Frontier Partisan Cinema — For Greater Glory

May 17, 2012
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Every once in a while, Hollywood surprises the hell out of you. What are the odds that a studio would take on a historical drama about an obscure religious rebellion in Mexico in the 1920s? Yet “For Greater Glory” hits theaters on June 1. The movie is a passion project of Andy Garcia, who has [...]

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The Day I Met Theodore Roosevelt

May 10, 2012
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This Thursday morning I spent a delightful half hour with Theodore Roosevelt. No, I’m not suffering from one of my periodic historical delusions (I haven’t had camp coffee with P.J. Pretorius for months). I was invited to meet Joe Wiegand, a nationally renowned Theodore Roosevelt reenactor. What a delightful man. Not only does he look [...]

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Safari to Gorillaland

May 1, 2012
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I stumbled upon a very cool site last week and thought to share it with my compadres of the silicon trail. (Best I can do right now with multiple deadlines staring me down like a pissed off Cape Buffalo). Gorillaland is the Web home of Greg Cummings, a conservationist and author of a thriller that [...]

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The Renaissance Frontier

April 17, 2012
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For most of the 15th and 16th centuries, the most important frontier in the world was the bloody sword’s edge that divided Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The epic, centuries-spanning struggle reached a savage peak when the forces of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent attempted to take the Mediterranean isle of Malta, the [...]

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The Siberian Frontier

April 10, 2012
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Stephen Bodio has announced an exciting development: the publication of A.A. Cherkassov’s 1865 “Notes of an East Siberian Hunter,” translated by Vladimir Beregovoy of Virginia. Bodio contributes a foreword. Visit Stephen Bodio’s Querencia for details, including ordering information. I’ll definitely be picking up a copy. Bodio’s foreword encapsulates what I find so endlessly fascinating about [...]

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The strange and twisted saga of Forrest Carter

April 4, 2012
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I’d be hard-pressed to name two novels that affected me more growing up than “Gone to Texas” (“The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales”) and “Watch For Me On the Mountain” (aka “Cry Geronimo!”) by Forrest Carter. Somehow I missed his most famous work, “The Education of Little Tree,” which I’ve never read. But those two novels [...]

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The Hunger Games — Guest Post by Ceili Cornelius

March 25, 2012
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My family and I went to see The Hunger Games last Friday. This movie is based off of a bestselling three-book series. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic era (the future) in a city called Panem with 12 outlying districts. Every year the Capitol of Panem hosts the annual Hunger Games. One girl and [...]

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A Tale of the Wild East

March 18, 2012
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Partisan warriors wearing fur caps; log forts; epic battles: The 18th Century American frontier, right? Nope. Try the 17th Century Polish frontier. The Wild East is terra incognita to most folks in the West. For my generation, it was a land beyond an Iron Curtain — it’s entire history obscured by the fog of the [...]

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Here come the Hatfields & McCoys

March 12, 2012
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My Frontier Partisan heart beat a little faster at the release of the trailer for the History Channel’s miniseries “Hatfields & McCoys,” due out Memorial Day. (Not least because of the potent, dark stomp of the song that plays over it: “Bartholomew” by The Silent Comedy). Watch it here. This is one of the great [...]

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Frontier Partisans of the mythic realm

March 10, 2012
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I have a curious relationship with Fantasy as a genre. I’ve never read much of it — generally preferring straight historical adventure or history — but what little I’ve read has had a profound effect on me.  Like many others of my generation, I read “The Lord of the Rings” once a year every year for [...]

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