"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
What Have Historians Been Reading? The journal of The Historical Society asked its readers for book recommendations. This one from a UConn prof sounds right up my alley:
I also recommend highly Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (Random House, 2003). It is a marvelous account of the intertwining careers and personal relations of a group of New England intellectuals, including Herman Melville, Henry Adams, the zoologist Sylvester Morse, the Amherst Dickinsons, John La Farge, Percival Lowell, and their Japanese friends and acquaintances—beautifully written cultural history with a good deal of political and diplomatic history as background. Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge come in toward the end. Lafcadio Hearn too, of course. Read it!
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Thomas Jefferson had a role in Haiti's nightmarish history: Who knew old Timothy Pickering stood up for the Haitians?
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Conrad Black's life of FDR is praised by Scoop Jackson's biographer.
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