Tales from History

Dear readers of this infrequently updated blog, I’ll be blogging semi-regularly at Psychology Today about personalities of the past. Check it out here: Welcome to the Past If you’ve [...]

Following on my first and second posts in this series, I’ll now wrap up by telling you why my upcoming History of the Renaissance World begins in the twelfth century and ends with the [...]

I spent the better part of a week rounding up contemporary chronicles that record this chunk of Welsh history, about the Welsh prince Llewellyn ap Gruffyd and his attempt to free Wales from the [...]

Polishing up a couple of early chapters in Volume 3 of the History of the World, I ran across one of my favorite minor historical characters. You can’t get much more colorfully off-the-wall [...]

On my Facebook page, I occasionally post a “Historical Fact of the Day”–generally the one interesting thing I’ve discovered in eight or ten hours of hard historical slog. [...]

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes – Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and [...]

Hey, I wrote about these guys! From CNN: They were 51 young men who met a grisly death far from home, their heads chopped off and their bodies thrown into a mass grave. Their resting place was [...]

I have now been sick since the Monday before Thanksgiving. In fact, I may never get well. So instead of racking my cough-syrup-addled brain for a topic to post on, I’m posting a highly [...]

You guys are good. The painting is by Jules Laure (1806-1861). It shows Charlemagne receiving manuscripts from his tutor, the monk Alcuin, around 781. Charlemagne is a good choice for the cover [...]

I’m not sure why, but whenever someone calls me a prolific writer, it makes me cringe. Why is that? It has some sort of negative implication which I can’t quite tease out. Anyway, [...]

Sundays are work days for us, so Mondays are our days off. It’s sprinkling a little this morning, but not too hard; the windows are open and the birds are singing. The neighbor’s cows [...]

I’m back to work now. So, in no particular order, here’s what’s occupying the brain of THIS working writer on the first day of December… 1. I’m waiting on the [...]