Boise Mock Trial Nationals
I am in the Boise airport, waiting to board my flight home to California, after attending high school mock trial nationals with the Phillips Exeter mock trial team, which I coach. I am, I must confess, tired and disappointed. You are not sure, as the weekend progress, how you have done, but we thought by…
Read MoreElectronic Newspapers
I am working away on my biography of Edwin Stanton, writing today the chapter that deals with 1861, the first few months of the Civil War. As I write I do bits of research, to “fill in the gaps” and to answer questions. This morning, for example, I was looking at letters between Stanton and…
Read MoreMock Trial
The Phillips Exeter mock trial team has won the New Hampshire state championship; the team will compete at nationals for the fourth time in five years. This year was different, very different, because I live in California not New Hampshire. So I was not able to work with the Exeter students in person, only by…
Read MoreSmithsonian TV
Tonight, April 18, and probably again a few times in the next few days, I will appear on Smithsonian TV in a show about Lincoln’s death. Show time tonight is 9pm east coast and west coast. The producers did a good job of weaving together several interviews, including with people who know MUCH more about…
Read MoreMilen Dempster on Marriage
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…
Read MorePittsburg Puzzle
On December 25, 1860, the New York Tribune reported that there was “intense excitement” in Pittsburgh the prior day because of reports of the imminent “shipment from the Allegheny Arsenal of seventy-eight guns to Newport, near Galveston Island, Texas, and forty-six more to Ship Island, near Balize, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the…
Read MoreAugustus Long
I am getting ready to teach, next semester at Chapman, a course on the Civil War, and thinking about how I first got fascinated by that war. It goes back, I think, to Augustus Long. It was about 1991 or 1992, when I started looking into my genealogy, that I learned that my great-great grandfather,…
Read MoreCommon Sense
I am reading this morning an interesting little book, a memoir by William Crook, body guard for Lincoln. Crook, when he arrived at the White House in January 1865, was a young police officer, detailed by the Washington chief to help guard the President. Crook remained on the White House staff after Lincoln’s death; indeed…
Read More“Broken Relic”
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…
Read MoreRevolution and Constitution
In a few days, on September 2, I will start teaching my first course at the college level. The course will cover American history from 1760 through 1815, a busy period. Indeed, as I prepare my first lecture, on Benjamin Franklin, I realize that one could teach an entire semester-long course just on that one…
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