Trivia question: what’s the most sung song in American history, perhaps in all human history? Here’s a hint: it started life as a kindergarten song in 1893, and gradually people started changing the words. The composer was Kentucky-born Mildred Hill, whose sister ran an experimental school. The Hill’s sisters’ ideas about music influenced Anton Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” And the song? “Happy birthday to you.”
What punctuation mark seems headed for the ash heap? According to Joel Miller, it’s the semicolon. And he asks, and answers, what happened to it.
We think of the end of the Civil War, and we connect to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Technically, that’s wrong. Confederate General William Johnston surrendered to Gen. Sherman two weeks later. The Confederate forces in Texas surrendered in June of 1865. But the last shots of the war were fired a long way from the battlefields – would you believe the Arctic Ocean?
The novel has been dead, close to death, dying, and on its last legs for nearly a century. If true, it’s the most prolonged death in literary history. Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft takes a long, thoughtful look at the so-called death of the novel, and he has some surprising insights.
More Good Reads
America 250
Key Battles That Secured America’s Victory in the Revolutionary War – Tiffini Theisen at Military.com.
Edmund Burke and the Defense of America – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.
Trojan Horse on the Water: The 1782 Attack on Beaufort, North Carolina – Josh Wheeler at Journal of the American Revolution.
Major John Van Dyk and the Bones of Major John Andre, Part II – Jeffrey Collin Wilford at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.
Faith
The Nicene Creed in Old English, translated by AElfric.
An Agrarian Prayer – Hadden Turner at Front Porch Republic.
Writing and Literature
The Scariest Question for Non-Fiction Writers – Thomas Kidd.
Thoreau and the Eco-Puritans of Concord – Ryan Salyards at Front Porch Republic.
Alasdair MacIntyre on the Writing of History – Michael Baxter at Church Life Journal.
Dostoevsky and the Cure of a Culture – Br. Barnabas Wilson at The Imaginative Conservative.
Israel
Iran’s Flying Monkeys – Tony Badran at Tablet Magazine.
Transforming Tactics to Strategy – Michael Oren at Clarity.
American Stuff
Custer’s Last Stand: The Epic Battle of the Little Big Horn – Jason Clark a This is the Day.
Trump’s tariffs didn’t unleash inflation – Robert Hutton at The Critic Magazine.
British Stuff
Samuel Johnson’s Last Word – Malcolm Forbes at Engelsberg Ideas.
The South Africanisation of Britain – Tom Jones at The Critic Magazine.
Poetry
“Sea-Fever,” poem by John Masefield – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.
“Preludes,” by T.S. Eliot – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Lauds – Matt Miller at Mere Orthodoxy.
Life ad Culture
Bringing Up Emil – Nadya Williams at Front Porch Republic.
What Both Sides Get Wrong About Immigration – Martin Gurri at The Free Press.
The Truth – Megan Woods
Painting: Young Woman Reading by a Window, oil on canvas by Delphin Enjolras (1857-1945).
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