Category Archives: History

The first round of the 2022 NBA Playoffs didn't give basketball fans a single Game 7, but the second round is ready to bring us a do-or-die doubleheader.

On Sunday, the Bucks, Celtics, Mavericks and Suns will all participate in Game 7s with trips to the Eastern and Western Conference Finals on the line. The series involving those teams have been extremely competitive, so it is only fitting that they go the distance.

Ahead of those contests, let's take a look back at the history of Game 7s in the NBA Playoffs and some of the league's best Game 7 performances.

(All stats courtesy of StatMuse)

MORE: Why Game 7 of Bucks vs. Celtics will be a classic

There have been 142 Game 7s in NBA Playoff history.

Before this year's postseason, the most recent Game 7 was played between the 76ers and Hawks in the 2021 Eastern Conference Semifinals. The Bucks and Nets also reached a Game 7 in the same round last year.

The Celtics have played in 33 Game 7s and won 24 of them. The Lakers are second on the all-time list with 24 Game 7s. They have a record of 16-8 in those games.

Boston and Los Angeles may have the most total Game 7 wins, but a surprising team has the highest winning percentage: the Timberwolves. Minnesota is the only franchise that has played in just one Game 7, defeating Sacramento in the 2004 Western Conference Semifinals.

Every active NBA team has played in at least one Game 7.

Hall of Famer Ray Allen has played in 11 Game 7s, the most in NBA history.

Two Celtics legends are right behind him, as Paul Pierce and Bill Russell each played in 10 Game 7s.

No need to dig deep into the history books.

Kevin Durant set the Game 7 scoring record just last season with 48 points against the Bucks. Unfortunately for Durant, his Nets lost an overtime thriller in Brooklyn, and Milwaukee went on to win the championship.

The NBA Finals has required a Game 7 to decide the winner 19 times.

The most recent Game 7 of the championship series was played between the Cavaliers and Warriors in 2016. Cleveland captured a 93-89 victory, becoming the first team in NBA Finals history to win the title after facing a 3-1 deficit.

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Game 7 history: NBA Playoff records, stats, best performances and more to know ahead of Celtics vs. Bucks, Suns vs. Mavericks - Sporting News

The New York Rangers are no strangers to Game Sevens having played 15 of them in their storied history. The good news is they are on the plus side, winning nine while losing six.

They are also tied for the most consecutive Game Seven wins with six from 2012 to 2015. That streak ended when the Tampa Bay Lightning defeated the Blueshirts in the seventh game of the Eastern Conference Finals in 2015.

The Rangers have gone to a seventh game only once versus the Pittsburgh Penguins, winning in 2014, coming back from a 3-1 deficit to do it and Ranger fans hope that history will repeat itself tonight.

The Rangers have victimized the Capitals the most times, winning three of four Game Sevens against them. They are undefeated in two seven game series against the Devils.

Their other Game Seven wins have come against the Penguins, Flyers, Senators and their most memorable win, against the Canucks in 1994 in the Stanley Cup Final.

Their Game Seven losses have come at the hands of the Flyers, Bruins, Capitals, Red Wings, Black Hawks and Lightning.

The Rangers lost in the 1939 Semi-Finals to the Boston Bruins in what was the longest Game Seven in NHL history, lasting eight minutes into the third overtime. That was surpassed in 1987 by the Islanders and Capitals epic quadruple overtime classic.

The two times the Rangers went to seven games in the Stanley Cup Final were in 1950 when they lost to the Detroit Red Wings and of course, in 1994.

Theres also this.

On the negative side, the Penguins have played in 17 Game Sevens and are 10-7 all-time and have won all six that they have played on the road.

Tonights game will be the 186th Game Seven in NHL playoff history, to be followed by the 187th when Dallas takes on Calgary.

This season there will be five Game Sevens already in the First Round and the higher seed has won in two of the three that have been concluded already. The Rangers hope to make that three of four.

The good news is the last two times they were down 3-1 in a series, they rebounded to win in seven games. Its time for the Blueshirts to extend that streak.

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Game 7s and the New York Rangers - Blue Line Station

Historic Ellicott City is celebrating 250 years since it was founded with a full schedule of opportunities to learn its story.

