Marking two more Confederate graves (07/12/07)
June 10 began with rainstorms; but it soon cleared up, turning into a rare June day for the worthy task of marking the graves of two notable Vernon Countians of Civil War times. Sons of Confederate Veterans Eldon Steward, Jerry Fast, and the present writer were joined by Terry and Tom Ramsey, representing the Vernon County Historical Society...

Books For Bushwhacker Days (06/14/07)
By all means, include a little pertinent reading in your observance of Bushwhacker Days 2007. There's no shortage of really good, new titles. The following are, or will be, purchasable from the Bushwhacker Museum, 212 W. Walnut, or from booksellers...

Is it bye-bye forever to bipartisanship? (05/10/07)
Comparing today's national political scene with that of the not-so-distant past, one can't help being struck by the contrast in the behavior of the "opposition" party. Sixty years ago, the Republican-controlled Congress, led by Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenburg, consistently supported the foreign policy of the Democratic administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Differ as the parties might on domestic policy, in foreign affairs America spoke with one voice...

Yes, there are 'Aristocrats' (04/26/07)
"Aristocrat" comes from the Greek aristos, "best." Who's "best"? In most of history it was defined by heredity. If your parents were "best," so were you, even if you were the most worthless lout on earth. The modern world rejects this "best," only to replace it with a "worse." The pop culture's "best" are the "rich and famous," most of whom are no better than that titled worthless lout. ...

Write your obituary in 'Talkese' (04/05/07)
"Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music, and Why We Should, Like, Care" (Gotham Books, 2003). Anything but a catchy title. The author, John McWhorter, seems to go out of his way to perpetrate the very linguistic sins he laments. He gives no real reason "why we should, like, care." And he ends with no suggestions for reversing or even halting the "degradation."...

Book sheds light on an important subject (03/01/07)
Notwithstanding its soporific title, its origin as a doctoral dissertation, and its suggestion of a pricey, slickpaper "coffeetable" book, "Evolution of the Missouri Militia into the National Guard of Missouri," by Dr. John Glendower Westover, turns out a surprisingly readable as well as informative volume. A publication of the Missouri Society for Military History, it tells much about an important subject of which most people know far too little...

Sorting out the 'great ice storms' (02/08/07)
Invariably a new ice storm provokes recollections of those of past years. Just how that of 2007 really rates alongside the truly memorable ones, it's too early yet to tell. But most of those of recent years, with which 2007 has already been compared, aren't even in the running...

'The Collapse of American Power' (12/14/06)
For some years I've possessed, and often browse, a book titled, "The Collapse of British Power," by well-known British writer on war, Corelli Barnett. I was telling a friend of Barnett's thesis: that the British (who seems to have done everything, built an empire and lost it, in "a fit of absent-mindedness") absent-mindedly collapsed just because they'd let their industrial plant decay. ...

Eliza Gabbert, Lady Bushwhacker, found (11/30/06)
On a mild November Saturday, Tom and Terry Ramsey and I were in the old Montevallo cemetery, pursuing our odd hobby, "cemetery crawling." We'd already stopped by the Sandstone cemetery to photograph the newly discovered burial place of Lt. Joe Wood. Now Terry was photographing the gravestones of Lt. Wood's children by his first wife, Susan...

This 'Diversity' Can Kill Us (10/20/06)
I can't hear that vogue word "diversity" without recalling the case, a year or two ago, of a Muslim FBI agent assigned to "wire" himself and eavesdrop on some Muslims suspected of terrorism. He refused: "A Muslim doesn't spy on fellow Muslims!" He wasn't fired, oh no! That would have lowered the FBI 's "diversity" quotient. He was merely reassigned. "Diversi-ty" trumped all else, such as his service oath...

The 'Three Stooges' of bankrobbing (10/05/06)
By Patrick Brophy Nevada Daily Mail Passing through the drowsy hamlet of Dederick today, it's hard to believe it was the scene of one of the most bizarre criminal melodramas in Vernon County history. Tragic as it was, at least for the major players, The Gang That Could Do Nothing Right, it comes across rather as slapstick comedy, almost too broad to be believable...

