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🎧📚A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore

A comprehensive narrative history of Mt. Rushmore, written in light of recent political controversies, and a timely retrospective for the monument's 100th anniversary in 2025 Most books mentioned in my reviews can be found at the affiliate links below. (Bookshop.org) (Biblio.com) (Better World Books-US) (Better World Books-UK)…

http://bargain-sleuth.com/2025/12/14/%f0%9f%8e%a7%f0%9f%93%9aa-biography-of-a-mountain-the-making-and-meaning-of-mount-rushmore-bookreview-brillianceaudio-stmartinspress-arcreview-americanhistory/

Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln by Edward Achorn, 2023

This vividly rendered Civil War history presents "a lively guided tour of Washington during the 24 hours or so around Lincoln's swearing-in"

Edward Achorn reveals the nation's capital on that momentous day—with its mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians.





By March 4, 1865, the Civil War had left intractable wounds on the nation. Tens of thousands crowded Washington's Capitol grounds that day to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath for a second term—and witness what was perhaps the greatest inaugural address in American history. Lincoln stunned the nation by arguing that both sides had been wrong, and that the war's unimaginable horrors might have been God's just verdict on the national sin of slavery. In Every Drop of Blood, Edward Achorn reveals the nation's capital on that momentous day—with its mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians. Swirling around the complex figure of Lincoln, a host of characters are brought to life, from grievously wounded Union colonel Selden Connor to the embarrassingly drunk new vice president, Andrew Johnson, to poet-journalist Walt Whitman; from soldiers' advocate Clara Barton and African American leader Frederick Douglass to conflicted actor John Wilkes Booth. In indelible scenes, Achorn captures the frenzy and division in the nation's capital at this crucial moment in America's history. His story offers new understanding of our great national crisis, and echoes down the decades to resonate in our own time.

By () Updated November 22, 2025 - !

"Since 1970, Indigenous people & their allies have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native people do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims & other European settlers. Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Indigenous ancestors and Native resilience. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide.

National Day of Mourning
Thursday, November 27, 2025
12:00 Noon
Cole’s Hill (above ),

Join us as we continue to …

, 11 Nov 1865, Dr Mary Edwards Walker receives the Medal of Honor from US President Andrew Johnson for her services as a field surgeon in the American Civil War.

A lifelong "dress reformer", she wore trousers under short dresses and eventually switched to trousers and jackets. She was frequently arrested for her choice. "I don't wear men's clothes, I wear my own clothes," she said.

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Dr Mary Edwards Walker in later life. She is a white woman with white hair wearing trousers, a frock coat and a topper. She still has the medal on the breast of her coat.
Dr Mary Edwards Walker in a dress in around 1863, wearing the medal. She is a white woman with dark hair tied back.

Marooned by Joseph Kelly, 2018

Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin

For readers of Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower , a groundbreaking history that makes the case for replacing Plymouth Rock with Jamestown as America's founding myth.




We all know the great American origin story. It begins with an exodus. Fleeing religious persecution, the hardworking, pious Pilgrims thrived in the wilds of New England, where they built their fabled city on a hill. Legend goes that the colony in Jamestown was a false start, offering a cautionary tale. Lazy louts hunted gold till they starved, and the shiftless settlers had to be rescued by English food and the hard discipline of martial law. Neither story is true. In Marooned , Joseph Kelly reexamines the history of Jamestown and comes to a radically different and decidedly American interpretation of these first Virginians. In this gripping account of shipwrecks and mutiny in America's earliest settlements, Kelly argues that the colonists at Jamestown were literally and figuratively marooned, cut loose from civilization, and cast into the wilderness. The British caste system meant little on this frontier: those who wanted to survive had to learn to work and fight and intermingle with the nearby native populations. Ten years before the Mayflower Compact and decades before Hobbes and Locke, they invented the idea of government by the people. 150 years before Jefferson, they discovered the truth that all men were equal. The epic origin of America was not an exodus and a fledgling theocracy. It is a tale of shipwrecked castaways of all classes marooned in the wilderness fending for themselves in any way they could--a story that illuminates who we are today.