WTOP/Valerie Bonk

WTOP/Valerie Bonk

WTOP/Valerie Bonk

WTOP/Valerie Bonk

Historic Ellicott City is celebrating 250 years since it was founded with a full schedule of opportunities to learn its story.

Outside of the historic Thomas Isaac Log Cabin on Main Street Ellicott City on Sunday, Janet Nickerson had a display of clothing she made that would have been worn in the 18th century.

You want to be aware of your history and also understand where people are coming from, where the city came from, how it was founded. There are a lot of interesting things about Ellicott City, Nickerson said.

On Thursday, theres an artists talk by Lisa Scarbath at the Howard County Center for the Arts. She created mosaic artwork consisting of six panels featuring Ellicott City landmarks.

The Historic Ellicott City Inc. Decorator Show House is open until June 5 and features a look at former Maryland Gov. Edwin Warfields estate.

The Museum of Howard County History has an exhibit looking at the lives of Ellicott Citys founding family.

Its 250 years of history, American history in a town older than America itself, said Ed Lilley, EC250 board member.

Arthur Malestein, a historian focusing on Maryland history, was on Main Street Ellicott City on Sunday, educating visitors on the areas history.

I have a lot of people that are like wow, I didnt know that,' Malestein said about those passing by and stopping at his table. In 1772, the Ellicott brothers from up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania came down and established a milling industry down here, he said.

Lilley encouraged people to take advantage of learning about the historic town by taking part in the scheduled events.

There are lots of things to see and do, Lilley said.

EC250 is hosting events throughout the year to mark the anniversary. See a full listing of the events for the anniversary on its website.

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Historic Ellicott City is celebrating its 250th birthday with opportunities to learn its history - WTOP

Today in OTM History

2021: Alex Verdugo celebrates his birthday in style; Lets hope he can do the same this afternoon in Texas.

2020: Wade Boggs is the Red Sox all-time third baseman; Could Rafael Devers be on a path to displace him?

2018: Andrew Benintendi is building his floor; As it turns out, its the ceiling which has proven elusive.

2017: Craig Kimbrels dominant start; The Red Sox could sure use a guy like that these days.

2016: Andrew Benintendi gets promoted to Portland; The majors wouldnt be too far behind.

2015: The Mariners could have had Jackie Bradley Jr.; This is one I had totally forgotten about.

2014: Keith Law mocks Marcus Wilson to Boston; They didnt draft him, but hed end up in the organization a few years later.

2003: The Red Sox sell out Fenway Park, something they would do every game (according to them, anyway) for the next decade for the longest sellout streak in league history.

Happy 55th birthday to John Smoltz, who is in the Hall of Fame, mostly for his time with the Braves, but did spend a lackluster half-season in Boston in the final year of his career back in 2009.

Happy 42nd birthday to Josh Beckett, who was the ace of the championship 2007 team, and while his tenure didnt end in the greatest fashion he will always be remembered for one of the greatest postseason runs in team history.

Happy 26th birthday to Alex Verdugo, who is obviously currently a starting outfielder for the Red Sox.

Many thanks to Baseball-Reference, NationalPastime.com and Today in Baseball History for assistance here, and thanks to Battery Power for the inspiration for these posts.

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Today in Boston Red Sox History: May 15 - Over The Monster

Steve Martin made a delightful cameo on last nights episode of Saturday Night Live, during his Only Murders in the Building co-star Selena Gomezs hosting debut. In a pretaped sketch, Gomezs Taylor Gosh introduced Archie Gizmo (Martin), the mastermind behind the whoopee cushion. Gizmo explains that he was just a struggling gag inventor in the 60s, looking for a sound to accompany his whoopee-cushion prototype, when he met Ms. Dina Beans (Aidy Bryant, of course). Her energy was magnetic; her eyes were endless, Gizmo says of Beans. And every time she sat down: gas. We then watch as Dina Beans is struck by lightning (twice!) and attacked by snakes each of her misfortunes inspiring one of Gizmos inventions. Bryant and Martin are electric (pun intended) together, and Gomez is perfectly deadpan as the documentarys host (The automobile, paper cup, dancing, computer: These were all invented.) Watch the full sketch above.

