Philadelphia Area Meet-up Details and a Book Recommendation

The main purpose of this micro-episode is to give you the details on the much ballyhooed Philadelphia area meet-up of fans of the podcast.  The date is this Friday, October 6, 2023.  The place will be Neshaminy Creek Brewing Company, 909 Ray Avenue, Croydon, Pennsylvania.  The official start-time is 5:00 pm, but if you can’t get there so early rest assured that I’ll be around until at least 7:30, and certainly as late as the conversation remains fun and interesting. I’ll aim to get there at 4:30 or so to check out the room I reserved, which I believe they call “the nook.”  I trust many of you will recognize me from my photo on the website or on Twitter or Facebook, but in case not I’ll be wearing a red “History Nerd” cap. 

I also read a short excerpt from Yascha Mounk’s new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which I highly recommend. Mounk explores the philosophical roots of critical theory and the full range of ideas clumsily lumped together as “wokeism,” or “the successor ideology.” The book is extremely useful for understanding how we arrived at our current identity politics, and is relevant to understanding the “history wars” that have played out over the last four or five years. You can buy it through the link above.

Further reading

The End of New Haven Colony

This is the story of the New Haven Colony from 1643 until is absorption by Connecticut in 1664. We look at the colony’s economic, military, and...

The Founding of New Haven Colony

Of the organized Puritan settlements in New England in the first half of the 17th century – Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut being...

Interview with James Horn

Dr. James Horn is President and Chief Officer of Jamestown Rediscovery (Preservation Virginia) at Historic Jamestowne.  Previously, he has served as...

The Witches of Springfield

It is the late 1640s. More than forty years before the famous witch hunt in Salem, William Pynchon’s town of Springfield, Massachusetts Bay...

The Golden Hind!

For those of you who have become unreconstructed fans of Sir Francis Drake, here’s a nice new video on the Golden Hind, the ship in which he...