A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.
Crumpet. Fifty years later, Michener and the Yanks show up. Then come the travel hacks, who have to justify their fancy rooms and plane fare by telling us this shithole is paradise. He stubbed out his...
Eight storage tanks were
The best you can do is catch an echo of the man. You can never reach out and touch him.
The world of the rural poor remained what it had been for generations: a day’s walk in radius, a tight, well-trod loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot.
At one stop in New Zealand, an Englishman bartered for sex. He was presented with a boy; when he complained, he was presented with another. The English related this incident with amusement, as a cruel...
The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, b...
Olmsted’s initial faith in reasoned discourse had also waned. In the course of his travels, the South’s leading men had struck him as implacable: convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound soci...
Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving: a day to solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union....Shopping was p...
Cook, judging from his journals, was not a pious man. A product of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, he valued reason above all else, and showed little patience for what he called Priest craft and...
They’re pushing the envelope in terms of authenticity, the Camp Chase Gazette editor, Bill Holschuh, told me when I phoned for his opinion. About the only thing left is live ammunition and Civil War d...
Looked about as romantic and welcoming as a tar pit. I later learned that producers of the 1962 Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty had imported white sand from America so Matavai Bay would match...
When Union litter-bearers climbed out of their trenches, four days after the assault, they found only two men still alive amongst the piles of stinking corpses. One burial party discovered a dead Yank...
Seventeen evangelicals, plus five of their wives and three children, disembarked at Tahiti in 1797. Eight missionaries fled on the next boat out, to Sydney. One of the remaining missionaries married a...
Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of...
In principle, rememberance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860's. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in...
If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature—even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or,...
The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren't national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were pre...
Cook, the historian Bernard Smith speculates, increasingly realised that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilization.
I found myself unexpectedly moved, less by the memory of Cook than by the people gathered to honor him. The British were brilliant at this sort of ceremony: sincere, stoic, and understated - nothing l...