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Geronimo surrenders on this day, go jump in a pool
Two hundred twenty-two years ago today, famed Apache chief Geronimo surrendered to U.S. and Mexican forces after 25 years of fighting. Now in mainstream culture his legend is reduced to jumping into...
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In Washington D.C. for Obama inauguration, Franklin birthday
I am going to the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington D.C. tonight, to get settled and look around town, where I will be covering the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday. More on that to come....
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The History of the Philadelphia Inquirer
The history of the Philadelphia Inquirer mirrors the path of all the big gray ladies in the United States. While putting together suggestions for the Inquirer months ago, I came across some...
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Who is Tom Ferrick's heir: the best Philadelphia newspaper columnists
Philadelphia was long a breeding ground for some of the most meaningful metro columnists in the country. Some say the newspaper columnist is dying, but it isn’t dead. So who’s the next columnist of...
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Changing ways in which society collects information
The way we have gained information has apparently changed in the past 200 years, according to a really interesting and insightful graphical analysis of those trends by online magazine Baekdal.com. The...
View Article“Being a reporter is only lately a respectable occupation:” Calvin Trillin
Former Time and New Yorker journalist Calvin Trillin on why there is less drinking in journalism. He references this New York Times story on the changing face of big name journalists. “Being a reporter...
View ArticleHistory Channel: America, The Story of Us
Happy Fourth of July. A couple weekends ago, while filing a lot of copy, I was engrossed in the 12-part History Channel documentary called America: The Story of Us. It reminded me of what the History...
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Urban imperialism: lessons from city boosterism of the 19th century for urban...
Creede, Colo. in 1880 Metropolitan boosters — men employed in the late 19th century to encourage Americans to move west to burgeoning cities — have been of interest to me lately. I’m interested in how...
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A Brief Timeline of the History of Daily Newspapers in Philadelphia
This Philadelphia daily newspaper family tree is framed in the Inquirer editorial board room at 400 N. Broad Street. Photo by Russell Cooke. Click to enlarge. There were a dozen or more daily...
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Philadelphia Evening Bulletin history: ‘Nearly Everybody Read It,’ a 1998...
The importance, sway and influence of one of the world’s most dominant 20th century newspapers was the focus of the 1998 collection of essays about the once powerful Philadelphia Evening Bulletin,...
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The Path Between the Seas: how the Panama Canal was constructed
The classic, National Book Award-winning 1977 historical narrative by David McCullough on the Panama Canal’s construction called the Path Between the Seas was perfect reading material leading into,...
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Here are some of my favorite historic photos of Philadelphia
I was on the hunt for a few photos that could be appropriately sourced and shared from historical Philadelphia and, well, I kept finding ones I loved and wished were in one place. So that’s what I’m...
View ArticleWhat we know from 150,000 years of human language
There was likely once a single language, first developed 150,000 years ago. That grew to as many as 100,000 languages, before we developed farming. Today there are 6,000 and by 2100, that might be back...
View ArticleThe Americas were more populated than Europe at the time of first contact
The Americas were home to some of the world’s most complex and established civilizations in the world at the time of European contact. As many as 100 million people may have lived in the Americas in...
View ArticleOur ‘tranquilizing drug of gradualism’
A version of this essay was published as part of my monthly newsletter a couple weeks back. In its own way, it commemorates African American History Month. Find other archives and join here to get...
View ArticleNote on “Reporting the Revolutionary War” from 2012 by Todd Andrlik
As Mark Twain put it: “History is the pale and tranquil reflection” of news. Before the patriotic tales of heroism, there was urgent, partisan and divided reporting about the relationship between...
View ArticleNotes on ‘The Invention of News’ by Andrew Pettegree
The journey to get to professionally-verified information includes social, economic and political coursework. To share this journey, historian Andrew Pettegree focused in his 2014 book The Invention...
View ArticleNotes from Scene on Radio’s ‘Seeing White’ in 2017
Ahead of an Antiracist seminar that several coworkers and I are attending, organizer Kim Crayton recommended attendees listen back to the popular 2017 podcast season of Scene on the Radio ‘Seeing...
View ArticleNewspapers were once the big tech platform companies everyone hated
This is adapted from a Twitter thread. There are many parallels between early newspapers and today. Like then, today big tech platforms are vilified for taking creative destruction to a more harmful...
View ArticleSpaces between words weren’t common until the 7th century
From the Economist: A book seems such a simple structure that it feels less invented than self-evident, the innovations behind it hard to see. Yet every chapter in its progress was slow, bound on...
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