Category: I Wrote That

Samuel Smedley: Man of Fairfield!

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Samuel Smedley, Connecticut PrivateerSaturday I’ll be at the downtown Fairfield University Bookstore to present about Fairfield’s Revolutionary past. Along with Rita Papazian — two for the price of free! — I’ll be discussing Samuel Smedley, Caleb Brewster, and the 1779 burning of Fairfield. The talk runs from 1-3pm on the second floor.

And if you’re a fan of Caleb Brewster, the first episode of Turn debuts this Sunday night on AMC. The five-part series dramatizes the events of the Culper spy ring, the famous Patriot intelligence network that developed in New York and Long Island after the city’s fall to British troops and Loyalists.

Brewster, a native of Setauket before decamping across the Sound to Fairfield, was a crucial link in the ring, ferrying information about British goings-on from Long Island to Connecticut and thence to General Washington. And as if he wasn’t enough of a bad-ass already, Brewster was also handy in a fight. The Journal of the American Revolution has seen early episodes and given it eight Huzzahs.

Solar Scuffle at Seaside Park

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Today at National Geographic’s Energy Blog, I have a story about Bridgeport’s environmentalist-on-environmentalist dog pile over a plan to situate a 9,000-panel solar array atop the landfill in Seaside Park:

Torres believes the solar project should be sited elsewhere in the city. “It does not belong in a park. It belongs on any of the countless, countless unused or massively underutilized land owned by the city.”

According to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), Bridgeport has 17 brownfield sites totaling more than 185 acres. This doesn’t include any number of non-polluted but abandoned lots and buildings in Bridgeport, a phenomenon so ubiquitous that Connecticut Yankee Seth MacFarlane once used it to zing the city on Family Guy.

Anybody who’s ever driven through Little-Detroit-on-the-Sound knows the city does not lack space for projects such as this. The real issue, of course, is that Bport doesn’t own any of those brownfields or derelict factories, so they’d have to lay some currency on the countertop before they could even think about siting the array anywhere but on park land. UIL sure as hell isn’t going to buy real estate for renewables.

I’m surprised Finch doesn’t want to put the panels on Pleasure Beach — it’s not like citizens will ever see a return on the $1.9 million appropriation to run ferries out there.

Blogosaurus Begins

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Dig, November/December 2013.I’ve been so busy I forgot to tout my latest assignment: writing a monthly column on dinosaurs for Dig.

The first column ran in the October issue. The November/December ish (at right) weighs the evidence of whether Triceratops was a separate species or just a baby Torosaurus. In coming months I will discuss why there’s no such thing as a raptor, T-rex’s teeth, if Spinosaurus actually had a sail-like fin on its back, and whether Pachycephalosaurus was a butthead.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the column’s title, Blogosaurus is only available in print or e-book. Alas, all of my suggestions for names were ixnayed; christening credit goes to the editor of Dig‘s sister magazine, Appleseeds. Some of my rejected titles included:

  • Don’t Take That Bone With Me Young Man
  • Do or Do Not, There Is No Triceratops
  • Mr. Gorbachev Ptero Down This Wall!
  • Diloph the Phone, Mom
  • That Was No Lady, That Was My Rex-Wife

Subscriptions to Dig are available in print and for Kindle. Just think — you can have me in your mailbox or e-reader nine times a year!

Samuel Smedley and Prize Division

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Over at the Journal of the American Revolution, I have an article on how the division of captured prizes undermined the Connecticut state navy:

All the sailors did the math and realized going on a privateer was the better option. That’s why Congress abandoned the two-thirds/one-third model and adopted a half-and-half system for merchant ships — they had to be competitive with privateers for recruitment.

Connecticut did not follow Congress’s example. They stubbornly stuck to the original two-thirds/one-third model. They wanted that extra sliver, that extra sixteen percent.

This greatly inhibited Smedley’s ability to recruit sailors for Defence. On his very first voyage, Smedley had trouble finding enough men. Just as they were prepared to sail from New London, the man Smedley thought was going to be his first lieutenant — a man by the name of Henry Billings — suddenly refused the job. Billings returned the commission in a letter to Trumbull in February 1777, writing, “I am offered the Command of a Burmudian Built Sloop fixing out as a Privateer — And I think to do Justice to myself & family I must except of the offer.”

If you haven’t read my book or attended one of my presentations, here’s a chance to grok the gist of it in 2,500 words.

Barbary Etymology

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Whilst combing the internets, I happened upon this kind review of my story, “Barbary:”

Despite some odd word choices (geezer), Kuhl vividly evokes a dissipated waterfront atmosphere… And, as a pipe-smoker myself, I raise my Peterson to the author who has written an authentic horror story which works through artifacts rather than artifice, and which delights and surprises throughout. This is the first Jackson Kuhl story I’ve had the pleasure to read and, I hope, not the last. Well worth investing in a copy of this issue of Black Static to read Barbary alone.

Much of the language used in “Barbary” was researched to prevent anachronism but apparently I didn’t dig deep enough. While “geezer” does hail from the early 1880s — the same decade in which the story is set — it derives from the word “guiser,” slang for someone who dressed eccentrically. Only later did it become a pejorative for senior citizen, which is how it’s used in the story. Mr. McEvoy is correct to bean me for it. Now somebody get me rewrite!