Category: Literature
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October 25: Agincourt
On this day in 1415, Henry V of England and his small army defeated a much larger French cavalry army at Agincourt. Henry was trying to establish his claim to the French throne, part of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between England and France for control of the Aquitaine and Normandy, provinces in France to…
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The Sherlock Holmes Law
I rather like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I should also admit that I’m not a hard-core devotee of mysteries in general. If I were, I probably would find the frequent plot holes in the Holmes corpus more annoying than I do. I enjoy them mostly for the period atmosphere, the prickly character of…
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Crafting a Literature Program
The liberal arts are, to great measure, founded on written remains, from the earliest times to our own. Literature (broadly construed to take in both fiction and non-fiction) encompasses a bewildering variety of texts, genres, attitudes, belief systems, and just about everything else. Like history (which can reasonably be construed to cover everything we know,…