To refresh everyone’s memory,  the legal seeds that would one day grow into the Doctrine of Discovery were first planted in the field of natural law by Crusading popes in the Middle Ages. The Papal See asserted its divine prerogative to send crusading armies to the Holy Lands in order to confiscate land from Muslim heathens and infidels.  These prerogatives were formally incorporated into canon law by Popes Innocent II and IV and would continue to evolve through the discovery-era courts in Spain, through the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts in England, and finally filter down through the founders of the republic of the United States and the U.S. Supreme Court.

These laws, which Congress used midway through the 20th century to remove the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people from their homelands of prehistory to make way for gigantic dams on the upper Missouri River, come down to us in a more familiar name: eminent domain. While the tribes claimed an absolute right to protect their ancestral lands from being inundated by these dams, the republic asserted a countervailing prerogative to trump the tribe’s aboriginal title by claiming a superior right, under eminent domain, i.e., the Doctrine of Discovery, to take those lands away.

As the great legal historian Robert Williams explains in monumental work, American Indians In Western Legal Thought, Discourses on Conquest, the founders of the United States republic made colossal errors in their formulation for government. For one thing, they utterly failed to take into account the 500 plus Indian nations that pre-existed the republic in the framework of federalism. Thus, says Williams, the U.S. Constitution succeeded in preserving a “legacy of 1,000 years of European racism and colonialism directed against non-Western peoples. The Doctrine of Discovery’s underlying medievally derived ideology – that normatively divergent savage peoples  could be denied rights and status equal to those accorded to the civilized nations of Europe – had become an integral part of the fabric of the United States federal Indian law.”

Or, to put that another way, and to paraphrase James Fennimore Cooper, freedom was a paradox not easily resolved.  Was it not paradoxical that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – the prizes of democracy –  were cherished by a society that was determined to deny these very prizes to black men and Indians?

To its credit, though not a moment too soon, word comes from 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, in Anaheim, California, that the church has seen fit to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery as a corrupt tool of the federal government that “history continues to be relevant in terms of justice issues today.”

It does indeed, but where do we begin when the vast majority of our citizens are so blissfully oblivious to the weight of their own history?

Speaking of Imelda Marcos: To this day whenever I think of Imelda I think of her as the epitome of super-sick materialism. I mean, who would buy thousands of shoes they could not possibly wear? Well, probably no one, including Ms. Marcos. Seems that shoe manufacturers in the Philippines – a nation known for quality shoewear – sent the First Lady almost all of those shoes in the hopes of receiving endorsements. Ever hear that story? Neither had I. Too bad it came years after the fact for Imelda “Shoes” Marcos has now become a historical “fact” in the minds of most folks.

The 1863 Lawrence Massacre here in Kansas makes no sense either unless you understand what Kansas had done to Missouri in the two years preceding the raid; that in turn makes no sense unless you know what Missourians had been doing in Kansas during the seven years prior to that, the period known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

The Indian rampage on the High Plains, 1866-1868, seems unusually savage and makes no sense unless you study the slaughter of Indians at the Sand Creek Massacre in the winter of 1864; and Sand Creek makes no sense unless you read of the slaughter of whites in Colorado the preceding summer.

I was watching a doc on the air war over Germany some time back and I was startled to hear the narrator admit that German pilots who parachuted from their burning planes were machine-gunned to death by American airmen as they floated down. I had suspicioned as much. I was well aware that Germans on the ground who tried to surrender were routinely murdered as the Allies swept through Europe. Even terrified old men and little boys in the German home guards were slaughtered as they came forward with their hands up. As Americans troops approached the prison at Dachau in 1945, the camp guards who fled were replaced by young SS soldiers who were rushed in to maintain order until the camp could be surrendered. When the Americans arrived they didn’t ask questions. They rounded up the German soldiers, disarmed them, placed them against a wall, then mowed them down with machine gun fire – five hundred of them.

