September 29, 2019
A trip to Weimar, Buchenwald, and two very different Germanies. In 1775, the duke of the tiny German state of Saxe-Weimar invited the German-speaking world’s hottest new celebrity, 25-year old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to take up residence in his quiet little capital. Goethe was famous because of his hit novel “The Sorrows if Young […]
September 26, 2019
From September 26, 2019: Over the weekend, I had the chance to visit Tempelhof, Berlin’s original airport and a very important site in the city’s history. Even before there was a terminal, Tempelhof Field, located south of Berlin’s city center, was witness to some of the earliest steps in aviation – including a demonstration, in […]
September 20, 2019
From September 20, 2019: Status: Currently escaping from Colditz Castle. Will let you know how it goes. If you’ve ever played and enjoyed “Castle Wolfenstein”, this post is for you. During WW2, Colditz Castle, about an hour southeast of Leipzig, served a top-security prison for Allied POWs, most of them officers. The Allied prisoners sent […]
September 17, 2019
In July 1945, the leaders of the three Allied Powers that had just defeated Hitler – Churchill, Truman, and Stalin – met at Potsdam, southwest of Berlin, to plot the continuing war against Japan and the immediate future of post-war Germany. They met at Schloss Cecilienhof, a rambling Tudor mansion built by the Crown Prince […]
August 27, 2019
Different dreams in Atlanta, Georgia. A thread. Dreams of the Lost Cause: The images of Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee, and Stonewall Jackson carved into Stone Mountain, Georgia. The top of Stone Mountain was infamously the site of the second foundation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. Statue of Mahatma Gandhi at the Martin […]
August 18, 2019
In May 1961, a group of interracial civil rights activists journeyed together through the South to challenge the non-enforcement of US Supreme Court rulings outlawing segregation on interstate buses. During a recent road trip through Alabama, I followed their path. Dubbed the “Freedom Riders” and sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), they planned […]
August 14, 2019
This is a post about my visit in the summer of 2019 to Tuskegee University, in eastern Alabama, which was an opportunity to learn about two amazing Americans and the legacy they left behind. Those two individuals are Booker T. Washington, the founding president of the school, and George Washington Carver, a scientist he recruited […]
July 25, 2019
In July 2019, I became aware that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing was approaching. Using the Lego Saturn V rocket my children had bought me for my birthday that year, I demonstrated for them the different stages of the mission. I started live-tweeting the photos and timeline of events I had […]
May 30, 2019
But the battle for the remote Solomon Islands was not over. And no one would experience this more directly than a young man born to privilege who arrived in Tulagi in April 1943, to take command of a PT patrol boat. His name was John F. Kennedy. This quonset hut on Tulagi was the repair […]
May 30, 2019
By mid-September, the Japanese were ready to try to break through the US perimeter again. Under the command of Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, they drilled a tortuous path through the jungle to hit the Marines from an unexpected direction – the south. Except that it wasn’t entirely unexpected. General Vandegrift had guessed the Japanese intentions […]