(Originally posted at The American Catholic. I assumed that the Star Trek and Constitution Mavens of Almost Chosen People might enjoy it.)
One of the “alternate Earth” episodes that became fairly common as the original Star Trek series proceeded, as explained by Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development, and by limited production budgets, this episode featured an Earth where a cataclysmic war had driven the Americans, the Yangs, out of their cities and into primitive warbands. Chinese Communists, the Kohms, settled in America. Their technology was a few steps higher than the Yangs. The Yangs had been waging a war for generations to drive the Kohms from their land, and the episode coincided with the Yangs taking the last of “the Kohm places”.
Over the generations, the Yangs had forgotten almost all of their history and what little knowledge remained was restricted to priests and chieftains.
“Cloud William: Freedom?
James T. Kirk: Spock.
Spock: Yes, I heard, Captain.
Cloud William: It is a worship word, Yang worship. You will not speak it.
James T. Kirk: Well, well, well. It is… our worship word, too.”(more…)
Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?
Prince William upon being presented by Gibbon with a copy of a volume in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(I originally posted this at The American Catholic. I thought the book mavens of Almost Chosen People might enjoy it.)
My co-blogger Darwin Catholic at The American Catholic has an intriguing post on the subject of books that a reader is supposed to like but didn’t. Go here to read his post. My response:
Piers the Plowman-Never have been able to make my way through that boring field.
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories-I attempted to read them when young but got stuck in A Study in Scarlet. The odd thing is that I love Holmes as a character in film and in books written by other authors which feature Holmes.
Stranger in a Strange Land-I have read everything Heinlein wrote and I was saddened to read the story that began his “dirty old pervert” phase.
Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants-I made it through all three volumes on the third attempt. Freeman’s erudition is vast and his scholarship impeccable, but he managed a near impossible feat: he made the Civil War seem dull to me.(more…)
On Saturday night, September 21, 2013, I was master of ceremonies at a performance of “Visiting the Lincolns” performed by Michael Krebs and Debra Ann Miller in Dwight, Illinois. The performance was masterful. Mr. Krebs and Ms. Miller have been performing as Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln since the mid-nineties and they gave a highly polished two person play. The audience was very much a part of the play, as the premise of the play is that the members of the audience are unexpected visitors at the White House who appear just before the Lincolns on Good Friday 1865 are due to leave to attend a play at Ford’s Theater.
The play is a mixture of comedy and drama as the Lincolns deal with the task of attempting to entertain their unexpected guests. Mrs. Lincoln serves lemon juice and cookies as she and Mr. Lincoln discuss their courtship, and their sorrow over the deaths of their sons Eddie and Willie, as well as Emancipation, the War and the other events that made the Civil War an unforgettable crossroads in American history. Mr. Krebs and Ms. Miller demonstrate both the bickering, that the Lincolns did on occasion historically, and their deep love for each other. The play is enlivened with some of Lincoln’s stories and constant interaction between the Lincolns and the audience. One of the more dramatic episodes occurs when Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln are reading amusing dispatches from Union generals and criticizing the incompetence that was often a hallmark of Union high command, when Mrs. Lincoln lightheartedly begins reading Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby, not realizing that the letter consoled a mother for the loss of her five sons, and the reading awakens Mary’s constant grief over the loss of her two sons. It made the dramatic hallmark for the evening. (more…)
Well, today is the day. Every year my little town has a festival, Dwight Harvest Days. We draw tens of thousands of visitors from all around for parades, a flea market, a craft show, rides, a 5k run, and many, many other events.
This year, I have arranged, well I should say the Dwight Rotary Club, of which I have been a member for 28 years, has arranged, for Michael Krebs and Debra Ann Miller to bring their presentations of Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln to the Dwight High School Auditorium, 801 South Franklin Street in Dwight on September 21, 2013, tonight, at 7:00 PM. The presentation is free and I think we will have a huge turnout, especially among students.
I have long followed the career of Mr. Krebs and I believe he is the king of Lincoln presenters. Some samples of his work:
I am looking forward to this immensely. It speaks well of the Great Emancipator in our national memory that he is by far the President most portrayed by historical re-enactors. Lincoln calls to something very deep in the American soul. Men portraying Lincoln go back to the first decade of the last century, while men and women who knew Lincoln were still alive, but were rapidly departing this vale of tears. They kept alive a memory of Lincoln as a man and not just a mere statue or a historical personage trapped in books. Those early Lincoln presenters gave the models by which Lincoln was portrayed in the new technology of film. Through the efforts of the Lincoln presenters the memory of Lincoln is kept ever green.
