HISTORY’S MICROSCOPE

  CHARACTER ISOLATED BY A DEED

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Can a person’s character be revealed by a deed? I want to say, “Of course not,” for in small ways I have acted the coward as well as the hero. Yet, we each are the sum of our deeds, and history is the sum of all our deeds.

What I do in this blog is take an individual from the past, sometimes famous or infamous, sometimes obscure, and use the moment of decision in a crisis, a resolve in the face of difficulty, or an unexpected accomplishment to explore his or her character, good and bad.

That said, I’m not going to ignore the absurd, the comic, the enthusiasms, the cruel and kind word, the silent sufferance, the sadness, and the tender moments that give life texture, and where most of us live most of the time, and therefore are also a matter of character.

The subtitle of this blog “Character isolated by a deed” comes from a line taken from a W.B. Yeats poem THE CIRCUS ANIMALS’ DESERTION. That is what animated him in writing his plays and that’s what interests me above all in history.

 
 
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THE GOOD AND THE BRAVE

THE BRIDGES AT BEREZINA

A vignette of hell and heroism during the last days of Napoleon’s Russian campaign

THE DOCTOR AND THE MAD SEA CAPTAIN

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Treatment of the criminally insane in Revolutionary France.

WOMAN’S WORK

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Fighting Indians, making music in the wilderness and these Epirote women defending hearth and home.

CASANOVA’S ESCAPE FROM THE LEADS

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The only good thing that you could say about the Leads, the prison on top of the doge’s palace, was that it wasn’t the Wells: cells in the cellar of the palace which always had two feet of water in them and were infested with giant sea rats.

Casanova wasn’t a good man, but he had nerve.

THE SAVIOR OF MONTREAL

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Hint: It isn’t the man.



THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY

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BUKHARIN’S LAST STAND

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During Stalin’s show trials the theoretical devil meets the devil incarnate. Bukharin is the one with his hand inside his coat like Napoleon.

CHARIOTS OF BLOOD

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Empress Theodora and Byzantine NASCAR

A MISER’S EPIPHANY

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A true tale: The Anti-Christmas Carol

A MARRIAGE OF INCONVENIENCE

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The dating scene in 15th century England.

OUTLIERS

THE FEMMES FATALES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

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There is more than one way to fight for a revolution.

THE DEVIL’S MUSE

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Isabel Burton

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Sir Richard Burton

Two hours after the doctor pronounced him dead, the wife of Sir Richard Burton, famous linguist, ethnographer, and translator of salacious literature, pronounced him alive and insisted the priest give her husband extreme unction so his soul would go to heaven.