Engaging Life with Courage and Intelligence
This is the story of one Y chromosome’s 250,000-year, 8,000-mile journey — from the Great Rift Valley through a near-extinction supervolcano, across the Red Sea, over the Eurasian Steppe, and finally across the Atlantic in 1640 — told as the road trip of a small, unbothered yellow bus who survives because he never needed anyone’s…
In January 1624, two teenagers married just days earlier boarded a small Dutch ship and sailed into a winter gale across the North Atlantic. They had almost nothing but each other — and they were about to help build one of the greatest cities on Earth. Joris Jansen Rapalje and Catalina Trico were French-speaking Walloon…
This is a video about the Rebel Who Measured America: George Hume, the Jacobite Exile Who Taught George Washington to Survey. In 1716, a 17-year-old Scottish aristocrat sat in a London prison, sentenced to die for treason. Instead, Britain shipped him to Virginia as convict labor — and accidentally exported a founder. This is the…
There is an interesting correlation between the familial roots of U.S. Presidents and their behavior as presidents. Even in the beginning, the families of the first six presidents had been in colonial America for several generations. It is probably no coincidence that the rule is that American presidents have to be natural-born citizens. Of course,…
A Brief History of Family X The following is the final chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. It is hard to put lipstick on a pig. Errol X and Maye Haldeman’s marriage dissolved after nine tumultuous years. Maye was high-spirited, physically attractive, and intelligent. Errol was her equal, but…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. John Elon Haldeman was an intelligent and educated man who relocated his young family from Minnesota to Saskatchewan. Although his son Joshua was drawn back to Davenport, Iowa, to attend the world’s first…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. Continuing from the last chapter, Maye Haldeman married into the family X in 1970 in South Africa. Maye’s roots lie in Switzerland in the Mennonite faith. Her Haldeman family was forced out of…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. Errol Graham X was born to Walter X and Cora Amelia Robinson X on May 25, 1946, in Pretoria, South Africa. His childhood was difficult due to his parents’ marital problems. His mother…
A Brief History of Family X The following is a chapter in a series about the evolution of the famed family X. Walter X never knew his biological father, Harry X, who died one year after Walter’s birth in Pretoria in 1916. Since Lucy Champion and Harry were divorced shortly before Harry’s death, we cannot…
I’m a little embarrassed about my birthday. However, there is a positive and a negative side to being a Gemini… I am a proud Gemini but… Donald Trump is a Gemini too. On the other hand, so were…John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Victoria, Paul McCartney, Judy Garland, Bob Dylan, Morgan Freeman, Richard Wagner, and…