A Liberal Dose, Oct. 31, 2024 "This Is Not Normal, and It Has to Stop"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 31, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“This is not normal and it has to stop”

 

As you read this column, it is Halloween… and five days before the election. Both of those things are spooky. By the time you read the next column one week from today, the election (hopefully) will be over. Half the country will be furious, half will be deliriously happy and relieved. No matter who wins, about half the country will believe that the future of the country and of democracy are in doubt. It should come as no surprise to you when I say that only one side would actually be right to think that way if they lost.

Four years ago, when Trump lost, I heaved a big sigh of relief because I thought, to quote Gerald Ford at his inauguration, “At last our long national nightmare is over.” But, as it turned out, it was not. I don’t think any of us who had voted for Joe Biden could have believed that the defeated sitting president would actually instigate a violent insurrection to prevent the certification of the vote, while simultaneously putting in place various illegal schemes to do the same thing in the courts. Or that four years later he would once again be the Republican nominee… and that the race would be a virtual tie this close to the election. Even with him being exposed for openly wishing he could have had generals like Hitler’s generals. With all his fascistic rhetoric, and total disregard for the Constitution (or even understanding of what it is), I am terrified of what will happen if he wins. Unfortunately, after what we saw last time, I’m also pretty darn scared of what will happen if he loses.

Trump has eroded all semblance of civility or decency in American public life. He has normalized violent speech, violent actions, and even calls for revenge and threats of using the military against his political opponents (which, we now know, he actually tried to do while in office but he was surrounded by people sensible and principled enough to prevent it, which will not be the case if he gets back in). Before you chime in that liberal rhetoric has led to two attempts on Trump’s life, let me remind you that BOTH those would-be assassins were, not liberal Democrats, but former Trump supporters… take a moment to think about what that means about who has created the atmosphere of violence.

I know many, many people in this and surrounding counties who are terrified to put out a Harris/Walz yard sign. Not because they’re afraid it will be stolen, but because they are afraid, almost all of them, that it would lead to Trump supporters vandalizing or even burning down their houses. And they are not overreacting. Many people who have prominently opposed Trump the past few years are laying plans to flee the country if he wins, for their own safety. Media outlets are refraining from criticizing Trump as much as they used to, or from supporting Harris, out of fear of reprisals against them if he wins. We know that Republican senators who thought Trump should have been convicted in his last impeachment refrained from voting to convict because they feared for their families’ safety, and even their lives, if they did so. Judges in Trump’s MANY court cases have been inundated with death threats. Volunteer poll workers around the country are scared for their safety, and we’ve already seen violence against them.

THIS IS NOT NORMAL.

At least, it didn’t used to be. At least, it SHOULDN’T be. But so many of us don’t even question it anymore, because it has come to FEEL normal just because it has been constant for nine years. Many of us are frogs in boiling water, with the temperature slowly rising.

I have a lot of conservative friends who say they support Trump only reluctantly, that they are disgusted by him on a personal level, but they just can’t support a liberal Democrat. If this describes you… you know that everything I have said about him is true. And we don’t have to let our country keep devolving this way. Once you are in that voting booth, it is you and your conscience. None of your friends, family, or neighbors will know how you vote unless you tell them. If you can’t vote for Harris, write in someone else or go on to the next line.

If you support Harris, and feel like your vote doesn’t count, go in to vote for Gloria Johnson for U.S. Senate. Because if Trump DOES win, we sure don’t need Marsha Blackburn in there helping enable him.

Here we go…

 

 --Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, October 17, 2024 "We Are All Doing It Together"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 17, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“We are all doing it together”

 

The purpose of this column is to be political -in fact, not only to be political, but to be politically partisan. I was asked to write it to represent the liberal, Democratic perspective, as a counterbalance to the conservative writers then appearing on this page (and others since).

But everything isn’t political, even in this pretty evenly divided country, even in the final weeks of an election campaign. Some things rise above politics.

In the last few weeks, the Southeast has been wracked by two destructive hurricanes -and not just on the coasts, as we are used to. The effects have extended far up into the mountains. Not quite as far as us here in White County, but only a couple of hours east of us. Hurricane Helene devastated East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, and parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida (who was then battered a few days later by Hurricane Milton).