The season's genealogical inquiries (08/31/06)
Summarized below are some of the genealogical inquiries received in recent months by the Vernon County Historical Society. Readers interested in, or having information about, any of these families are invited to contact the inquirer directly, or the VCHS, at Bushwhacker Museum, open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., weekdays, telephone (417) 667-9602...

That venerable Southernism, the double name (08/15/06)
Once or twice ere the hit July 23 program by our native-born musicologist, I found myself referring to "Marsha Ann," and with blank looks being asked, "Who?" Last time I'd really looked (listened, rather), she was "Marsha Ann" for true. What else to be expected of one whose mother was always "EdnaFlorence" (never just one or the other) when she wasn't merely "Sister," sib of best friend Salem Wilson? What had happened indeed? Marsha Ann, I could only speculate darkly, had strayed off into the trackless Massachusetts marshes and there been robbed of (or, knowing not what she did, cast off) her distinctive linguistic birthright, the "binary" (two-part) name.. ...

You think it's hot, think about the summer of '36 (07/27/06)
The long hot summer got you down? Pity yourself as you rush from air conditioned house to air conditioned car while the temperature flirts with 100? All aboard the time machine, you wimps, for a 70-year trip back to 1936, when hot was hot! 1936, of course, was in the depths of the Great Depression, and it was as if nature had decided to step in and remind us that all hardships and disasters aren't manmade...

A slighted bicentennial, part 2 (07/13/06)
With 24 whites and 30 Osages, Capt. Zebulon Pike left the Osage towns (in modem Vernon County) on Aug. 26, 1806, traveling an old Osage trail west-by-south up Little and Big Drywood creeks over to the Neosho watershed. (Some historians have him heading due west up the Little Osage River, having misread Pike's vague mention of the Little Osage village ) Seeing the prairies in the year's driest month, Pike would confirm the myth of the "Great American Desert," an expanse "on which not a speck of vegetable matter existed." His next objective, the Pawnees, under Caracterish (White Wolf), were then centered on the Republican River in north central Kansas. ...

A slighted bicentennial, part I (07/06/06)
Poor old Zeb Pike! A pioneering Rodney Dangerfield, he just gets no respect. Lewis and Clark hogged all the exploratory glory in their own time. Now, it seems, they've managed to hog it even during this, the bicentennial that's more nearly Pike's than theirs...

He fought alongside Vernon Countains (04/27/06)
He was Cedar County's first sheriff, played a pivotal part in the Battle of Wilson's Creek, fighting alongside Col. DeWitt C. Hunter and his Vernon Countians, and there gave his life. He will be commemorated, and his new gravestone dedicated, Saturday in a ceremony staged by the Col. John T. Coffee Camp No.1934 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans...

Crawford's Comedians remembered (04/20/06)
Some artifacts lately donated to the Bushwhacker Museum brought on a spate of curiosity about a venerable Nevada institution: Crawford's Comedians. With the artifacts came a huge pile of old thermifax copies of Nevada Daily Mail entries on the subject, accumulated by the donor. ...

Author to speak at Sunday meeting (04/06/06)
Those who fancy we live in corrupt, venal, decadent days, the worst by far ever seen in the world, would do well to crack a history book. Almost any serious history book would do, but they could do no better, for a start, than "General James G. Blunt: Tarnished Glory," by Robert Collins...

Booklet makes sense of the new road names (03/23/06)
Doubtless it was inevitable that the project of naming Vernon County's rural roads would arouse some misunderstanding and dissatisfaction. More than one country dweller awoke to find himself living on a road with a far-fetched or incomprehensible name, or even one with troubling connotations...

Despite some flaws, a recommended book (03/09/06)
Donald L. Gilmore serves notice up front: His roots are just about as Darnyankee as they come, and numbers of his forebears "wore Union blue." While his family's been in Missouri for over a century, he's "at opposite poles from the stereotypical Southerner." "This book, therefore," he points out, "is not a personal vendetta meant to settle the score for some real or imagined wrong inflicted by Northerners." This caveat is needed to account for Gilmore's persuasive brief for the Missouri cause in the Border Wars and the Civil War.. ...

