Found History

I recently finished rereading, for the first time in many years, one of my childhood favorites, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. I was immediately struck that the dates Bradbury imagined for his tale of human colonization of Mars are 1999-2026, setting the main action of the book in what is now today. Writing around 1950, [...]

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Despite media claims, polling data, and bureaucratic number crunching to the contrary, one of the main contentions of Found History is that people care deeply about history—sometimes to the point of fighting about it. For evidence of this you don’t need to go to Kashmir or Kurdistan or some other far off province where wars [...]

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English stand-up comedian Robert Newman builds his act on history. “The History of Oil” is his very funny, very sarcastic, 45-minute-long examination of British and American involvement in the Middle East. From WWI to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Newman tackles nearly a century of history, taking time out along the way to [...]

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Found on the floor of the United States Senate: James Inhofe (R-OK) explores his family history.

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I wanted to post this before a new issue came out, but alas I didn’t make it in time. In case you missed it, the May 21st New York Times Magazine featured a series of articles on the question of why contemporary architecture, above all other art forms, inspires popular cultural debates. The editors’ brief [...]

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This morning on Fox News Sunday, the President’s new Chief of Staff, Josh Bolton said something in passing that has become conventional wisdom in Washington on both sides of the aisle. Talking about the many reasons for high gas prices, Bolton mentioned Hurricane Katrina and the damage it did to drilling and refining operations in [...]

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This is a little (lot) late in coming, but I want to say something about this past winter’s Oprah-James Frey controversy. For those of you who don’t remember, the controversy erupted when Oprah discovered that James Frey had “lied” in writing “A Million Little Pieces,” the memoir of his struggle with drug addition, which Oprah [...]

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