Preface to Essays

I had a pedantic essay posted here last year and now humbly update it. I was then working on starting to teach High School and getting my teacher certification. At the time I was having discussions with my daughters reminding me about Hanna Arendt and Robert Nozick and Frederick Nietzsche and …. I started revisiting many of the authors I had once read when younger, but now revisited many decades later, found all to have a different texture.

I had a great mentor (an experienced teacher of 30 years) and really enjoyed working with teenagers. But, my dreams of teaching were dashed against the rocks of a stultifying public schools system (strange to say that the life of discipline in the military has more freedom and creativity, or so it felt to me.) In any case, I resigned and took off to take care of my sick brother, travel and visit family and friends. And, after a few months of doing that , during an inspirational visit to the American Museum of National History during Xmas 2005, started pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology. This led me to Africa to look at human origins, million year old bones and hunt for stone age tools. But, ...

Then, by a strange confluence of events during a week stay in the Catskills during late summer 2006, a historian friend placed me in a Ph.D. program in England for military history. So here I go on another strange trip ...