The 'e' in e-mail must be for exasperating (02/16/06)
As corresponding secretary of the Vernon County Historical Society, I often get handed "mail" that's not "mail" at all, as I understand it. Tada! It's e-mail, and it arrived by mysterious, obviously malevolent electronic means. Electronic it may be. Exasperating it indubitably is...

'The Smoke Never Clears' (02/09/06)
The above title I've plagiarized from Southern Partisan, its pithy, appropriate name for its Civil War book review section. Some people suffer from the delusion the Civil War's over. Other considerations apart, they haven't checked recent publishers' lists! It's been said a Civil War-related title has appeared at the rate of at least one a day since Lee surrendered in 1865. ...

Boyhood memory inspires World War II research (01/05/06)
In November the Vernon County Historical Society received the following letter from one John Meurs, of a place called Rueti, Switzerland: "When I was a 9-year-old schoolboy living in Nazi-occupied Holland a B-17 bomber of the 8th U.S. Air Force crashed behind our house in the village called Apeldoorn. That was Nov. 26, 1944...

Franklin Palmer Norman, 1910-2005 (12/22/05)
The end of an era. Why does the quiet death of a 95-year-old man bring such a thought to mind? He's hardly the only one. Hope Hornback, too, died at 95, earlier in the year. Alice Hill, very much of the same generation, died just days before Franklin...

Genealogy comes to him who stands and waits (12/15/05)
My family tree has always interested me, mildly, but never to the extent of putting me in that mob that, so we're told, has raised genealogy to the secondmostpopular American pastime. (The first seems to be NASCAR, which I find even harder to imagine.) Already I seemed to know more than most beginning family tree climbers. ...

The Osage sites -- Vernon County's unsung assets (12/08/05)
Leading Vernon Countians took advantage of an unseasonably pleasant Nov. 18 to tour Osage Indian and other historical sites in the county's northeast comer. The occasion was a visit by Eddy Red Eagle, Jr., a fullblooded Osage who's director of "Wa Zha Zhi," a tribal cultural center under development in Pawhuska, Okla...

The 'Dead Hand' of Government (11/17/05)
Recently I sat in on a meeting of the city council, my first offense in that line for many a year. It wasn't quite as mindnumbing an experience as usual; still, my own mind wandered, and I found myself mulling general principles, the "bigger picture," more than the particular issue at hand, which clearly had the full attention of most of the attending public...

Col. DeWitt Clinton Hunter, 1830-1904, part one (09/08/05)
He's been called "our most notable citizen of all times." His name graces a street. Franklin Norman is campaigning to get the name affixed to a public building. He named and surveyed Nevada. He was the first resident, attorney, circuit and county clerk, and postmaster. He designed and superintended the first courthouse...

Osage jumping on the bandwagon? (08/18/05)
The Vernon County Historical Society can only be grateful to the Osage Tribal Museum and others responsible for bringing the latter institution's traveling exhibit to the Bushwhacker Museum, where it will be on public view till about mid-October. But the present writer is surprised and rather troubled by some of the written interpretation accompanying the exhibit...

Trials and tortures (08/04/05)
The recent History Channel series, "Last Days of World War II," reminded me, with a bit of a shock, that it was just 60 years ago I made my epochal pilgrimage to the Mayo Clinic. We arrived on Flag Day. They were having a parade, all World War I old-timers, the young being overseas. The trip took two full days in our 1937 Pontiac coupe. Rationing still being in force, my mother had had to con the ration board out of extra gas, and we had two flats on the way...

The abused old English language (07/21/05)
An English language lover's lot is not a happy one these days. There always were wordwreckers at large, of course; but there're many more of them today thanks to the politically correct fashion of toadying to the fancied sensibilities of some foreigners, whose sensibilities ought rightly to be the least of our linguistic concerns, and who need to be told, in no uncertain terms, our language is strictly our business, none of theirs whatsoever...