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Steve Martin Explains the History of the Whoopee Cushion on SNL - Vulture

SPARE PARTSThe Story of Medicine Through the History of Transplant SurgeryBy Paul Craddock

Paul Craddocks Spare Parts: The Story of Medicine Through the History of Transplant Surgery opens midoperation, as a donor organ (this lifeless gray mass, as Craddock describes it) is sewn into place. Clamps released, the new kidney comes alive, or appears to. Before my eyes, the surgeon removed these devices and in a matter of seconds the kidney turned from gray to pink, then almost red, Craddock writes. It seemed as if life itself had cascaded from one mans body into anothers. The operation is described as state of the art, yet Craddock, a senior research associate in the division of surgery and interventional sciences at the University College of Londons medical school, sets out to show the ancient roots of transplantation. Transplant surgery is far from an exclusively modern phenomenon, he writes, with a surprisingly long and rich history that stretches back as far as the pyramids.

And so we are off, on a thrilling and often terrifying ride through transplantation and the theories and techniques that made it possible. It begins in Renaissance Italy, where the push for rhinoplasty came not from kings but from the general populace, who had perfected skin grafts long before the European medical profession such as it was. (The Sushruta Samhita, a 500 B.C. Sanskrit text that Craddock cites, described skin grafts, among hundreds of other surgeries.) Craddocks tantalizing opening assertion is that late-16th-century specialists were merely catching up with farmers, who had long ago learned a way to graft skin from an arm to a nose, masking nasal bridge collapses caused by syphilis or mutilation from duels, both common. In Italy, skin grafting had evolved as a peasants operation, linked culturally and technically to the farmers procedure of plant grafting.

The book is arranged chronologically by procedure: from that 16th-century skin grafting to 17th-century blood transfusions to 18th-century tooth transplants. It skips lightly over the 1800s (and the development of germ theory, anesthesia and nursing) and winds up with 20th-century kidney and heart transplants. Craddock explains the scientific theories underlying each new technique and then he highlights a star, or several. In addition to nose repair, Leonardo Fioravanti claimed to have cured leprosy and discovered the antiseptic attributes of aquavit and urine; in 16th-century Bologna, he urinated on patients (literally) while metaphorically urinating on a medical establishment he saw as devoted to moribund classical texts. As Craddock puts it, Fioravanti preferred to base his own medical system on the collective, intuitive wisdom of centuries a live tradition with no written component as opposed to a raft of dead, book-learned knowledge.

The reigning such text was by Galen of Pergamon, the first-century Greek philosopher, who was silent on skin grafts (Aristotle related the bodys largest organ to the crust on a polenta) but famously described health in terms of the four humors blood, yellow bile, phlegm and black bile, the flow of which was thought to be affected by mood, personality and the stars. Medicine was a matter of humoral balance, often regulated by bleeding. Galens anatomical descriptions, though still gospel in the 16th century, were hampered by a Roman rule against dissection of humans. When Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish anatomist, published On the Fabric of the Human Body in 1543, based on his own dissection of corpses, it helped to highlight the importance of scientific observation and to reconceive the heart as pumplike. It also stressed the idea that blood was better inside the body than out inspiring a slew of experiments that made life in Paris and London horrible for dogs. The heart was now perceived as a ruler or king, the seat and organ of all passions, prompting questions about dogs (whether a fierce Dog by being often new stocked with the blood of a cowardly Dog, may not be more tame) and then humans. In 1667, French doctors infused a man with calfs blood in part to improve his character. Sheep, docile in the Bible, were a go-to for human transfusion, though a butcher, infused by members of an English scientific society, irritated doctors when he slaughtered and then ate his donor. By 1700, a faint professional decorum, fortified by public ridicule, shut the experiments down.

The generally unsuccessful attempts to transplant teeth, Craddock argues, coincided with a view of the body as a machine, complete with transferable parts complicating the work of philosophers, and enriching that of salespeople. Enter the dentist, offering advice (gargle with urine!) and private tooth transplants to fancy customers put off by public tooth-yankers. The new teeth were eventually supplied by young and poor mouths: As Craddock points out, the dystopian reality of body shopping has a dark precedent in teeth. The search for what animated the human machine also led to theories on nerves and the associated disorders observed to particularly affect the more developed upper classes. The soul was body-bound, a material thing that pulsed through it.

