Tag: history

• Cursed weapons (August 31, 2025)

  In A Haunting Relic From America’s Past, Wright Thompson describes his encounter with the Army-issued pistol that was used to beat and murder 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Thompson located the gun while writing a book about the context and legacy of that murder. Subsequently, the person who had inherited it—a local crop duster—donated it to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, where it just went on permanent display.

• A stone in Portland (August 19, 2025)

  An inscribed paving stone found in the East End neighborhood of Portland, Maine:

• Your flag is what you fly (August 13, 2025)

  Posting this amidst a two-week vacation in Freeport, on the Maine coast. I can report that the 1901 Maine flag, with two simple shapes on a plain background, is ubiquitous on souvenir merchandise here. In shop after shop I see it embroidered on caps, screened onto T-shirts, and carved into coasters. People here are proud of the design, and visitors clearly love it too, buying every sort of representation to take back home. I shall be among them.