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. 

Just published: A Guide to the Battle of Bennington and the Battle Monument, 2nd ed., nine years after my first attempt, which was successful enough in the marketplace to sell out. The front cover is (almost) the same, and the back cover now bears a blurb from Peter Gilbert, retired Director of Vermont Humanities.

The first edition was 56 pages; this one is 80. Some of the new material comes in the form of photographs that I’ve been taking over the past 9 years, and re-enactment photos provided by Peter Schaaphok of the Friends of the Bennington Battlefield, and a dramatic drone shot of a maintenance technician rappelling down the exterior of the Monument, provided by Vermont’s Division of Historic Preservation. There are new works of art, too, including a painting of the Battle by Jacob Lawrence, and Grandma Moses’s’ “Black Horses,” which she related to the death of one of her ancestors’ black horses at the Battle. Also new: sections on Molly Stark, on women at the Battle, on Black Patriots at the Battle, on rum, the official drink (per General Stark) of the Battle.

Once again I have had the benefit of the superb skills of graphic designer Leslie Noyes of Bennington. I don’t sell on Amazon, only in Vermont bookstores and shops. If you’re at a distance, you can order online from the Bennington Bookshop or Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore.

I gave my “Black Presence” talk in Shoreham, Vt., earlier in the month and will be doing it again in Sheffield, Mass., at the end of the month (the 26th, 6:30 pm) in the old Congregational church in the center of town. That will make the second church I have spoken in this month, as I gave a talk on Robert Frost and his Arlington connections to the Arlington Common on the 7th in the now deconsecrated mid-century Catholic Church on Main Street. That required dipping back in to Sarah Cleghorn’s Threescore, from which I extracted some moving quotations about the effect of spoken word poetry on her, especially Frost’s by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and modern poetry by her friend Halley Phillips Gilchrist, the force behind the Southern Vermont Poetry Society, which first brought Frost to the area. I enjoy these bursts of research and speaking, and a couple of local historians (Bill Budde and Shawn Harrington) dug up some good things for me. 35 or so people showed up and I was happy to take requests in the second part of the program.

Of course, Adam Plunkett has also spoken, in his new biography of Robert Frost. He persuasively explodes Frost’s oft-told tale about staying up all night at the Stone House in summer 1922 to write “New Hampshire,” then coming up with “Stopping by Woods” in the morning. Plunkett ascribes this piece of deception on Frost’s part in terms of his rivalry with T.S. Eliot and the clamor over “The Wasteland” (1922). I, with many others, have fallen for Frost’s and can’t call it (my 3rd edition) back now. It will have to wait for the 4th…

Meanwhile, we are almost all set for the 250th activities around the commemoration of the taking of Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys in May 1775. I have been quite occupied with those activities, especially in regard to the educational tour for 4th grade students. It’s another CVNHP-funded project, quite ambitious, too.