History

Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine [http://www.chesterton.org/explore-the-acs/gilbertmagazine/], I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full

From the Notebooks I've started going back through books I read from about age 20 through age 40. The first book I pulled off my shelf was the first book I read when I decided (for whatever reason) that I needed to become much more erudite: Will Durant&

Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine [http://www.chesterton.org/explore-the-acs/gilbertmagazine/], I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full

Roman History Finding myself firmly ensconced in middle age, there's one small thing I regret: I never sat down and focused on one thing for a prolonged period. Sure, I kept my life focused on the big things: getting my professional degree, doing my job well, raising a

Letters to Children: On History It's difficult to instruct you here, but I suggest you concentrate your reading in three areas: (1) Obtaining a general historical sense; (2) American history; (3) Classical history. (1) In order to understand much of what you read, you need a general chronological

Colors When I grew up, I thought the old world (pre-I Love Lucy) was black and white. I knew, of course, that there was color before The Wizard of Oz, but when I thought about how things must've been like, my mind intuitively fell into shades of grey.

I like it when I run across a historian who supports Belloc's popular histories. For kicks, I recently started reading Simon Schama's A History of Britain. On page 45, he writes about the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain: A tidy compartmentalization of British history,

Rome Me I was a history major in college. Within my history major, I emphasized classical civilization: Greece, Rome, Byzantium. I loved the stuff, but that was many years ago, and I've forgotten a lot of what I learned. Last weekend, though, I stumbled across an amazing podcast: