Upon the recommendation of others, my husband started watching The Curse of Oak Island recently. This is a reality show series from The History Channel wherein a couple of brothers and their team search a 140-acre island off the coast of Nova Scotia for a supposed buried treasure. The search for this treasure has occurred by various parties over the past 200 years. My husband got a few episodes in before I sat down to…
The Saturday before Halloween this year (2019), Hubby and I were invited to a Halloween party. A costume is never really required, but people who attend this annual shindig tend to have fun with their costumes. They are usually pretty clever. (This year, one person came as “A Blessing in Disguise.”) Erik and I are not really costume people and we typically try to figure something out at the last minute. This year, we actually…
Leading a local historical society, as I do, creating long-term financial stability for the organization is always on my mind. At this time of year, so is membership, particularly figuring out how to increase the number of members. Members, especially those who remain members over a long period of time, are not only the lifeblood of historical societies, they add immeasurably to the organization in terms of moral, financial, and other forms of support. Colleen…
I was paging through the University of Minnesota Press’s current holiday book guide and ran across a couple of entries that stopped me cold. Like, I haven’t even looked through the rest of the guide, stopped cold. Two books by author Larry Millett, who has written architectural history books, caught my attention. They were “Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma” and “Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders.” Whoa! Two books about Sherlock Holmes set…
In the September edition of 3 O’Clock Punch!, my email newsletter**, I shared an article on Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist. Gorman discusses the importance of preserving the stuff we put up in space, the satellites, Moon Landing articles, spacecraft, and etc. After sharing that article, I ran across a book at my local library called, “Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past,” by Sarah Parcak. I thought it was going to be…