Like most counties in Central Illinois, we have our Lincoln sites, places Lincoln visited while he was riding the circuit as a lawyer. In those more civilized days, courts in most areas only operated part time. On a court day, the judges and attorneys would arrive at a county seat, and the trials on the court’s docket would be called and tried. So it was on May 18, 1840 when Lincoln and his fellow attorneys rode into Pontiac, the then tiny county seat of Livingston County, for the first ever session of the Circuit Court in Livingston County.(more…)
An intelligent observer of the American Civil War in early September of 1863 would have reached certain conclusions about the War thus far:
1. The Union was losing the War in the East. After many spectacular battles and huge casualties, the battle lines in Virginia remained much the same as they had early in the War: the Union controlled the northern third of the Old Dominion state and the South controlled the Southern two-thirds. A stalemate of more than two years duration favored the Confederacy.
2. The War in the trans-Mississippi was a side show that could be ignored.
3. In the West, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, the Union was clearly winning, with control of the Mississippi wrested from the Confederacy, with New Orleans and large sections of Louisiana controlled by the Union, and with Tennessee largely under Union control.
4. The northern Presidential election in 1864 would probably prove decisive. If Lincoln could make progress in the East and continue to win in the West he would likely be re-elected. If the Confederacy could maintain the stalemate in the East and reverse the Union momentum in the West, or at least slow it to a crawl, Lincoln would be defeated and the Confederacy would win its independence.
General Braxton Bragg, the irascible commander of the Army of Tennessee, clearly understood that the Confederacy could not continue losing in the West, and that is why he rolled the iron dice of war at Chickamauga in a desperate attempt to stop the offensive of Major General William Rosecrans and his Union Army of the Cumberland. Bragg proved fortunate, and his hard luck army gave the Confederacy one of its great victories, and the chance to change the whole course of the War.
Below is the passage on Chickamauga from the memoir of John B. Gordon, who during the war rose from Captain to Major General in the Army of Northern Virginia. Gordon did not fight at Chickamauga, but his wonderfully colorful account of the battle, ground he was familiar with from being reared there in his childhood, written with his usual entertaining purple prose, captures well the facts of the battle, and how this victory was treasured by the South, even as its benefits to the Confederacy were ultimately thrown away due to a lack of pursuit and the desultory, and unsuccessful, siege of Chattanooga. (more…)
I beg in behalf of this army that the War Department may not overlook so great an event because it is not written in letters of blood.
Major General William Rosecrans to Secretary of War Stanton after the completion of the Tullahoma Campaign.
Mention Gettysburg and almost all Americans will recall that it was a battle fought during the Civil War. Mention the Tullahoma campaign, and almost all Americans will give a blank stare. A pity, because the almost bloodless campaign demonstrates one of the finest pieces of generalship to be found in the War.
After the battle of Murfreesboro in December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863, the two opposing armies seemed to go into suspended animation for a period of half a year. Bragg withdrew his Army of Tennessee to 30 miles south of Murfreesboro at Tullahoma, Tennessee and contented himself with observing Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland and awaiting events. Rosecrans seemed content to stay in Murfreesboro indefinitely, reinforcing and resupplying his army. Calls to remove Rosecrans became frequent, along with frequent entreaties for Rosecrans to attack Bragg. Rosecrans refused to move until he was ready. On June 23, 1863 he was ready.
Here is the account of the campaign written by Union Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert C. Kniffin in 1887 for The Century Magazine and which later appeared in Battles and Leaders. I admire both its conciseness and its accuracy: (more…)
During World War II, GI’s would watch a lot of training films, and most of them would often cure any insomnia that viewers might be suffering from. However, the Private Snafu shorts were different. Snafu, a term familiar to anyone who has even been in the Army, was the ultimate Army foul up who taught by negative example. The production values were quite good, with Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, lending his talents, and dialogue sometimes being written by Theodore Geisl, who went on to post war fame as Dr. Seuss.
The films were funny, risqué for their time and blunt: the message conveyed tended to linger in the minds of the troops. A broad range of topics were covered:
Something for the weekend. The score from the movie Twelve O’clock High (1949). A film shorn of any Hollywood glamor or heroics it tells the story of the fictional 918th bomb group as it pioneers daylight precision bombing in the early days of the Eighth Air Force in England and suffers harrowing losses as a result. Veterans of the Eighth Air Force applauded the film for its stark realism and its demonstration of the impact of war on the men called upon to fight it. Anyone who has not seen this masterpiece should do so as quickly as possible.
(more…)
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 