General
When American Veterans Took Up Arms for the Ballot Box
This is a true story about American veterans who returned home from World War II only to find their own community under the grip of political corruption. On August 1, 1946, the people of McMinn County, Tennessee, went to the polls expecting to choose their local leaders. By the following morning, the county seat of Athens had become the center of an armed uprising that would capture national attention. Men who had fought dictatorships overseas had taken up arms against their own local government, determined to prevent what they believed was a stolen election.
By Tim Carmichael9 days ago in History
The Secretary Who Knew Too Much — Constantinople, 843 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ Nikiphoros Phokas was not yet aware that he was going to die. But he had a tormenting presentiment that he was about to suffer something severe. He took a piece of parchment from his desk, wrote a single word, sealed it and carried it in the inner pocket of his cloak to the corridor outside the Magnolia Hall.
By S. Kallistos12 days ago in History
The Girl Who Could Be Quiet — Constantinople, 836 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ The young girl used to count at her house in Thessaloniki — the house where her mother was happily grinding wheat in the kitchen, with a lemon tree in the courtyard and the desk where she had been taught to read by her father. Counting meant sequence. Sequence meant for her that the world was moving forward. But the sequence was interrupted three nights ago, the moment when two men knocked at their door. She remembered her father sternly telling her: "Go to your room."
By S. Kallistos12 days ago in History
400 Years of Capital Punishment in America:
400 Years of Capital Punishment in America: Justice, Revenge, and the Price of a Life From colonial hangings and public spectacles to lethal injections, nitrogen gas, and firing squads, the American death penalty has spent four centuries evolving without ever escaping its most uncomfortable question: Can a government trusted to deliver justice also be trusted with the power to decide who deserves to die?
By Lilithea Adasia12 days ago in History
The Widow - Constantinople, 840 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ Theophano Doukena wrote to her husband on the third day of every week. Not for news; the household gave her none, since it ran itself, the way a good house does, on the quiet competence of people who had served it for years. She wrote because the writing kept him in the room. That morning she set the parchment on the small cedar table by the window and told him the small things: the fig had set fruit early, the cistern was low, the water carriers wanted more than they were worth, Eirene had learned to read the Psalms and stumbled only on the long words. She told him these because the alternative was to tell him she was afraid, and that was not a thing you wrote to a man on a frontier.
By S. Kallistos12 days ago in History
The General Who Almost Knew — The Taurus Frontier, 840 AD
✦ ✦ ✦ The fortress was nameless on the imperial maps. It was distinguished by a number: Outpost Twelve, and its mission, written in the same dry hand as everything else in the Logothesia of the Course, was to watch the road.
By S. Kallistos12 days ago in History
The Knights Who Came in the Night
Tulsa, Oklahoma - November 9, 1917. Seventeen men, most connected to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), sat in police custody. Their organization’s opposition to the war and confrontational organizing had made them targets of suspicion. After appearing before a judge and facing questions that probed not just their alleged offenses but also their patriotism, they were loaded into automobiles, expecting a routine trip to jail.
By The Iron Lighthouse14 days ago in History
The Life and Work of Poet Olive Tilford Dargan (1869–1968)
Olive Tilford Dargan lived for nearly a century, and her writing carries the imprint of every place she called home: schoolrooms, farms, college halls, city apartments, and a mountain valley along the Nantahala River. Few writers of the Appalachian South lived as long or wrote across as many forms. She produced poetic dramas, lyric verse, short stories, and novels, earned an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina, and received the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award. Readers today often meet her through Call Home the Heart , a novel of mill-town struggle, yet the fuller record reveals a poet of mountain beauty and a chronicler of hardship working side by side for decades.
By Tim Carmichael15 days ago in History
Freedom ain’t free baby
This food and this drank cost more than just money my love… I’ve been having this same thought for years now, but more heavily these recent months. Even though I’m black living in America (inherited oppression notwithstanding) I don’t realize how good I’ve got it…generationally speaking.
By Shaun Johnson15 days ago in History
