Category Archives: History

I realize Black History Month has passed, but while recently trekking a 4-mile hike through my old neighborhood in East End with my dear friend, I began to reminisce. He is white and I am not. We chatted about Black History Month and vented to each other about how very important it is to acknowledge the contributions of Black people in our country regularly not just one month of the year.

I took a moment to reflect on the time when my mother shared with my brother and me that we would be changing schools. Our beautiful, new, and wonderfully maintained school, located in a cohesive Black neighborhood of East End, would no longer be the school we would be attending.

I recalled the sock hops at Lucy S. Herring School at 85 Mountain St. I recalled the lunch room with the great lunches and the folks who worked throughout the school teacher, librarian, cafeteria staff, or janitor all lived in our East End neighborhood.

The words Mommy shared with me and Ricky were, Starting in two months, you will be going to a different school. You will be in classes with the white children; therefore, you will get a better education and better books.

Can you imagine how difficult that was for her to share with us, knowing that this integration thing could go horribly wrong, or trusting that it will be just fine?

I do not recall speaking of this with my friends in the neighborhood. It was not mentioned.

When I arrived to the new old school David Millard Junior High located on College Street at the time it was huge and dark and old. And there I was: a seventh grader, tall, skinny, dark, and shy, entering these long halls and passing what seemed like grey walls everywhere.

It was a challenge even finding where my classes were. I do not recall stares from white kids, but I do remember one guy named Dan. I would love to know his last name and where he is. For he said hello to me.

Dan was a white guy with an Afro. He was tall and slender, and he said hello to me. He was so welcoming to me. I wish I had known how to accept his friendship, but I was clueless.

All my teachers where white. Where were my Black teachers? Mrs. Owens, Mrs. Hammonds, Mrs. Rumley, Mrs. Louise White, Mrs. Young? Ahh, at last I spotted Mrs. Anderson, the librarian from Lucy S. Herring, in the new old school library. I said nothing but exhaled: in my seventh-grader mind, I felt she would look out for me, for us. It was such a relief to see her.

I recall sitting in my English Literature class. My teacher, Mrs. Clodfelter. It was me and one other Black student in the class. The other 10 were white. All I wanted to do was to get into my classroom and sit unnoticed. It took me too long to find the class and when I did, everyone else was seated, so I sat at the closest desk I could wander to.

She had already started the class when she made the announcement.

I hear it now like it was yesterday: Class, we have two new students with us today. We have Nigras (not Negroes but Nigras) joining us.

That word did not feel right. But Mommy said this school will be a better school and we would get a better education; therefore, in my adolescent mind, I decided that this was the proper way to say Negroes. I shared this with no one; I kept it within me in a safe place and did not choose to visit there, as it never felt right.

Fast forward six years. Im sitting in an English Literature class during my freshman year in college, studying the works of an African American writer. As I devour the assigned reading, something he had written blows me away. He mentioned how Black people were addressed as Nigger or in some circumstances Nigra

Wait! Did he say Nigra?

At that moment, I realized why that word never felt right. Because it was not right. It was evil and full of ignorance. These words exuded from the mouth and heart of my teacher. My white teacher in my new old school.

So, at the end of our walk, I went home and reflected on this moment, though it occurred so long ago. How has that impacted me, influenced how I feel about me today? Have I implanted enough self-efficacy in my adult children that they are not influenced by people who can be ignorant? Have my children encountered situations that they have not told me about?

I do recall a moment: When my son was in the first grade at a private Christian school, he was sitting at the dinner table and all of a sudden he burst out crying. I asked what was the matter, and he said, My friend at school said she could not play with me anymore because I am Black. He then said, I told her God would not say that.

I loved how he responded, at age 6, in just the first grade. It hurt him, yet he responded so well. Me, not so much. We met the family at their home the following day, and lets just say they got the message.

During my sessions on Cultural Humility I ask this question: When did you first feel different?

My dear friend helped me to answer that question during our long hike on a beautiful day. It is beautiful that we are all different. We must embrace our uniqueness and the uniqueness of others. Culture makes us different.

The 1990s movie "Cool Runnings," about a Jamaican bobsled team, includes a line that is so memorable, so true, so important: People are afraid of what they do not know about.

Remember that. Do not allow others to tell you who you are or quantify your value or your contribution to humanity. If others do not know about you, who you are, you must teach them, inform them, show them! You are the lead actor in the role of your life. Live, Laugh, and Love.

So I ask you, each reader, When did you first feel different? What did you do with that information? Did you hide it, or shape it? Did you learn from it, embrace it? Did you grow into it, celebrate your difference, your uniqueness?

We have the power within to shape our negative lived experiences into a force that propels us forward and upward. And we must do so. As Dr. Maya Angelou wrote, and taught us ... And Still I Rise.

Sharon West(Photo: Courtesy of Sharon West)

This is the opinion of Sharon Kelly-West, a registered nurse in Asheville. Contact her at sharonkellywest@gmail.com.

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West: Reflections on Black history (it isn't just a February thing) - Citizen Times

Brett Peters| Curator, Washington County Historical Society

Established in 1762 by Jonathan Hager, Hagerstown has a far more interesting history than you might realize.

The land on which Hagerstown currently stands was originally settled by various East Coast Native American tribes, including the Susquehannock, Piscataway, Catawbaand Lenni Lenape. The first known non-Native American visitors to the Hagerstown area included land surveyors and fur traders.

By 1739, the area's cheap, fertile land and plentiful natural resources had attracted farmers and craftsmen like the German-born Jonathan Hager, who patented a tract of land in the vicinity of present-day Hagerstown City Park called Hagers Fancy from Charles Calvert, the 5th Lord Baltimore. It was here that Hager built a house that would double as a fort and trading post.

In 1762, Jonathan Hager, by now a leading citizen and French and Indian War veteran, laid out and established Elizabethtowne, named for his beloved wife, Anna Elizabeth Kirschner Hager. Elizabethtowne would be formally renamed Hagerstown in 1814.

By the mid-to-late 1760s, Jonathan Hager had acquired several thousand acres of land, which he proceeded to sell liberally. It was at this point that the city began to experience a marked boom in population and industry.

Although Hager passed away in 1775, Hagerstown continued to grow at a rapid rate in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, due in large part to its favorable location at the crossroads of the Warrior Trading Path and first National Road, for which construction began in 1811. By this point, Hagerstown had become a prominent market hub. Hagerstowns rapid expansion and development continued well into the 19th century, and culminated with the arrival of the railroad.

The first railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, arrived in Western Maryland in 1834. While this B&O route bypassed Hagerstown, other railroads including the Cumberland Valley and the Western Maryland converged here, giving Hagerstown the name Hub City for its role in rail freight and passenger service.

Eventually the B&O constructed a spur line to Hagerstown. As the railroad expanded, Hagerstown became a principal stop for many railroad companies. By the time of the Civil War, the county seat of Washington County had become a railroad hub, transportation and service centerand center of trade and industry.

During the Civil War, Hagerstown would become a crossroads of history as well. In July 1863, Hagerstown played a major role in the Confederate Armys retreat from Gettysburg. Following the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg, Gen. Robert E. Lee and his men attempted to cross the Potomac River into Virginia. In an effort to prevent the Confederate forces from crossing the river, Union cavalry under Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick galloped into Hagerstown, where Lee had set up a garrison to cover his army's rear. The ensuing Battle of Hagerstown lasted seven hours, involved roughly 2,000 soldiersand resulted in nearly 200 casualties.

Hagerstown also was one of three Maryland cities to be ransomed by the Confederate Army.

On July 5, 1864, in one of the final events of the war to take place in the area, Confederate Brig. Gen. John McCausland Jr. issued an ultimatum to the citizens of Hagerstown pay $20,000 plus 1,500 suits of clothes for the Confederate troops, or the city would be put to the torch.

After issuing his demands, McCausland and his men invaded the city on the morning of July 6, setting up shop in Hagerstowns Market House. Fearful, the citizens of Hagerstown quickly raised the sum, and the clothes were provided. McCausland and his men left the city in the early morning of July 7.

After the Civil War, Hagerstown hit a zenith. Hub City had become a principal stop for various railroads, and the postwar expansion of the railroad increased industry and transportation. It brought businesses like M. P. Mller Pipe Organ Co., Foltz Manufacturingand the Jamison Cold Storage Door Company to the city.

