Hardihood Books Newsletter 50
June, 2025
Greetings.
Welcome to the June edition of the Hardihood Books Newsletter. Thank you for supporting my work.
Housekeeping:
No news.
Next Month and Beyond:
Nothing to report.
On Anniversaries:
Since it will be July by the time most of you read this, I thought it would be appropriate to kick off July's patriotic theme with my June newsletter. As I wrote last year, perhaps we should think of June as being the most patriotic month, or rather the period from Memorial Day at the end of May through Independence Day on July 4th. Flag Day (June 14th), the anniversary of D-Day (June 6th), and Juneteenth (the 19th) all fall during that six-week period. And this year we also had the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the Continental Army (which was celebrated on Flag Day with a military parade).
Back in April, we officially entered the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War - which began, of course, on April 19th, 1775 with the shot heard round the world. So in the coming years, we'll be celebrating a number of key anniversaries for our nation's history, perhaps most especially the semiquincentennial next year on July 4th. A little over ten years ago, we had a similar period of anniversaries for the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
Naturally, when we consider the sheer number of anniversaries some might ask why is it worth commemorating all of these events. After all, given that history grows longer every year, our year could rapidly be filled with anniversaries, with every day an anniversary of some battle or some signing or some first fill-in-the-blank. What a crushing weight that would be. And so many of these things which we are called to remember happened so long before we were born. Do they really bear upon our lives today?