#Tony Horwitz

[fenris64]

I have 30 feet of just travel literature at home.

Drawn in Adobe Fresco on iPad from an iPhone photo. The only book I regret buying is Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl because he was such an asshole. He wanted artefacts from Easter Island indigenous peoples who were reluctant to give them to him, so he lied and cheated and fooled them into doing so. Those artefacts are in Oslo now instead of still on the Island. SUCH a complete asshole.

[genevieveetguy]

. I don't know how to stop Anxiety. Maybe we can't. Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less joy.

Inside Out 2, Kelsey Mann (2024)

[galescafe]

lunchtime bio and sushi / billy at sunset

04 FEBRUARY 2024 | 43/100 DAYS OF PRODUCTIVITY

woke up sooo late, but i was having a really weird dream that i can't remember the specifics of, but tom holland was in it as the antagonist

leftover sushi from last night for lunch while i finished a 75-question pset for physiology

went to choir practice for the cultural show i'm gonna be part of

sunday reset! went grocery shopping and am washing my sheets

now slogging away at the endless readings for my other classes

wearing a mask in public is an act of love!!

🎧: voulez-vouz - abba (best abba album, u can't change my mind) 📚: confederates in the attic - tony horwitz (26%); the body in pain - elaine scarry (9%) 

i had a friend make a joke about the "light reading" i'm doing, and she was so real for that, reading one book about neo-confederates and one about war/torture/pain is making for some real "light reading"

[drjohnhwatson]

I read 93 books this year!! Over triple the amount of last year (29), so I’d like to give my ten favourite books I read to close out this year on the very last day!

The Whimbrel House series by Charlie N. Holmberg (only the first two but!) (YES I’m allowed to do series!!)

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton

Leeward by Katie Daysh (19th century naval queer fiction and is promising to be the start of a series)

The Gower Street Detective series by MRC Kasasian (my absolute favourite of the lot by far) (a tongue-in-cheek 19th century PERSONAL detective and his assistant handling really fucked up gory cases. It’s very funny (seriously!) and the detective is lovably awful and grows through the series)

One Night in Hartswood by Emma Denny (queer story set in the 14th century!)

Queen of Scots: The True Life of Marie de Guise by John Guy (nonfiction)

Edward III: The Perfect King (nonfiction)

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War by Tony Horwitz (nonfiction)

Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman by Mary Mann Hamilton (nonfiction) (bring hankies 😢)

[artfulprankster]

“It feels so good to laugh!”

Short summary:

George Beard is a fourth grader at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School. He is best friends with Harold Hutchins and is one of the two main protagonists of the Captain Underpants series. He lives with his parents and two cats. He’s the de facto leader of the trio, using his bravery to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

🖌Basic information 🖌

Name: George Beard

Age: 10

Gender: Cis-Male

Pronouns: He/him

Height: 4’6

Birthday: July 11, 1986

Zodiac: Cancer

Sexuality: Bi

Species: Human

Race: Black

Languages: English

Relationships:

Family:

Barbara Beard (mother), Moses Beard (father), Harold Hutchins (Non blood related brother), George's Grandma (grandma), Lisa Beard (future wife), Nik Beard (future son), Meena Beard (future daughter).

Friends: Captain Underpants, Sulu, Crackers, Erica Wang, Bo Hweemuth, Steve Yamaguchi, Jessica and the Sophies, Stanley Peet, Dressy Killman, Moxie Swaggerman, Melvin Sneedly (Sometimes), Tony, Orlando, and Dawn, Livmen, Wendy Swan, Mr. Cleveland, Cash Networth, Diddlysaurus, Plungerina, Creeply Rattlechains, Grace Wain, Jerry Citizen, Dr. Shifty Fitzgibbons, Old Captain Underpants, Sergeant Boxers.

Apperance

George is a 10 year old boy. He is introduced as being "the kid on the left with the tie and flat top". True to this description, George wears a white collared T-shirt with a red tie and has a crew cut (before Harold gave him a haircut during their final anti-bully prank, he had an afro that was bigger than his body at the time). He also wears shorts and brown shoes. In the animated incarnations, his hair is curlier.

In Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, his yellow tie has red stripes, his shorts are a bit lighter, and his sneakers are black and white.

In The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants, his tie is completely red and his sneakers are dark blue instead of black.

Personality:

Alignment: Chaotic Lawful + Good

Archetypes: The Hero and The Everyman

Type: ENFP-T, The Campaigner.