Probably not the last word on flag, name, problem (07/07/05)
"The Confederate flag has been used by racist hatemongers, therefore it must be banned!" "There were baddies among the Bushwhackers, therefore the name must go!" This is as sensible as to say, "Airplanes have been used to bomb and kill people, therefore those works of the devil must be banned!"...

Laputans and Yahoos (06/23/05)
From the beginning, this writer has tried hard to befriend and find common ground with Charles Nash. His June 19 column only points up how abysmally I've failed. The historical record shows incontrovertibly that Nevada has always staunchly supported Cottey College. Still, the legended divide between "town and gown" seems to apply here just as at old Oxford. The difference being, at Oxford it was the students who brought the town misunderstanding. Here, it seems to be one of its faculty...

A rebel yell, all in good fun … or almost all (06/09/05)
The "rebel-yelling" of some denizens of these parts these days is strictly tongue-in-cheek, all in good fun ... 'til a Shannon Harwell comes along to remind us the "fun" rests on a bedrock of often very unfunny truth. I've never met the lady, and she comes across in print as through a glass darkly. ...

Schooling: then and now (05/12/05)
In looking over available source material for a requested brief biography of Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard, Cottey College's founder, this writer found himself drawn less to the notion of a straightforward life-story than to an appraisal of the broader subject: the field this woman and her school epitomized in her day, and above all how that day contrasts with ours...

'Heritage' is more than cliché (04/28/05)
Have you ever noticed how a thriving, pleasant, "normal" life seems to go on in this land, utterly unnoticed in the newspapers and other "media" that affect to report on, and indeed mirror, what's going on? "What's going on," according to them, far from normality, is an endless round of mayhem and political crisis, in an atmosphere of bitter rancor...

Amnesia afflicts local parks and memorials (03/31/05)
Memorials are supposed to memorialize, i.e. to keep the names they bear alive; but often, it seems, the memorials themselves need aides memoires if they're to serve their purpose. Franklin Norman, a member of the city parks and recreation board, is amazed to discover that the city's parks, as it were, have no history. ...

Just a woman NOT doing her job ('protecting the public') (03/29/05)
"She sure showed you a thing or two, didn't she!" exulted a lady friend of Lynn Wade's comments on my March 17 column. "We all agreed, you had the better of it," a male friend reported of the male consensus at the YMCA. How dismaying! There's no objective truth after all, then. Truth is totally relative to our "gender" (sex)...

Martyrs to political correctness (03/17/05)
"The dead and injured in that Georgia courthouse shooting," said a friend, "are martyrs to political correctness." I hadn't gotten so far so soon myself. My first thought was just to wonder if that woman deputy, shot in the face and "critical," saw her "equality" as worth it...

How the "red states" got that way (02/24/05)
James Webb is less well known as a writer than as President Reagan's feisty and effective ex-Marine Secretary of the Navy. Yet every serious reader ought to read his rather misleadingly titled "Born Fighting" (Broadway Books, 2004). The present writer was serendipitously drawn to it by its subtitle: "How the Scots-Irish Shaped America."...

More 'unimportant thought' on (gasp!) sex (02/10/05)
"Language with all its defects contains a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on." --C S. Lewis. "If words are to have any value to us, we ought to respect the way that they have been used historically."...

A good word for the 'Good Old Days' (02/03/05)
A vow to forsake a certain subject is a hard one for a writer to keep. For the good reason that the subject itself refuses to go away, but rather continues to provoke. Recent reading, including Richard Carpenter's Jan. 30 column, brings one back to that delicate subject, "the schools." Which are now so much better, we're told, than in the Good Old Days...

The season's haul of genealogical inquiries (01/27/05)
Below are genealogical inquiries lately received by the Vernon County Historical Society. Anyone interested is encouraged to contact the inquirer directly. Boyd -- My great-grandparents were James Everett Boyd (1886-1940) and Myrtle Corp Boyd (1894-1962), married in Nevada 1909, buried in Newton Cemetery. ...