Unless you accept that humans are innately depraved and savage, the above illustrations make no sense until you learn the rest of the story. There are always two – or more – sides to every story, never one, and any “historian” who presents only one side is writing a press release at best and pure propaganda at worst. A true historian’s duty is to never quit until he presents both sides of the story with as much objectivity as he can muster.

These artifacts have an interesting history in themselves, but on another level they serve as a physical reminder of a time when a people refused to accept the rule of an increasingly corrupt authoritarian government; these people would rather die. In different times and places but with similar circumstances, they would be joined in the fight for liberty by the Iceni in Britain and the Acoma Indians in North America.

Just prior to the Jewish revolt in the first century, the Iceni people of  northwest Britain and their remarkable Queen Boudicca led a revolt against the Romans – citing many of the same grievances as the Jews. Nero, the Roman Emperor at the time of both uprisings, encouraged his provincial governors to maximize tax collections. Rome, beginning to become irrevocably bloated in its various appetites, including the extravagant sadism of the gladiatorial games, had many bills to pay. Roman governors could also keep anything above and beyond what was due to Rome – an open invitation to corruption.

The caliber of virtue in Roman soldiers had also declined. Boudicca was flogged and forced to watch her daughters get raped. In Jerusalem, there were accounts of Roman soldiers exposing themselves in the Temple and burning Torah Scrolls.

Both of these revolts were temporarily successful. With the Romans, though, a temporary success usually meant an extended, vicious slaughter when the moments of glory passed. The Iceni and the Jews suffered swift and severe reprisals, the Jews having their sacred temple destroyed – for a second time.

All was not lost, though. What is left to us are two testaments to liberty. Rather than surrender and be made slave or worse, Boudicca drank poison. There in Britain, long before Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution, we see evidence of the intense passion for freedom. When the Jewish revolt seemed doomed, 960 Zealots made their final stand on the heights of Masada, holding out for three years. Though this tower of rock was virtually impregnable, the Jews there finally realized that the Roman army encamped on the plain below was not going to simply go away. Rather than submit to subjugation, the Jewish men killed their wives and children and then each other in a last, ritualistic act of freedom and defiance. It is on these heights, in fact, that Israeli soldiers today take the oath, “Masada shall not fall again.”

Fast forward to 1599 and the North American version of Masada. Out of the New Mexican desert, seemingly by magic, arises a huge mesa, upon which the Acoma Pueblo resides. It was on these heights that the Acoma Indians, in another epic testament to liberty, would resist the Spanish Empire, then the largest in the world. Over 800 of the Acoma Indians were killed while the Spaniards lost only 12. In true Roman fashion, a Spaniard by the name of Juan de Oñate ordered that men over the age of 25 have half of one foot cut off, and that those between the ages of 12 and 25 would be made slaves for 20 years. Though it can hardly be considered an Indian victory, it did set into motion events that would be continually fueled by bitter memories such as these, events that would lead to the full scale Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This revolt did, in fact, drive the Spanish from the region, at least for a while.

Today, the site where the Israeli coins were found is symbolic, or symptomatic, of a different and much more complicated struggle for liberty – the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both peoples claim the site as a holy place, for the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands atop the ruins of the Second Temple. This mosque is revered as the third holiest Islamic site behind only Mecca and Medina. It is taught that here the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven.

Sadly, though, it seems the holier something is held, the more bitter is the hatred and fighting over it.

In his day, Luke Howard’s sky-breaking essay “On the Modifications of Clouds” was as revolutionary to Enlightenment era scientists as E.O. Wilson’s work with ants has been to evolutionary biology a century and a half later. Howard broke clouds into three major groupings -  cirrus, stratus, and cumulus – and subdivided each group into families of clouds with five and six siblings. That was the start of much bigger things to come. Along the way, Howard acquired the distinction of being named “the father of meteorology,” and the new field of atmospheric science that soon grew up around his work had some of the best and brightest minds trained on the heavens.