George, like his best friend Harold, is a class clown and loves to pull pranks. However, George is more bold than Harold and usually the brains behind their prank ideas. He is the braver of the two, using his lionheart to stand up to injustice. George is ironically a bit more cautious when it comes to fighting monsters. Despite his pranking nature, George's actions are generally targeted towards adult cruelty, such as his teachers and not his fellow students.

His other hobbies are skateboarding, watching TV, and making comic books with Harold, where he writes the comics. He has created comic book characters like Captain Underpants, Super Diaper Baby, Timmy the Talking Toilet, Dog Man, Ook and Gluk, Boxer Boy, Great Granny Girdle, and the Amazing Cow Lady. Despite crediting himself as a good speller, he often misspells words.

He uses his bravery to help protect Harold, even though the later is much stronger in terms of physical strength. He doesn’t stand for injustice and will use his tie to give some no good bad guys a real kick in the pants. He’s also incredibly smart and resourceful, usually the one making plans in the middle of battles.

Fun facts and information:

❤️: George, Alongside Harold, canonically has ADHD and Dyslexia to match the series creator Dav.

❤️: George loves Hippopotamuses. He knows a good chunk about them and usually talks about them to Harold.

❤️: George’s favorite food is Chocolate chip cookies!

❤️: Even though George Beard is a 6th grader in elementary school, in most places 6th graders are in middle school. Meaning he’s a prodigy child And has advanced knowledge compared to other kids in his class.

❤️: In book 6, he actually breaks the fourth wall by yelling at the narrator to stop describing Melvin's booger form so much, as he's making everyone sick with his disgusting imagery.

❤️: He is extremely sensitive to loud sounds. As seen in the movie multiple times where he’s plugged his ears due to loud noises.

❤️: he is also afraid of blood.

Backstory and present:

Like Harold’s, this will have a mix of book lore and show lore. This section also contains spoilers for both the books and show.

Warnings for themes of bullying, brainwashing, mind control, violence and more

Pre-Captain Underpants / Early Life

George Beard was born a quarter of a year after his best friend Harold Hutchins. Described as a "precocious" child, George's mother had already taught him how to read and write, and by kindergarten, scored higher on tests "than most children half his age." In fact, George was so smart for his age his teachers recommended he skip to the third grade, but his parents decided against it, reasoning that George would be overall better off in a classroom with students his age. George's parents, however, came to question that decision, as although it helped George develop adept social skills and was well-liked by his classmates, he was often bored in class due to his higher intellect and sometimes got into mischief, to the dismay of his teachers and parents.

When not riding his skateboard, reading comic books and graphic novels, or watching monster movies, George would often write stories, and had reportedly "filled up" twenty one spiral notebooks full of "marvelously silly adventure stories" he had written, one such being The Fart That Ate Detroit. Most of George's stories would often get him in trouble, due to at least most of them being filled with inappropriate and violent content for his age, despite his classmates enjoying them whenever he read them aloud.

Sometime during or before kindergarten, he and his parents moved from Michigan to Piqua, Ohio, in the hopes of starting a new life. On his first school day there, George's mother wanted George to make a good first impression at school by wearing a tie, which, after a short argument, reluctantly agreed to wear it, stating that "ties are for nerds".

On the way skateboarding to school, George was waiting for the traffic light to change when he saw Mr. Billy Bill, an unfriendly and cold gas station owner, push his new neighbor, Harold Hutchins, towards a few mean-looking sixth-graders, who yank the kid up and steal Harold's lunch money while the gas station owner watched and cruelly told the kid he needed to learn to stick up for himself, apparently humored by the child's lack of advantage against the bullies. George was visibly angered by the hostility and unfairness of the circumstance, as the bullies and Bill were easily bigger and stronger than Harold and outnumbered him 5 - 1.

When the light changed and the bullies had dragged poor Harold away, George walked over and switched the words on the gas station sign from "Free Brake Inspection" to "Free Bra Inspection", attracting the attention of an increasing mob of women, who became angry at the new words on the sign and beat the horrible gas station owner senseless. George parroted the same words Bill had said to the kid.

