Writing History

America is safer, but if Al Qaeda attacks around Nov. 2 we may have to postpone the election (especially if President Bush trails in the polls). All the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, but the war was right. Sen. John Kerry doesn't have the combat experience to be commander in chief, but Bush's National Guard records were inadvertently destroyed. Millionaires Kerry and John Edwards cannot speak for the common man, but millionaires Bush and Dick Cheney can. We have given Iraq freedom from oppression, but not from getting its people killed by the dozen.

Re "Obama to Bush's rescue," July 1 Jonah Goldberg writes of President Bush's policies, "Whatever the merits of those policies, it's unlikely that historians will see them as a radical, right-wing break from the Clinton years. " If he's writing that history, highly unlikely. Goldberg also says he was in the Oval Office with the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists. Doing what? Washing the president's feet? David Hocker South Pasadena -- I greatly enjoy watching Goldberg squirm as he struggles to put a positive face on the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush administration.

A memorial service for longtime Artesia resident and historian Albert O. Little will be held today at 1 p.m. at the Artesia Community Center, 18750 Clarkdale Ave. Little, who was known to many residents as "Mr. Artesia," died Tuesday at Pioneer Hospital. He was 87. The center was renamed the Albert O. Little Community Center on Aug. 10. Today's ceremony had been originally planned to be a rededication ceremony, City Manager Eugene Romig said.

I am a former member of the 15th Hospital Center, a World War II Army medical unit that trained at Camp Barkeley, Tex., and served in the Zone of Interior at Cirencester, England, during 1944-45. I am writing a history of the old Army unit and am attempting to contact as many of our former members, or their survivors, as I possibly can. Many of my addresses are 40 years old. Four of our group came from the Los Angeles area: Leo Block, Merle E. Blough, Charles N. Morris and the late Glenn V. Woodward.

Ferol Egan writes in his excellent review of John S. D. Eisenhower's "So Far From God, the U.S. War With Mexico 1846-1848" (Book Review, June 25): "Eisenhower brings his background as a former Army general to bear upon the wide range of battles in this war." Actually, the former President's son, although holding a reserve brigadier general's commission, resigned from active duty in 1963 as a lieutenant colonel. And it was probably his 19 years' background at finally this Regular rank plus his subsequent distinguished civilian military writing career that contributed to this most recent work.

With millions of books sold worldwide, historian, Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Robert K. Massie has devoted the majority of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's royal family from 1613 to 1917. He will be lecturing on the craft of writing history Monday night at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont. Massie, author of  “Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman,” now available in paperback, became an expert on the imperial family beginning with "Nicholas and Alexandra.

Question: What interests you about writing history? Answer: I'm interested in telling stories, in capturing those moments when the internal imagined experience intersects with social reality. Individual lives give this experience context. I have to be adept at telling the tale and using the factual record. I have to be particularly choosy about which facts I get to keep. Q: What aspect of California history interests you most?

Ed Turner, 66, who helped establish CNN as a respected major news organization, died Saturday of liver cancer in George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. Turner was hired in 1980 as one of the first news professionals brought into the fledgling network. The fact that he coincidentally shared the last name of CNN founder Ted Turner earned him the nickname "No Relation" Turner, which he had printed on matchbooks he distributed from his office.

Harry Potter didn't even wait until the sun rose to start vanquishing box-office records. The last big-screen adventure of the boy wizard, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2," raked in $42.5 million at midnight screenings in the U.S. and Canada, according to Warner Bros. The previous record was about $30 million, set in 2009 by "The Twilight Saga: New Moon. " Fans eager to see Harry's final battle with the evil Lord Voldemort began lining up early Thursday for the shows.

Just about everything that has happened in tiny Sierra County in Northern California since its discovery in 1849 is recorded in James J. Sinnott's six-volume history. If you ever lived in the sparsely populated, isolated, mountainous county, chances are you are mentioned in Sinnott's historical series, which probably is the most comprehensive history of any California county.