Cut to 1901. Immunology is a new discipline, and the previous blood types dog, cat, sheep, human have evolved into our modern iteration, named by the Viennese researcher Karl Landsteiner. In the same year, Alexis Carrel, a young French surgeon whose mother owned textile factories, studied with Marie-Anne Leroudier, one of Lyons finest embroiderers (and one of very few women featured in Spare Parts). Leroudiers dexterity in handling unfathomable intricate decaying fabrics taught the young surgeon how to stitch together blood vessels, making kidney and heart transplants as well as bypass surgery possible, though her contributions were minimized by Carrel and the bulk of Western scientific history. After being drummed out of Europe, Carrel, whose experiments make Dr. Frankenstein look like a genial Marcus Welby, landed in 1930s New York, where his passion for eugenics earned him the friendship of Charles Lindberg. Together, they would invent a perfusion device to keep an organ viable outside the body all in the pursuit of weeding the weak from society. Carrels book, Man, the Unknown, was a U.S. best seller in 1936; the German edition praised the Nazis eugenics work.

The first heart transplant surgeons were less health- than prize-oriented. As one doctor put it: Virtually all the patients subject to the procedure died, having satisfied the macho aspirations of their surgeons. Meanwhile, any technical successes had more to do with medicines deeper communal understanding of immunology how to address organ rejection than with surgical breakthroughs.

Craddocks conclusion is meant to feel hopeful: According to colleagues at U.C.L. in London, printing an entire replacement body part might only be a decade away. But it doesnt reassure so much as concern a reader, especially given the case of Paolo Macchiarini, the U.C.L.-affiliated celebrity surgeon (unmentioned by Craddock) widely lauded for performing the worlds first synthetic trachea transplants using stem cells but currently on trial in Sweden for aggravated assault against his patients. In fact, what inspires most hope is what ends up seeming like the accidental subtext of Spare Parts. It relates to the way Renaissance Italian farmers saw themselves in trees: distinctly individual trees that, as Craddock notes, science has only recently become aware are in communication with one another, not to mention us. If we look more carefully at the forest, the past indicates, we just might repair ourselves through the trees.

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A Medical History of Transplant Surgery Thats Not for the Squeamish - The New York Times

WINDHAM A group of four buried in a local cemetery with no names engraved on headstones were honored Saturday with a new historical marker.

The towns African American Committee, along with the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, unveiled a new historic plaque Saturday to commemorate the lives of three men Pompey, Jeffry, Peter Thomas and one woman, Rose, all honored for the growth and prosperity of the Windham community.

The process got its start when Shelley Walcott, a member of the Windham committee, read an article about unmarked graves of enslaved African Americans being discovered in the local Cemetery on the Hill.

That discovery was due to extensive research done by local historian Brad Dinsmore.

I have wondered about the history of blacks in Windham, Walcott said at the ceremony Saturday.

The plaque unveiled Saturday will eventually find a permanent place atop a granite monument at the cemetery.

The 1883 History of Windham states that they were buried in that part of the original cemetery on the hill in the southeasterly corner, near the highway.

Dinsmore spoke at the ceremony Saturday, saying the fact the graves were unmarked was a moral travesty.

And its literally a grave injustice, Dinsmore said. But our town is going to rectify this today.

Dinsmore continued, saying the new marker will tell their stories and will be a permanent reminder of their names and their roles in shaping Windhams history.

The new plaque to be placed at the cemetery reads that Pompey and Jeffry, both skilled artisans, were hired out by their enslaver to clear land for Windhams early farms.

Pompey was also hired out to work on the old town meeting house located in this cemetery. They and other enslaved men and women helped to build the town of Windham, the plaque reads.

Walcott said making the discoveries and now paying tribute to those lying in unmarked graves is a way to make sure the past is appreciated and honored.

Black lives in the town of Windham do matter, she said.

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Marker unveiled to honor African American history in Windham - Eagle-Tribune

Capped by probably the biggest baseball brawl ever, between the San Diego Padres and Atlanta Braves on Sunday, August 12th, the 1984 season was the worst for fighting in more than a quarter century.

