Last week I saw a performance of Jaclyn Backhaus’ Men On Boats produced by the Speakeasy Stage Company at the Calderwood Pavilion. All I knew about the production was that it told the story of John Wesley Powell’s voyage down the Colorado River, mapping territory in 1869. And that all the 10 characters — all…
Commentators are discussing the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. On June 4, 1989, Chinese army troops rolled into the center of Beijing to destroy the nascent democracy movement there. For those unfamiliar with the geography of Beijing, it would be the equivalent of tanks on Washington’s National Mall. I remember the June 4…
Looking at my blog, I noticed there were a few things I did last year or earlier this year that I did not mention or link to. Two of them are websites for American Experience films: Oswald’s Ghost and Whitman. Oswald’s Ghost is about the impact of the Kennedy assassination on the nation’s psyche, the…
Further adventures in my life as a letter writing crank: This is from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, May 25, 2008, in response to a short piece by Charles Pierce. I’m not sure what Rosie Crocker’s problem with it was, but I thought it was a good bit of historical reflection. In fact, this is…
I just got this nice e-mail: “We are writing with the very nice news that World History Matters (the combined rubric for World History Sources and Women and World History–at http://worldhistorymatters.org) has been awarded the James Harvey Robinson Prize of the American Historical Association for its for “outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of…
Embarassingly, I forgot to post before the actual show, but PBS affiliates may be repeating the latest American Experience program this week. The show is on The Boy in the Bubble and I wrote the content for the accompanying website. I will write more later, but suffice it to say for the moment that I…
This is a bit tangential to anything, but it’s almost Patriot’s Day when we remember Paul Revere and once again forget William Dawes, the other guy who went to warn Sam Adams in Concord of the Redcoats. I just heard this amazing story by Don Was about a song composed by Charles Dawes, a descendent…
Jack Cheng, PhD 