During this time, Hagerstown was manufacturing and exporting more goods than ever before, and Mller, Foltzand Beachley Furniture all served as important exporters and economic drivers. Hagerstowns industrial boom would continue into World War II with Fairchild Aviation, and beyond when Mack Trucks Inc. built a million square-foot manufacturing plant in Hagerstown in 1959.

Over the course of its history, Hagerstown has played host to a Civil War battle, survived a ransomand seen visitations by several U.S. Presidents, including George Washington, William Henry Harrisonand Teddy Roosevelt.

Hagerstown has undergone a remarkable transformation from small farming settlement to booming transportation and industrial hub. In fact, one might argue that it has surely outgrown Jonathan Hagers vision for what it could have become. It is truly a unique crossroads of history.

To learn more about the history of Hagerstown, join us at our next Zoom Culture and Cocktails event at 6 p.m. Friday, May 14. Featuring author and historian Mary Rubin, the program will explore Hagerstowns development as a crossroads of history and commerce. The featured cocktail will be: The colonial Strawberry Shrub.

Culture & Cocktails 2021 has been made possible by the generous support of the James and Mary Schurz Foundation.

The mission of the Washington County Historical Society is to develop an interest in and preserve the history of Washington County, Maryland. Located in the Miller House at 135 W. Washington St., we are currently closed to the public.

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From agriculture to industry, Hagerstown's history as a hub might surprise you - Herald-Mail Media

The moment came and went quietly, no doubt the way Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle preferred it.

Seconds after the final buzzer sounded on Dallas victory over Cleveland Friday night, live video of Carlisle exiting the court briefly was shown on the American Airlines Center video board and public address announcer Sean Heath informed fans that Carlisle had become the 15th winningest coach in NBA history.

Then Heath announced that in the same game Luka Doncic had become the fourth-youngest player in NBA history to reach 5,000 points. And that the Mavericks had clinched the fourth division title in franchise history.

Though the nights Carlisle Moment rather quickly passed and most of the Mavericks collective attention turned to the regular seasons final five games and playoff positioning, there no doubt was quiet reflection for Carlisle not only because of the attainment, but the coach he passed on the victory list.

Carlisles record of 833-687 moved him past Lowell Cotton Fitzsimmons 832-775 mark. Fitzsimmons 21-season career, which like that of most coaches occasionally was interrupted by firings, spanned from 1971 to 1997. Carlisles 19-season head coaching career spans from 2002 to present.

Though their head coaching careers didnt intersect, Carlisle, when asked Friday evening for his favorite Fitzsimmons memory, revealed that colorful raspy-voiced Cotton was instrumental in Carlisle getting his first head coaching position.

Carlisle had been an assistant at New Jersey (1989-94), Portland (1994-97) and Indiana (1997-2000), but when Larry Bird stepped down as the Pacers head coach in 2000 Isiah Thomas edged out Carlisle for the job despite Bird recommending Carlisle.

I decided to take a year away from coaching to study the game, spend time with a lot of great basketball people, learn, Carlisle said. I ended up with a broadcasting job with the Seattle SuperSonics, which was a great experience, too, because Nate McMillan ended up taking over the team that year, so I saw how a great young coach like Nate took over a difficult situation and turned it into a positive.

Enter Fitzsimmons, with a phone call that ultimately would change Carlisles life. Fitzsimmons was overseeing the Phoenix Classic, a tournament for draft-eligible college players. Fitzsimmons asked Carlisle to coach one of the teams.

It was coaching three games with a team, Carlisle recalled. You get a team, coach them for two practices and maybe play three games.

Carlisles team went 2-1.

And it turned out that that was a really important opportunity for me, Carlisle said. Why? Because in attendance was Pistons president Joe Dumars, who in 2001 would hire Carlisle as Detroits head coach.

He [Dumars] told me that actually watching me coach in that setting as a head coach was very helpful for him to visualize me as an NBA head coach.

Fitzsimmons died in 2004 at age 72, of lung cancer.

I thanked him many times in the ensuing years in thinking of me in that opportunity, Carlisle said. Hes just a guy that would light up a room when he would come in. He had such a magical magnetic personality. When he passed a few years ago it was a great, great loss but so many people have many amazing fond memories of him.

Perhaps now you understand a little more about why Carlisle is the president of the NBA Coaches Association and why he never misses an opportunity to pay it forward. A notable example occurred early last month, when Carlisle tested positive for COVID-19 (it turned out to be a false-positive) and proudly watched from his New York hotel room while Mavericks assistant Jamahl Mosley coached Dallas to a victory over the Knicks.

How big of a deal is cracking the top 15 in coaching victories? Understand that of the fellow members of the top 15 who have won at least one NBA championship, the only ones who are not in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame are ex-Mavericks coach Dick Motta and active coaches Gregg Popovich, Doc Rivers and Carlisle.

Find more Mavericks coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.

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Upon becoming 15th-winningest coach in NBA history, Rick Carlisle deeply grateful to the man he passed: - The Dallas Morning News

A sea of red and white. Basketball arenas packed to standing-room-only capacity. Championship effort on the baseball diamond.

Fans bleeding red and gold. Students filling the stands at every home game. Colorful coaches teaching life lessons to their players through sports.

For over three decades, the rivalry between Victoria High and Victoria Stroman was a staple in the community, and these were just some of the sights one might see on any given night.

East baseball coach Wes Kolle, VHS Class of '97: "You grew up in the 80s watching those guys play, and that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to be Stingarees and play on Friday nights at Memorial Stadium, and in the spring we wanted to play baseball at Riverside."

Cuero girls basketball coach Amy Alkek Crain, VHS Class of '83: "It was one of those city rivalries. Whether it was football or basketball, that game was always penciled in on our schedule."

West baseball coach Manuel Alvarado, Stroman Class of '85: Every time, it was Victoria High and Stroman going at it. It didn't matter what your record was. You're looking forward to that game, and it brings out the best of Victoria."

The Victoria High and Stroman rivalry was still going strong when The Advocate published its 150th anniversary issue in 1996.

Twenty-five years later, Victoria High and Stroman are no more. Mascots have vanished, and trophies have been thrown out in their consolidation into Victoria Memorial in 2000.

East vs. West is now the annual rivalry game, but many former players from Victoria High and Stroman have become coaches, both in the Crossroads and throughout Texas.

This story aims to paint a picture of those teams through their eyes.

FOOTBALL AND FAMILY

Victoria High football games had been an event for decades by the time Mark Reeve and his family arrived in town in 1990.

Five thousand fans filled the home stands 10,000 for the Stroman game in a sea of red that greeted the players as they marched down to Memorial Stadium.

Under Reeve, along with coordinators Wayne Condra and Leonard McAngus, the Stingarees experienced their most successful era. Despite never being loaded with Division I talent, the Stingarees won seven district titles between 1990-98.

New Caney football coach TRAVIS REEVE, VHS Class of '94: "We really were the epitome of what a football family is, and I think guys genuinely cared about each other. I think it showed with the success we were able to have. Everybody was committed to being there for each other, working, fighting for each other. It's resulted in a lot of lifetime relationships that have lasted over the years."

New Caney offensive coordinator CHARLIE REEVE, VHS Class of '99: "The things that really stick out to me are discipline, dedication, character. All things that we kinda hung our hat on were the pillars of our program at Victoria High."

The Stingarees' culture was formed in the offseason Sting-Maker boot camp, a period of training and team bonding. Former Stingaree players, now coaches, still have their red headbands from boot camp training, Charlie Reeve said.

KOLLE: "They were talking and preaching "trust the process" before it was a catchphrase, stuff you hear Nick Saban talking about. They were all about building the culture and trusting the process and working hard."

West head football coach COURTNEY BOYCE, VHS Class of '96: "Everybody had a lot of respect for going to school there and playing sports. Our coaches had a great deal to do with that. They gave us a lot of confidence. If you're confident I think you play better.

Travis Reeve quarterbacked the Stingarees to the state semifinals in 1993, the furthest any Victoria school has gone in the UIL playoffs.

Mark Reeve left in 1999 to become head coach at Plano West, partly due to disagreements over consolidation. But Travis and Charlie Reeve both followed Mark Reeve's footsteps and are coaching together at New Caney after leading Cuero to a state championship in 2018.

MARK REEVE: "It's not about wins and losses. I believe that a coaching staff can change a whole community through the kids that they coach. I think a lot of the coaches, some of them in Victoria now, some of them at other places, that's the influence I'm hoping that they're making and when I look at their program, that's what I see, how much they care about the kids and what they're willing to do to help build their character and their work ethic."

