress. Now it displays correctly in Google Chrome and Firefox under Ubuntu, and on the Kindle…but displays upside down on two iPhones. What is going on here, he said, slamming his head against a wall?
Edited to add 11/11: Okay. Now that I’m back home and can use iPhoto, let’s see how this comes out.
Obit watch: October 30, 2014.
Thursday, October 30th, 2014Col. Jack Broughton (USAF – ret.) passed away last Friday.
Col. Broughton was a former Thunderbird and wrote several books, including Thud Ridge
He is perhaps most famous for an incident that occurred during the Vietnam War. At the time, Col. Broughton was vice commander of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing. One of his pilots approached him after a raid and stated that he might have accidentally hit a Soviet ship with cannon fire while he was bombing Vietnamese anti-aircraft positions located nearby. The next day, the Soviets complained that one of their ships had been bombed; Col. Broughton, in an attempt to protect his pilots, ordered the gun camera film from their aircraft destroyed.
Col. Broughton and two of his pilots were court-martialled for allegedly bombing the Soviet ship. However, the gun camera film was the only evidence of what happened; since it had been destroyed, there wasn’t any evidence that the ship had actually been bombed, and Col. Broughton and the pilots were acquitted on that charge. Col. Broughton was, however, found guilty of “destruction of government property” (the gun camera film, with an estimated worth of $5). His conviction was later overturned due to “undue command influence”.
Here’s a pretty good article reprinted from Vietnam magazine that covers the cases of Col. Broughton and Jack Lavelle. (I’ve also written about the Lavelle case; the linked article is from 1997, and doesn’t cover the more recent developments.)
Obit watch: September 11, 2014.
Thursday, September 11th, 2014Colonel Bernard F. Fisher (USAF – ret) passed away on August 16th, though his death does not appear to have been widely reported until today.
Col. Fisher (he was a major at the time) received the Medal of Honor for pulling off one of the greatest rescue missions in the history of the Vietnam War.
(I swear that I read this story in Reader’s Digest when I was a child, maybe as a “Drama In Real Life”.)
The paper of record does not seem to have deigned to note the passing of Richard “Jaws” Kiel, but the LATimes and the A/V Club have.
Edited to add: now the NYT gets around to it.
You want sad? I’ll give you sad.
Wednesday, September 10th, 2014Very often the president would stride briskly out of the White House, with Tad at his side trying to keep up, and march four blocks down to 1207 New York Avenue, to Stuntz’s Fancy Store, a magical little toy shop. The owner, Joseph Stuntz, was a retired French soldier who carved wooden toy soldiers in a tiny back room. Sometimes Lincoln showed up alone at Stuntz’s and bought toy soldiers for Tad for Christmas. “I want to give him all the toys I did not have and all the toys I would have given the boy who went away,” Lincoln told the master toy maker.
—The Last Lincolns
Inside the White House, workmen were making last minute repairs, preparing the executive mansion for the new president. In a second-floor bedroom they found something unexpected — the vast collection of Tad Lincoln’s toy soldiers. These were the beautiful, hand-carved figurines Abraham Lincoln had purchased for his son at Stuntz’s toy store. They were Tad’s favorite playthings, but he had left them behind, probably because he could not bear to see them again. He was no longer the president’s son. He was just Tad Lincoln.
–ibid., page 71
Quote of the day
Tuesday, September 9th, 2014Lincoln, Robert Todd, xi, 3, 4, 22, 210.
See also Jinxy McDeath;
Presidential Angel of Death
—index entry in Charles Lachman’s The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family
(Explained.)
(I just started reading Lachman’s book yesterday. For some reason, I found Chapter 2, about Willie, Tad, and the president’s relationship with the boys, really hard to get through. You want sad? That’s a sad sundae with sad sauce and chopped sad sprinkled over it.)