Tag: history
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A Lifetime of Reading
January is a good month for reading. It’s cold outside, new books are coming out, and we may have received a few as holiday gifts. Getting lost in a book is one of the ways I deal with stress. My passion for reading has carried me past many rough patches: an emotionally fraught childhood, lonely […]
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Election Time. Who Cares?
Around this time of year, when I was quite young, a car rolled slowly past our house with big round “loudspeakers” fastened to the roof, from which blared the voice of a man telling us who to vote for, a voice I heard even after the car rounded the corner and moved down the next […]
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The Mysterious Black Madonna
Her face was everywhere. Growing up Catholic in the 1950s, statues of saints and their pictures on “holy cards” were a part of daily life. But the scarred face of the Madonna of Czestochowa was special. In our immigrant community, she represented the Polish people’s struggle for nationhood. A fifteenth-century Polish historian wrote that the […]
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Eyewitness to History
We didn’t always have television, as I’m sure you know. Some of us remember the day that big box was carried into our living rooms and the screen lit up with the faces of people in “black and white.” And so it was on November 24, 1963, that a black and white TV console in […]
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Kat’s Tales – first in a series
This is the first in a series of posts by Kat Kowalski, protagonist of my novel in progress, Memoirs of the Queen of Poland. Ever since I came back from the nineteenth century, I have wanted to tell my story. It’s taken me a few years to get it all down on paper. Life intervenes, […]