Depending on the circles you travel in, you may be aware that some right-wing types believe that there is a concerted “War on Christmas” that has been going on for years. Just Google “War on Christmas” and you will find over 2 million hits. Or you could go to Amazon.com and buy Fox…
Every year as an icebreaker exercise I ask students to name which record album they would want with them if they were trapped on a desert island (with an infinite supply of electricity). Parenthetically, I’ve been doing this so long that I’ve had to change the question from “record album” to “CD” and…
Sometimes I like to play the “What Do They Have In Common” game. Like, it’s cool to know that the members of Steely Dan and Larry Hagman all went to Bard College. Or that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after they signed…
I am a teacher of history for a living. And at times my focus has been the history of baseball. I became a baseball fan at an early age, and growing up in Warminster, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia), I became a Phillies fan. In the mid 1970’s through early 1980’s,…
Last night I participated in Wyoming Seminary’s “Cannonball For A Cure”. In this event students, faculty children, teachers and administrators did cannonballs into the swimming pool to raise money for breast cancer research. Students made donations all week to see which of the adults in the community would have to get in the pool.…
Any sports fan is sure to be aware of certain truisms, or axioms that announcers, coaches and athletes repeat over and over again. These tend to make up sort of a “conventional wisdom” and to my knowledge they are rarely questioned. But sometimes they don’t make much sense. Here are my thoughts on…
Even though people are usually quite surprised to hear me say this, I am a devoted fan of professional wrestling, and I have been for decades. As a boy growing up in the Philadelphia area I used to watch WWWF (precursor to WWF/WWE) wrestling on the local channels. When we got cable in…
For many years now I have known the secret to making it as a player in Major League Baseball. In fact, this secret is so potent that I actually believe that it could be the key to creating the first woman big leaguer. I’ve kept this under wraps for quite some time, hoping…
The late Stevie Ray Vaughan Twenty years ago today, I woke up early to find the radio playing a song by Stevie Ray Vaughan. “Pretty cool”, I thought. I really liked SRV, to the point of having sold two guitars to pay for a Fender Stratocaster that summer, mainly based on the fact…
When the Sassy Librarian suggested that I start a blog, I naturally planned to name it Ethan Lewis’ Blog. After all, my website is www.ethanlewis.org, the online forum for my history class is ethanlewis.ning.com and I feel like it is a nice brand identity. But then I was told that “Ethan Lewis…