RIVERSIDE CHAMPIONS

1985 was a banner year for Stroman High School.

The Raiders made their only football playoff appearance in the fall, but in the spring, baseball reached the mountain top.

Edward "Hodie" Garcia coached the Raiders from 1983 to 1988 and instilled a culture of discipline and hard work that was aimed to create success in the classroom, at work and on the baseball field.

It paid off when Stroman defeated Pasadena Rayburn 3-0 to win the Class 5A state championship.

ALVARADO: "We grew up playing Little League against each other and then got put together on one team. We busted our butt those years getting to the state championship. That's something no one can ever take away from you."

HODIE GARCIA: "We created something there at Stroman. The kids get the credit. All I had for them was a plan, and I made sure I stuck with the plan and then took it from there every day. We weren't going to take back seats to anyone, and the kids, they took to that attitude."

Stroman lost in the state semifinals the following year, but the '85 championship made Stroman the only Victoria school to win a title in baseball.

While the Raiders never found sustained success on the football field, members of the '85 team continue to carry on Garcia's teachings.

ALVARADO: "At the end we're just all friends and get along together. It's gratifying to see former players and even rivals being successful and seeing them loving the game and teaching the game and hopefully they can also be successful."

KOLLE: "Coach (Michael) Yates has been with us since Day One at East. I remember my dad taking me to watch those Stroman Raider games in the 80s. It's always fun to reminisce and go down memory lane and at the same time try to instill some of the lessons they learned as athletes into these current East Titan athletes."

THE PLACE TO BE

When school was out for summer, anyone from Victoria High or Stroman could be found attending the Red & White Summer League, the brain child of longtime Stingarees boys basketball coach Mike Smith, one of the original organizers of the Texas Basketball Coaches Association.

About 600 people would fill up either gymnasium as Smith had made basketball a must-see event in the community.

Corpus Christi King boys basketball coach SEAN ARMSTRONG, VHS Class of '99: "He got everyone in town passionate about basketball because of summer league. Coach Smith was one of the first guys to do summer leagues in Texas with the Red & White League. So that was what you did during the summer."

West boys basketball coach PAT ERSKINE, VHS Class of '82: We lived for basketball, and we lived for practice. Some people say they really liked playing the games and the success that we had. But we liked practice just as much as we liked the games."

Smith coached the Stingarees from 1972 to 1998, winning 17 district titles and making 21 playoff appearances. The Stingarees reached the state tournament two times, but both times fellto the eventual state champion. Regardless, his former players continue to praise Smith for his impact on basketball and how it shaped them.

Erskine: "What made us just want to run through walls for him was that he made us believe in ourselves, believe that we could win. He taught us to 'expect to win.' That's probably a life lesson in everything that we do. He always felt like if we were prepared, we had a chance to win at any cost."

Concordia Lutheran girls basketball coach Steve Spurlin, VHS Class of '81: "It didn't matter what records either Victoria or Stroman had. In any sport, it was a rivalry. We'd play with them. We knew them. We hung out with them, but when it was that game, that night, what sport, it didn't matter. Throw everything out the window, it was gonna be rockin' and rollin'."

The Victoriadores, the cheerleaders and the Bleacher Creatures about 200 football players never missed a home game. In the 90s, the Stingarees played the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls theme music during player introductions, complete with spotlight and everything. Everything possible to intimidate the opposing team.

MIKE SMITH: "It's very gratifying because I've watched almost all these guys and their teams really remind me of our old teams, the way they play, the way they have discipline, the way they have unity. Pat Erskine had a great team this year. He did it like I would've done it. He made a family out of the group and made 'em commit to each other, put the team first."

A LEGACY ON THE COURT

One of the best basketball programs in Texas belonged to the Victoria Stingarettes.

Head coach Jan Lahodny created a culture that made her both feared and loved by her players. With three state championships in 1979, 1982, 1986 and eight state tournament appearances between 1975-96, it was a culture that had success on the basketball court and led to several alumni entering the coaching ranks throughout the Crossroads.

East girls basketball coach YULONDA WIMBISH-NORTH, VHS Class of '83: "When I went in, there was a history, there was a tradition of winning state. That was the goal. That was the vision. Once you got there, it was the expectation of you compete and you're working to be the best in the state."

Former St. Joseph girls basketball coach CARRIE HELDT MYERS, VHS Class of '89: "Every practice was intense. Definitely taught you how to be a winner and not like to lose. If we were late to practice, there was punishment. I can recall running down the hallways to get to our fourth period athletics so that we'd be on time."

CRAIN: "Coach Lahodny had really put our program and Victoria on the map. We knew that each and every year we had the opportunity to get to state, and that was our goal. We knew how to get there. We knew that our coaches and Lahodny knew how to get there. We had good days. We had bad days, but we never questioned anything. It was always 'we're going to get after it.'"

Wimbish-North and Crain were on the '82 state championship team and both went on to win national championships at Texas and USC, respectively.

But the '89 state runner-up team is the one group from Lahodny's tenure that has a reunion every year.

PATTY SMITH NORWOOD, VHS Class of '89: "There wasn't just one good player on our team or one outstanding player, we worked as a team and as a unit. Without that unit we wouldn't be successful and I think that created a bond with her and with us that just kept going."

MYERS: "The majority of us played together at Crain Middle School, and then we added the girls from Howell, so we always had a rivalry with them. But once you put us together, it just took us to a new level. We're as close today as we were back in high school."

LAHODNY: "They know that the most important thing is that a coach has to love her players. The players will do anything for them. I used to run 'em like dogs, but I'd still have a lot of fun with them off the court, and I think they take that same approach."

LOST TRADITION

The party ended in 1999 when the Victoria Independent School District announced that Victoria High and Stroman would consolidate into Victoria Memorial after the 1999-2000 academic year.

In one fell swoop, all the championship trophies and banners were thrown away, and the Stingaree and Raider mascots were covered up to make room for the Vipers. It's a decision that doesn't sit well with alumni to this day.

MYERS: "Losing our home school was hard. The last time we met, we went over to the high school and took pictures with the Stingaree on the floor. My parents were Stingarees. I was a Stingaree. My brother was a Stingaree. It's just hard growing up in this town to see that it's not there anymore."

ALVARADO: "I feel bad for Stroman and Victoria High. A lot of good memories were made across the years in sports and other areas, too. Kids growing up now have no recollection of how good those teams were. It was a great rivalry."

WIMBISH-NORTH: "We can tell them about it, but they don't see anything. They don't even know the rich history that girls basketball was something even before I got to Victoria High. But there's nothing that these kids could go and even see to know the history of girls basketball in the city of Victoria."

LEGACY CONTINUED

Memorial lasted only 10 years. The old campuses have been converted. East and West are now the Victoria public high schools.

Smith and Lahodny are still coaching as the girls head golf coach and assistant girls basketball coach at East, respectively.

There may be no trophies or banners for future students to look back on, but the stories remain. Be it former players of Mark Reeve, Hodie Garcia, Mike Smith or Jan Lahodny, former Stingarees and Raiders continue to coach in the Crossroads and throughout Texas, passing on the lessons to the next generation of players.

CRAIN: "The lessons I try to pass onto the kids is just what can you do daily to help yourself be a better student. Be a better friend; be a better teammate? You get the opportunity to teach these young ladies at a young age. I think they'll take with them for the rest of their lives."

TRAVIS REEVE: "We need coaches that are willing to put in the time and effort to pore into kids' lives and make an effort. A lot of the guys that have come from Victoria are doing that at their respective places and it's a lot of fun to see."

A special thank you to Yulonda Wimbish-North, Carrie Heldt Myers, Patty Norwood, John Grammer, Travis Reeve, Paula Smith, Charlie Reeve, Zach Mueller, Courtney Boyce, Daniel Tunchez, Jaime Thomas, Pat Erskine, Manuel Alvarado, Hodie Garcia, Mark Reeve, Wayne Condra, Wes Kolle, Mike Smith, Jan Lahodny, Sean Armstrong, Amy Crain, Steve Spurlin, Jerhme Urban and Kelley Louth Morris for contributing to this story.

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Tradition Gone By: an oral history of Victoria High and Stroman - Victoria Advocate

The apothegm "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" ("Of the dead, say nothing but good") urges compassion and respect for the recently deceased, no matter how flawed they were in life. That injunction was obeyed last week in a memorial conference arranged by Yale's Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy for Morton Charles Hill, the university's "Diplomat in Residence," who died, at 84, on March 27.

