If you are a baseball fan, you know the name Roberto Clemente. If you aren’t, you still need to know his story and why it matters. His life was uplifting to many, yet had a tragic end. Furthermore, the story of Roberto Clemente’s death, and life, reveals much about America during the middle of the […]
Tag: baseball
After the Fog – Rob’s Review
The novel After the Fog caught my interest because it’s a rarity—a novel featuring environmental history. Stories of this type are badly underrepresented in literature. As I read, things got even better, subject-wise. The novel turned out to be about a working-class, ethnic family in 1948 Donora, Pennsylvania. This is another type of story badly […]
Octavius Catto, Civil Rights Legend
The career of Octavius Catto ranks among the great stories of the United States in the 1800s. This versatile figure came to prominence during and after the Civil War. This was a time of dramatic change in America. Octavius Catto is a second-generation figure in the struggle of African Americans for equality in the United […]
Honest and Dishonest Graft—George W. Plunkitt
Honest and dishonest graft was a way of life in 19th century politics. In my last post I mentioned the great political cartoonist Thomas Nast. Nast burnished his fame with his cartoons identifying the corruption and graft of the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City politics. But I realize many of my readers […]
Review of Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Deacon King Kong is a historical fiction novel that appeared in 2020. Author James McBride is an iconic figure in African American literature. He’s one of those Published Authors™ who only needs to write a book every five years or so to keep up his cred. To read my other recent historical fiction book reviews, […]
The Spalding World Tour of 1888-1889
The late 1800s was an age of imperialism, and Albert Spalding knew it. Powerful European nations struggled across the globe to carve out colonies and extend their military, economic, and cultural influence to the ends of the earth. America’s industrial interests were doing the same and, in its own way, the game of baseball was, […]