The inevitable quotidian 'me-and-my-cat' tale (01/13/05)
This columnist tries to avoid the quotidian and the personal. "The present writer" (as, he stuffily calls himself) reckons enough others, plumb up to the K.C. Star's C.W. Gusewelle, are interminably beavering away keeping those two interminable topics covered...

Probate papers bring a racy past to life (12/30/04)
Volunteers at the Bushwhacker Museum are at last nearing completion of the fascinating, if herculean, task of inventorying the original Vernon County probate papers: hundreds of boxes, thousands of file folders covering more than a century of deceased individuals...

The War of the Worldviews (12/16/04)
David S. Reif is a partisan of the South who, one suspects, speaks over the heads of those likely to disagree with him, while making his natural sympathizers uneasy. Twice he's been the featured speaker at regional events, first at the Gov. Claiborne Jackson birthday anniversary dinner, held in Nevada a couple of years ago, then last November at the dedication of the Missouri Brigades Monument near Osceola...

Islam: 'Making A Desert?' (12/02/04)
Truth is often unpalatable and "politically incorrect." Anyone to whom the following is unpalatable is invited, not just to object, but to refute it, point by point. There's a saying in the Middle East: "The Arabs will either find a desert or make one." Doubtless the Kurds and the non-Arab Sudanese would agree...

Thanksgiving uncommon 146 years ago (11/18/04)
Since no newspaper was published in Vernon County before the "Nevada City Times" in 1866, the county's first periodical publication of any sort must be "The Little Osage Enterprise." This was one of the several projects of "The Little Osage Literary Association," a curious organization launched in 1838 by residents of Little Osage, the formal or post-office name of the place always better known as Balltown, a little west of modern Horton. ...

Then and Now (11/04/04)
2005: Another birthday besides the 150th Nothing can make one feel one's years quite like finding oneself "a part of history," being rudely reminded that happenings which to oneself are but the doings of day-before-yesterday, not really different from those of yesterday itself, to others are "history."...

Then and Now (10/21/04)
Every Child Left Behind Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurrit. Having read the Oct. 8 Daily Mail, it occurred to me old Horace might well have been commenting on its article "Stamping Out Bullies." To paraphrase, with poetic license: "You can stamp the bullies out, but they'll soon find a way back."...

Then and Now (10/07/04)
The long-ago murder in 'Ghost Hollow' "Murder will out," runs an old saying. And it will "out" not just once, it seems, but over and over, forever. Hardly another six months can go by without interest stirring afresh in some Vernon County murder case from long, long ago...

Then and Now (09/24/04)
Ringing the changes on 'Change' -- again The alltime best-received column in this series appeared, appropriately enough in another election year, under the title "Change is Good? Not Always." Predictably they're at it again, those folks so unchanging in their devotion to "change." John Kerry sanguinely put the bite on a cashless friend with the cheery assurance, "We're sending a powerful message: Change is coming!" I'm sure Caesar said much the same thing to a Rome already punchdrunk from "change," over 2,000 years ago.. ...

Then and Now (09/10/04)
Jefferson comes off poorly from 'Hamilton' "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press, 2004) would be recommended reading anytime, but above all in an election year. It's well worth reading for its titular subject alone, but also for the historical perspective it brings to American politics as a whole, and the light it sheds on others, one above all, among the founding immortals...

Then and Now (08/30/04)
A heathen's well-wishes for St. Mary's School I was pleased to read the little article "St. Mary's school begins 100th year of classes" in the Aug.18 Daily Mail, but historically appalled at the blooper (or perhaps, to be kinder, oversight) perpetrated in the first two-line paragraph...

Then and Now (08/13/04)
Drat those buttons! Full speed ahead! Willynilly, a series of columns seems to be developing on, as we might say, "rediscovered treasures" in the Bushwhacker Museum. Last year it was the so-called "surveyor's transit" that turned out to be a vernier compass made by the well-known St. Louis instrument maker Jacob Blattner, only the fifth such known to survive at all, and in far better condition than the other four...