The conference webinar's virtually assembled (and tightly monitored) participants some Yale faculty were "removed" by the website host from the "audience" parodied unintentionally Hill's long career of diplomatic dissembling. A Vulcan conservative, he revered England's iron-fisted 17th-century Puritan "Lord Protector" Oliver Cromwell but also John Milton, an enigmatic diplomatic aide and chronicler whose work prefigured Hill's. He emulated both models at times in his own Foreign Service work and as a confidant and ghostwriter for secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; as the chief foreign policy adviser to Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign (during which Sen. Joe Biden quipped that Giuliani's every sentence "contains a verb, a noun and 9/11"); and as the purveyor to starstruck Yale students of his own dark, twisted reading of liberal education's great conversation across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit.

"Nil nisi bonum" has long been Yale's way of arranging senior luminaries' comings and goings with announcements "staged in a sequence indicative of sound judgment, good feeling, and the dawn of a bright new day," as Lewis Lapham put it in "Quarrels With Providence,"his poignant, sometimes hilarious short history of Yale. In one such orchestration, you might have thought that Charles Hill was ascending to oceans of eternal light last week as the tributes to him flowed at the Yale conference.

Kissinger, now 97, characterized Hill as a master practitioner of "anonymous indispensability" throughout their 50-year relationship. Hill was Shultz's top executive assistant in the State Department and then a fellow with Shultz at the conservative Hoover Institution.

Yale named him "Diplomat in Residence" and a "distinguished fellow" of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which has been funded by former Reagan Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and securities analyst Charles Johnson, as well as by the conservative Olin and Smith-Richardson Foundations. For more than 20 years, that program's faculty triumvirate John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Hill worked to make "grand strategy" a brand name within Yale and at other universities, collaborating with other conservative-funded Yale initiatives: the Jackson School of Global Affairs, the William F. Buckley Program and the Johnson Center.

Conference tributes came also from Yale alumnus L. Paul Bremer III, the former American proconsul of Iraq's Green Zone in 2003; from former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills (who embarrassingly praised Charles Hill's work withBoutros-Ghali);and from toadying Yale faculty, including Hill's Grand Strategy partners, the historians Gaddis and Kennedy, as well as from the ubiquitous political scientist Bryan Garsten and the self-avowed "public interest lawyer" and longtime program functionary Justin Zaremby.

But a better admonition to conference goers would have been "De mortuis nil nisi veritas" ("Of the dead, say nothing but the truth"). The whole truth is that Hill instilled in student acolytes the strain of that iron yet duplicitous discipline that has run from Yale's own Puritan founders and from its first "spy," Nathan Hale, class of 1773, through its birthing of the CIA (see the movie "The Good Shepherd") and Yale's outsized role in designing and staffing 20th-century American foreign policy. "Nothing but the truth" would reveal that, in Washington as well as at Yale, Hill perpetrated something worse than diplomacy's inevitable, artful deceptions.

If you're tempted to consider this assessment over-determinedly liberal or leftist, read a strongly similar assessment of Hill in the American Conservativeby Michael Desch, a professor at the George H.W. Bush School at Texas A&M University. Desch reports as the recent, credulous, error-ridden Washington Post obituaryfor Hilldoes not that "Hill was forced to resign from the Foreign Service after it became clear that he had concealed evidence of Shultz's extensive knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal from federal agents."Hill was a "Diplomat in Residence" at Yale because he was a diplomat in exile from Washington. And that's only the beginning of what the nil nisi bonum faithful evaded.

When teaching becomes political

It's worrisome enough that today's financialization of everything in America is forcing university development officers to rely not only on conservative donors with "agendas" such as those of the Yale programs I've mentioned, but also on civically rudderless benefactors such as private equity baron Stephen Schwarzman, whose priorities constrain universities to become business corporations in an education industry that incentivizes students to become not citizens of a republic or the world but mincing, self-marketing, indebted buyers and sellers.

Some leftist and "politically correct" initiatives on college campuses are feckless reactions against these pressures. Some conservative faculty at Yale welcomed Hill as a superior antidote to such civic mindlessness and as the embodiment of an older social discipline and sense of duty on which Yale had been founded. Hill and his backers insinuated themselves into liberal education in ways that prompt two cautionary lessons.

First, the writing of history may be damaged, not enriched, when would-be statesmen teach it and write it.

Second, a university dedicated to liberal education's great conversation across the ages needs an immune system and antibodies strong enough to resist not only financialized greed and power lust but also all ideologies that serve such pressures instead of resisting them.

By the early 1990s, Yale's immune system had been weakened, if not traumatized, by demographic and economic upheavals in New Haven and within the university itself a long, sad story, beyond my scope here. As if sensing blood in the water of left-liberal responses to these dislocations, right-wing journalists and operatives began attacking Yale as too gay, too feminized, too hostile to the Western canon. Yale president Richard Levin made tactical responses to the university's many challenges, engaging more seriously with New Haven's social institutions and residents, rebuilding the university's physical plant, and welcoming the lavishly funded conservative initiatives and operatives and exponents such as Hill.

Those tactics successfully deflected some of the right-wing assaults; Hill put out some fires set by conservative bashers of "liberal Yale," some of whom had been his confederates in conservative policy making and Wall Street Journal punditry. But his Vulcan, almost pagan sense of human nature and its prospects compromised the classically liberal freedoms of expression and inquiry that he claimed to defend. Thousands of people beyond campus and the U.S. have become "mortuis" thanks to thinking and policies that Hill propounded as a sage to young acolytes at Yale.

Shortly before the war in Iraq began, I watched him pitch it forcefully to a packed Yale Law School auditorium audience. Interviewed on March 5, 2003 by "PBS NewsHour" correspondent Paul Solman (who would later join the Grand Strategy Program as a part-time lecturer), Hill assured PBS viewers that the United States had the capability "to do this operation swiftly, and it will be a war that will not do great damage to Iraq, to its installations, to its infrastructure, or to its people. We will see the restoration of American credibility and decisiveness. We'll see an Iraq that is freed from oppression."

Five years later, at a dinner in Yale President Levin's home, Hill regaled the guests with a Periclean assessment of Giuliani's recent presidential campaign, which he'd served while on leave from Grand Strategy.

What bad politics does to history

By 2010, when I was reading Hill's "Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order" for my Foreign Policy magazine review, PBS was broadcasting a documentary based on George Shultz's 1993 memoir, "Turmoil and Triumph," which had mainly been written by Hill. The PBS ombudsman criticized the film's hagiographical, conservative slant, but the deeper problem was that Hill's crafting of the memoir revealed unintentionally what can happen when former statesmen try to write or teach history.

Iran-Contra special counsel Lawrence Walsh's 1993 report on how American officials had secretly funneled proceeds from illegal arms sales to Iran to right-wing insurgents in Nicaragua established that although Hill and Shultz opposed the scheme, bureaucratic self-interest kept them from trying to stop it. In congressional testimony written by Hill, Shultz lied about what they'd known and when, compromising the public investigation but providing Ronald Reagan with plausible deniability. By not telling the truth about the scandal, they hoped to avoid retribution from top Reagan aides. As the report goes, "Independent Counsel concluded that Shultz's testimony was incorrect, if not false, in significant respects and misleading, if literally true, in others, and that information had been withheld from investigators by Shultz's executive assistant, M. Charles Hill."

Desch of the American Conservative notes that Hill "describes himself as an 'Edmund Burke conservative,' but as one former Yale International Security Studies Fellow told me, 'There's not much if any daylight between Charlie and the neocons.'" Always at Hill's elbow were the admonitory ghosts that had haunted him since his student years at Brown University. A large oil portrait of Oliver Cromwell hung in Hill's New Haven home. The paleoconservative Richard Weaver, whose "Ideas Have Consequences" (1948) roused Hill's and other conservatives' dread of "the crumbling of modern man and the philosophical and moral threats hatching on the other side of the Iron curtain," as Molly Worthen, a former Hill student, wrote in her biography of Hill, "The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost."

An energetic autodidact, Hill spun great literature, classical and modern, to justify his mottled Foreign Service record, paleoconservative convictions and neoconservative alliances. That might suit the schoolmaster of a military boarding school better than a teacher of liberal arts. But it sidestepped what becomes of great men's ideas when those who virtually write their memoirs, as Hill did Shultz's, twist their record to evade the judgment of history (and, in his case, of the Iran-Contra independent counsel). In real life, Hill's dissembling compromised not only Shultz and foreign policy making but also an old, civic-republican college's three-century-long struggle to balance humanist truth-seeking with training for republican power-wielding.