Within this new field of meteorology two distinct and very different disciplines coexist: the study of weather and the study of climate. As Mark Twain once quipped, weather is what’s falling on your head at any given moment. Climate is what happens to continents and oceans over decades. Thanks to an unlikely sequence of events that would have astonished Aristotle and Descartes and Luke Howard, the latter humble efforts to bring some scientific understanding to the self-ruining phenomena that float above our heads would eventually eclipse even astro- and nuclear physics in importance. The modern day-climatologist’s study of clouds, those silent messengers of weather that mesmerized the ancient Chaldeans and Chinese, had now morphed from the voodoo-like muse of poets into the most intense and important field of inquiry in modern-day science.

How did that happen? Well, that question can’t be answered in a blog, but suffice it to say that Howard’s scientific descendents in the field of climatology began asking some interesting questions about clouds in the 1970s.  In many respects, they were the same kinds of questions asked by the ancient Chinese and Aristotle; only now, scientist had access to instruments  (and planes and rockets and high altitude weather balloons) with which to actually venture aloft in search of answers. By the 1990s, when global climate change was becoming a very contentious topic in scientific and political circles around the world, the question that most intrigued climate scientists was simply this: What (if any) role do clouds play in the infinitely complex world of climate change?

Hot in pursuit of that answer were cloud physicists and climate modelers like NASA’s Anthony Del Genio, who works at the Goddard Space Institute at Columbia University in New York. What folks like Del Genio were soon to discover about clouds was nothing short – his words –  of “amazing.”

The clouds Del Genio and his colleagues were most interested in were the cumulonimbus formations in the tropics. For one thing, these clouds are among Mother Nature’s most violent children, and for another, they completely dominate the skies in the tropical belt, that area on our planet that circles the globe 20 degrees north and south of the equator. It is here where weather is generated, so with that big question in mind: What role do these clouds play in driving the planet’s climate? NASA assembled more than three hundred scientists in Florida in the summer of 2002 for the largest experiment ever conducted on clouds.

CRYSTAL-FACE, as it is now known, was, in many respects, the culmination of thousands of years of human speculation about cumulonimbus formations. The experiment involved battalions of scientists, flocks of satellites, squadron’s of aircrafts, and oodles of money, $20 million and counting. What they discovered would have astonished Aristotle.

Cumulonimbus formations are those clouds that form in the early afternoon and quickly grow into towering giants.  In fact, they flatten out on top, at about 55,000 feet, when they hit a warmer layer of air at the top of the troposphere.  These are the classical anvil formations that have fascinated scientists for thousands of years – and for good reason. It turns out that one cumulonimbus cloud is so complex, says Del Genio, that NASA’s best computers cannot process all the data to properly model even one cloud.  For example, that temperature at the base layer of one of these clouds is usually around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, but the temperature at the anvil is minus 100, a difference of 180 degrees.  Inside the cloud, electrical charges are so intense and unstable that lightening discharged beneath the anvil, inside the cloud, can superheat the surrounding air to 50,000 degrees F, an imbalance that creates collumnar updrafts inside the cloud that move at hundreds of miles per hour.

Those updrafts, in turn, are encircled by downdrafts of cooler air moving just as fast!  Along the way, these ferocious currents of air create violent outflows of air at various altitudes, and conversely, inflows at others.  It is those entraining inflows that helped the scientists finally answer the big question.

CRYSTAL-FACE demonstrated that clouds of this size are entraining microscopic aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by man-made processes.  Often, those aerosols, which can be tiny bits of sulfur discharged from coal burning power plants, can float thousands of miles through the atmosphere before becoming entrained, or pulled into, one of these clouds.  Then, something remarkable happens.  Each one of those tiny specks of dust or sulfur or carbon becomes the nucleus of a raindrop, and those billions of raindrops are then carried aloft to the top of the cloud by its hurricane force updrafts.  At the top of the cloud, those gazillion drops freeze and become tiny mirrors, countless brilliant little mirrors that reflect solar radiation back into space and thereby help to cool the planet by deflecting heat causing radiation away from the planet.