I have a lot of connections to Cherokee, NC. My primary field of historical expertise is Cherokee history and culture… but it also extends to the personal. I have friends there. My Cherokee connections actually extend to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and individual Cherokees living around the country. When I was first approached, in 2017, to participate in an interdisciplinary team at Tennessee Tech to apply for an NSF grant that involved cultural training for STEM grad students, with the goal of helping them learn to communicate with communities, learn from them, and work together with them, a Cherokee term came immediately to my mind: Gadugi. Gadugi is a sacred concept to the Cherokee people. It comes from a root word meaning “we all do it together.” In the old days, every Cherokee village had a community corn field which the whole town worked in, and which fed every family according to their needs. In more modern history, when Wilma Mankiller was secretary of state of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma (just before she became the first female Cherokee principal chief in 1985), they got a government grant to modernize their plumbing systems -but did not receive funds to hire contractors to do it. Every able-bodied person in the Cherokee Nation took turns digging ditches until everyone was taken care of. I told my colleagues this story, and they wanted to form a partnership with the Cherokees in both NC and OK for our project, which we received permission from the tribal governments to call Gadugi. Since then we have connected several grad students working in food, energy, or water with the Cherokee people.

One group we have interacted with often on the Cherokee reservation in NC is the Living Waters Lutheran Church, whose pastor and parishioners are Cherokee and which operates a food pantry that serves the poor and needy on the reservation. Students have made many trips there over the last year or so to volunteer in the food distribution. After the hurricane I reached out to see how they were. Cherokee itself was not as badly hit as other areas- but the warehouse that supplied the pantry was in Asheville, and was destroyed, leaving them with no idea where they were going to get the food and other items to help their people. Because they were not as badly hit, most of the help was going elsewhere.

I immediately put out the call on social media and by word of mouth that we needed donations -of food, water, diapers, cleaning supplies, hygiene products, or cash to buy them -to get to Cherokee the following Wednesday, because their need was immediate. The response was overwhelming. The TTU history department agreed to be a drop-off point for campus, and the Putnam County Democratic HQ (which is open all day during election season) agreed to do the same. But it was not a political initiative or mission, they were just the drop-off point. Many conservatives I know donated.

I want to thank the 70 or so people who donated, my wife Robin (who worked for years at the East Illinois Food Bank) for helping me organize it, and my colleague Dr. Sabrina Buer, grad student Creek Anderson, and undergrad student Jonas Carter for putting in a 13-hour day loading, driving, and unloading.

As we were getting ready to head out from my house on Wednesday morning -with a van, a student’s car, and a truck -there was still some room left on the truck, and still some money left. We stopped at Sparta Wal-mart to buy more in order to fill the truck. As we were loading $1700 worth of items at the checkout, random customers who’d heard what we were doing came to our line and pressed more money into our hands. The first person to do so was my good friend John Gottlied, who used to write the other column on this page and argue with me regularly about politics. One of the first people to contribute money electronically was the new adviser to the Tennessee Tech College Republicans (I advise the College Democrats).

Pastor Russel at the pantry was overwhelmed by our generosity and kindness, and said that it was proof that natural disasters are the time for humanity, not for politics, and he was right. It may be months before their warehouse is back up, so they continue to have need. When we got there late Wednesday afternoon they had already served sixty needy families, and had enough to get through the next day, but had nothing for after that. We will be going back on the second week of November, so if you’d like to help please contact me -Putnam County Dems and TTU History office will still be accepting donations, and if there is any business or office in Sparta that is open daily that would be willing to be a drop-off point, please let me know.

I also want to direct people’s attention to ways you can help people in East Tennessee that were impacted. My friend Samantha Satterfield, of Sunseeker Outfitters here in White County, is collecting goods for another trip to East Tennessee. Samantha, a travel nurse, tells me communities out there need water and food, but also need medical supplies. She was recently in Newport and plans to get to other communities out that way. Text her at her business number, (931)319-1906 , or email her at happyhippiesam@gmail.com . You can email me at tdsmith@tntech.edu.

Lisa Russell (Pastor Jack’s wife, who runs the pantry) asked me to tell you this: “You have no idea how many families these supplies will help. You are awesome! Please thank EVERYONE who helped with all of this, we appreciate all of you!”

There is no Cherokee word for goodbye. They say dodadagohvi- “we will see each other again.”