Then and Now (07/29/04)
Iraq War eerily evokes the Mexican War That "there's nothing new under the sun" has been expressed in dozens of different ways. Yet specific instances often come as a surprise. Happening on a book about the Mexican War of 1846-48 ("Gone for Soldiers," by Jeff Shaara, author of the more recent bestseller "Gods and Generals"), the present writer was struck by the many eerie parallels between that war and the recent one in Iraq...

Then and Now (07/15/04)
Confessions and/or apologies of a novelist Publishing, above all of fiction, can have the feel of disrobing in public. It's embarrassing! One almost wants to apologize for the indelicacy. Who am I anyway, one asks himself, to inflict yet another self-revelation on the world, above all on one's friends?...

Then and Now (07/01/04)
'The White Man's Burden' reconsidered Rudyard Kipling, a Nobel Laureate for Literature, has been "politically incorrect" almost since he won the award, back in 1907. All the more reason for his many admirers, including the present writer, to like and respect him. His "Gunga Din" alone proves he wasn't the "racist" he's accused of being; and his countless would-be "sexist" remarks ("A woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke"), taken in context, read quite otherwise...

Then and Now (06/10/04)
Editor's note: A newly released book, "Peninsula of Lies," by Edward Ball (Simon and Schuster, 2004) delves into the truth and consequences woven into the story of Gordon Langley Hall, who lived in Nevada some 50 years ago. Following is local historian Pat Brophy's take on .....

Then and now (05/30/04)
Anyone who believes hatreds and violence aren't ineradicably ingrained in human nature, and are destined to lessen and disappear, or can be encouraged to do so simply by efforts of good will, needn't look far to be disillusioned. One need fare no farther than the former Yugoslavia, where group hatreds had so long been damped down by Communist tyranny it was imagined they'd disappeared. ...

Then and now (04/06/04)
Author's note: Reader, this effort is to be taken seriously,but also at least half in jest sans malice or Lancor. Nothing is so sacrosanct as not to be mischievously poked fun at. "A perfect evening meeting for 30. Each person as carefully chosen as an instrument in an orchestra. Yet how many of the guests would rather be engaged that evening in a tete-a-tete? Or to leave early for a brothel?"...

Then and now (03/25/04)
"Just what the world needs," I wrote a few years ago. "Another Jesse James book!" And the irony was, my conclusion was that, Yes, it did. The book in question, Ted Yeatman's "Frank and Jesse James," brought new information and new insights to a subject of timeless (certainly deathless) interest and significance. ...

The and now (03/04/04)
A column in this newspaper not long ago reported on a new book, "The Blank Slate: The Modem Denial of Human Nature," by Steven Pinker. It "challenges the foundational principle of modem liberalism:" that human life is determined by environment, not heredity, "nurture," not "nature"; that human ills are the results of "ignorance, discrimination, poverty, and disease," not some biologically immutable "human nature," with a built-in propensity for evil; and that thus "education, legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods.". ...

Then and now (02/19/04)
Some of the genealogical queries reaching the Vernon County Historical Society in recent months are summarized below. Readers interested in any of the families or individuals mentioned are encouraged to contact the inquirer directly, or the Historical Society, telephone (417) 667-9602...

Then and now (01/22/04)
Lately I had occasion to reread C. S. Lewis's "The Four Loves," a marvelously wise little book by an always rewarding writer. Scintillating in its every sentence, it defies summation. But in brief, the Greeks, as usual, had a word for each of the Four:...

Then and Now (01/08/04)
The History Channel lately invited us to "Remember The Alamo," a more "politically correct" Alamo, as a runup to the much-touted movie on the subject. I'd confused the movie with the "documentary" and so was a bit let down by the latter, essentially a gathering of often contradictory talking heads, mixed up with snippets of dialogueless reenactment...

Then and now (12/30/03)
Once again, the present writer was struck by the same two things in the course of reviewing a century-old murder case: They murdered for different reasons, or in a different mental state, in the old days, it seems. And the newspapers certainly wrote it up differently...

