Author’s Forward

After completing my BA in history at Eastern Illinois University in 1998, I found myself quite burnt out on the subject.  I also found myself engaged to be married, and with a step-son to see to.  As an introvert by nature, I found that the toll of every day life, work, family, and debt sapped a great deal of my energy, and all of my passion for history which at one point in my adolescence was like that of a raging fire.  Time passes.

  In August 2008 I took my family on a weekend camping trip to St. Louis.  We traveled along I-55 which at some points subsumed portions of Old Route 66, “The Great Mother Road.”  We went first to the Cahokia Indian mounds in present day Collinsville, Illinois.  Marveling at the scope of Monk’s Mound, my family and I climbed to the top of this structure, which at its base is larger than the pyramid at Giza.  We camped that night at a campground in Granite City Illinois, just off Old Route 66.  The next day, we spent in St. Louis at the Gateway Arch, and Old Courthouse museum.  I spent some minutes under the arch staring at the Mississippi River, and ruminating.  I don’t know what my thoughts were exactly, but they had to do with a combination of Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, the Cahokia mounds and Old Route 66.  Now my knowledge of history had never gone away, but at this moment my passion for it was which before had been warm embers at best, exploded into a bonfire.

Since that moment I have been reading history at a relatively accelerated pace, with a few asides to read some fiction so as to cleanse my mental palette from time to time.  What follows is a series of book reviews, of what I have read.  I do this on a personal note as an outlet for my historical passions, which is rare to come by in everyday conversation.  I do not know what the final product will look like, nor if it will be of any particular interest to anyone but my self.  I expect I will emote more than if it were being prepared for a college history class, and that they will be less abbreviated than book reviews found in history periodicals.  I will include a personal note as to how I came across the book in question.  Should any history periodical find these reviews worthy, these anecdotes can be removed.  The Tightwad gazette on the other hand might find them eminently useful.  It will be my policy at some point to send a copy of this to the history departments of any accredited university I can think of, so potential plagiarists-do your own homework!

-Michael Bruce Terry