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Troubled waters during the French and Indian War

WE VISIT FORT WILLIAM HENRY

The Seven Years’ War is not very well known in this country. Winston Churchill called it “The first World War” since it was actually fought on five different continents.  It’s difficult to point to a single event that historians agree was the casus belli.  Was it the Prussian invasion of Saxony in Europe?  A dispute over the boundaries of Arcadia? A skirmish, perhaps, in western Pennsylvania between British forces who were badly-led by a twenty-two-year-old officer named George Washington in which a French envoy...

Post cards from last century

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE–VOICES FROM THE LAST PANDEMIC

I found several dozen letters and personal accounts from the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 in the U.S. on the CDC website, and I’ve included some here as a context of what our ancestors experienced back then, and in terms of what we’re going through now. You can see that during the flu pandemic, people were urged to stay home, limit social activities, and churches and schools were closed even as now. By and large, Americans back then saw it as their...