Then and now (11/20/03)
Cooperation between the Vernon County Historical Society and the Sons of Confederate Veterans should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the local past (or even merely with the local present: Bushwhacker Days and all that). According to the record, 19 out of 20 Vernon Countians were Confederate sympathizers. Proportionate to population, Bushwhackers apart, the county sent more men to the Confederate army than any other in Missouri...

Then and now 10/23 (10/23/03)
I was recently handed a letterhead copy ofa letter, dated Sept. 10, from a certain railroad company to its employees, telling them that they might be disciplined, or even dismissed, if they exercised their would-be Constitutional right of free speech. ...

Then and now 10/9 (10/09/03)
Like many another Civil War soldier, Hiram Ready led a checkered military life. His adventures will be commemorated as part of a memorial ceremony to be held Saturday, October 11, by the Col. John T. Coffee Camp No. 1934 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. ...

Then and now 9/25 (09/25/03)
The day may not be far off, I sometimes think, when this country will grind to a halt, will simply seize up, like an engine deprived of oil or coolant. The moving parts will no longer move. Smoke will billow out the tailpipe, followed by explosion and flames. ...

Then and now 9/11 (09/11/03)
With the refurbished Sen. William Joel Stone memorial due to be rededicated on October 11, perhaps it's time for another look at the man himself. As a longtime fixture of the courthouse yard the monument tends to lead modern Nevada folk to fancy Stone's link to the community was more intimate than it really was. ...

Then and now 8.28 (08/28/03)
"Children's literature" is a relatively modern innovation. Traditionally, literature was just literature. Kids cut their reading teeth on the books their elders were reading. I'm not the only one to have misgivings about the idea of "children's literature," of books written just for children. ...

Then and now 8/14 (08/14/03)
Praise of my historical writings often leaves me feeling humble, or at least uneasy. Looking at them myself I can see only the faults, how they could've been done better. An instance of praise not so long ago, however, had more positive and thought-provoking effects. ...

Then and now (07/31/03)
True to my cracked-record refrain that columnists ought to carry on a running dialogue on things that matters, not just serve up further budgets of their personal "kitchenmaid' s chatter," as Europeans call it, I've been trying to make head or tail of a recent contribution of one of the most eminent among us, and so formulate some kind of pertinent response. ...

Then and now 7/17 (07/17/03)
Poor David P. Giboney just had no luck at all. As if it weren't enough losing his life early in the Civil War and having his body subject to indignities by his Kansas killers, he goes down in history ("The History of Vernon County") incorrectly as "D. ...

Then and now 7/3 (07/03/03)
I'm pleased that my lament of the lack of reader response seems to be bearing fruit, above all on the subject of liberalism. I won't necessarily go on belaboring it forever; but the responses deserve a response in return. And surely I'm not the only person who sees a protracted pursuit of a subject not as a "word-war" but as an enjoyable and even illuminating dialogue. ...

Then and now 6/20 (06/20/03)
A head-cold doomed me to several desperate television evenings, rewatching old movies and reflecting that they don't make 'em like they used to. Even the "Grade B" efforts shine alongside what surrounds them, the "wasteland" of regular television fare and the newer movies: mindless concoctions, with a few exceptions, of glitzy "special effects," gratuitous sex and violence, and "political correctness." "The Unforgiven," from the late 1940s (not to be confused with Clint Eastwood' s film of the same name), is a classic Western, telling the story as it was always told before the coming of "deconstructionism." (Though why not just say "destruction?") The heroes are the settlers, fighting to bring civilization to the Texas frontier; the villains are the Indians, the Kiowas, referred to in every other line by a curse or slur and twice in the film called "G-- Red N --" which was a new one on me. ...

Then and now 5/29 (05/29/03)
Less is heard about feminism these days. Women go out of their way to deny they're feminists. The reason, clearly, is that it's no longer necessary. Feminism has become part of the "received wisdom." It's "politically correct." It's so pervaded the culture, in fact, it's no longer visible. ...