Recommendations

I have spent about the last hour watching a very interesting documentary produced in the 1970s about the Yukon Passage during the Klondike Gold Rush. The primary focus of the documentary is not the gold rush itself, but rather the way in which prospectors would have gotten to the Klondike region in the late nineteenth … more »

I have a new featured book for you this week. This one is an American classic called Roughing It by Mark Twain. It is one of Mark Twain’s travel books which made him famous as an author. In this book he writes about his travels throughout the Old American West, his adventures with mining, newspaper … more »

The other day I stumbled upon a very interesting website put together by the City of Westminster, London. It is a digitalization of the journal of Nathaniel Bryceson, an early Victorian clerk. The journal was written in 1846 when Nathaniel was nineteen years old. The online version as posted on the website for the City … more »

This week I have a new featured book called Europe in the High Middle Ages by William Chester Jordan. It is a very well-written book which details the Europe in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It covers a range of topics from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, the Crusades to monasteries, the Catholic Church … 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 »

Last night I finished Ghost Stories of the Old West by Dan Asfar. Other than several editing mistakes (spelling, grammar, etc), the book was actually quite good. You always hear about legends and myths from Europe about haunted castles and so on, but to read the legends of some of America’s own haunted places is … more »

So I decided to take a break from reading non-fiction and treat myself to a book full of short ghost stories of the old west. The book I found is appropriately titled Ghost Stories of the Old West and is by Dan Asfar. I really haven’t gotten very far into it at all; only a … more »

I realized today that I haven’t changed the featured book for quite a long time. So, I’ve changed it to another book about Native Americans called The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America by James Wilson. It is a fascinating history of the Native Americans that gives each region of the United States … more »

I recently subscribed to a couple of history magazines that I really enjoy a lot. The first one is called Wild West and, as the title implies, discusses events that happened in the “wild west” days of the US. This seems to me to be a fairly unique magazine as I have not really found … more »

I have posted a new featured book called Native American Testimony edited by Peter Nabokov. This book is a very interesting culmination of testimonials by Native Americans about the coming of the white man. What makes this such a unique volume is that it is told from the perspective of the Native Americans rather than … more »