The Padres had twice beaten the second-place Braves in the weekend series and led them by 10 1/2 games in the old National League West, en route to their first World Series appearance in franchise history.

The battle in old Fulton County Stadium was like a tag-team wrestling match with 50 participants (plus coaches) instead of the customary four inside the ring.

Why did it erupt?

Oh, the usual your-guy-threw-at-my-guy retaliation, only the teams didnt settle their scores with one brushback pitch, or even with one donnybrook. They came out of their dugouts THREE TIMES, twice for violent struggles. But some Braves fans (five of them), operating on possible alcohol ingestion and the misguided notion that this activity on the field was an invitation for audience participation, were arrested for joining in the fracas and taken off the field in handcuffs.

RELATED: Watch San Diego Padres vs Atlanta Braves: Live stream, TV channel for MLB Sunday Leadoff Game on Peacock and NBC

Understandably, the level of violence was alarming to National League President Chub Feeney. The hand of justice was most felt by San Diego Manager Dick Williams. He received a $10,000 fine and a 10-day suspension. Across the field, Atlanta Manager Joe Torre, received a $1,000 fine and three days off. A record seventeen players, a dozen of them Padres, including two acting managers, and five Braves were fined, suspended or both.

Williams, a world-class bench jockey during his playing career in the 50s, had admitted ordering each of his pitchers to aim for Braves starter Pascual Perez, who had opened the game by nailing leadoff man Alan Wiggins in the back with a fastball on his first pitch. In the bottom of the second inning, Perez came to bat against San Diego starter Ed Whitson. He threw behind Perez head with his first pitch but missed him three times. He was tossed out of the game along with Williams. Reliever Greg Booker followed and came close to hitting Perez in the fifth inning. He was also asked to remove himself from the premises.

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Incredibly, it was not until Perez fourth at-bat that Craig Lefferts finally made contact. That eighth-inning bullseye set off the first of two bench- clearing brawls.

Lefferts told NBC at the time: Its unfortunate and something you hate to see happen in this game but they started it and we had to do something about it so we finished it.

Another brawl followed in the ninth when Atlanta reliever Donnie Moore hit Graig Nettles with his second pitch, the result of their confrontation the previous inning. Padres players ejected after the first brawl returned to the field to join in the melee.

Now, have you ever heard of something like this? Braves slugger Bob Horner, watching the proceedings from the press box with a broken arm, rushed down to the clubhouse, changed into his uniform and came onto the field. Outfielder Champ Summers of the Padres spotted him and raced across the field to warn him not to get involved for his own good. Of course, other gathered around him to listen in.

The intervention of security police was all that prevented the brouhaha from becoming an all-out riot involving both teams and the fans. The ninth inning was played with both benches and bullpens cleared of personnel in their respective clubhouses, except for those due to hit, and with police lined in front of both dugouts. Braves announcer Chip Caray said on WTBS, Welcome back to guerrilla baseball from Atlanta.

In his postgame comments, Torre called Williams, an idiot and you can spell that with a capital I. Williams said hed meet Torre anytime, anyplace to settle matters.

RELATED: Mr. Stats Notes: Manny Machado the key to victory for Padres in 2022

Ive never seen violence like that. Its a miracle somebody didnt get seriously hurt. It took baseball down 50 years, umpiring crew chief John McSherry told the Atlanta Constitution at the time. Just a few days earlier, McSherry had refereed a brawl between the Chicago Cubs and New York Mets at Wrigley Field. It was the worst thing I have ever seen in my life. It was pathetic, absolutely pathetic.

Oh, a footnote: Atlanta won the game 5-3 and Pascual Perez, who was never ejected, got the win.

Could this happen in todays game? Tim Flannery, the former Padres infielder who later won three rings on Bruce Bochys coaching staff at San Francisco, thinks not.

You know, its funny, that fight comes up every year near the anniversary in August, Flannery said. Its so different today. Its hard for todays players to understand. Theyve sanitized the game with no collisions at second base and at home and bigger bases.

RELATED: 2022 MLB on Peacock schedule: How to watch, live stream Sunday morning baseball games online

Flannery made one other point.

When you look back on the 80s, teams stayed together. Players didnt jump around from team to team nearly as much. Now, a team has a bad year and a player says I want out. The commitment is different today.

