Sam watched a log slowly break into a dozen chunks of bright orange. He let out a deep breath. “I don’t see how we can defeat the British. The situation looks hopeless to me. You believe we can?” ...
“Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” John Adams January 10, 1776. A political pamphlet, forty-six pages long and written by the anonymous author “an Englishman”, hit the streets of Philadelphia. In...
“With the help of God, we are undertaking to go from Vannes, whence we were outfitted, to the coast of Guinea in the ship Diligent belonging to the brothers Billy and Mr. La Croix, our outfitters and from thence to Martinique...
Poor old Tom Paine! there he lies:Nobody laughs and nobody criesWhere he’s gone or how he faresNobody knows and nobody cares. Two hundred and eleven years after his lonely death on June 8, 1809, belittled and forgotten by the country...
In the early months of 1776, George Washington, whose Continental forces had surrounded the British in occupied Boston for almost 11 months, wanted to make a ‘bold attempt’ to force the British out. With few good options, limited...
Part II - Leather If toiling all day in a paper mill sounds like a nasty, smelly job, working as a leather worker, or ‘tanner,’ was even worse! Tanners were considered among the lowest class of workers during medieval...
Part II - Who is real? Who is fictional? Chapter 8 - RecoverySherry, the horse. Sherry is fictional, but she comes from one of my favorite childhood books, Mr. Revere and I, by Robert Lawson. The boys at the dock, listening...
Dr. Bodo Otto. Photo Courtesy of The Dr. Bodo Otto Family Association Who is fictional? Who is real? Prologue - Deadly Disease Samuel Nevens – I chose the name Sam from the name of the main character in one of my favorite childhood...
"Why are you writing this book?" A friend, also an author, asked me this simple question not long after I began writing The King's Broad Arrow. The simplest answer - life lessons. She grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote,...
The creation of paper has been dated back as far as 105 AD in China. By 800, paper was being made in Egypt and Iraq, but the technology did not make its way to Europe until the 1300’s, when paper...