This April, Abby’s society played three softball games. Abby was the captain and first basewoman of her team. The Bobcats acquitted themselves well. The Garland family and I were the most loyal fans. Take a look at the gallery of the last game, which was played on a very cold and windy day. I’ll leave the play-by-play to anyone who wants to leave comments.

An article from the Washington Post about how we react to beauty. Hear the performance itself.

HT: Andrew Garland @ Points of View

The single most memorable reading assignment of my undergraduate studies was an essay by Samuel Eliot Morison titled “History as a Literary Art.” Dr. Matzko assigned it for Historical Research and Writing. Morison pleads with young historians to learn to write history well and gives them “a few hints as to the craft.” His first hint has had the most effect on me:

First and foremost, get writing! Young scholars generally wish to secure the last fact before writing anything, like General McClellan refusing to advance (as people said) until the last mule was shod. . . . Above all, start writing. Nothing is more pathetic than a “gonna” historian, who from graduate school on is always “gonna” write a magnum opus but never completes his research on the subject, and dies without anything to show for a lifetime’s work.

What Morison says is true—I’d rather spend a week researching than an hour writing. For my paper on Puritans, Indians, and time, I have list of sources pages long that I would like to investigate. That research will wait till summer. Now I must “get writing!”

As I was researching tonight for my paper on New England Indians and the Sabbath, I looked at the devotional writings that John Eliot translated into Algonquian. One book was a translation of Lewis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety. The translated title was Manitowompae Pomantamoonk: Sampwshanau Christianoh Uttoh woh an Pomantog Wussikkitteahonat [sic] God. Notice that Early American Imprints included the note sic just in case anyone noticed the misspelled Algonquian word.

For the first two-thirds of a semester, words go into the student, packaged in books, lectures, articles, class discussions, and primary sources. For the last third of the semester, words come out of the student, packaged in papers. Like the law of the conservation of mass/energy, there is a law of the conservation of words: fewer words come out of the student than go into the student.

This semester, I have two significant papers to write. The first deals with Alexander Hamilton’s First Report on the Public Credit. The second studies how Puritans in seventeenth-century Massachusetts used Sabbatarianism and other conceptions of time as both the means and the end of converting Indians. It will first explain first Puritan conceptions of work and time, second Indian conceptions of work and time, and third how Puritan conceptions were transferred (or rejected) by Indians. I recently realized that I’m studying only half of the topic. It would be equally worthwhile to study how Indian conceptions of time were transferred or rejected to Puritans, particularly to the “white Indians,” the captives of the Indians who were assimilated into their culture. Perhaps I can expand the paper over the summer.