Brian Benoit holds a BA with Distinction in Philosophy & Political Science from Boston University (1986), and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He specializes in 20th century history. In 2012 he co-authored a children’s book, Crustacean Vacation, with artist Marty Kelley on Islandport Press. Mr. Benoit lives in Vermont.
Nearly two hundred years before Neo, the hero of the Matrix films, extended his consciousness to render bullets harmless in his ostensive reality, Comanche chief and medicine man Po-bish-e-quash-o...
It's October 1962. Two large countries are fighting over a very small part of the world. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes immediately to mind but there was a simultaneous clash over 8,000 miles away at...
Ah, the Caribbean! Turquoise water, miles of sandy beaches, tropical climate. Island paradises mostly, large and small. The Bahamas. Jamaica. Also, Cuba, but that's another story. Vibrant, ancient...
Part 1 recounted the unsolved murder of Joseph Brown Elwell, a wealthy man known for his card playing and womanizing. The Elwell case motivated S.S. Van Dine to write detective stories in the 1920s...
All it took was one bullet to kill Joseph Bowne Elwell, shot in the forehead around eight o'clock on the morning of June 11, 1920, in his tony Manhattan brownstone. He didn't die right away but...
In a world where cellphones and wristwatches are ubiquitous, it’s anachronistic to ask somebody what time it is. We’re immersed in time, and the evidence of its passage is all around us. Of course...
Suppose you were embarking upon the purchase of a car. A new one is out of the question; you don’t have that kind of money. You’ve been saving for this for a long time. You’ve chosen a nice used Lada...
The title phrase is drawn from colloquial jurisprudence; to “throw the book” at someone is to charge them with every crime for which they might be culpable, the goal being to “convict” them on all...
Allowing that the American Civil War pitted North against South, it’s fair to characterize America’s un-civil war as that which the “Great Father” in the eastern seat of government waged against...
A person’s social standing has much to do with where they sit, or whether they’re even allowed to do so. During U.S. civil rights protests in the 1960s, Rosa Parks and other Black citizens went to...
General Ulysses S. Grant’s wife, Julia Dent Grant, enjoyed sharing the following anecdote about their epic voyage around the world. Her story emphasized a key difference between her husband and his...
In January 1840, 31-year-old Albert Pike published a poem entitled “Dissolution of the Union.” With the arrival of the American Civil War, the poem’s prophecy was proven true; its Boston-born author...
Like many bank robbers, Cassie Chadwick proffered a note to her victims. Early in her criminal career, when she was just 22 years old, that elegant, imaginative note simply stated that because she was...
Grace Halsell was a ghostwriter before she became a ghost. As a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson she was officially invisible; as an undercover journalist she later adopted a number of racial...
The evocative quotation in the title comes from Dr. Benjamin Wilson, professor of history at Western Michigan University, who in 2002 wrote Black Eden: The Idlewild Community. “R and R from racism”...
Consider the groundhog, how its reputation precedes it. It neither sows nor reaps (over the winter), yet learned editors and numerous others laud this rodent’s “vaticinations” upon its annual February...
Intrepid souls who ventured out into the blizzard in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 7, 1875 might have encountered a singular apparition: a procession of formally-dressed African-American men...
The word “club” has divergent associations: on the one hand it relates to a weapon, on the other to a group of like-minded individuals who gather regularly for a specific purpose. Following the...
Ice is a remarkable substance, solid yet transparent, alternately useful and vexatious in cold climates, marvelous in tropical ones, made of water yet it floats. The arrival of ice in Calcutta, India...
It does seem a little like murder to pick off a man as one would a deer, but sharp-shooting in war is one of the “necessities.” The “Near Yorktown” correspondent of the New York Post relates the...
Blame it on a literal reading of the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 1834, the New Hampshire state legislature granted a charter to found Noyes Academy in the rural Town of Canaan. Because the...
In 1895 at least one death was ascribed to a work of fiction. Its overwhelming influence was described in viral terms before viruses were well understood as biological let alone social phenomena. That...
That there were witches in the olden times is true, else the Bible fights against shadows: for it tells us not once but many times that there were witches. According to printed sources dating to the...
Nineteenth century European Romantic writers viewed tuberculosis as a fashionable disease. The slow but inexorable progression of the “white plague” (or consumption) and the austerity of the pale...
![Mother Shipton. [oil on panel, c. 1830] Gift from Mary Allott, 1997. The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate.](/sites/default/files/styles/featured_image/public/2020-07/Shipton%204.jpg?h=e9f8c3f7&itok=J4ZsBwGJ)