Finished with Bill, George skateboarded to the school and yelled at the boys to leave Harold alone. When the bullies Kipper Krupp and his gang began to run toward George, he undid his tie and proceeded to whip Kipper and his friends with his tie, scaring them to retreat into a trash bin. With the bullies in the trash bin, George stated firmly to them that if they messed with him or Harold again, they "will get the tie", and snapped his tie in the air again to make his point. Through his tears, Kipper wailed for his uncle Benjamin Krupp, who came over and demanded what was going on. Kipper framed George for bullying him, and took George and Harold (whom Krupp thought was lying about George merely defending himself) into detention.

In detention, the two sat quietly until the kid started to draw. Harold introduced himself as George's neighbor, and lent him papers to write on. George and Harold spent the entirety of the detention (which lasted all day due to Krupp being so busy that day he forgot about the boys) working on their first comic together, The Adventures of Dog Man. On the way out the school, the two came across Kipper and his gang, about to give "killer wedgies" to a couple of kindergartners, but when they saw George, the bullies released the kids and ran away. On the way home, the two talked about each other's interests and decided to start their own comic book company, Tree House Comix Inc.. After greeting his father, introducing him to Harold, making a couple of peanut butter and gummy-worm sandwiches, the boys went straight to George's bedroom and began writing a list of Kipper Krupp's strengths and weaknesses, only having but only needing "kinda dumb" under the weaknesses section.

The next day at school, the boys spent every free moment they had spying on Kipper and his gang, studying his schedule, behavior, and activities. They got his locker number and the type of padlock he used, even going so far as to stay after school, when Kipper had wrestling class. In just a week, George and Harold knew Kipper's schedule better than Kipper himself knew. One day after school, the boys went to a local hardware store and bought a padlock that was the same type as Kipper's, and went across the street to a toy store and bought a Susie Sunshine Friendship Bracelet Kit. That weekend, George and Harold spent most of their time planning and designing pranks to assist them in putting an end to Kipper's bullying. They got a roll of shelf-lining paper from the Beard family's kitchen and pants and dress shoes Harold's father left behind and nailed them to a pair of wooden stilts they had built.

On Monday, George and Harold arrived at school fifteen minutes early to take the friendship bracelet kit and the stilt pants into the boy's lavatory inside a stall, which looked from the outside as if someone was using the toilet. When the rest of the students arrived, George and Harold continued with their day, until the afternoon when they asked to use the restroom, during which they quickly grabbed the stilt pants and used it and the shelf-lining paper to make measurements on and around Kipper's locker. causing him to get embarrassed in front of his friends However, Kipper eventually catches on to the setup and, the next day, him and his gang steal the pizzas that George and Harold bought for the kindergartners as a way to torture them even further.

Infuriated, the two friends come up with another major prank on the bullies in retaliation. First, they fill the four bullies' lockers with shaving cream to pass it off as ectoplasmic ghost juice. While initially this works, Principal Krupp points out that the "ectoplasm" was obviously sprayed through the vents on doors. Enraged and tired of the anonymous pranks, Kipper and his friends begin to torture the kindergarteners for answers, even stealing more pizzas, which George and Harold were actually counting on them to steal, as they ordered them to have double ghost chili peppers (Piqua Pizza Palace's hottest chili peppers) which cause the bullies' tongues to burn up completely, resulting in them getting sent to the nurse's office.

George and Harold eventually create a comic that tells the tale of Wedgie Magee and the signs of his curse, all of which match their pranks. After Kipper and his gang "see" that ghost (George on stilts, wearing a giant pair of pants), they run outside in terror, during a severe thunderstorm and power outage.

On Monday morning, Kipper gives a 5 dollar bill to Donny Shoemeyer and promises to return all the money he stole from him. Elsewhere, Kipper's friends are passing out money to the kindergartners and doing good deeds for them. Kipper and his friends eventually gave back all the money they stole and never picked on anyone ever again.

Elementary school days

As they grew up, they excessively pull numerous pranks on the cruel teachers, many of which are directed at their bitter principal, Mr. Benjamin "Benny" Krupp, putting the two at odds with him. The duo also create comic books about an imaginary superhero named Captain Underpants, who fights crime in a pair of underwear and a cape. They distribute these to their schoolmates through a comic company called Treehouse Comix Inc., located in their treehouse.

George and Harold's pranks come to an apparent end after they're caught tampering with a toilet invention, the Turbo Toilet 2000, made by the school's intelligent and local snitch and intellectual, Melvin Sneedly, on video. Finally having solid proof of the boys' antics, Mr. Krupp excitedly prepares to annihilate their friendship by putting them in separate classes.