Dissembling in print

In 1993 The New York Review of Books published a damning review of Shultz's "Turmoil and Triumph" by Theodore H. Draper, the grand historian of Communism and of the Cold War (which had been sputtering toward its close in the Reagan-Shultz years). Draper faulted Shultz's facts and his methodology in presenting them. That prompted a letter from Hill contesting Draper's judgment but, ultimately, discrediting his own. Hill contended that the factual errors Draper flagged in the memoir reflected Shultz's sound decision to confine his narrative "to what he knew or was told at the time" and, in so doing, to exclude "information and evidence which came to light after a decision or event occurred."

Defending this strange methodology, Hill unintentionally revealed what was untrustworthy in his own methods. He claimed that Shultz's decision to report only what he knew of past events as they were unfolding (or only what Shultz and Hill want readers to think he knew) "makes 'Turmoil and Triumph' a unique, irreplaceable and unchallengeable historical document, as it reveals a reality that 'memoirs' invariably obscure: decisions of statecraft must be taken on the basis of partial and sometimes erroneous reports." Parrying one of Draper's factual corrections, Hill admitted that "it may be true that [Iranian-born arms merchant Albert] Hakim, not [CIA official George] Cave, was the drafter [of a memo on the Iran-Contra deal], but Shultz at the time was told it was Cave, and to be true to how things actually were, Shultz's narrative must say 'Cave.'"

But shouldn't the narrative have moved on to tell what Shultz learned shortly thereafter? Hill's casuistry is all too common in memoirs written by or for statesmen seeking to sanitize their own blunders and lies. His letter to the editor concluded his justification of that hoary practice with a try at literary grace: "In this review Draper reads every note, but never seems to be able to hear the music." But Hill's own music was meant to distract attention from his flimsy rationale for Shultz's presenting as factual the many suppositions that he and Hill knew but never told readers had already been discredited by the time they were writing the memoir.

Such gyrations would offend Thucydides, and they open a Pandora's box or Orwellian memory hole in the writing of history: Hill's is a "peculiar interpretation of 'how things actually were,'" Draper replied, since the truth, as Hill and Shultz knew when they were writing the book, was that "Hakim was the [memo's] drafter, so that is how 'things actually were,'" while "Shultz was told at the time that it was Cave, so that was how things actually were not. But even if we accept [Hill's] strange premise that Shultz had to put in his book only what he was told at the time, however erroneous, a question arises: Was not Shultz obliged to tell the reader what the truth was? As for notes and music," Draper concludes, "the music cannot be right if the notes are wrong."

This was no trivial exchange. It bared something wrong not only in Hill's writing but also in the slippery historiographical and pedagogical modus he imparted to Yale students in lectures, seminars and campus publications. It should have disqualified him from teaching at a liberal arts college, but, as his students told me, and as I sometimes witnessed firsthand, he used his position as a supposed guide to the great humanist conversation, not to deepen their reckonings with the humanities' lasting challenges to politics and the spirit, but to advance his Vulcan logic and his superiors' strategic interests. His firmness and his intimacy with the great and powerful impressed students eager to learn how not to say that an emperor has no clothes and how to supply the necessary drapery if someone is incautious enough to say it.

Both Hill and a student reporter seemed disposed to do precisely that in a Yale Daily News interview a month after 9/11:

[M]any have noted a change in President Bush's behavior in the last month, the New York Times going so far as to say that he has achieved a certain degree of "gravitas." Do you agree?

I think that people with basically sound leadership instincts will find them growing stronger over time. So it seems to me that what we have seen in the president's behavior is a string of more and more able performances, more and more firm and definitive performances. And this is what you want to see. It's a growing process, and I don't see any limitation to this growth.

Hill wasn't teaching student readers here how to conduct an inquiry in the spirit of liberal education. He was engaging in his almost instinctive misrepresentation of what was actually going on in order to reinforce political instincts and premises he believed the young reporter and his readers were inclined to share.

Hill loathed Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose understanding of equality and the General Will challenge the Lockean liberalism and Anglo-American hegemony that Hill claimed to defend. Never mind that more serious threats to Lockean liberalism and American hegemony come not from the revolutionary left but from casino-finance capital and corporate welfare that would have horrified Locke and Adam Smith, under banners of "free markets." On one occasion Hill made students from his freshman seminar in Yale's Directed Studies program recite in unison, from wherever each was seated in a larger assembly of the program's students and faculty, a Rousseauian Creed, intended "to depict Rousseauianism as proto-totalitarian," as one of the participants later wrote me.

"We went in feeling rather excited about it," the student added, "but as soon as it happened, I felt rather uncomfortable. There was something disturbingly authoritarian in Hill's getting students to recite certain words at his prompting. In trying to combat a particular sort of groupthink, Hill actually wound up emulating what he claims to oppose." A faculty member later confirmed that impression and more. "People were at each other's throats over it afterward, he told me. 'This isn't liberal education,' some of us felt."

In 1998 Hill wrote another duplicitous, doomed letter to the New York Review, this one charging that Joan Didion's review of "Lion King," Dinesh D'Souza's hagiography of Ronald Reagan, recycled an "erroneous story" that Reagan had falsely claimed to have seen the Nazi death camps in person during World War II. (Reagan never left the U.S. during the war. He'd seen only footage from military cameramen, which he edited into briefing films.) Hoping to protect Reagan (as the Iran-Contra independent counsel had found him eager to do when that scandal broke), Hill cited Shultz's claim in "Turmoil and Triumph" that Reagan showed filmed footage of the death camps to visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who told it to "the Hebrew language" press, whose reports of the meeting, according to Hill, were garbled in translation back to English, giving the misimpression that Reagan had claimed to have been in the camps.

Didion's reply showed that Hill's effort to deny Reagan's blurring of romance and fact was wishful, at best. She cited Washington Post correspondent Lou Cannon's report that both Shamir and Elie Wiesel told friends that Reagan, in separate, unrelated meetings with them, had given them the impression he'd visited the camps, and that both men had sincerely believed and been moved by what they understood to have been his experience. Perhaps four "statesmen" were only embellishing the past as they wandered through the fog of Reagan's mind. But more likely Hill was compounding Reagan's dissimulations. Scholars don't do such things. Foreign Service officers are expected to do it. Hill shouldn't have done such things so often at Yale.

Sometimes his footwork was so fancy that it only compounded suspicions he was trying to allay. In April 2006, the Yale Daily News noted that "An article published in the Yale Israel Journal by Charles Hill has become the center of a debate over alleged plagiarism in a lecture delivered by George Shultz at the Library of Congress. The controversy arose when a group of Stanford students revealed last week that they had come across 22 sentences in Shultz's 2004 Kissinger Lecture that had previously appeared in Hill's article, published the prior year."

It was really a non-story, given the two men's long relationship. But with colleges struggling to prevent plagiarism as opportunities for it proliferate, students are often concerned and confused about what plagiarism entails. In this case Hill need only have explained that he'd been Shultz's speechwriter and confidant for years and that the mix-up that led both to publish the same words under separate bylines hardly involved one person claiming credit for another's work.

But Hill couldn't leave well enough alone, probably because, as a teacher at Yale, he had to defend his scholarly integrity as well as that of Shultz, who was by then a "professor" at Stanford. Hill's first feint was to fall nobly on his sword, as a Foreign Service officer would: "It was my doing, and [Shultz] is blameless," he told the Yale Daily News before explaining that he, too, was blameless because he and Shultz met every summer "to discuss and debate current world issues, usually while taking notes and writing throughout."

Hill told the paper "he believes that after one such trip a few years ago, when Shultz was preparing for a lecture, they both took notes on their discussions, and then each returned home and wrote something up. Although Hill did not intend to publish his paper, he submitted it to the Yale Israel Journal when he was approached for an article on a short deadline. While he and Shultz later corresponded about the latter's upcoming Library of Congress lecture, Hill said, he found a copy of the paper he had written and recommended that Shultz take a look at it, forgetting that the paper had been published.

"[Shultz] got blindsided and it was my fault because I just didn't recall any of this," Hill said. "I guess I plagiarized something in reverse by using my own thing and gave him something he had contributed to without knowing it, so the whole thing is kind of upside down."

The image of Shultz and Hill scribbling madly as they "discuss and debate current world issues" in the California sun and then writing up their notes in their rooms soon afterward seems too clever by half an effort to spare Shultz embarrassment over what shouldn't have been embarrassing at all to a former public official with a longtime amanuensis and few scholarly pretensions.