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party, and the board of the Tennessee chapter of the American Indian Movement-Indian Territory. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, October 10, 2024 "The Stormy Seas Have Followed Us"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 10, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“The Stormy Seas Have Followed Us Inland”

 

Who’d have ever expected that so much destruction and death (230 people and counting as I write this on Sunday) would visit the Smoky Mountains and surrounding areas from a hurricane hitting the coast of Florida hundreds of miles away. It is the worst flooding the region has seen in over a century. Over the last decade or so, as dramatic weather events have slowly begun to convince some die-hard climate change deniers that things really are getting bad at an accelerated pace, the percentage of Americans who recognize that coastal areas are endangered due to rising sea levels and intensified storms related to warmer air currents, and that forested mountains around the country are endangered by wildfires due to the heat and drier climate, has grown (hopefully it is not too little, too late). But no one expected this… from a hurricane at sea.

Two years ago, I was part of a team that embarked on an oral history of extreme weather in the Upper Cumberland, which also involved gathering data from government sources, especially NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). We actually were able to fill in a lot of gaps in that NOAA data for our local region. But we had to warn our student workers, when interviewing locals, to be sure to say “weather” instead of “climate”, because as soon as that latter word is introduced some people shut down because they view the discussion as politicized. “Climate” should not be a political word… but it has become one, because so many conservative politicians have made it one in recent decades. When I was a kid in the 70s, conservative and liberal politicians alike used the word climate freely, without political association, and were equally concerned about protecting it. That ship sailed some time ago, primarily due to business interests’ desire to avoid environmental regulations that would affect their profits. Those corporations, and the politicians in their pockets, have used propaganda and misdirection, and outright lies, to convince many voters that any effort to protect our earth and keep it habitable is a liberal scam worthy of contempt, to the extent a lot of people go around deliberately polluting the atmosphere around them just to show how much they enjoy “liberal tears.”

This particular climate disaster has dovetailed with another conservative tactic of the past decade: spreading the most outrageous, ridiculous conspiracy theories -without the slightest mooring to fact -as irrefutable truths, to stir up their ever-more-easily-impassioned base and distract them from the real issues. Eight years ago, according to them, Hillary Clinton (and, somehow, Tom Hanks) were running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor (which had no basement). Four years ago, Donald Trump was going to magically reverse the results of a national election and execute liberals in the town square. Today, relief and rescue efforts have been seriously hampered by an unbelievable string of conspiracy theories (propounded by actual conservative politicians) claiming Biden and Harris were stealing disaster relief money and giving it to “illegal immigrants”, or even that liberals had somehow generated this hurricane and intentionally turned it loose onto red states in order to win the election. You really can’t summon up anything too ridiculous, fantastic, and over-the-top that millions of MAGA faithful won’t believe every word of it if only their burnt-orange demigod and his acolytes say it to them. Much as with the mythical dog-eating Haitians of Springfield, local and state Republican officials have practically begged Trump and his devotees to cut it out because they are causing chaos in their communities -and, in this case, in relief efforts.

So many of the people who spread these falsehoods do not take the time and mental energy to see the real conspiracy. The Republican Party has been commandeered by people who want to dismantle the workings of the federal government, and any confidence the public has in it, in order to make it easier for oligarchs to get their tax cuts and deregulation, to the ultimate detriment of their own willing supporters, as outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 -which these same supporters insist Trump has nothing to do with, just because he says so (despite all evidence to the contrary). It truly has reached the level of a cult -and one which endangers not just democracy but the future of the very ground we stand on.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 26, 2024 "Hopefully We Are Turning a Corner"

 

A Liberal Dose

Sept. 26, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“Hopefully we are turning a corner”

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I outlined all the momentous political events that had unfolded in a span of only two months? Then I said things had kind of come to a standstill, with polls in a dead heat, and it felt like we were in the eye of a storm.

BUT, I then pointed out, the Harris/Trump debate was only a couple of days away at that time, and who knew what seismic shifts THAT could bring.

Well… yeah. Turns out that shook things up a good bit.

It was a doozy of a debate. It was kind of like the Biden/Trump debate, but in reverse. Trump had his keister handed to him. This time HE was the doddering old man (and, in reality, were he to be elected he would be the oldest person ever elected president in U.S. history). Harris really threw him off his game when she criticized his crowd sizes- he came unglued, as she knew he would. Next thing you know, he was following J. D. Vance down that ridiculous rabbit hole about Haitians in Ohio eating people’s pets (something Vance himself admitted, a few days later, was untrue but something he was repeating anyway).

I was cruising around Facebook during the debate, watching my conservative friends’ reactions. “Is this really the only choice we have?” said one die-hard local Republican friend of mine. Several others were complaining that Trump was killing his own chances.

In other words, they were reacting like many of my liberal friends on the night of the first debate, sent into a state of panic over Biden’s poor performance.