To prevent this, George hypnotizes Mr. Krupp with a 3D Hypno Ring he received out of a cereal box. The boys see that Mr. Krupp bears an odd resemblance to Captain Underpants without his toupee and command him to be Captain Underpants. The boys soon learn the severity of their actions when "Captain Underpants" begins causing problems around Piqua. To prevent these issues, the boys take him to their treehouse, where they discover that they can turn Captain Underpants back into Mr. Krupp by splashing water on him and can turn him back into Captain Underpants by snapping their fingers.

Knowing that Mr. Krupp will continue trying to separate them, they decide to settle with Captain Underpants but insist that he be dressed up as Mr. Krupp under the pretense of a "secret identity," to which Captain Underpants agrees. His sudden personality change even manages to attract the attention (and affection) of the school's shy lunch lady, Edith. Just when George and Harold believe that their troubles have ended, Jerome Horwitz Elementary School is visited by an odd, German-accented scientist named Professor Pee-Pee Diarrheastein Poopypants, Esq., or as he calls himself, Professor P (who is pretending to be a nice school teacher). Captain Underpants (disguised as Mr. Krupp) hires him to be the new science teacher, but George and Harold are suspicious of him due to his violent and short-tempered attitude, as well as his resume's content.

Captain Underpants, George and Harold have a plan to make Jerome Horwitz Elementary School fun again. As the first step of their plan, George and Harold made Captain Underpants conduct the 1812 Overture, with whoopee cushions to reboot the school. As the second step, they open the art room. For the third step, Captain Underpants sets up a funfair at the schoolyard, However, Harold and George have to keep watch of Captain Underpants as most of the games involve water. Mr Krupp is snapped into Captain Underpants back and forth as the boys would try to keep track of him due to the shenanigans taking place. As it starts to rain, Captain Underpants is back into an angry Krupp. Mr. Krupp finally separates the boys, which causes their plan to fail due to Professor Poopypants's reign of terror.

Professor Poopypants tries to take over the town with a giant version of the Turbo Toilet 2000, fueled by the school cafeteria's rotten leftovers left out by Edith and uses Melvin's brain to turn the children into glum, humorless zombies. George and Harold are caught by Mr. Krupp but to stop Professor Poopypants, the boys had no choice but to snap Krupp into Captain Underpants once again. Captain Underpants tries to stop the villain, but due to having no actual superpowers, is effortlessly defeated and thrown into the toilet. George and Harold are captured and nearly turned into zombies, but are able to escape after Professor Poopypants mentions the planet Uranus, causing the boys to laugh and damage the Turbo Toilet 2000's computer, restoring the children back to normal. Upon consuming the mutated leftovers, Captain Underpants acquires superpowers and, with George and Harold's help, defeats and shrinks Poopypants. Professor Poopypants easily escapes on a bee while the Turbo Toilet 2000 is sent to the junkyard for scrap.

Meanwhile, George and Harold destroy the Hypno Ring while bidding their final farewell to Captain Underpants in an attempt to permanently change him back to Mr. Krupp. Feeling that Mr. Krupp would be nicer if he had friends, the boys set him and lovesick Edith up on a date, thus making Mr. Krupp have a change of heart. Krupp returns the comics he took away from George and Harold, and even admits their comics are funny. However, the toxic waste from the Turbo Toilet 2000 transforms all the toilets into an army of Talking Toilets which attack the restaurant at which Mr. Krupp and Edith are dining. Mr. Krupp and Edith notice a toilet eating a guest and as Mr. Krupp calls for a waiter to get a check in hopes of leaving, upon snapping his fingers accidentally, Mr. Krupp once again becomes Captain Underpants, carrying George and Harold away to help him fight them, much to Edith's surprise and admiration

Post movie canon and Wacky side adventures

The two friends since then have been on many adventures along side the lovable superhero Captain Underpants. The adventures are already written on Harold’s bio, so head over there to see more wacky adventures!

Adult life and more

George beard gets married to Lisa Beard sometime after college. He had taken classes for a culinary degree, to which he got a associates degree and then dedicated his full time into a masters in writing and history. George works as a successful author with his own set of Autobiographies, The life of a superhero’s sidekick, along side the Dogman series. He works alongside Harold and sometimes Melvin.