But Hill was still trying to live down the fact that his voluminous note-taking for Shultz had shown federal investigators, who wrested the notes from Hill only with difficulty, that the Senate testimony he'd prepared for Shultz on Iran-Contra was false. The report of the independent counsel called Hill's efforts to blame others "unworthy," as I mentioned in the Foreign Policy review.

A last telling instance of Hill's prevarications that I'll offer here highlights the dangers of entangling a state's public discourse with a university's teaching of the liberal arts. This time the late Tony Judt, not Theodore Draper, unmasked it. Reviewing a book by Hill's Grand Strategy colleague John Lewis Gaddis in the New York Review in 2006, Judt noted sardonically that "Gaddis' account of [Mikhail Gorbachev] gives the Reagan administration full credit for many of Gorbachev's own opinions, ideas, and achievements as well it might, since in this section of the book Gaddis is paraphrasing and citing Secretary of State George Shultz's memoir, 'Turmoil and Triumph.'"

Not only had Hill ghostwritten Shultz's claim; he'd made the same claim himself, in the Hoover Digest in 2001, writing that "through the quiet pressure of Secretary of State George Shultz," the United States had become in the 1980s "a guide for [the Soviet Union's] ridding itself of much of its socialistic economic system." Judt counters that "what changed [Gorbachev's] perspective" on Communism and capitalism" was not Shultz's private lectures on the virtues of capitalism (as both Shultz and, less, forgivably, Gaddis appears to believe) but the catastrophe of Chernobyl and its aftermath."

Chernobyl isn't mentioned by Shultz, Hill or Gaddis or by Hill and Gaddis' former student Molly Worthen in her book's brief account of Hill's role in the U.S.-Soviet endgame. Worthen's account is Hill's account, polished by Gaddis, with whom she took a course in biography before writing the book and whom she thanks in her acknowledgments for having "read every chapter" in manuscript. So Gaddis, in his book "The Cold War," credits Shultz's account in "Turmoil and Triumph," which was really written by Gaddis' own Grand Strategy partner Hill; and all three men use a 24-year-old, prepped by Gaddis and Hill, to tell the story as they want it told.

What should we learn?

I've been sketching here the highly self-indulgent claims to omniscience of people who consider themselves credentialed and entitled to determine a republic's grand strategies. A lot depends on how and by whom they've been trained. The predominantly Ivy graduates whom the late David Halberstam dubbed, with mordant irony, "The Best and the Brightest," masterminded the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam fiascos, and their successors masterminded our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wrong conceptions and training reinforce arrogant ignorance of how the world really works. A republic must determine its vital interests by taking its innermost bearings through teaching and public discourse unlike Hill's.

A republic needs a well-disciplined but open elite an "aristocracy of talent and virtue," as Jefferson characterized it, not of breeding or wealth. Charles Hill believed in this goal, which he warned that some liberals and leftists had forsaken in the name of a facile "equality" and cultural relativism. But strategists who are drawn inexorably to top-down crisis-definition and management can be facile and feckless too, corrupting the republican ethos and liberal education they mean to rescue from liberals.

"Superpowers Don't Get to Retire," warned the neoconservative Hill admirer Robert Kagan in a 2013 essay, insisting, as Hill did, that often only willpower and force can sustain the liberal order we've taken for granted. Quoting Michael Ignatieff, Kagan warned that liberal civilization itself "runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature." Perhaps, Kagan added, "this fragile democratic garden requires the protection of a liberal world order, with constant feeding, watering, weeding, and the fencing off of an ever-encroaching jungle."

But such encroachments come not only from jungles abroad but also from within our own garden, and some of Yale's postwar strategists have been their carriers, casualties and apologists, too eager to supply missing drapery to emperors who lack clothes. Yale's own founders anticipated such dangers. They crossed an ocean to escape a corrupt regime and to build a college and society on moral and civic foundations stronger than armies and wealth. Soon enough, though, they had to seek material support from Elihu Yale, a governor of the East India Company, one of the world's first multinational corporations.

Yale has embodied that tension ever since, struggling to balance students' preparation for capitalist wealth-making with truth-seeking (first religious, then scientific) and civic-republican leadership training. The truth-seeking that I and other Yale students encountered in the 1960s nurtured in some of us enough independence of mind and spirit to resist established premises and practices when alternative strategies must be tried. Grand-strategic ventures abroad depend ultimately on such independence at home. Without it, the civic-republican strengths that effective foreign policy-making requires will be stampeded too easily into feckless ventures like the ones that Hill served in Vietnam and the Middle East and that he continued to defend and promote in New Haven.

A fuller accounting of this miscarriage will go farther than I can go here. But surely the true story of Charles Hill's experience should teach us to stop applauding tricksters and their funders who train young Americans to mistake presumed omniscience for clear-eyed assessment, total surveillance for real security and chronic lying for necessary discretion.

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What "politics" does to history: The saga of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz's right-hand man - Salon

The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first military action of the Cold War. It was sparked by the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea by 75,000 members of the North Korean Peoples Army. The line they crossed, the 38th parallel, was created in 1945 to separate the Soviet-supported Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (todays North Korea) and the U.S.-supported Republic of Korea to the South. The Korean War was a civil conflict that became a proxy war between superpowers clashing over communism and democracy. Between 2 and 4 million people died, 70 percent of them civilians. No peace treaty was ever signed.

WATCH: The Korean War on HISTORY Vault

The Korean War was a civil war, says Charles Kim, Korea Foundation associate professor, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Korea was a unified kingdom for centuries before Japan annexed it following their victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese ruled over Korea with an iron fist from 1910-1945. They used assimilation tactics like forbidding the Korean language and de-emphasizing Korean history in favor of Japanese culture to weaken their colony.

When Japan surrendered to the Allies following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, control of the Korean peninsula passed from Japan to the Americans and the Soviet Union. The superpowers chose to divide Korea between themselves at the 38th parallel, which roughly bisected the peninsula. It didnt correspond to political, cultural, or terrain boundaries, Kim says. The Soviets set up a communist government to the North, and the United States helped establish a military government in the South.

The DMZ line at the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea, 1990. (Credit: Kurita KAKU/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

At the time, Korean politics ran the gamut from communism on the extreme left to right-wing nationalists, all vying for power, Kim says. There was a lot of contention between the Soviet and U.S. occupation forces, and with the polarization of Korean leadership, it was a volatile situation, says Kim. Each viewed the other as illegitimate. Both wanted to invade the other to unify Korea.

Scattered border skirmishes from 1948-50 kept tensions simmering. In 1948, the United States called on the United Nations to sponsor a vote for Koreans to determine their future government. When the North refused to participate, the South formed its own government in Seoul under the anti-communist Syngman Rhee. In retaliation, Kim Il Sung, a former communist guerilla, was named Premier of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Il Sung went to Moscow in 1949 and again in 1950 to seek Soviet support for invading South Korea. He was able to get Joseph Stalin to commit to providing support for the invasion of South Korea. He also got a verbal commitment from China, Kim says.

When North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, North Korea was banking on the U.S. not coming back, says Kim. North Korean forces were strong; they had the aid of experienced veterans of the Chinese Civil War, which had just ended in August of 1949. North Koreans made swift progress southward. The world watched to see what would happen next.

The U.S. initially didnt want to get involved in any kind of invasion. They didnt want to get tangled up with North Korea, much less China or the Soviet Union, says Kim. Key events on the world stage caused the United States to change course.

On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who had helped the United States build its atomic bomb program, had leaked the blueprint of the Fat Man atomic bomb to the Soviets. The revelation stoked Cold War paranoia. Then, on October 1, 1949, communist revolutionary Mao Zedong announced the creation of the Peoples Republic of China following the defeat of the U.S.-supported Chinese nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. The loss of China was a phrase used by Republican critics of the Truman administration, says Kim.

Thousands of Chinese troops were sent to aid the North Koreans. Mao Zedong was adamant about helping out his North Korean allies. He wanted to improve Chinas prestige in the communist world by what he saw as freeing South Koreans from U.S. imperialist rule, Kim says.

WATCH: July 19, 1950: President Truman Orders U.S. Forces to Fight in Korean War

On December 16, 1950 U.S. President Harry Truman declared a state of emergency, proclaiming that communist imperialism was a threat to democracy. The following April, Truman received a document called National Security Council Paper Number 68 (NSC-68). Created by the Defense Department, the State Department, the CIA, and other agencies, it advised the president to grow the defense industry to counter what these agencies saw as the threat of global communism. The recommendations cemented Trumans next move.