Unfortunately, that cooling effect is being more than offset on the underside of the clouds, which are trapping enormous amounts of energy close to the ground.  Scientists like Del Genio now believe that this may finally explain why our planet is experiencing a significant reduction in solar radiation, also know as solar dimming, at an unprecedented time of planetary warming.

So, thousands of years after the Greeks and Chinese first speculated on the nature of clouds, these latest discoveries would probably not come as a big surprise to the historical antecedents of modern scientists.   Just as those ancients predicted, it turns out that some of the answers to the biggest ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ of global climate may have been floating right above our heads all along.

—Aristophanes

From the ancient Chaldeans to modern climate modelers, clouds have been the self-ruining objects of timeless fascination and wonder. And why not. What better to ponder on a beautiful summer day, anywhere on this planet of ours, than those remnants of distant storms. Yet for all the brainpower and technological know-how of modern-day climate scientists, it’s remarkable how little we knew about these ethereal phantoms until very, very recently. In fact, what scientists knew about clouds just 50 years ago wasn’t much different than their Babylonian and Chaldean predecessors, who compiled the earliest known records of clouds, thousands of years ago.

“When a cloud grows dark in heaven,” noted one anonymous Chaldean weatherman, “a wind will blow.” Unbeknownst to that Chaldean weatherman, his contemporaries in the Chinese Shang dynasty were observing the same parade of clouds across the heavens. Chinese scholars theorized that careful observations and quantifiable data would enable them to deconstruct weather into knowable, measurable parts. In fact, they were the first ‘scientists’ to use charcoal to gauge the relative humidity (RH) of air, an achievement that predates Pericles and the Golden Age of Greece by two millennia.

Centuries later, Taoists anticipated discoveries by modern meteorologists when they established a Ministry of Thunder and a God of Clouds, but it wasn’t until Aristotle cast his eyes skyward and composed his extraordinary treatise, Meteorologicia, that clouds found a permanent home in science. Parting company with his Oriental predecessors, the great Hellenic metaphysician described clouds as a mixing of vapors that were drawn from both the upper atmosphere and terra firma, a great rising and falling and commingling of moisture trapped in perpetual motion by the attraction of the earth and the repulsing power of stars. His insightful musings framed the debate about clouds for nearly two thousand years, when scientific advancements in the Age of Enlightenment, combined with the theoretical genius of Rene Descartes, set the science of clouds on the course where we find it today.

Remarkably, Descartes speculated that clouds were made up of tiny water droplets and particles of ice formed by compressed vapor. This vapor, he reasoned, escapes from both the ground and bodies of water to form these lighter-than-air heaps in the sky that we call clouds. But just how these processes worked in the atmosphere to influence our climate would remain a mystery for another two centuries, when19th century scientists, armed with newfangled tools such as thermometers and barometers, took their questions into the sky in hot air balloons. Yet even as they ascended to dizzying heights above Paris and London, it never occurred to these intrepid aerialists that clouds should have names.

That taxonomic threshold would be crossed in 1802 by an unassuming young English chemist named Luke Howard, now known as the Father of Meteorology. On a rainy December evening, Howard stood before a small gathering of scientists at Plough Court, in London, and uttered a new family of words derived from Latin: Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus. Howard’s taxonomy for clouds was broken into three basic groups, with four divisions within each group.   Clouds, he argued, were as distinct from each other as chickens are distinct from trees. Cirrus were clouds shaped like wisps of hair; Cumulus clouds build into piles and heaps, and finally; Stratus clouds are layered in sheets. Each member of the cloud family is shaped by distinct climatic phenomena.

Howard’s prosaic title, “On the Modifications of Clouds,” belied a daring proposal that would forever alter the way scientists look at the sky.  By the time meteorologists added Nimbostratus a century later, Howard’s taxonomy had become a universal fixture of everyday language. Today, clouds arrive in our midst with the names of Roman gods: Undulatus, Cumulonimbus Incus, Fibratus, and Lenticularis, among numerous others, and announce their entrance with stinging hail and deadly tails, or a shadow drifting across a field of ripe grain. Howard’s achievement set the stage for the next great leap forward, but the adventure commenced by the Chaldeans and Chinese would have to wait until 20th century rocket technology punched a hole in the sky. Then, at long last, the intellectual descendants of Aristotle could begin to investigate the role played by clouds in our global climate.  (Part II of this story, next week.)

