First, lets just get this out of the way. Hillary Clinton won the election. She got more than TWO MILLION more votes than Donald Trump. Clearly, voters rejected neither her not her message. Liberals who were disenchanted with her moderate-right policies and who had backed Bernie Sanders clearly turned out in droves to vote for… Read more The Conundrum of the Battleground States
The Colour of Poison is the first in the Sebastian Foxley Medieval Mystery series by Toni Mount, and if the others are even so much as half as good as this first one I’ll be snatching them all up as soon as they go into print. This story revolves around the Foxley brothers, Jude and… Read more The Colour of Poison by Toni Mount
Marie de Guise was born on 22 November 1515 in Lorraine, France. She was the eldest daughter of Claude of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and quite the matrimonial catch. A tall and lithesome woman, she was also intelligent and brave, and proved her worth many times over as both a duchess and the Queen of… Read more Mary of Guise
Radicalization is always political, and any religion can serve as a metaphorical base camp for terrorism. Thanks to both public amnesia and sociopolitical eliding of some forms of terrorism once the terrorists are rebranded “freedom fighters”, people don’t seem to know much about historically recent occurring in Europe. For example, the 20th century Fight for… Read more Sunday, Bloody Sunday
On the night of 18 November 1404 into the morning of the 19th the oceanic tide combined with a storm surge from the North Sea pushed huge amounts of water up the coastal rivers, overwhelmed the dike system of Flanders, Zeeland and Holland (part of modern day Belgium and the Netherlands) and causing massive flooding… Read more The St. Elizabeth Floods
I remember sitting in Mrs. Gorin’s history class in 1988 hearing about the time a POTUS won in the Electoral College even though he lost the popular vote. I remember DISTINCTLY thinking, with the smugness only a Reagan-loving American teenager durring the Cold War achieve, that I was glad that wouldn’t happen again. It was… Read more Why the Electoral College Needs an Overhaul
Happy Halloween! We are now only a couple of weeks away from the US Presidential Election, which the whole world is watching with genuine terror lest Donald Trump become POTUS and get access to the nuclear codes. Since little is more horrifying than monsters and politicians, today is an excellent day to discuss the zeitgeist… Read more Monstrous Politics
The future King Edward VI of England was baptized at Hampton Court on 15 October 1537, with all the holy pomp his father, King Henry VIII, could muster. Every caution was taken to preserve the baby from illness or cold, and no expense was spared on ceremony. As Margaret Beaufort had dictated decades before, the… Read more Baptizing Edward VI
Up until 1066 most of England was Anglo-Saxon and proud of it. There had been a few decades of Danish rule on and off, but for the last 24 years the King of England had been Edward the Confessor, the son of Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy, who had been given the throne… Read more The Battle of Hastings: Making England French in 1066
Edward of Westminster, the disputed Prince of Wales, was called by that name because he born at the Palace of Westminster on 13 October 1453. He was the only child of King Henry VI of England and Margaret of Anjou, and his birth infuriated Richard, 3rd Duke of York and plunged England into a civil… Read more The Short Life of Edward of Westminster