View Post Belarus has reportedly banned the sale of the book “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” effective May 19. But why would a book about a chronically depressed, chain-smoking bureaucrat in a fictional country have strike such fear into totalitarian governments? And how did such a novel come about in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and … Read more
In his 1986 article “Treasure Seeking in the American Northeast, 1780-1830” for the American Quarterly historian Alan Taylor made the following observation: “A canvas of travelers’ accounts, town histories, and other antiquarian sources for the American Northeast documents over forty incidents where groups of rural folk employed occult techniques to seek buried treasure, generally in … Read more
George Dodd came to Spitalfields to write this account for Charles Knight’s LONDON published in 1842. Dodds recalls the rural East End that still lingered in the collective memory and described the East End of weavers living in ramshackle timber and plaster dwellings which in its century would be “redeveloped” out of existence by the … Read more
George Armstrong Custer: A Military Life, by Sandy Barnard, South Dakota Historical Society Press, Pierre, 2021, $ 14.95 Why another George Custer biography? To author Sandy Barnard the answer is clear: “Custer’s death and defeat at Little Bighorn assured that he would forever remain more than a footnote in America’s military legacy.” The retired professor … Read more
Manhattan artist George Deem is remembered for referencing the history of painting by re-imagining Old Masters in a contemporary context. He re-configured iconic pictorial images through visual ploys such as repetition and erasure, or through the addition of components of contemporary life and art. Recycling Art Born in 1932 in Decker, a small town in … Read more
George Smith Patton IV, asked what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a World War II icon, replied in a 1977 interview: “I’ve never worried about it. I’ve been too busy. ” Born in Boston on Dec. 24, 1923, he was the fourth in his family to bear the George Smith … Read more
George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded Age, by Matthew Bernstein, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2021, $ 55 Americans who do recognize his name likely recall George Hearst as the father of infamous newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, in no small part because Orson Welles related the younger Hearst’s quasi-biographical story in the 1941 … Read more