[ghostofskywalker]

i was tagged by @happy-beeeps for this! thank you so much :) :)

last song: hits different by taylor swift

currently watching: lucifer

currently reading: confederates in the attic: dispatches from the unfinished civil war by tony horwitz (i am getting relentlessly teased by my family for reading a nonfiction book for fun, but it's a fascinating look at why so many people in the american south won't let the civil war go, and i was born and raised in the north, plus i didn't get a history degree for nothing lol)

current obsession: star wars (really mostly the clones and prequel era in general) and taylor swift, but my agent carter obsession is always lurking and i am one bad day from getting fully obsessed with it again 😂

tagging: anyone who wants to share :) i never know who to tag with these things

[roscoebarnes3]

Joseph McGill Jr. coming to Natchez for two-day program on slave dwellings

Joseph McGill Jr., founder and director of the Slave Dwelling Project

NATCHEZ, Miss. -- Joseph McGill Jr., a renowned authority on slave dwellings, is coming to Natchez for a two-day program that will feature a lecture and a living history campfire conversation.

The lecture, which is titled, “The Education Value of Sleeping in Slave Dwellings: Mississippi Edition,” will be presented at 6 p.m. Friday, April 14 at Historic Natchez Foundation. The campfire conversation will be held at 6 p.m., April 15 at the Auburn slave quarters.

Both events are free and open to the public. They are part of McGill’s nationally acclaimed Slave Dwelling Project. The two-day program is being hosted by Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez National Historical Park, and Our Restoration Nation.

McGill is a history consultant for Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, S.C., and the founder and director of the Slave Dwelling Project. Through the Slave Dwelling Project, he has arranged for people to “sleep in extant slave dwellings,” providing experiences that “brought much needed attention to these often-neglected structures that are vitally important to the American built environment,” McGill said in a biographical sketch.

Since 2018, McGill has conducted more than 250 overnights in about 100 different sites in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

As a field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, McGill worked to revitalize the Sweet Auburn commercial district in Atlanta, Ga., and to develop a management plan for the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area.

McGill is a former executive director of the African American Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a former director of history and culture at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, South Carolina. He has also served as a National Park Service park ranger at Fort Sumter National Monument in Charleston.

McGill holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Professional English from South Carolina State University, Orangeburg, S.C. He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.

McGill’s work is recognized by authors and historians. He is featured in the books “Confederates in the Attic” by Tony Horwitz and “Behind the Big House” by Jodi Skipper.

Historic Natchez Foundation is located at 108 S. Commerce St. and Auburn is at 400 Duncan Avenue, both in Natchez. Parking is in the rear of Auburn, which is accessed from the second road on the right inside the Duncan Park Gate.

For more information, contact Carter Burns at Historic Natchez Foundation: Call 601-442-2500 or send email to carterburns@natchez.org. Information about the Slave Dwelling Project can be found at https://slavedwellingproject.org/

[anantradingpvtltd]

Price: [price_with_discount] (as of [price_update_date] - Details) [ad_1] Popular media can spark the national consciousness in a way that captures people’s attention, interests them in history, and inspires them to visit battlefields, museums, and historic sites. This lively collection of essays and feature stories celebrates the novels, popular histories, magazines, movies, television shows, photography, and songs that have enticed Americans to learn more about our most dramatic historical era. From Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, from Roots to Ken Burns’s The Civil War, from “Dixie” to “Ashokan Farewell,” and from Civil War photography to the Gettysburg Cyclorama, trendy and well-loved depictions of the Civil War are the subjects of twenty contributors who tell how they and the general public have been influenced by them. Sarah Kay Bierle examines the eternal appeal of Gone with the Wind and asks how it is that a protagonist who so opposed the war has become such a figurehead for it. H. R. Gordon talks with New York Times–bestselling novelist Jeff Shaara to discuss the power of storytelling. Paul Ashdown explores ColdMountain’s value as a portrait of the war as national upheaval, and Kevin Pawlak traces a shift in cinema’s depiction of slavery epitomized by 12 Years a Slave. Tony Horwitz revisits his iconic Confederates in the Attic twenty years later. The contributors’ fresh analysis articulates a shared passion for history’s representation in the popular media. The variety of voices and topics in this collection coalesces into a fascinating discussion of some of the most popular texts in the genres. In keeping with the innovative nature of this series, web-exclusive material extends the conversation beyond the book.   ASIN ‏ : ‎ B085KXVZ82 Publisher ‏ : ‎ Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (10 February 2020) Language ‏ : ‎ English File size ‏ : ‎ 4946 KB Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled Print length ‏ : ‎ 272 pages [ad_2]