On June 25, 1950 President Truman ordered U.S. forces to South Korea to repulse the Norths invasion. Democrats needed to look tough on communism, Kim says. Truman used Korea to send a message that the U.S. will contain communism and come to the aid of their allies.

The United States never formally declared war on North Korea. Instead, Truman referred to the addition of ground troops as a police action. U.S. General Douglas MacArthurs Inchon landing on September 8, 1950, turned the tide of the war and enabled Southern forces to push Northward beyond the 38th parallel.

Read more: 10 Famous Korean War Veterans

MacArthurs efforts were not enough to secure victory. The Korean War armistice, signed on July 27, 1953, drew a new border between North Korea and South Korea, granting South Korea some additional territory and demilitarizing the zone between the two nations. A formal peace treaty was never signed.

Over 2.5 million people died in the Korean War. Despite two prisoner of war exchanges, Operation Little Switch and Operation Big Switch, 7,800 Americans are still missing in action, while South Korea is still searching for over 124,000 servicemen.

READ MORE: The Most Harrowing Battle of the Korean War

The absence of a final conclusion to the Korean War has kept it alive as a major influence on Asian affairs, says Sheila Miyoshi Jager, professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin and author of Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea.

She argues the Korean War directly influenced President Lyndon B. Johnsons policy in Vietnam: Here was a successful sovereign nation, divided by the Cold War, being threatened by its communist neighbor backed by China and the Soviet Union. Korea was now seen as a war that had successfully stopped the Chinese communist expansion in Asia.

Sandwiched between World War II and The Vietnam War, The Korean War was nicknamed The Forgotten War. But to Jager, its not over: The Korean War continues to influence events in East Asia, she says. Tensions between the United States and North Korea are ongoing.

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What Caused the Korean War and Why Did the US Get Involved? - History

Over the years, thePokmon TCG has featured many different patterns used on their holographic cards. Some patterns lasted for years, while others had short stays, making them markers for their short time in the franchise. On this first installment ofA Holographic History of the Pokmon TCG, let's take a look back at the first-ever holographic pattern used by Wizards of the Coast in their English-language release of the firstPokmon TCG sets: the classic stars.

One of the most instantly recognizable holographic patterns is this old-school star pattern used in the first three English-languagePokmon TCG sets:Base Set, Jungle, andFossil.The pattern featured the Pokmon set over a generally simple background that was rendered in a foil that, when tilted around in the light, saw stars pop from the surface. It gave the cards intense depth, with stars appearing closer to the surface with sharp clarity, while other stars seemed blurred and far away. This gave the impression that the Pokmon was popping out from the surface, which made for cards that were, simply put, very cool. This pattern elevated cards like the iconic Charizard (pictured above), Blastoise, and Venusaur, which were simply Pokmon posing over a colorful background, into something that felt special.

Back in the days ofBase, Jungle, andFossil, there were no such things as Ultra Rare cards. No ex, no EX, no GX, no V, no VMAX, no Full Art nothing. A holographic card was the most exciting thing you could pull, which made the cards very, very special.

Interestingly, this was not the pattern used in the Japanese version of these sets. Japan was already using the galaxy foil pattern, which featured a similar style but with brighter circles, swirls, and what looks like stardust. This pattern, which we'll talk about next time, ended up entering the English-languageTCG inTeam Rocket. However,Fossilwasn't exactly the last we'd see of the original star pattern.XY: Evolutions, which reimagined Base Set forPokmon's 20th anniversary, included a tweaked version of the star pattern which featured a very, very slightly different shape for the stars.

Some of the most iconicPokmon TCG cards were done in this style. Even though it only lasted for three sets, the starry holographic cards remain some of the most iconic trading cards in existence.

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A Holographic History Of The Pokmon TCG: Stars Abound - Bleeding Cool News

Richard Klinzman| For the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union USA TODAY NETWORK

"Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am"

Author: Julia Cooke

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28, 288 pages

Julia Cooke's intriguing book about the rise and fall of Pan Am airlines is a great diversion from the summers thrillers. Cooke conducted extensive interviews with many stewardesses who were part of the Pan Am family throughout the life of the company.

She primarily focuses on three women: Lynne Totten Rawling, Karen Walker Ryan and Tori Werner.Although not household names, all three are very bright and accomplished women who set the standard for other young women not hypnotized by a life with so few options in the late 1950s through the 1970s.

In an extremely interesting take on the dawning of the Jet Age, Cooke weaves in two other societal changes. The first is the Women's Liberation Movement, which began with that generation's women deciding that the limited options reserved for them were nowhere near enough, and the Viet Nam War all three events beginning at roughly the same time.

Most airlines served their own countries with a few nominal trips to other countries. Pan Am decided from the beginning that they would solely be an international company and created flight paths that were deemed to be important to industry.

The role of a stewardess was deemed so important that strict rules were set up relating to looks, height and weight. Although agreeing to these conditions in the beginning, women soon began questioning the need for this. Bedrock changes were coming, not only in how women looked and shaped the world around them, but how society also began questioning the rights and wrongs of our government regarding the war.

You will come to care about these people and their bravery. Not all heroes carried guns. Some were heroic in serving the public. The most touching and soul anguishing is detailed as Saigon was about to fall and the people of Pan Am were rallied to serve in Operation Baby Lift, a U.S. sponsored rescue program to save thousands of children fathered and abandoned by U.S. servicemen. It is a part of our history that was almost forgotten. It never should be.

Richard Klinzman lives in Middleburg.

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Book review: 'Women of Pan Am' traveled the globe, played role in history - The Florida Times-Union

The $1 million Grade 1 Preakness Stakes on May 15 at Pimlico follows the Kentucky Derby Presented by Woodford Reserve as the second leg of the Triple Crown, taking place just two weeks after the fabled showdown under the twin spires at Churchill Downs. But what a difference two weeks makes in how horseplayers approach handicapping the two races.

The Kentucky Derby is typically dissected from every angle, with bettors pouring over tons of historical data to identify the most likely winner. In contrast, the Preakness receives considerably less attention from a trends and angles perspective, with the historical data instead overshadowed by a single burning question: will the Kentucky Derby winner come back to win the Preakness, setting up a shot at the Triple Crown?

But this doesnt mean historical data is irrelevant in the Preakness. To the contrary, the race tends to produce similar results year after year, and reviewing the recent history of the Preakness can help guide us toward logical contenders.

With this in mind, lets dig into the data and review five valuable tips and trends for handicapping the 2021 Preakness Stakes:

Respect pacesetters and speed horses

As a general rule, its wise to bet on horses with tactical speed. Four of the last 12 Preakness winners prevailed in gate-to-wire fashion, including Triple Crown winners American Pharoah and Justify. Six others were racing within 3 1/2 lengths of the lead after the opening half-mile.

In contrast, only one horse in the last 12 years has rallied from the back half of the Preakness field to reach the winners circle. That one horse was the mud-loving Exaggerator, who benefited from chasing a fast pace over a sloppy, tiring track to close from eighth place and win easily in 2016.

Year

Winner

Position after first 1/2 mile

-mile & -mile times

2020

Swiss Skydiver

5th by 3 lengths (11 starters)

47.65, 1:11.24 (fast)

2019

War of Will

4th by 3.5 lengths (13 starters)

46.16, 1:10.56 (fast)

2018

Justify

1st by a head (8 starters)

47.19, 1:11.42 (sloppy)

2017

Cloud Computing

3rd by 3 lengths (10 starters)

46.81, 1:11.00 (fast)

2016

Exaggerator

8th by 6.5 lengths (11 starters)

46.56, 1:11.97 (sloppy)

2015

American Pharoah

1st by 2.5 lengths (8 starters)

46.49, 1:11.42 (sloppy)

2014

California Chrome

3rd by 2 lengths (10 starters)

46.85, 1:11.06 (fast)

2013

Oxbow

1st by 2 lengths (9 starters)

48.60, 1:13.26 (fast)

2012

Ill Have Another

4th by 3.5 lengths (11 starters)

47.68, 1:11.72 (fast)

2011

Shackleford

2nd by 0.5 lengths (14 starters)

46.87, 1:12.01 (fast)

2010

Lookin At Lucky

5th by 5 lengths (12 starters)

46.47, 1:11.22 (fast)

2009

Rachel Alexandra

1st by a head (13 starters)

46.71, 1:11.01 (fast)

Favor horses exiting the Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks

Over the last 20 years, horses exiting the Kentucky Derby have dominated the Preakness, visiting the winners circle 16 times. Two others (the fillies Rachel Alexandra and Swiss Skydiver) used the Kentucky Oaks as their springboard to glory at Pimlico, leaving Bernardini (coming off a win in the Withers Stakes at Aqueduct) and Cloud Computing (exiting a third in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct) as the only Preakness winners since 2001 who didnt prep in the Derby or Oaks.

