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If you cannot view this video, you need to download a browser which supports the latest HTML 5 standards. Firefox or Apple Safari are good and free choices. You can also download the video here. This is a very short, but interesting video showing Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria in 1910 or so. It really … more »

I’ve just begun reading a new and so far very interesting book about European conquest, colonization and cultural change in the late medieval/early middle ages period. I will be spending a significant amount of time over my break pouring through this book as it is quite interesting. It starts off talking about the expansion of … more »

The semester is finally over for me. I had my last final and had to turn in my last paper yesterday. The paper was an interesting paper, however, because it involved the history of the Wyoming Territorial Prison Museum. It wasn’t about this history of the prison itself, but rather of the site as a … more »

One of the research papers I am currently working on for my German literature class is about the ad hominem style of argumentation in the rhetorical dialog Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, or The Ploughman from Bohemia. While I am not going to go into the style of argumentation used in the text on this blog, … more »

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably noticed by now that today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was on this day, November 9th, in 1989 that the Wall was breached and East Germans finally allowed into West Germany. This was the result of a long, complicated … more »

Today I was killing time by browsing Wikipedia and ran across a very interesting photograph. It is a photograph taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 and is considered to be the first permanent photograph ever taken. Although difficult to make out, it is a photograph of buildings taken from a window in his apartment. … more »

Last Friday I gave a talk about the Battle of the Washita to a group of undergraduate students and because of that I thought I would create a post here about this particularly interesting battle. The Battle of the Washita was a battle that took place in the morning of November 27, 1868. The Seventh … more »

I’ve been contacted by the person running the online journal of Dieter Finzen and asked if I would be willing to do translations for the site. The idea behind the site is to post journal entries made by the German World War I solider, Dieter Finzen. Each entry is posted 93 years after it was … more »

Another blog I regularly follow pointed me in the direction of a very interesting article written by General William T. Sherman about his ‘Grand Strategy’ of the Civil War. It’s interesting to read Sherman’s take on it about two decades after it actually took place. I know this post is a bit short, but unfortunately … more »

The other day I stumbled upon a website called Academic Earth. The purpose of the website is to provide free lectures on various subjects from the leading universities in the US. I very eagerly browsed through their history section and ran across a series of lectures by Professor David W. Blight from Yale University about … more »