Category Archives: History

On the Trail of US Presidents

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In September, we took one of our Midwest driving trips, visited many (23) friends and family along the way, and made several new tourist stops. These included two sites established to commemorate U.S. Presidents who fought for their country: The Eisenhower National Historic Site outside Gettysburg, Pa., and Indiana’s Tippecanoe Battlefield, where President William Henry Harrison made his mark on U.S. military history.

You may wonder why Ike, our 34th President, settled in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania. “Hey, wait, wasn’t he born in Texas?” “Didn’t he grow up in Kansas?” You’re right! But, after his presidency, he settled near Gettysburg. His ancestors had lived in Central Pennsylvania, and I believe the park ranger said that, as a child, Ike spent a lot of time there. Also, in retirement, he was still consulting with the government, and the farm was a (relatively) short commute to D.C.

So, that’s why. Now to the what. The farm is a beautiful piece of property and, when the Eisenhowers bought it in 1950, it included a smallish house that had to be rebuilt. More than most historic houses, this one is filled with the Eisenhowers’ own furnishings and decorations (a lot of “Mamie pink”). We saw the sunporch where the couple reportedly ate their dinners on tv trays, watching the evening news (!). The house had generous accommodations for guests, and an office for Ike that couldn’t have been larger than 8’ x 10’. Here, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, who directed the Normandy landings on D-Day, carried out his work, modestly and efficiently.

You can tour the house and grounds, garage (presidential limousine!), barns, and the farm he and his partners established that raised prize-winning Black Angus cattle.

And, if you also want to tour the battlefield while you’re there (which we have done numerous times, not this trip), the downtown Hotel Gettysburg is a lovely spot.

The Tippecanoe Battlefield and Museum is a national historic landmark a little over an hour northwest of Indianapolis. At 96 acres, it’s small (much smaller than Ike’s farm!). On 7 November 1811, a decisive battle occurred there between U.S. forces and the Native American Confederation and a bloody prelude to the War of 1812.

The Americans were led by William Henry Harrison, later elected the ninth U.S. President—the last one born as a British subject. He died of a fever after only one month in office. (We’ve seen his monument outside Cincinnati.)

The Native Americans were a large, multi-tribal community led by the famous Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa, called The Prophet. The brothers, who had seen Natives repeatedly displaced from their homelands to the east, vociferously advocated that they reject European ways and return to a traditional lifestyle.

Tecumseh traveled to the South in 1811 to recruit more allies for the confederation and warned his brother not to attack the encroaching U.S. military forces until he returned. On the fateful day, the Prophet nevertheless ordered a pre-dawn attack. The Natives were defeated, their community destroyed, and their hope of continued settlement in the Great Lakes Region went down with them. In retaliation, Tecumseh sided with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812.

Adjacent to the Battlefield, the Tippecanoe County Historical Association operates a small museum with thoughtful displays that put the battle in context.

Two very different historical sites. Both well worth a visit!

Jewels of Scandal and Desire

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For a long time, I’ve had the glimmer of an idea for a story about a jeweler for British royalty. You’ll remember how Elizabeth II always wore a lovely pin on her jacket when she was out in public. Somebody must have made them, cleaned them, repaired them. And somebody must have thought about ways to steal them. Somebody besides me, that is.

You can imagine how my interest was piqued by an American Ancestors program “Jewels of Scandal & Desire: British Jewelry Collections and Country Houses,” hosted by Curt DiCamillo, an authority on British historic houses and the decorative arts. He has actually seen some of that jewelry up close, in museum exhibits and when he was presented to the late Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, and The Prince of Wales.

No doubt this is a topic that could have a month’s worth of lectures, and in an hour he had to just hit the highlights and, in some cases, the lowlights of gems among the British royalty. Here are a few anecdotes.

DiCamillo began with Daisy Fellowes, heiress to the Singer sewing fortune. She had an unhappy life, but she did have fabulous jewelry, including the tutti-frutti necklace pictured above with 4500 emeralds, as well as rubies and sapphires, designed by Cartier and now in the Cartier Collection. Cartier also made the spectacular tiara owned by Lady Hugh Montagu Allan (above), who was aboard the Lusitania in 1915 when it was struck by a German torpedo and sunk. One of her maids saved the tiara and Lady Allan was badly injured, but her two daughters were among the 1,150 people lost.

The Earl and Countess of March were tied up for perhaps twelve hours in early 2016 when thieves invaded Goodwood House in West Sussex. They stole jewelry that was not only valuable in monetary terms, but the haul included an emerald and diamond ring King Charles II had given to one of his French mistresses, an ancestor of the Earl. A stolen tiara, containing hundreds of diamonds, was probably disassembled, Di Camillo said. Such pieces are almost never recovered, because loose diamonds are much harder to identify and easier to sell.

