history Archives - Hal Phillips

Maine Place Names: Observations on visiting, pronouncing Vienna, Madrid, Calais and Peru — while never leaving the 207

Hal Phillips — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:16:00 +0000

Prior to the smartphone era, when folks read mainly in analog fashion, a great many of us kept a Maine Atlas and Gazetteer in the glove compartment of our cars, or the privy. Published by Yarmouth-based mapmaker DeLorme, this oversized, soft-cover booklet neatly divided this Great State of ours into 96 pages, or rectangular quadrants, […]

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World Series 1975 Revisited: Recapturing an All-time Classic, via iPhone

Hal Phillips — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:59:00 +0000

It’s often argued that the 1975 World Series — contested 50 years ago this month — ranks among the finest in baseball history. In terms of legendary personalities and the competitive iconography that framed them, Game 6 featured enough fairy-tale moments all on its own: a not-yet-befouled Pete Rose bellyflopping into third then popping up […]

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What Made Grandma Grandma? Graver Fleshes her out, using Family History and Fiction

Hal Phillips — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 20:16:03 +0000

Book Review There is historical fiction. There are the literary cousins of memoir and family history. Then there is the canny, lyric hybrid Elizabeth Graver conjures in Kantika, the 2023 novel that tracks her own family’s 20th-century journey from Constantinople to America, by way of Barcelona and Havana. Don’t worry: Ellis Island and its many […]

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It Was 20 Years Ago Today: Marking the Birth of Modern Red Sox Fandom

Hal Phillips — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 14:11:29 +0000

AUBURN, Maine (Oct. 6, 2023) — The Red Sox, for whatever cosmic reasons, have proved remarkably championship-prolific at the beginning of centuries. By 1918 they had claimed more World Series titles (5) than any team in Major League Baseball. That they wouldn’t win another until 2004 has been, erm, well documented. But listen: They had […]

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Adventures in Historiography: Why New Takes on U.S. History Rise or Fall

Hal Phillips — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 16:22:11 +0000

AUBURN, Maine (Dec. 23, 2021) — Let’s get to know Charles Beard, whose intellectual connection to the “controversial” 1619 Project may tar him in some quarters, but whose broader reputation has much to teach us. Born in 1874, Beard was perhaps the most influential American historian of the first half of the 20th century. We segment […]

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Great Moments in Getting Towed: A Brief, Late ’80s Anthology

Hal Phillips — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 13:34:55 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in Boston, which is to say it’s been a long time since I’ve experienced the complicated sensations of getting towed. Cars do get towed in Maine, I suppose. But vehicular hazards here are more often centered on large antlered mammals in the roadway, as opposed to somewhat […]

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Count Me Out of Any and All Baseball Hall of Fame Melodrama

Hal Phillips — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 20:13:26 +0000

In my dotage, I find myself at the heart of Major League Baseball’s core demographic. After all, I still watch playoff and World Series games in their entirety — not later, online, via some highlights package. I get choked up when Henry Aaron and other icons from my youth pass from the scene. I even […]

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Trump Verse: “Coup-by-Con” — an Alternative Fragment

Hal Phillips — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 16:43:55 +0000

“What’s unfolding now is an attempted coup by a con.”— Tim Egan, The New York Times, Nov. 20, 2020 In Xanadu did Coup-by-Con Via stately news bubble decree Where Rudy, the sacred river troll, ran Amok through caverns baseless and inscrutable to man Down to the Four Seasons — no, not that one. Twice the popular […]

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Why Politics So Often Trumps Piety: It’s Baked Right In

Hal Phillips — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 20:22:34 +0000

Confused by stalwart evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump? Don’t be. Organized religious movements, especially those of the Christian variety, are only nominally “religious” or faith-directed. They are, in fact, political movements. Always have been; they started that way. We aren’t confused by U.S. Chamber of Commerce support for Trump, for example. These captains of […]

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Unprecedented? Nope. Modern GOP Still Harking Back to the ’80s — the 1880s

Hal Phillips — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:27:33 +0000

With word that President Donald Trump planned to resume his in-person political rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 19, 2020 — that’s Juneteenth, a commemoration of slavery’s end and black America’s biggest secular holiday — the era of Republican dog-whistling finally came to a close. Tulsa was, of course, site of the so-called ‘race riots’ […]

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