I Am Not Hamlet

My family and some friends of ours spent a portion of last evening at Birmingham's First Night celebration. The details of which don't matter, except for one aspect; our second stop at the Allen House. This was a house built in the first third of the 19th century, and has to be the oldest existing house in Oakland County--and it's located in a park in downtown Birmingham. We were able to walk through the house and talk with the three interpreters who knew most of their "stuff." What's truly fascinating though is we were walking through the 19th century, while outside most people were looking forward to the next year of the 21st century (which unless I'm mistaken still has one more year to go before a new decade starts). The plank floors creaked under us, the dull iron and whitewashed walls caught our eyes, while outside cars rolled by and people spoke on cellular phones. Within the surprisingly quiet confines of the Allen house, we could take a momen...

A respect for history--even if you kitchify some of it, you've still gotta have respect. Where's the French influence in Detroit(aside from some street names?) Where's the Underground Railroad tour? Where indeed, Detroit.

I finished Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus back in March and I'm still letting some of his work settle in between my cranial folds. A couple points of interest he raises: There were quite possibly more people living in the Americas than Europe in 1491 (scientists disagree but even the conservative estimates are higher than those found in most high school textbooks) Some Indians were living in harmony with their environment, but many had radically changed their surroundings:e.g., the Great Plains of America, the areas of New England where the Pilgrims and Puritans first settled. This is fascinating because the idea still is disseminated that Indians were perfect Earth-keepers as oppossed to those greedy Europeans. The evidence gives the lie to these antiquated ideas. The truth is that Indians like any other group of people they had good and bad practices and that they impacted their environment for their benefit. See for instance, Ma...