While diamonds are often the most prized of the four main gemstones, they’re actually the least valuable. Most valuable are emeralds, followed by rubies, sapphires, and then diamonds. DiCamillo says De Beers has millions of diamonds in warehouses that they don’t release; by limiting availability, they keep the prices high. In the 1700s, diamonds had been found only in India. In the 1800s, they were discovered in Brazil and, later, in South Africa and Russia, so are not as rare as one might think.

A hundred years ago, Margaret Whigham Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, was considered the best-dressed woman in the world. She lived quite a scandalous life and had numerous lovers. She even made it into a Cole Porter song. But in 1943 she fell 40 feet down an elevator shaft. Although she recovered, she permanently lost her sense of smell. She and the Duke of Argyll lived in beautiful Inverara Castle (where some Downton Abbey scenes were filmed). Alas, in 1954, her jewelry was stolen by cat burglars and never recovered. Eventually the Duke divorced her for infidelity (he was no peach, either). Once at the top of society, she died in a nursing home in 1992.

Lots of good stories could be spun from these little episodes, but they all seem to carry the same message: “wealth does not guarantee happiness.”

Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts

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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as seen through a father’s loving eyes, and it satisfies on many levels.

I particularly liked the author’s writing style. It was as if he and I were sitting at a tiny outdoor café table somewhere in Hungary and, over a plate of cherry strudel (not apple for me), he was telling me a story. It’s that personal, immediate, and written from the heart.

You don’t have to be Hungarian as he and I (not my Texas half) are to enjoy the touches of Old Europe he found, interspersed with enough history to make events unfolding there today more meaningful. He tells the story of his Jewish immigrant ancestors and how they came to America from Hungary and Slovakia (which was part of Hungary until after World War I) and made new lives here. Not all came, though, and many of those who clung to their homeland perished in the Holocaust.

My grandparents were likewise Hungarian and Slovakian, from the same part of the country, though they were Roman Catholic, and I treasured each detail and scene. But you needn’t share his family’s history to find a thrilling tale in his forebears’ determination, their courage in embarking on the long journey and starting their lives anew, their daily difficulties in a country whose language they didn’t speak. When Alan found remnants of the family’s homes and the businesses they left behind, it was compelling evidence of their past lives, like a lingering fingerprint in the community.

Alan had envisioned taking this trip ever since he became interested in family history several decades ago. Finally, as his son Jake graduated from law school, they decided to do it together. As a result, you see several Central European countries not just through Alan’s eyes, a man who has “lived it” vicariously for a long time, but through the eyes of his son Jake, who came of age more than a half-century after the Holocaust. Alan wasn’t sure Jake would be interested, but the young man’s observations proved him a perceptive, compassionate observer. In this way, it’s a story about the maturing of a father-son relationship that is heart-warming to read amidst all the tribulations and disconnects in the world, past and present.

Alan is also a trained chef, and you’ll be extra-pleased to find several family recipes he’s collected at the back of the book. They are just another way he transforms the abstractions of history and culture into something meaningful in daily life. Jó étvágyat!

P.S. I’m told my grandmother’s strudel dough was so thin, your could see the pattern of the cloth beneath it, as in this photograph. Alas, none of her six daughters did what Alan has done and preserved those precious recipes. — VW

What Did You Say Your Name Is?

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An interest in family history has led me down many intriguing paths and arcane byways. Naturally, my interest was piqued by a recent story in Natural History magazine by Samuel M. Wilson, “How Surnames Came to Be.” Do you know the origins of your surname? Enter it here and find out its original meaning and where people with your surname live all around the world .

My father was the child of Hungarian immigrants, and their five sons spelled the last name variously as Hegyi, Hedge, Hegge, and Hadde. It took ages for me to find my grandfather on a ship manifest, because he spelled it using the Latin spelling, Heggus. I’d forgotten that Latin was the official language of Hungary until the mid-1800s. The name attracts some jokesters too, as the picture attests.

My mother’s family isn’t necessarily easier to research. Her father’s last name, Edwards, is straightforward, but surnames on both sides of her family have inspired creative spelling: Woollen, Standifer, McClure. You have to take into consideration that even into the mid-1800s, many Americans could not read or write, and the clerks who recorded their names in church records, land transactions, and court documents relied on phonetic approximation. And maybe they didn’t hear so good, either.