With that in mind for todays game, its hard to imagine anything resembling what took place on Sunday, August 12, 1984 in Atlanta.

I went to the archives for this piece thanks in part to the Society for American Baseball Research.

Padres vs Braves: Remembering one of the worst brawls in baseball history originally appeared on NBCSports.com

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Padres vs Braves: Remembering one of the worst brawls in baseball history - Yahoo Sports

Most of us who spend our time reading books gobble up their verbal contents, then set aside or at best shelve the container. But those receptacles have an identity and existence of their own: with their upright spines, their paper layered like skin and their protective jackets, books possess bodies and wear clothing, and they enjoy adventures or suffer mishaps as they circulate around the world. Overlooking the epic bulk of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer addresses the poem as his little book and sends it off into the future with fond parental solicitude, while in Thackerays Vanity Fair the heroine begins her career of rebellion by hurling a copy of Samuel Johnsons officious, prescriptive dictionary out of the window.

In Portable Magic, Emma Smith wittily and ingeniously studies books as objects, possessed by readers not produced by writers. Her title, borrowed from an essay by Stephen King, emphasises the mobility of these apparently inert items and their occult powers. Like motorcars or metaphors, books transport us to destinations unknown, and that propulsion has something uncanny about it. Smith begins with sorcerers conjuring as they consult books of spells; she goes on to examine the varieties of magical reading, which range from the spiritual transcendence of Saint Augustine, who was converted by a random perusal of the Bible, to the dark arts of a necromantic volume such as Mein Kampf, distributed to all households during the Third Reich as a sinister talisman, the bibliographic manifestation of Hitlerism.

In their packaging, early gospels brought heaven down to Earth, lettered in celestial gold and silver on regally purple parchment. Other books scrutinised by Smith have been desecrated or, as she cheekily puts it, visually pimped. Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell were imprisoned for replacing illustrations in genteel books with homoerotic pinups, although the Islington library that had them prosecuted now displays the defaced copies as artistic treasures. Elsewhere, Smith locates books with an incendiary intent: a paperback murder mystery from the apartheid era in South Africa secretes a bomb-making manual inside, and a 17th-century Venetian missal encloses a boxed pistol with a silken bookmark that activates its trigger. Better these lethal boobytraps than the blandly curated shelves of Gwyneth Paltrow, whose interior designer supplied her with job lots of blooks chosen for the soothing colour of their spines.

Etymologically, all books are analogues of the Bible, since the word biblion derives from a Semitic term for papyrus or scroll. On her way through the centuries, Smith teases some playful neologisms out of that ancient root. Fortune-tellers indulge in bibliomancy by opening books at random to find prophetic guidance, Ortons indecent collages are described as a creative biblioclasm, and the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow exhibits an act of bibliocide when books in the New York Public Library are incinerated for fuel during a new ice age. Best of all is Smiths translation of the scholarly term incunabula as biblio-babies: these 15th-century printed books derive their name from the Latin for swaddling clothes or cradle, which makes them infants from Gutenbergs nursery. Nearer to the present, mass-marketed books challenge readers to multiply in their own unmechanical way. Paperbacks, Smith declares, were the baby-boomers of the book demographic, and Dr Spocks The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care was one of the new formats first huge successes.

Smith reads with all her senses alert. She listens to pages rustling when turned, sniffs bindings like a winebibber relishing the bouquet of a vintage, and deliciously inhales the woody vanilla musk of cheap secondhand bookshops; she knows the recipes for making ink, which in the case of one Norse saga involved boiling the berries of an Arctic shrub. Indulgent about the rings left by coffee mugs, she also treasures the spattered sauce on her kitchen copy of Claudia Rodens Med: books cater to every appetite.

Although Smith defines herself as a bookish academic, she balks at Arcimboldos 16th-century portrait of a man constructed from books, with fluttery pages for hair, ribs made of stacked tomes, and bookmarks for fingers. The monstrous figure in the painting reminds her that the book-human relationship is reciprocal: if we are made up of books, books are made up of us. Proving the point, she notices that a small Spanish-language Bible confiscated from a migrant at the US border is curved around the contours of a body, having been stuffed in a pocket for comfort and companionship during the long trek north to the Rio Grande.