Of course, being Trump supporters, this did not last long. Before the debate was even over, many of them were blaming the moderators, saying they had ganged up on him and that the debate was actually three-against-one… because they “fact-checked” him (something the Trump team tried unsuccessfully to forbid in the debate rules). “Fact-check” is a polite way of saying they corrected his blatant lies. “They didn’t fact-check Harris!” they complained. Well, Harris wasn’t spreading unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about cat-eaters, or saying ridiculous things like executing babies after they are born is perfectly legal in blue states.

Trump did a fair job of controlling himself in the Biden debate, but he went off the rails in this one. While Trump’s fans quickly got over their initial panic and returned to their standard approach of pretending that what they saw with their own eyes didn’t happen, independent and swing voters were reminded of just how unstable (and yes, weird) Donald Trump is. On the night of the debate I could feel it happening, just as we could all feel it with Biden. I found myself wondering if we were witnessing the same sort of moment America saw when Joseph McCarthy was finally challenged on live television and asked, “At long last, sir, have you no decency?” and swiftly tumbled into irrelevancy (side note: Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s biggest defender, was later Trump’s mentor). We’re seeing the polls now, and Harris is pulling ahead- in general, and in several swing states. It is still very close, mind you, but the trend lines are favoring her. And you can feel the Republican panic (you can tell when the Republican Party is scared, they try to prevent even more people from voting).

And that is ultimately the difference between the present-day Democratic and Republican parties. Democrats do not hitch themselves with blind devotion to one person and march to their orders no matter what- they attach themselves to the good of their party, and beyond that to the good of the nation, and beyond that to the ideals the nation was founded on. Anyone who remains a Republican has attached themselves to a cult of personality - to one crass, blasphemous, autocratic con artist -no matter what, and no matter what the damage to their party, their country, and their ideals.

Here’s hoping Trumpism, like McCarthyism, is on its way to becoming a historic side note of a bad time in our country that we are all embarrassed by, but which we got beyond.

Troy Smith, a native of White County, is a novelist, a member of the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee, and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His views do not necessarily reflect those of TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 19, 2024 “My Experience With Haitian Immigrants”

A Liberal Dose

September 19, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“My experience with Haitian immigrants”

Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, I served in two French-speaking congregations -the first in West Palm Beach and the second in Brooklyn. This was 1987 to 1989, when a wave of Haitian immigrants came to the country to escape the political turmoil in their country. Most went either to Florida or the NY/NJ area. I had done really well in my three years of high school French at WCHS, with the late and extremely lamented Mrs. Sarah Jane Thurman, and this was an opportunity to do mission work without leaving the country. Turns out high school French is not quite the same as Haitian Creole, but after two years of daily exposure to the language I became conversational. In my New York congregation I was one of only five non-Haitian members out of over three hundred. I developed a deep love, and admiration, for the Haitian people and their culture.

Many of these folks had risked their lives on rickety boats to reach America. They had good reason to leave, as the Duvalier family (a father-son dictatorship) ruled ruthlessly and cruelly over their own people. I will never forget a conversation I had in Florida with a man, probably in his sixties, who had witnessed his adult son being killed in the streets by the machetes of the Tonton Macoute- the Duvaliers’ secret police. As he was telling me the story his own mother, who had been silent up to then and had to have been at least ninety, leaned forward and said -in a deep, foreboding voice –“Sang est le couleur d’Haiti.” Blood is the color of Haiti.

The Haitians I knew considered themselves incredibly lucky to live in the United States. I worked among them daily, translating for them and helping them do things like fill out job applications. Those people were workers, let me tell you. Many of the Haitian immigrants I knew had two or three jobs, yet maintained their joy of life and cheerful dispositions -and their warm, welcoming attitudes toward me. They were patient with my efforts to become more fluent in their language, even as they were doing the same with mine. Rarely have I felt as loved and accepted as I was by the members of La Congregation FrancaiseCentrale de Brooklyn.

In both locales, families from the congregation took turns feeding me on Sundays after services. I remember one family that was well-off introducing me to Haitian delicacies such as lambi, deep-fried conch meat that is very pricy in the coastal areas of the U.S. where you can even find it and which I still love (though, alas, from afar, as it is hard to get in Tennessee). Most families were not so well off, and some were impoverished, but they still shared with me what little they had.Every meal started with beans and rice, usually followed by pikleez, sometimes just called salade, which consisted of pickled and julienned carrots, cabbage, and peppers. Pikleez had a very strong flavor, and I never quite acquired the same taste for it as I did for lambi. Fried plantains were a popular side dish. I ate a lot of griot fritailles- spicy, fried pork nuggets. I bought a plate of griot fritailles and plantains at a Haitian restaurant during my recent visit to Brooklyn. I also ate quite a bit of goat, especially when invited to family barbecues.

