In these United States our Religious systemhas undergone a revolution, if possible,more extraordinary than our political one. —John Carroll, 1783 John Carroll and his fellow priests did not go so far as to declare independence in the religious sphere as the American patriots did in the political realm. Doing so would have obliterated their identity as […]
The angry thunderclaps that crashed in the darkness above Whitemarsh Plantation in Prince Georges County, Maryland, robbed Father John Carroll of any sleep his agitated mind might have allowed him on this May night of 1789. Before dawn of the next day, Carroll, bleary-eyed and still weary, rose from his bed, said his morning prayers, […]
Though Handel’s “Messiah” rightly reigns supreme as the king of music for Easter, there are many other seasonal masterpieces that deserve to be heard more often. Here are ten lesser-known classical works that brilliantly depict the dramatic events of Holy Week and Easter Sunday. 1. “Resurrexit” from the Messe Solennelle, by Hector Berlioz (1824) The […]
“They are finally going to play my music.” —Hector Berlioz, on his deathbed Though Hector Berlioz’s operas are still little known today—even to the opera-going public, who are much more likely to find the dramas of Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, and Mozart on the program—the increasing recognition of their many glories is slowly making them less […]
George Washington, the great actor, was playing his part in a great drama, not just for Americans of his day, but for you and me. Washington, the Stoic, used his “gift of silence” shrewdly, and surely it is his actions more than his words that echo down to us today. In December 2009, a letter […]
Gil Meche His career stats indicate that he was a mediocre baseball pitcher—perhaps the epitome of mediocrity: 84 wins; 83 losses; a 4.49 Earned Run Average; a Walks-plus-Hits-to-Innings-Pitched ratio of 1.42. Yet Gil Meche, who played for the Seattle Mariners and Kansas City Royals, was responsible for one of the most astounding, yet almost unnoticed, acts of […]
M*A*S*H’s Dr. Winchester and the Chinese prisoners in the American camp find a common language in a single piece of music, written a century-and-a-half before: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The final episode of the hit TV series, M*A*S*H aired on February 28, 1983, garnering an astounding 125 million viewers, the most in television history at the […]
Forrest McDonald demonstrated that the historian above all must be a pragmatist who looks at the reality of the past as it was, who gets his hands dirty by putting in long hours of research, who makes sense of vast quantities of data, and who then communicates what he has found in an understandable and […]
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