Arts & Culture, History, and Music

Beata Palya
Secret World of Songs: Beata Palya

Even if I’m emotional, I want to turn those feelings into a nice, musically worked out song. I like words and meaning but I also like sounds, rhythm and melodies. So, I‘m like a mother, looking after her two children – words and music – playing together, I love them both. I want to make both happy, but I don’t want to see that one is pushing the other down.

James McPherson
Keeping Time: A Conversation with Historian James McPherson

Like many professional historians James McPherson strives for the gold standard of objectivity in uncovering historical fact and applying analysis. He prefers the careful methodology of Ancient Greek historian Thucydides (circa 460 BC-400 BC), whose major work, The History of the Peloponnesian War, is still read today in college history seminars, to the looser and hyperbolic writings of the man often referred to as the “father of history” Herodotus (circa 484 BC-425 BC).