Though some small and remote societies today still do not use surnames, Wilson says the earliest English efforts to develop them began about a thousand years ago. The kings wanted to identify all their subjects in order to levy taxes (a fine old governmental preoccupation). There, and elsewhere in Europe, surnames were often created from where the person lived: a town name or “Ford,” “Wood,” “Hill.” I have friends with all those names. “De Bilt” is a town in the Netherlands where the Vanderbilt family originated. Some names, like Wright, Cooper, Smith, etc., referred to a profession.

Often the last name started out as a patronymic, indicating who the father was: Johnson, Carlsen, Wilson, and so on. The prefixes Mac, Mc, O’ and Fitz also originally indicated “son of,” as, did the suffixes -ez in Spanish, -ski in Poland, and -vich in Russian. Some languages use a slightly different naming convention for daughters. In Scandinavia, you’d find Lavransdottir, and in Poland Kowalska, -not ski. In Slavic languages, a son of Ivan might have the surname Ivanov, and his sister the surname Ivanova. Of course, she may lose that distinction when she marries.

When populations become big enough, too many people with the same name can be confusing. The United States has more than three million living males named John. Perhaps reflecting the higher-born’s more frequent interaction with the authorities, Wilson writes, “In all known cases, [adopting surnames] began with the highest ranking tiers of society.” You may recall how in Tudor history, a Duke like Norfolk would be called Norfolk and also referred to by his family name Howard. Very confusing. Patterns of giving sons in multiple generations the same names mostly confound genealogists (me!), though sometimes the repetition suggests the Arthur you found is indeed from a family peppered with Arthurs.

I was interested to learn that some countries (Denmark, Germany), have approved lists of gender-specific first names. In Germany the name cannot be “the name of a product or common object, and cannot be a surname.” No Moon Unit Zappas there.

Finally, a recent New Yorker article about retiring meatpacking district business owner John T. Jobbagy (pronounced Joe-bagee) notes that Jobbagy is Hungarian, like my dad’s family, and you know that instantly because the surname ending in “agy.” Apparently all such surnames, like Nagy, are Hungarian. Who knew?

Water Everywhere

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When I opened Janet Rudolph’s fascinating Spring 2025 collection of essays for Mystery Readers Journal—this edition her second on the theme of “London Mysteries,” I was delighted to discover the first one, by Aubrey Nye Hamilton, was “The Lost Rivers of London.” This was a happy coincidence, because my mystery book club this week was set to discuss Rivers of London: Midnight Riot, a 2011 book by Ben Aaronovitch that I listened to a few years ago.

This was one of those books I would never have chosen if I’d realized what it was about, but which I enjoyed immensely—despite myself, you might say. There has been a new book in the series every year since (plus a second in 2011), bringing the series total to 14 so far. I’ve not read another of these urban fantasies, but I did enjoy the first. In it, an apprentice wizard (and London police constable) must figure out why ordinary people are becoming vicious killers, as well as try to broker a peace between two warring gods of the River Thames and their respective families. I recall that the several River gods and their watery relatives were quite entertaining.

Hamilton’s essay describes the 600 km network of rivers that flows mostly invisibly, but sometimes audibly, beneath the city. They are the numerous tributaries of the Thames, and the River Fleet (yellow on the map), for which Fleet Street is named, is the largest. As author Melinda Mullet notes in her MRJ essay, the Charlbert Street Bridge (pictured above) is actually an aqueduct whose enclosed iron pipes carry water from the “lost” Tyburn River (purple on the map) to the lake in Regent’s Park.

Paved over and channeled into drainage pipes, the city’s “lost rivers” now aid its sewage and flood protection systems. Nevertheless, Hamilton notes, “sections of the sewer are often relatively dry and quite safe, if unpleasant, to travel.” This has made it possible for people, for whatever reason, to walk the city easily and invisibly, underground. As this and other essays in the volume attest, crime fiction writers have taken full advantage of this urban feature. In recent years, considerable effort has been directed to restoring and revitalizing these watercourses.

The map shows the lost rivers in color. The white squiggle is the River Thames. Perhaps they do all have distinctive personalities like author Aaronovitch speculates. The currents below the surface.

Queen of Diamonds

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This is the third in Beezy Marsh’s trilogy inspired by a real-life female shoplifting gang that operated in London in the first half of the twentieth century. The first two books, Queen of Thieves and Queen of Clubs, deal with the gang’s activities during their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, while this book describes how their leader—Alice Diamond—got her dubious start two decades earlier.

Alice, the future Queen of Diamonds, is an orphan working long hot hours in Pink’s Jam Factory. Aspiring to a better life, she shoplifts little indulgences for herself on her off-hours—silk stockings, colorful scarves, and the like. Alice’s story is interspersed with that of Mary Carr, another legendary leader of a real-life shoplifting gang whose career began several decades earlier. Mary grew up in one of London’s most notorious slums, Seven Dials.

In Marsh’s story, Mary is noticed by a Mayfair lady out slumming. She’s looking for subjects for her paintings of dirty, downtrodden, poverty-stricken children and finds Mary a perfect model for her art. By inviting the girl to her home and studio, the condescending Lady Harcourt exposes Mary to a completely different side of life, whetting her appetite for better things. Mary soon realizes she’s treated completely differently when she’s wearing Lady Harcourt’s daughter’s hand-me-downs than when dressed in her own dirty rags. From that point, there’s no going back for her.

Author Marsh evokes sympathy with her descriptions of the women’s sordid living conditions and unambitious, resentful family members. It isn’t surprising they aspire to glamour beyond the understanding of the people they grew up with. What’s remarkable is that both Mary and Alice are brash and determined enough to get it, with potential trouble with the authorities always right around the corner.

All that is fairly sociological. What about the story? It never flags and rests on the tremendous strength of the characters Marsh has created. She puts us right there, fingering those silks, decorating those bonnets, and running for our lives when the coppers appear.

An Irish Classic: the International

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hotel bar, barman
(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International: A Novel of Belfast.

The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” says Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about a barmen who was shot dead, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

I wrote about this book and a visit to Princeton by Belfast author Glenn Patterson a few years ago, and it seems apt to return to it on St. Patrick’s Day, especially given his writing’s emphasis on history and politics and his deep sense of place. He said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” When we think about our current moment in America, that is a sobering thought.

Here’s Glenn Patterson’s list of his top 10 books about Belfast, compiled in 2012.

Oscars Live Action Shorts

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We squeezed in a trip to the local movie house to see the live action shorts the day before the awards ceremony. They were all fresh in our minds, and we both felt the Oscar went to the least interesting of them! Nevertheless, there’s something watchable for people of widely varying tastes. A characteristic common to four of the five nominees was that the ending was notably ambiguous. What happens next? We don’t know. Also, this year, none of them was particularly long. They’re in theaters so briefly, in case you missed them, here they are and how you can see them.

A Lien (USA)

A terrifying look at how America’s immigration crackdowns wield law and policy in unfair and dehumanizing ways. It involves a young couple—she’s American; he’s from Central America and has lived here for decades—visiting an immigration center with all their paperwork so he can get the green card he’s absolutely eligible for. What’s scariest is that you feel that such things happen not because the system is broken, but because it’s operating exactly as intended. (Watch it here.)

Anuja (India, USA)

Nine-year-old Anuja must choose between going to work in a sewing factory with her older sister and taking a test that may get her into a tuition-free school for gifted students. It’s a choice between the demands of the here-and-now versus the possibility of greater benefit in the future. The sisters—played by real-life street children—are charming. (Available for viewing on Netflix)

The Last Ranger (South Africa)

At a South African wildlife preserve, rangers engage in the dangerous job of protecting rhinoceroses from poachers. Stealing the horn is a lucrative business, and the film never lets you forget how noble are the rangers and how evil are the poachers. A young girl goes with the ranger one day. She’s charming, and the scenery is spectacular. (Apparently not available for streaming)

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (Croatia)

In 1993, a passenger train crossing Bosnia-Herzegovina is stopped by armed paramilitaries. They board, demanding to examine people’s papers. This conjures memories of every “escape from Nazi Germany” movie you ever saw. The people sharing a compartment with a man who admits he has no papers have to make choices, silence or courage. Based on the real-life Štrpci massacre and the death of Tomo Buzov, a former Yugoslav army officer. The film won the Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2024. (Watch it here.)

And now the winner: I’m Not a Robot (Belgium, Netherlands)

We see the action from the point of view of a woman working in the music business who fails her CAPTCHA test so many times her computer concludes she’s a robot. The absurdity of the situation spirals downward, as her grip on reality loosens. I wasn’t convinced. (See it here.)

The March of Television

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This spring promises several new television seasons and series that should be worth watching. But first, let me praise the extremely quirky Interior Chinatown, which we’ve watched over the last few months. It’s based on a 2020 novel by Charles Yu, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. A couple of episodes in, I realized I’d actually read this book. I did not get it at all. My reaction: “Huh?”

But someone must have, and the transition to the small screen is terrific. Jimmy O. Yang plays Willis Wu, a background character in a police drama set in a fictional city. His parents, especially his mom, have some hilarious moments, as does his fellow waiter, Fatty Choi, who thrives on insulting the restaurant’s customers. The plot is essentially indescribable, but Wu is on a quest to find out what happened to his older brother, whom the TV show calls “Kung Fu Guy.” Many hilarious and heartfelt moments. Watch it on Hulu.

On TV this spring, I’m looking forward to the televised version of Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, a book I enjoyed immensely. In it, a cop who works in Philadelphia’s rough Kensington neighborhood, scene of a series of prostitute murders, never escapes the fear that one day what she’ll find is the body of her renegade sister. Amanda Seyfried plays the police officer, Mickey Fitzpatrick. Excellent family interactions in the novel; I hope they’re preserved. Coming on Peacock March 13.

Damian Lewis will reprise his role as Henry VIII in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the third book in the late Hilary Mantel’s riveting series about Tudor political shenanigans involving the King, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), and Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce). The books were great, and the acting in this series, first aired in 2015 as Wolf Hall, is exceptional. Wolf Hall was the ancestral home of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, the one (out of eight) he presumably most loved. It’s premiering March 23 on PBS.

Another season of Dark Winds arrives March 9 on AMC. This crime series, set on Arizona’s Navajo reservation, is based on Tony Hillerman’s popular books featuring Sheriff Joe Leaphorn and his deputy Jim Chee. Leaphorn is played by Zahn McClarnon, an actor I came to admire in the Longmire series, and Chee by Kiowa Gordon. The rest of the mostly Native American cast is also strong. And you can’t beat the beautifully stark Southwestern landscape.

I’ll also give a try to the British detective drama Ludwig, which aired on the BBC in 2024, but will be available on BritBox starting March 20. The title character (played by actor-comedian David Mitchell) is a puzzle-maker, and Ludwig is his pen name. His identical twin brother (I know, I know, beware of twins) is a Cambridge police DCI who’s gone missing. Ludwig poses as his brother to get access to police information about the disappearance. He is, of course, taken for the detective, and becomes caught up in the department’s investigations. Puzzle-solving should come in handy.

Delicious UK Crime Fiction

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What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close

Ajay Close’s new crime thriller is inspired by the notorious 1970s Yorkshire Ripper case, which prompted a massive and massively inefficient manhunt. In that case, the police eventually identified the killer, but were severely criticized for many aspects of their investigation.

Close’s fictional treatment contains elements of a police procedural, as the authorities stumble along almost completely devoid of clues and full of misplaced emphases. What sets this book apart, though, is the equal, if not greater, attention to the cultural milieu in which the crimes occurred. In that respect, it is a scathing social history.

Close has achieved an inspired juxtaposition here, using as her principal protagonist young police constable Liz Seeley, attached to the task force investigating a series of prostitutes’ murders. She knows firsthand about mistreated women, and, to escape her abusive boyfriend, she has moved to a communal house in Leeds, occupied by six feminists who hate the cops.

The attitude toward women that Liz experiences in the police department—condescending, salacious, misogynistic—is a dark side of male behavior. They don’t take much interest in the dead and engage in victim-blaming until the murder of a middle-class girl who is most definitely not in the sex trade. Liz is trapped between two behavioral and attitudinal extremes.

While male readers might want to give themselves a pass, because they don’t share those extreme beliefs or behaviors, they undoubtedly have seen it, may have tolerated it, and very possibly laughed it off, even if uncomfortably. In susceptible minds, endemic disrespect and hostility end up where Close’s investigators find them.

It’s a bit of a difficult read in the beginning because Close uses the street language and slang of Yorkshire residents of fifty years ago. But it is well worth the effort. It’s an important book, especially when we still receive too-frequent reminders of how willing some people (people who ought to know better) are to trot out the old prejudices and gender slurs, half a century later.

The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay

Now, escape the 21st c. for a romp in late-Victorian London. In this entertaining historical crime novel, Quinn le Blanc is the Queen of Fives, head of a once-large and notorious group of female con women, now reduced to her, her major domo, Mr. Silk, and a few loosely connected paid confederates of dubious loyalty.

Quinn’s actions are guided by a Rulebook created by her predecessor Queens, which lays out the rules for any number of confidence schemes, all of which follow a prescribed path and have in common the goal of obtaining something of value. Preferably a lot of value.

Quinn has selected an aloof young duke from the richest family of England as her quarry, and through an elaborate set of stratagems and disguises, sets out to trick him into marriage. It isn’t only his money she’s after; she’d like to derail his do-gooder step-mother whose charities are bent on tearing down old houses, including the traditional seat of the Queen of Fives.

But if the course of true love never did run smooth, neither in this case does the course of false love. A mysterious man, the duke’s suspicious sister, the duke’s secret love all conspire against the Queen. What’s most fun are the clever plots and quick-change artistry of the characters. Pure fun and mischief.