New Book Is Out

On May 24th at 3pm at the Old Courthouse in Danbury, NC, I will be the speaker at the annual Memorial Day Program of the Stokes County Sons of the Confederacy. I will speak about Stokes County during the period of the Civil War as it appears in my latest book, Pine House, The Day Emancipation Dawned. The book will be on public sale for the first time at that program and I will do a book signing. Since this novel is based on Pine Hall, a plantation in Stokes County, the Civil War is a featured subject. The fictional "Pine House" is a Confederate Commissary and Leonard and Martha Nicholson loose their son during the war. At the end of the war, Leonard must adjust to the loss of his slaves as property and as an owned labor force. Still he is a farmer who must have "hands" to raise his crops.

The book can be bought through lulu.com. Look it up on the internet and type in Rodenbough. It sells for $19.95.

My Own Kunstkammer

I think it appropriate that I explain my choice of "My Own Kunstkammer" as the name of my blog. About a year ago I read the book, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II, by Peter Marshall. It was essentially a biography of this Holy Roman Emperor but I was especially interested in the Kunstkammer that the Emperor created for himself. Kunstkammer in German means a cabinet of curiosities or works of art. I used it for a collection of articles about antiques, art, and curiosities that Jean and I have accumulated over the years because we liked them and knew in many cases that they had some particular curiosity. The internet opened new possibilities of information that made what we only had as a minor curiosity into in depth details about the object's history and provenance. I had never dreamed this possible without days of research in far flung university libraries. Some day I might put some of these stories into book form but for now I am borrowing the title for my blog. I anticipate it will include opinions, curiosities, bits of historical information that may perform the function once performed by Rudolf's Kunstkammer.

Ken Byerly, Sr.

I just ran across a good quote from the late newspaperman, Ken Byerly, Sr. of Montana and UNC/Chapel Hill. "A dog fight on Main Street is more important than a revolution in Bulgaria." This seems to me to speak very directly to the difficilty the newspaper business is having adapting to the demands and resources for information of the 21st Century. Byerly had made a success operating small newspapers in Montana before he returned to his wife's native North Carolina to teach at UNC. Two of his sons were successful in the operation of small newspapers in Virginia and Montana and such newspapers concentrated on the "dog fight on Main Street." The American public is clearly transitioning in the way they depend on getting their news and the newspaper may become to the internet what radio became to TV.

Congressional Embarrassment

Since she first ran for Congress I have followed Rep. Virginia Foxx because she represented a district which adjoined my own, a district in which I grew up, North Carolina's 5th. My first reaction to her was, "where did she come from?" Out of the 5th District, which includes Winston-Salem, could they not do better? Sooner or later, old milk curdles. Virginia Foxx is old milk and she has finally curdled. So absurd were her comments before Congress yesterday, 4/29, concerning HR 1913 that they were picked up by the national media and the talking heads as fodder from the extreme right and pure horse manure for the left. She was heard characterizing the most egregious hate crime in recent memory, the beating and stringing on a fence to die of University of Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard (1998), as a "HOAX." Rep. Foxx said this in her statement before Congress and ironically before Matthew's mother who was in the gallery for the deliberation on a hate crime law which bore her son's name. The right of Rep. Foxx to make any claim that she wishes in sacrosanct but such speech as she exhibited yesterday exposes an ignorant, bigoted spokesperson for the very "hate crimes" that the Congress, by a vote of 249 to 175 agreed to appropriately criminalize. The report of Mark Binker in the Greensboro News & Record headlines, "Foxx Irks Gays with Comment on Killing." I'm not gay and I'm outraged.

My Own Kunstkammer

My Own Kunstkammer