My father recently moved to an apartment in an assisted living facility. As with any move, some things went missing. A few days ago, we discovered that his passport was missing. We were looking for the passport because my father was set to fly Saturday night to Miami and board an international cruise Sunday morning.…

We had a wonderful book launch party on the evening of August 8, 2017, at Lido Village Books.  Most of the folks were friends from St. James the Great, and I talked about Stanton and his faith, with some long quotes from the book, such as his praise to God Almighty when the news arrived…

Almost every day, for the past sixteen years, I have gotten up early to feed and walk our dog, Sunny.  I will not have to get up tomorrow, for Sunny died today. I had nothing to do with selecting and purchasing Sunny.  My goal, on Saturday, March 24, 2001, was to buy a new car, to…

I have on my desk here a large stack of paper, the first set of printed page proofs for Stanton.  I am reading and marking them, in some cases finding small typos, in other cases making small improvements.  I am nearly done, which is good, because I owe these pages back to the publisher on…

My biography of Edwin Stanton is coming, on August 8, 2017.  With the new year I am turning away from writing and revising the book (although there is still some of that work ahead) and towards promoting the book.  I have one book event set, for Jackson, Mississippi, on August 17, 2017.  I expect to…

I have just returned from Washington, from the Library of Congress, where I found many interesting and useful sources.  What is sad is that, in most cases, I will be able to quote only a few words from these sources, not whole paragraphs.  In an effort to right that wrong, I attach here my rough…

I am making progress on Stanton.  I now have 176,372 words written in 18 chapters.  The book is supposed to be 200,000 words long, so that would suggest that I only have another 24,000 words to write. The reality is that I have more to do than that.  This morning, for example, I am rewriting…

My parents, John Stahr and Elizabeth Dempster, were married sixty years ago today at Stanford Chapel.  The minister was my mother’s uncle Milen Dempster. Milen was a remarkable man:  educated in divinity at Harvard, briefly serving as a Unitarian minister, but then running for governor in 1932 as a Socialist, and working thereafter as a…

I am doing some Stanton reading today, and as often happens, I find something about Seward to report. I am reading The Impeachment and Trial of President Andrew Johnson, by David Miller DeWitt, published in 1903.  DeWitt was a New York Democrat, sympathetic to Johnson, hostile towards Stevens, Sumner and the other Radicals.  Since almost…