[jdwrpdfo]

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War - Tony Horwitz

[galescafe]

early morning readings / evening in the stacks

01 APRIL 2024 | 71/100 DAYS OF PRODUCTIVITY

woke up at 5am this morning to finish the readings for a paper i had due at 5pm, and i gotta say that procrastination kicked my ass

finished the readings and started outlining my paper before my bio lab at noon

we did a renal function lab, which meant we had to pee in a cup every 30 minutes and test it, kind of a gross lab overall since it wasn't super sterile, and the whole room smelled like pee

went home after and finished my paper!

went to my sociology lecture, talking about genetic testing, which was super cool

had a dance practice for my cultural show in two weeks, finished choreographing and teaching the dance!

spent the rest of the night finishing readings for my seminars tomorrow

🎧: spotify's liminal mix 📚: confederates in the attic - tony horwitz (55%); we are a haunting - tyriek white (70%)

[krispyweiss]

Book Review: Tony Horwitz - “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide” *

Recreating an 1850s American journey by a 19th-century New York Times correspondent writing as “Yeoman,” Tony Horwitz details how much has changed - and much more has remained the same - in “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.”

Sadly, this book turns out to be the swan song from the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of “Confederates in the Attic;” Horwitz, 60, died of a heart attack while taking a walk just after the 496-page book was published. As it goes, "Spying on the South" is an appropriate bookend to "Confederates" and a book that, if it has to be his last, is a fitting end to Horwitz's esteemed career.

Following as closely as possible in Yeoman's 170-year-old footsteps, Horwitz travels by car, barge, train and mule down the Ohio River, through what is now known as the Rust Belt, down to the Delta and across Texas into Mexico to see what remains of Yeoman's time and what has been washed away by the tides of history.

The answers are not much, and not much.

Yeoman - aka the landscape architect and Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted - decided to make his journey to the slaveholding South with the goal of finding a way for the country's marching-toward-war sides to find common ground and prevent what would become the Civil War. But he soon found some positions are not defensible and some people cannot be reasoned with. And before his trip was over, Olmsted found himself working clandestinely with progressive-minded German immigrants in Texas who sought abolition.

For his part, Horwitz, traveling in the months leading up to the presidential election that installed Donald Trump in the White House, bunks with crusty barge operators on the Ohio; drinks with Cajuns in Louisiana; and gets hammered on cider at a demolition derby in Texas, recounts stories of post-Bellum, racially charged riots in the South and the monuments that pay tribute to them. He also eats copious amounts of health-destroying food that sidelines one of his traveling companions and makes portions of "Spying on the South" read like an unintentional preview of the author's sad demise.

By the end of his journey, Horwitz - like Olmsted before him - is despairing for his country. However, he retains his hope and when he finishes his trip with a visit to Central Park, he is buoyed by his inspiration's creation and its ability to bridge the economic, social and racial divides the surrounding New York City has built up over the centuries.

"Spying on the South" is not Horwitz's best work - that honor falls squarely on "Confederates in the Attic" - but it's a perfect capper to a near-perfect, and prolific career of reportage and writing. It stands as a gift to Americans of all stripes who want to learn how we got to where we are and how we might chart a different course to attain the high ideals we've always espoused and rarely lived up to.

Grade card: Tony Horwitz - “Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide” - B

* Sound Bites occasionally finds himself interested in something other than music.

8/4/19

[dr-archeville]

Tony Horwitz’s great-grandfather Isaac Moses Perski came to America from tsarist Russia in 1882, a penniless teen-ager, and one of the first things he bought in his new country was a book, an illustrated history of the Civil War.  In 1965, he showed that book to his very little great-grandson.  “Peering over his arm, I saw pen-and-ink soldiers hurtling up at me with bayonets,” Horwitz later wrote in The New Yorker.  “I was six, Poppa Isaac a hundred and one.”

Horwitz, who died Monday, at the age of sixty, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, a former New Yorker staff writer, and a distinguished American historian with a singular voice, full of compassion and delight and wry observations and self-deprecating humor — layers that covered but never obscured his deep and abiding moral seriousness about the task of the historian as the conscience of a nation.

