Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 123
March 31, 2010
March 29, 2010
March 26, 2010
Happy "Frost Day"
"I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
How about a national holiday today, celebrating poetry, in honor of Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874.
Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost's poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of...
March 16, 2010
The Power of the Press: My Lai and Seymour Hersh
On March 16, 1968, in a small Vietnamese village, "something dark and bloody" took place.
On November 12, 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the massacre in My Lai during the Vietnam War. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for the story. It was a story that changed history.
Dropped into the village by helicopter that March day in 1968, the men of Charlie Company found only the old men, women, and children of My Lai. There were no Vietcong, and nothing to suggest that My Lai was a...
March 12, 2010
Don't Know Much About Jack Kerouac
Lots of people, including Bob Dylan, say he changed their lives. Born this date, March 12, in 1922, Jack Kerouac.
Born Jean-Louis Kerouac in down-and-out Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was a central figure among the so-called "Beat Generation" of writers—in fact, he coined the term "Beat." In the nineteen-fifties, an era marked by conformity, the Beat writers believed in breaking the mold, and as writers, they valued spontaneity and intuition, impulsiveness and free expression. Along...
March 11, 2010
Defending "terrorists": What would the Founders do?
In the midst of all the "Tea Party" chatter these days, it is a tad surprising that the anniversary of another significant Boston event went largely unnoticed last week. It was, after all, 240 years ago on March 5, 1770, that the Boston Massacre took place.
And what was the "Boston Massacre" class?
A mob of unemployed, angry (and probably three-sheets to the wind) dockworkers got into a shouting match with some of the much-hated British soldiers then quartered in Boston –and competing for...