In the meantime, I’ve put together a little test so that you can measure your own understanding of clouds and the role they play in our global weather.  The answers might surprise you!

1)  Who were the first scientists to use charcoal to gauge the relative humidity of air?

a.  the Phoenicians

b.  the Egyptians

c.  the Italians

d.  early Christians

e.  the Chinese

2)  Finish this sentence (good luck):  Clouds are…

a.  a figment of our imaginations

b.  atmospheric ephemera

c.  the discarded garments of angels

d.  among the most violent phenomena in nature

3)  The term ‘albedo’ refers to the relative ________________ of a cloud?

a. density

b.  height, from bottom to top.

c.  the speed at which it moves over the ground

d.  its relative brightness

4)  In climatology, the term ‘entrain’ means…

a.  a cluster of clouds

b.  a sky with different formations at different altitudes

c.  to gather in particles

d.  to merge one cloud with another

5)  The single most important cloud formation in the global climate engine is which of the following?

a.   Cirrus

b.  Undulatus

c.  Lenticularis

d.  Cumulonimbus

e.  O Solo Mio

6)  Who is famous for this quote: “Clouds are the patron goddesses of the layabout. From them come our intelligence, our dialectic and our reason.”

a.  Thomas Jefferson

b.  Shakespeare

c.  Milton

d.  Aristophanes

e.  Chaucer

f.  Saint Paul

And now, the envelope please…..

1) e    2) d    3) d    4) c    5) d    6) d

In addition to the finger print, there are more clues that tie the painting to da Vinci. They’ve somehow determined that the painting was done by a south paw, which Leonardo was. I admit, I have no idea how they figured that out, though if I painted a picture with my left hand, it would be rather obvious! Stylistic and compositional evidence also points to da Vinci’s left hand. So, it looks as though this little painting will take its place among the small collection of about 15 works known to be done by the famous artist.

Leonardo da Vinci left his mark on more than just the art world. We all know him as an inventor, but he also made contributions to architecture, civil engineering, astronomy, anatomy, zoology, geography and paleontology. That’s a lot of ologies! So, not just handy with a paint brush, da Vinci was one of the best scientists of his day. For instance, he came up with today’s explanation of how clam shells and the like are found high up in the mountains. His contemporaries had two theories: a) they grew there and b) the great Biblical flood put them there. Not exactly crack scientific methodology is it?

As for theory “a,” he reasoned that the shells were living organisms that could not have fed without motion and in the mountains they could not move. As for theory “b,” well, there was no flood! After all, where would all that water drain? I’m sure that pleased the church very much. He believed that the shells were on the sea floor before the sea floor became a mountain. Radical thinking indeed. That meant that he knew the world was a lot older, I mean a lot older, than people of his time believed. Not bad for a guy who also painted some of the world’s most famous paintings.

Today’s pop culture still feels the finger of da Vinci’s influence. Who hasn’t seen a t-shirt or poster with Vitruvian Man, or a parody of the Mona Lisa? His The Last Supper sparked a couple of books and movies too. Where else have you seen his mark? Time and space dictate that I have to end my list here, but you keep looking. I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at where you find his fingerprints. Usually, you won’t even need a magnifying glass.

Peter Culos is an artist/graphic designer as well as creator of history-geek.com

A lone rider came to a leisurely halt along the side of the dusty trail. Standing in his path were three of the deadliest outlaws in the Indian Territory – the notorious Brunter brothers. These infamous murderers and thieves were the sort of cop-killing fugitive bastards who would just as soon have immolated you with a blowtorch as urinated on your burning corpse. These men, all looking like they’d just stepped off the set of the movie Tombstone, pointed a multi-flavored assortment of shotguns and revolvers at the interloper, gesturing for him to dismount from his horse. The rider complied.