In holding a book we clasp or embrace it or even nurse it on our laps: the meeting of minds relaxes into a closer communion, and when you finish Portable Magic its pages will be spotted with your fingerprints and dusted by traces of your DNA. Smith encourages this intimacy by puffing Phew! after a particularly strenuous page of argumentation and thanking readers who stay the course. Her wise, funny, endearingly personal book made me want to shake her hand, or give her a grateful, disembodied hug.

Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers by Emma Smith is published by Allen Lane (20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers review a spine-tingling adventure - The Guardian

Granting that maritime jargon can be esoteric, a few basic commandments have governed the English language for at least 500 years. One is: Thou shalt not confuse ships with boats. Ships carry boats, but not vice versa, and any surface vessel large enough to carry its own boats is a ship. When a layperson confuses the terms, it may seem like terminological pettifogging to correct the error but in a work of naval history, the standard is different. To call a heavy warship a boat, as is often done in these pages, is a cardinal error. Entire classes of giant battleships and aircraft carriers are introduced, for example, as Iowa-class boats, Yorktown-class boats, Illustrious-class boats and Bismarck-class boats.

In a quick look at Kennedys earlier works, no references to boats for ships are found. In Victory at Sea, the instances fall into a 70-page section of the book, in Chapters 8 and 9. The question arises: After decades of having used the terms correctly, did Kennedy write the mistaken phrases in this book? Or did he lose control of the editing process? In his acknowledgments, he names eight research assistants, seven at Yale and one at Kings College London. He claims sole responsibility for the final product, warts and all, and in a strict sense, he is right to. But with enough research assistants to organize a basketball team, one wonders whether better coaching was needed. At the very least, some part of the collective effort could have been diverted to identifying and correcting errors, for example, by searching Wikipedia.

In a mark of his confidence as a scholar, Kennedy does not gloss over his reliance on that online encyclopedia. He quotes from Wikipedia liberally in the main text, cites it more often than any other single source and regrets that he cannot acknowledge so many fine though anonymous authors by name. And indeed, Wikipedia does not deserve much of the disparagement often aimed against it. As a first look reference, it is a handy tool; this reviewer even consulted it while writing this review. Wikipedias articles on military history have improved in recent years, and many contain information not easily found elsewhere on the web. But, by Wikipedias own account, studies measuring its accuracy and reliability have been mixed, and its crowdsourced model means that any page can be edited by anyone, at any time, anonymously. For that reason, Wikipedia does not consider itself to be a reliable source and discourages readers from using it in academic or research settings. Many university professors would mark down a student paper that included uncorroborated Wikipedia citations. For a major university press to include more than 80 in one volume may be unprecedented. What on earth is going on in New Haven?

Kennedys professional legacy rests upon 50 years of distinguished scholarship. He is a legitimately great historian. No one book, much less a single faultfinding review, could dull a reputation that glitters so brightly. As the preface tells us, Victory at Sea was first conceived as an art book. After Ian Marshalls death, the project grew by degrees into something much bigger and more ambitious. If Kennedys motive in reimagining the book was to pay posthumous tribute to a dear friend, it lends a noble character to the enterprise, in which case the reviewer is a rascal who deserves to feel ashamed of the criticism offered here.

But what is true of maritime affairs is equally true in the profession of history: If you book the passage, you have to pay the freight. Scholarship progresses inexorably. Let a decade go by, and the price of updating ones expertise might be 20,000 pages of new reading. Researching and writing history is like a spinach-eating competition in which the only possible prize is another helping of fresh, steaming vegetables. In a valedictory passage in his acknowledgments, Kennedy seems to concede that some spinach was left uneaten: If I have failed to acknowledge another scholars work, I apologize; it has been a joy to give credit (in the endnotes) to so much earlier writing and research. The sentiment is generous but perplexing. To apologize seems a bit much better, perhaps, to call it a sense of regret? A consciousness of shortcoming? But if the point is to concede that Victory at Sea is based mainly on outdated scholarship, wouldnt the apology be owed to the reader, rather than the neglected scholars?

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The Battle for the Seas in World War II, and How It Changed History - The New York Times