Deliverance Creek, written by Melissa Carter. Produced by Nicholas Sparks. Lifetime, September 13, 2014 (Premiere). The best thing about the Lifetime original movie/”First Original Nicholas Sparks Television Event” may be its poster. A woman stands alone in a desolate landscape with stormy skies. Smoke billows up behind her. She is hunched over . . .
Read MoreBeginning this week, I will be writing a regular column for JSTOR Daily, a new online magazine that “features topical essays that draw connections between current affairs, historical scholarship, and other content that’s housed on JSTOR.” In “(Un)Catalogued” (h/t to Paul Erickson for suggesting the title), I will be reporting on my . . .
Read MoreOn a chilly day in December 1861, an Iowa farmer and Colorado gold miner named Alonzo Ferdinand Ickis put on his Union uniform—what he called his “suit of Sam’s best”—and set out from Cañon City with ninety fellow soldiers in Company B, 2nd Colorado Infantry. Their destination was Fort Garland, a federal . . .
Read MoreThey say you can always go home again. This is certainly true for me; my parents are happy when I come home to visit. They put me up in their guest room, where I sleep surrounded by antique objects–most of which scare the living bejesus out of me. My mother has collected . . .
Read MoreWhy do so few historians talk about the American Civil War in the West? And by “the West” I don’t mean the trans-Mississippi. I mean the vast stretches of high desert and the extensive mountain ranges west of the 100th meridian, where elevation and aridity make everything a bit more difficult: breathing, . . .
Read MoreYou probably think that I’ve got some sort of obsession with vampire TV shows and movies. But have you considered that perhaps this is because recent vampire TV shows and movies have an obsession with history? Most historians have not paid much attention to vampires; literary critics, on the other hand, have . . .
Read MoreJust getting to the 9/11 Museum is quite a production. Most of the surrounding area is still a construction site, and so after you leave the subway station you walk all the way around it, hemmed in by tall chain-link fences, before you come upon the 9/11 Memorial: the two gigantic waterfalls . . .
Read MoreOne of the first items you see in the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition on Civil War textiles is a giant cotton bale. Its burlap bagging is shredded so that the cotton mushrooms up out of it, released from the tension of compaction. Behind it is a photograph of a Confederate fortification at . . .
Read MoreA tall figure strides toward you through the fog. Then you see him from the back as he walks up a hillside, dragging his left hand through the tall grass. There he is again, staring out at the Pacific Ocean. Always in a long black coat and a stovepipe hat, a hint . . .
Read MoreWhat is it that inspires us to write? The pressure of a deadline? Competitive word counting, à la the #GraftonLine project? A serendipitous discovery in the archive? For me, inspiration has taken many forms. Pressure, yes. Guilt, yes. Excitement, yes. But what has done more than just inspire me–what has actually changed . . .
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