Bass Reeves calmly took three steps towards the Brunter brothers, his grim face registering neither fear nor respect for these punk-ass bitches. He was an intimidating, serious-looking man, standing over six feet tall and solidly built. His clothes and equipment were nondescript, covered with the dust from several thousand miles of hard riding, hard fighting, and hard drinking. His beaten-up black hat and long black coat sported a variety of bullet holes and blood stains. The brass star proudly displayed on his lapel was tarnished with age.

“What the hell are you doing out here, lawman?” the elder Brunter brother demanded.

Bass spat. “Well, I’ve come to arrest you,” he said in the sort of nonchalant, matter-of-fact way that an evil mechanic tells you that you need a new transmission. “Got the warrant right here.” He reached into his coat pocket, produced a worn, folded up piece of paper, and casually handed it to the elder brother.

The Brunters all looked at each other in disbelief. They couldn’t believe the stupidity of the man standing before them to have admitted this fact as plainly as he had. Sure, they respected the fact he possessed what obviously must have been solid brass balls, but they were still definitely going to have to kill his ass.

The eldest brother unfolded the warrant, and jokingly showed his brothers the lengthy list of serious charges leveled against them. The moment their collective eyes looked down towards the page, Reeves’ right hand twitched ever so slightly. Then, in a flash, he closed his fingers around the handle of the .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker strapped to his thigh, drew his weapon and fired two shots from the hip in rapid succession. Both bullets hit home, sending two Brunters spinning into a dance of death. The eldest brother pointed his gun at the lawman’s head, but before he could fire it Bass Reeves was on him. Reeves grabbed the man’s revolver with one hand, redirected the weapon so it was pointing up into the air, and then proceeded to pistol-whip the dude unconscious with his free hand. In the span of about twenty seconds, the toughest U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi had just taken out three of the Indian Territory’s deadliest criminals.

Lesser-known Giants of the 20th Century examines the lives of 11 important men and women who experienced and influenced the 20th century. It is the result of an “ah-ha” moment. While visiting the Palace of Versailles near Paris, my wife and I spotted a larger-than-life reproduction of the signature pages of the treaty signed at the end of World War I. You could easily recognize the names of some famous statesmen of their day, including Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Among them, written in beautiful script, was “I J Paderewski.” I thought of my mother’s words of encouragement when, as a young boy, I was given piano lessons: “If you practice every day, you’ll grow up to play like Paderewski” she assured me. There in the Palace of Versailles, in my ignorance I wondered, “Why would a pianist have signed the Versailles Treaty?”

The episode inspired me to learn about the life of a man who, by the turn of the 20th century, had become a rock star to the classical music world. On his U.S. tours, ordinary people walked the length and breadth of counties for the lifetime memory of attending a performance by the great artist. Paderewski’s devotion to the cause of freedom of his Polish homeland inspired him to political activism. Using the advantage of his celebrity, he was able to inveigle his way into the inner circle of Woodrow Wilson and lobby for the inclusion of the freedom of Poland in Wilson’s Fourteen Point Plan. Returning home at the end of the war, Paderewski was swept into office as prime minister and became one of the two Polish representatives to the Versailles treaty convention.

My discovery of Paderewski’s story made me realize that Giants have always inhabited the earth and are all around us. This does not refer to physical gargantuans, but to people from all walks of life, who achieve greatness and use their celebrity to do some good in this world, only to be forgotten by history. What a pity that their stories fade from the collective memory so that the life lessons and inspiration they offer are lost to future generations. I wanted to re-tell the stories of a group whose lives overlapped and spanned The American Century. They include people from the fields of professional sports, politics, journalism, academe and banking. They were Polish, Italian, Jewish, German, African American and Palestinian. Diversity, however, was a happy by-product. I was looking for stories that amaze, and I found them.

How many major league baseball players can you name who graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, spoke seven languages and attended the Sorbonne and Columbia University in the off season? I became interested in Moe Berg’s story because of an urban legend. While visiting Japan in 1934, he secretly shot some panoramic movie footage of Tokyo. According to the story, the film was used to help Jimmy Doolittle plan his famous air raid a few years later. Far more remarkable were Berg’s actual exploits as a spy for the OSS during World War II.

