Category Archives: history

100 GREATEST AFRICAN AMERICANS

In 2002 Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante amassed list for his biographical dictionary 100 GREATEST AFRICAN AMERICANS. The illustrious names were listed alphabetically with # 1 being Hank Aaron and Malcolm X closed out the hundred. I recognized forty-one of them. Historical giants and thank to Wikipedia I read how the remaining fifty-nine African […]

True Lack Of Color

George Washington has been revered as the Father of this Country for decades. The Virginian planter and his wife owned 318 slaves. Life of the plantation masters had always been painted full-white, however the Southern climate had been deadly to white women and slave owners exercised droit seigneur over the chattel women and girls. The […]

Tar In The Blood

My father’s side of the family traveled to the New World on the the Mayflower. My antecedents were Howlands. A young indentured servant, John Howland, had been washed overboard mid-Atlantic and somehow had grabbed a trailing lanyard to haul himself to the safety of the Mayflower. Centuries later my Irish Nana had sailed on a […]

TORA TORA TORA 2023

Like JFK’s assassination everyone of a certain age remembered where they were during the announcement of the Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. Many had to ask, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?” This morning to commemorate their ignorance I posed the same question to younger people on the streets of Manhattan. Few of […]

Glatt Thanksgiving

The Brownist English Dissenters fled their homeland in the 16th and 17th Century to escape religious persecution by the Church of England, which worsened with the return of the Catholic Stuarts’ return to the throne. Leyden in Holland welcomed the refugees, but the Puritans led a precarious economic existence in the Netherlands, whose people were […]