The author of “Baghdad Without a Map,” Horwitz undertook adventure.  He reported on strikes.  He covered the war in Iraq.  He once retraced the ocean voyage of James Cook.  But, most lastingly, he wrote about the Civil War and its tortured legacy of hatred and division, battles that never ended.  Those pen-and-ink soldiers, in the pages of Horwitz’s many books, came to life in their descendants, champions of the Confederacy, modern-day Klansmen, anguished, angry, and haunted.

His book “Confederates in the Attic,” from 1998, shattered his readers’ understanding of the Civil War.  When Horwitz and his wife, the novelist Geraldine Brooks, had a son and decided to take a break from their work as war correspondents, they moved to a house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Horwitz started spending his weekends with Civil War reënactors.  The Confederacy, he reported, was alive and well, and as full of animus at the idea of equality as ever.  Horwitz interviewed a Klanswoman at a gathering, a macramé-making grandmother, who told him about the test she’d had to take, full of tricky questions.  “Like, if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out.”  Horwitz then asked her why she wasn’t wearing her robe.  “It’s a good look,” she said, but “the cleaning bills will kill you.”

Horwitz wasn’t the liberal tourist, laughing at hicks.  He hated that stuff.  That attic?  That was his attic, the American attic.  As a boy, he’d painted the walls of the attic of his family’s house with a re-creation of the Battle of Antietam.  “The attic became my bedroom,” he wrote, “and each morning I woke to the sound of my father bounding up the attic stairs, blowing a mock bugle call through his fingers and shouting, ‘General, the troops await your command!’ ”

I first met Tony fifteen years ago, when he spent a year at Harvard, and he sat in on a class of mine.  We’d meet for lunch and swap stories and take walks and talk books.  He’d come by the house and tease my kids.  The first time his family came for dinner, we played Fishy, Fishy, Cross My Ocean in the park, and he made an excellent shark.  The kindest, gentlest, and most generous people are always the ones most fun to watch trying to be ferocious.  He was like an uncle, the one with all the funniest stories.  Not the uncle who says “Gosh, you’ve gotten big!” to the littlest kid but the uncle who brings chocolate and says, to that kid, “Eat all of this before your brothers get back and I won’t tell them I brought it.”  Mostly, we e-mailed each other terrible jokes, because we both had boys who had a particular passion for really bad one-liners.

Horwitz reckoned with the legacy of the Civil War all his life, fearlessly, long before battles over Confederate monuments and the press’s fascination with the resurgence of white nationalism.  He was the rare historian — the only historian I can think of — equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated scholar, a devoted journalist.  He counted, among his heroes, John Brown, the subject of his masterly book “Midnight Rising,” from 2011.  But I think he identified most with the subject of his last book, “Spying on the South,” Frederick Law Olmsted, who, on assignment for the Times, reported on the South in the eighteen-fifties, years before he became a landscape architect and designed Central Park.  Horwitz retraced Olmsted’s steps, and redid his reporting, in Trump’s America, marvelling at what his “Fred” had seen, and what he hadn’t, and what’s changed, and what hasn’t.  He’d send me dispatches from the road, full of despair and homesickness and dread.  He’d struggled with writing the end of the book.  He wanted to find something beautiful for the ending, and where, now, is beauty?  A century and a half after the Civil War, twenty years after “Confederates in the Attic,” people hate one another as much as ever, hurtling tweets as barbed and blood-soaked as bayonets.

He went, in the end, to Central Park, to wander.  He struck up a conversation with a sixth grader from Harlem, and asked him what he liked best about the park.  “Going where I want,” the kid said.  Tony said he thought the man who designed the park would like that, and the kid asked what his name was, and then the kid said, “Tell Fred he did good.”

Horwitz is very much the sort of writer where historians of a certain generation are going on Twitter to say he's the reason they got into history.

[daziechane]

Y’all.  I am crushed.  Tony was a friend of a friend, a brilliant author, and the catalyst for my fascination with the American Civil War.

I’m crushed.  We’ve lost a brilliant mind.

[bigtickhk]

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz https://amzn.to/2Ymf7GI  

[conchobarbarian]

I'm listening to a book about it (midnight rising by tony horwitz) & honestly there are just a lot of Characters involved

also fuck yeah violent resistance to a morally bankrupt government

prestige tv show about john brown's raid when

[artofquotation]

In Memory: “Even aimless journeys have a purpose.” "Even aimless journeys have a purpose." Tony Horwitz, 1959-2019, author, Pultizer Prize winner, quote from “One for the Road"