There is the story of Sen. Margaret Chase Smith who won a special election to the House of Representatives in 1940 to complete the term of her husband, who had died in office. She won reelection on her own four times, then “promotion” by the voters of Maine to the U.S. Senate where she served for more than 20 years. Smith was the only member of the upper chamber who showed the courage to stand in vocal opposition to the tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy when, on June 1, 1950, she gave her “Declaration of Conscience” address on the Senate floor. She later became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for President of the United States at the national convention of a major political party.

Several of the true-life stories involve the civil rights struggle. The life of boxer Joe Louis is juxtaposed with that of Max Schmeling. While serving in the U.S. Army during WWII, Louis pulled strings to get a newly commissioned African- American out of serious trouble. In doing so, he may have saved the future baseball career of Lt. Jackie Robinson. Branch Rickey, the father of baseball’s farm team system and many other innovations, made the decision to sign Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodgers, thereby ending segregation in major league baseball. There is also the story of Medgar Evers, “servant-leader” of the movement, who enlisted Thurgood Marshall to help James Meredith break the color line at Ole Miss. Evers also risked his own life by investigating racist murders, including that of an African American teenager visiting Mississippi from Chicago, named Emmett Till.

At a time when we face so many challenges and fears, it may be comforting to reflect on the achievements of those who overcame adversity and made important contributions to America and the world. If you decide to read these stories, when you finish please pass the book along to a high school or college student. Young people are the least likely to know anything about these giants and are the most likely to draw inspiration from their stories. You can find thumbnail sketches of all 11 stories on my Website, www.charlesaulino.com.

Vermeer was born in 1632, close to the end of an 80-year Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. That’s one long war. It also encompassed the Thirty Years War which wrecked Europe and ended in 1648. The upshot of all that was a new Netherlands Republic in prime position to make lots of money in trade and shipping. Suddenly, even the lower classes had some disposable income and could afford to pimp out their cribs. The Dutch went art-crazy and the Golden Age of Dutch art was born.

Back to our ordinary Milkmaid. Johannes Vermeer became less interested in the grand history and religious (religion, after all, played no small part in all the recent waring) paintings that had been popular. He found dignity in the ordinary. To prove his point, he has rendered this common domestic in dramatic light which pours over the vibrant colors of her clothing. The painting takes on a jewel-like quality. Even the dish being prepared backs up his theme. She is making bread pudding which uses stale bread that would otherwise be discarded. Domestic virtue indeed!

The dignity of the common man is the root of our own American republic, is it not? Plus, the Dutch, with their newfound wealth, helped finance our revolt against Great Britain which allowed us to employ similar capitalistic and democratic ideals.

Maybe the Crown Prince is right after all. There is a lot of symbolism packed into this one little painting.

Peter Culos is and artist/graphic designer as well as creator of history-geek.com

In its youth, the Internet was rambunctious, free-spirited and often quirky, as most of us were in our halcyon days. That led it to many revelations and innovations, but also often reinforced among its users the “me-centered” attitude common to teenagers and young adults. Download a song without paying the performer and songwriter for what they created? Hey, it’s on the Net, therefore it’s free! Got a narrow point of view you simply must share with the world to convince others they should think the same way? Start your own Web site!

But the Net is maturing, even if some of its users haven’t. It provides, almost instantly, vast access to medical information, historical research, scientific and other data that even the largest library could never hold, and that information grows exponentially each year; however, don’t buy the nonsense that “everything is on the Net.” It isn’t.

The Internet allows old friends to reconnect and new ones to be found. It has created entirely new ways of working and new jobs that couldn’t exist without it – including mine. It has become a responsible adult while retaining the characteristics of a mischievous child. And it has changed our lives and our cultures in irreversible ways.

So, let’s say happy 40th birthday to friend Internet. No need to tell it about Geritol or hair-coloring products; it already knows where to find that information.