Know what I didn’t eat?

Dogs and cats. Because Haitians don’t eat dogs and cats.

Now, I had a very good friend in Brooklyn who was Cambodian, and he ate cat every chance he got, because it was a part of his culture. “Cat is very good, my brotha,” he would say, “It makes my heart rejoice.” But he did not go around catnapping people’s pets and eating them. This friend, by the way -his name was Sophan -had barely escaped his home country with his life, and had seen most of his family killed by the Khmer Rouge.

All these people I have described had risked everything to reach the “land of the free,” where they could live their lives and support their families and be treated with dignity and respect. Just like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, almost all of whom are here legally and are productive citizens of their new community.

All this insane, ridiculous, malicious slander being tossed around about them, solely to stoke up racial hatred and anti-immigrant hysteria in order to gin up votes for Donald Trump, an American Duvalier, is going to get some of them killed. Shame on you if you repeat it; shame on you if, without any proof or any knowledge of these people and their culture, you believe it.

What we give to the poor, the Haitian proverb says, we lend to God. 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 12, 2024 “What a Crazy Ride This Summer Has Been”

 

A Liberal Dose

September 12, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“What a Crazy Ride This Summer Has Been”

 

Things have been pretty hectic and unpredictable this summer in the presidential election cycle. Trump and Biden had their first of several planned debates on June 28, and Biden supporters were left clutching their chests like Fred Sanford by their candidate’s feeble demeanor and weak performance. Then, two weeks later on July 13, Trump survived an assassination attempt (though a member of his audience did not). The dramatic image of Trump pumping his fist defiantly seemed likely to seal his election victory. Just two days later, on the first day of the Republican National Convention, Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate. While still close, the GOP ticket seemed to be pulling ahead in the polls.

Just six days later, on July 21, Biden dropped out of the race, and his biggest detractors in his own party hailed him as a hero for it. Within days, Vice-President Harris had become the heir-apparent of the Democratic Party, which infused many Democratic voters with -first, relief -then hope and energy. She had the best week of fundraising in presidential history. Less than a month later, the Democratic National Convention amped up that energy. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance either made, or was learned to have made in the past, one colossal public relations blunder after another, making many women voters even madder about the prospect of a second Trump administration (and many were plenty mad already). Also meanwhile, Trump has been even more incoherent than usual, showing his (very advanced) age, and has been even more combative and nasty. And… the race still seems to be neck-and-neck, and anything could happen as we go into the final lap of the election season.

And all this happened in the space of two months.

I have rarely in my lifetime seen such a succession of seismic political shifts happen so quickly. The complete shift in global mood 23 years ago on the day of September 11, 2001, certainly counts, as does the unexpected collapse -over a four-month period -of the Soviet Union in 1991, but those were events that existed apart from (although certainly affecting) U.S. politics. My mind has been boggled this summer, and I’m sure yours has, too.

And in only two MORE months, it will have all been played out and decided (we hope). I find myself hoping that the fact election day falls on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day in the U.K. and a symbol of anarchy and destruction, winds up being purest coincidence and not prophetic. After all that rapid change, it almost feels like -now that the pieces have all been put in place -time has slowed down to a standstill. Like we’re in the eye of a storm. Of course, by the time this column (which I am writing Sunday night) comes out, we will have seen the debate between Trump and Harris -and who knows what other seismic shifts may have occurred.

One thing is for certain. We are no longer living in the same world we inhabited nine years ago when Donald Trump first came down that golden escalator. Much as we probably all long for a return to normalcy, even many of his supporters, I am not sure how “normal” life can be in a (hopefully!!) post-Trump era. I thought his candidacy was a joke in the summer of 2015. As he ran away with the Republican primaries, I found myself almost joyful about it -I couldn’t believe my party’s good luck, that the other side was going to put forward a buffoon with absolutely no chance of actually being elected by the American people, unlike a Jeb Bush or a Marco Rubio. It was only when I started to notice people I knew, liked, and respected starting to talk admiringly about him that I started to worry. Wow, what I’d give to be able to return to that sort of naivete. Of course, knowing just how naïve those thoughts were is, in itself, a protection against overconfidence and against letting up before the final whistle has sounded.

Buckle up, we’ve still got a bumpy ride ahead.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE