(on Holocaust Memorial Day) Today, I’m paying respects to Chaja Laufer Blaug, and Ignaz, Eva, and Gustave Dicker. But here too, are some personal and anecdotal memories and photos from the life of Mark Blaug (1927–2011) who, thanks to the foresight of his father, got out of the Netherlands in…

No child is a historian; every child becomes one — We have all faced the difficulty of remembering our earliest childhood years. Freud called it “infantile amnesia… that failure of memory… that turns everyone’s childhood into something like a prehistoric epoch.”[1] In three earlier posts titled Childhood Amnesia, Storytelling, and the Lifelong Game of Memory, I looked at Freud’s initial…

In the lands of the singular and the plural I begin with a Dictionary of Etymology. archive (n.) See archives I follow the instruction to depart from archive and make my way to archives. archives (n.) c.1600, “records or documents preserved as evidence,” from French archif (16c. …

Some of us are inveterate users of dictionaries: general ones, subject-specific ones, and dictionaries of etymology. Often this is because there are intriguing words that, at first glance, we assume to know. But at a second or third glance, we sense a mistake or some subtlety of meaning that escapes…

There is an old bluegrass song, Death is Only a Dream. I borrow (and adapt) this line for my life as a historian. History is only a dream. The borrowing doesn’t stop there, for the pursuit of history is, itself, a kind of death wish. Not only must the historian…

Dear readers, This is a brief post to let you know that I am moving my writing and photography projects over to Substack. Thank you for reading and commenting — all very much appreciated. Thanks are also due to the people who keep Medium running for the rest of us. I will keep this page open for now, and may add new posts from time to time. However, the bulk of my work will now be with Substack. I hope you will join me there. I look forward to more direct contact with readers - as facilitated by the new platform.

This Tiny Life Which Deems Itself Eternal Some things go unnoticed. The motivations behind our small acts and choices. Often, they slip by us, no matter how glaring to others. Little unexplained tendencies. We all have them. How, for example, did I fail to notice the phonetic resemblance between the two old-fashioned names, Agnes and Gladys, plainly…

I first saw him one late afternoon. He was in a field, perhaps twenty yards from me. He tucked into the tall grass and watched as I walked along the path below him. This is the second time. Beside the same path, he sits on a fence post at nightfall…

Dandelions I am thinking of the change of seasons, my lifelong love of the turn from summer to fall. October in sight. Yet this year, there is a nagging memory of last spring, masses of dandelions on every walk. …