Bet Kentucky Derby winners trained by Bob Baffert

Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert has won the Preakness a record seven times. All seven of his winners came out of the Kentucky Derby, including five who prevailed in the run for the roses.

To put it another way, Bafferts first five Kentucky Derby winners all came back to win the Preakness. The only Baffert Derby winner who failed to claim victory at Pimlico was Authentic, who finished second by a neck in 2020. Notably, there were extenuating circumstances the 2020 Preakness was held in October due to COVID-19, and the race took place four weeks after the Kentucky Derby rather than the typical two weeks.

Avoid playing major longshots

Its not uncommon for mid-range longshots to reach the Preakness winners circle. In the last 15 years, Bernardini (2006), Shackleford (2011), Oxbow (2013), and Cloud Computing (2017) have all prevailed at odds between 12-1 and 15-1.

But its a testament to the generally predictable nature of the Preakness that these four upset winners rank among the 11 highest-priced winners in Preakness history. Although the race has been contested 145 times, only four winners have ever started at higher than 15-1, with Master Derbys 23-1 surprise in 1975 standing as the record for a longshot winner.

Again, theres no reason to avoid mid-range longshots; double-digit winners have been just as common as winning favorites over the last 15 years, with each group claiming five victories. But history suggests bettors should hesitate before supporting horses at higher than 15-1 in the betting.

Support proven graded stakes winners

Its rare for horses unproven against graded stakes company to win the Preakness. In fact, 18 of the last 20 Preakness winners had previously won a graded stakes, with 14 proving their worth at the Grade 1 level prior to prevailing at Pimlico.

The lone exceptions to the graded stakes trend were Shackleford (2011) and Cloud Computing (2017), though both had placed second at the graded stakes level, with Shackleford most notably coming up a head short of victory in the Grade 1 Florida Derby.

Conclusions

The Preakness field is still coming into focus, but one contender who looks formidable from a historical perspective is Medina Spirit. Trained by Bob Baffert, the dark bay colt was a surprise winner of the Kentucky Derby, leading all the way to spring a 12.10-1 upset. But you can bet he wont be a longshot at Pimlico with his front-running speed and proven form against Grade 1 company, Medina Spirit is a perfect match for the historical profile of a Preakness winner. All signs suggest hell be very tough to defeat.

Medina Spirit will be joined in the Preakness by fellow Kentucky Derby starters Midnight Bourbon (sixth) and Keepmeinmind (seventh). Both are proven graded stakes winners, with Midnight Bourbon looming as a particularly strong contender from a historical standpoint. A troubled start forced Midnight Bourbon to rally from mid-pack in the Kentucky Derby, but its more common for the son of Tiznow to race up and on the pace, as he did win wiring the Grade 3 Lecomte Stakes during the winter. A clean break against a smaller field in the Preakness figures to place Midnight Bourbon in the hunt for a strong finish at what should be good odds.

A wildcard in the Preakness field is Bob Bafferts Concert Tour, winner of the Grade 2 Rebel Stakes and third in the Grade 1 Arkansas Derby. The son of Street Sense is clearly a talented prospect, and hell be a short price at Pimlico. But the fact he didnt contest the Kentucky Derby is a meaningful question mark from a historical standpoint.

Good luck, and enjoy the race!

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Using History to Handicap the 2021 Preakness Stakes - America's Best Racing

Xue Davis was planting dahlias in the backyard of her home in Monroe when she had what she called a no-way moment.

There are a lot of rocks in her yard, and at first, she thought the object she had dug up was just another piece of slate. Then she realized, it clearly had been worked by human hands.

My first instinct was that it must have been a replica, Davis said.

As it turned out, the arrowhead she uncovered was older than Connecticut itself, preexisting modern society.

It was made and used by some of the first people to walk Connecticuts woods, approximately the same time as the birth of Jesus.

Projectile points vary in size and shape. While larger and heavier projectile points are referred to as spears or darts, smaller and lighter ones are commonly called arrowheads or arrow points that are associated with a bow and arrow.

The arrowhead Davis dug up is estimated to be anywhere from 1,200 to 2,700 years old.

I guess for these projectile points, especially the ones that are so old, we dont know very much about the people or specific tribes, Davis said. We don't know what they called themselves.

Davis is a scientist by trade, a neuroscientist working at Yale, but she turned to Sarah Sportman, Connecticuts state archaeologist, for more information.

Its not that uncommon to find ancient arrowheads in Connecticut, but the kind Davis unearthed is not usually found in this part of the continent. Sportman identified it as a relic of a culture known as the Adena.

The Adena, named after the site the culture was first identified, are known as mound-builders. They were centered around the Ohio River valley, though they did have extensive trade networks.

We don't have a great handle on whether people from the Midwest were coming this far east, or if it was just ideas and goods that were coming through trade, Sportman said.

So its possible the arrowhead was knapped and shaped near the Ohio River, traded from person to person, and used and lost millennia ago, only to be dug up by a Yale neuroscientist as she planted dahlias.

Thats the part of it that I think Im most enamored by, holding it and looking at it, thinking that a person did this, they made it by hand, Davis said. It connects them to me in a way. Your imagination can run wild in thinking about how their experience was so different than ours, and what is the human experience going to be like 2,000 years from now.

Though Connecticut may not often be thought of as an archaeological mecca, Sportman said the oldest artifacts in Connecticut are older than Davis arrowhead by an order of magnitude.

In 2019, a site in Avon was uncovered that put any projectile point to shame.

It was found through a development project for a bridge, Sportman said. It is very deeply buried, and we have a radiocarbon date for 12,500 years ago.

Whether or not the Native American tribes that inhabited Connecticut when Europeans first arrived in the 1600s bear any relationship to the people who used Davis arrowhead is an open question.

When Davis arrowhead was made, is what we refer to as the early woodland period here in Connecticut, Sportman said.

The modern groups are the groups that are around today, and that were around at the time of colonization, they may not have been exactly the same a couple of thousand years before, she said.

As for the first people in Connecticut, such as those who inhabited Avon and the rest of the area 12,000 years ago, how they may or may not be related to the people who used Davis arrowhead is not known.

Those are still some of the questions that archaeologists are researching, Sportman said. Trying to figure out those identities and how these people are related is really complicated. It's about looking for similarities in the material culture, in the ways that they made their stone tools and their pots and things like that, and trying to figure out if there are similarities in different areas, and maybe those were related groups of people sharing ideas.

There is not much evidence left.

All we have to go on is the material that people left behind, and most of the time, with archaeology, youre dealing with people's garbage, Sportman said.

It's the stuff that they left, she said. Their broken pots, and their broken arrowheads and the things that they didn't feel were worthwhile to pick up and take with them.

Davis discovery led her on a bit of an internet journey. She discovered a robust trade in antiquities, collectors of projectile points willing to pay hard cash for a piece like hers. Its not worth much, though, maybe 20 or 30 bucks, she said.

That fact is bittersweet for Sportman. Trade in antiquities makes preservation more difficult.

In this part of the country, its not as robust as it once was historically. In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, it was rampant, but it still happens, she said. If you go on eBay and other places like that, and auction sites, you'll still see collections of artifacts up for sale.

On the other hand, a lot of archaeologists actually got their start as children finding arrowheads and fields and things like that. That's what got them interested, she said.

Davis agreed: I actually find it hard to imagine that it wouldnt spark imagination to find something like this.

Though she is excited about her discovery, Davis is not tearing up her lawn looking for antiquities. She lives in one of those 60s raised ranches, and believes its unlikely the dirt had not been disturbed over the last few centuries.

Also, the Pequonnock River runs through her neighborhood, and the arrowhead may have traveled downstream.

Over the last 1,000 years, who knows? Maybe the course of it ran through my yard, she said. I dont think I'm sitting on top of a deposit of arrowheads.

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Arrowhead found in Monroe backyard hints at Connecticuts ancient history - CTPost