Not all my readers will recognize the allusion. When Edward Gibbon presented the second volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the Duke of Gloucester, said Duke is said to have remarked, “Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?”

No thick volume has come from me, but the Bennington Museum has issued A Continued Clap of Thunder (422 pages), a collection of essays on the Battle of Bennington and various Vermont subjects. I have one of the former (just a concise account of the Battle) and one of the latter in the book.

I was glad to see that they reprinted my piece on Robert Frost and Bennington College, which first appeared in the Walloomsack Reviewfive years ago. 

I’ve published a couple of history pieces in the Bennington Banner in recent weeks:

https://www.benningtonbanner.com/local-news/local-history-phil-holland-who-said-the-first-link-first-hint—it-wasn/article_32f030d6-d63c-4ffb-8168-7835c0cf385d.html

https://www.benningtonbanner.com/local-news/local-history-phil-holland-burns-and-atkinson-take-on-the-battle-of-bennington/article_e238feff-2a9c-4342-94fa-1dd9efba6eba.html

Next up: I’m working with Museum curator Jamie Franklin on an audio component for a new exhibit on the Battle of Bennington. The first-person voice-acted audio clips in the Ken Burns Revolutionary War documentary were inspiring. I did this kind of work for the Friends of the Bennington Battlefield in 2022. 

It’s official: the Bennington 250^th Committee has awarded a grant to three of us (Katie Brownell, Ingrid Madelayne, and me) to write and produce a play based on Sarah Rudd’s 90-page pension file, to go up in 2027. I am very excited about this project. It will take me not only into Revolutionary War Bennington but to Bennington and Washington, D.C, in 1837-8, the latter location for scenes at the U.S. Commissioner of Pensions’ office.