Baseball is starting up again and COVID-19 is still throwing fastballs. This isn’t the first time such good and bad news coexisted: Johnny Smith, professor of sports history at Georgia Tech, is co-author (with historian Randy Roberts) of the excellent War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War (Basic, 2020). Here are edited excerpts from our April interview.

On May 31, as protests and looting hit large cities and the airwaves filled with talk about the great need for racial reconciliation, I happened to be in Checotah, Okla. The city of 3,481 is the “Steer Wrestling Capital of the World”—and 3½ miles northeast of it lies the site of the most racially diverse battle ever fought on U.S. soil.

It’s pretty tough, some wise sage has observed, to overestimate the power of the printed page. 

Which prompts me to ask: Does the size of that printed page make any difference in its final impact?

I raise that issue because of a nostalgic discovery I made a few weeks ago, and which I share with you below on this page. It is a faithful reprint of the Sunday bulletin of the church where my father was pastor in 1949. The bulletin was a simple 3-by-5 black-and-white, front-and-back leaflet. It stirs my memory on two fronts.

Many of us are familiar with the Jerusalem event of A.D. 30 or 33 that is the turning point in all human history and our own salvation. Fewer of us know of the Jerusalem disaster of A.D. 70 that offers a crucial spiritual lesson.

Picture this scene 1,950 years ago: Roman legions, the top soldiers in the world, have spent four years subduing almost all of ancient Israel. Romans have crucified thousands, some upside down or sideways, and enslaved others. Desperate Judeans and Galileans have responded ferociously. 

Amity Shlaes graduated from Yale, became a journalist, and is now a Forbes columnist and the author of five books, including The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression and her latest, Great Society, which spotlights the cracks in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Richard Nixon’s attempts to expand it. Her reporting-honed ability to tell a good story, with human interest and specific detail, makes those history books a delight to read.

We’re publishing a monthly series of “stump speeches” I’ve given over the last 25 years. Last month, it was a talk I gave about Andrew Jackson and peer pressure. In April, we posted my speech about how concerns over corrupt Anglicanism helped spur American colonists to revolt. Here’s one I gave at a conference hosted by the Jonathan Edwards Institute on July 6, 1999.

A salvage firm can retrieve the Marconi wireless machine that the crew of the RMS Titanic used to signal for help, a judge ruled on Monday. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith’s decision amends an earlier order blocking RMS Titanic Inc. from cutting into the wreckage of the ocean liner. Beach said the company has a unique opportunity to recover an artifact from the rapidly decaying ship. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration argued against the mission, saying the telegraph is likely surrounded “by the mortal remains of more than 1,500 people.”