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Harpers Ferry
Added on 26 November 2012
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- Harpers Ferry
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A day of touring and photos followed by weeks of careful consideration and writing turned into a Ken Burns inspired brief history of Harpers Ferry, where the Potomac meets the Shenandoah and the past meets present.
Losing Our Memory
As a society, despite our species’ obsession with memory, we haven’t always honored or sustained those who’ve traded the finite time of their only lives to preserve a piece of the present around us. Such is the story of Mathew Brady, the man who sacrificed the comfort of his life to allow us to remember [...]
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We Are All Historians
Although you may have never realized it, you are a historian. Each and every day, you consciously process thousands of seconds of ephemeral and irrecoverable time, piecing together the strands of that abstraction into a single narrative, and the story of a day, a month, a year, or even a life. There are numerous ways [...]
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The Pull of History
After I graduated from high-school, my dad and my uncles let me in on the stories from their childhood years in Brazil as sons of a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. I had heard bits and pieces when I was a kid, but they sheltered me from most of them for fear of corrupting me or, [...]
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A Book a Month
Throughout my adult life, at least since my junior year of college after I read David McCullough’s John Adams, I’ve repeatedly attempted, yet mostly failed to become “well read”. Despite the amount of time and money I spent during the following year collecting the books that I wanted to read after I graduated, sometimes even [...]
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History as Personal Identity
This is the first installment of a multipart series on "History as Personal Identity". We all have stories behind our origins; stories of people whose lives intersected with the events of their world and our history. This is mine.
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Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest
As with so many of our national monuments, posterity had forgotten about Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest plantation. When the car became king and Americans fled in flocks from crowded cities to spacious 60′s style ranch houses, suburban sprawl almost devoured Jefferson’s most balanced architectural creation and turned it into the centerpiece of the community country [...]
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Robbed at Gunpoint and Worshipping the Sun
The Earth has completed another revolution around the Sun, at least as measured from an intersection of time and space that we arbitrarily name January 1st of any given year. This last revolution was the 2,012th of such since another particular intersection of space and time. Symbolized in words and numbers as 1 A.D., that [...]
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A Life’s ‘Genuine Journal’
While Monticello may not “form the only full and genuine journal of his life”, it is a significant piece of it that is still standing, still touchable, and still able to affect the same emotions that Jefferson felt when he rose with the sun and surveyed his plantation through the fog from his terrace.
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The Meaning of Thanksgiving
Objectivity intermingles with fantasy, and Thanksgiving morphs into a typical day of gorging on the flesh of a bird and on the violence of football. Ironically, in some ways, a day rooted in the reflection of our hardship filled history now symbolizes our national amnesia, hypocrisy and gluttony.
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Confluence of Past and Present
I wiped the beads of sweat off of my forehead with the sleeve of my sweater. It was hot for a late afternoon in mid-October in the Appalachians of West Virginia, and until the breeze from above nudged aside the sun’s radiance, I didn’t believe the auburn leaves scattered about announcing autumn’s arrival. Shades of [...]
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A Piece of the Eternal
Lately, in search of a piece of the eternal, I’ve been trying to disconnect from the transience and insignificance of the daily affairs of the material world. It’s my attempt at a sort of mental “Walden”, in which I try to “suck out all the marrow of life” in a less disrupting – and perhaps, [...]
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On the Road
As we travel down the endless interstate lined with trees topped with drops of gold, I feel alive again. We’re painting the grainy canvas of life with rich and crisp colors instead of the monotone greys and the blurred blues of drudging through the mud of 8 to 6 wage-slavery. There’s sunshine ahead coming through [...]
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The Songs of My Soul
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, and dark and silent late last night I think I might have heard them calling me. And though it was just a dream, today I could see it: decide what to be and just go be it. It must have been [...]
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Stargazing Back in Time
Every time we look up at the stars or out around us at who we are, we realize that, from the Milky Way to Homer to Jefferson, we will always be guided by light from the past.
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Reconditioning A Sore Mind
Maybe it’s all Google’s fault, but after a couple of weeks of owning my time again, I’m having trouble concentrating. I feel anxiety creeping after fifteen minutes of trying to capture an author’s voice in my head. A word on the page will lead to a foreign idea and opens mental tabs in my brain [...]
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Slow Down Back to Nature
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Happiness for Time with Some Currency on the Side
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Reconditioning A Sore Mind
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Autumn’s Promise of Renewal
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Harpers Ferry
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Losing Our Memory
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We Are All Historians
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The Pull of History
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A Book a Month
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History as Personal Identity
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Claudia Pinto: John, Muy interesante esta historia de Mathew Bra...
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Grant: "Each and every day, you consciously process thous...
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John: David, Thanks for the numbers, I hadn't seen th...
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David Jackman: According to the National Archives' record, the US...
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© 2013 Live Like Jefferson.