I have said many times here that I am a Constitutionalist, and I do believe that within the US Constitution and Bill of Rights one of those rare events occurred wherein something fundamentally important about a free society was set down on paper and enshrined into law. I enjoy reading Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Paine. But I also feel--both as a scholar and a teacher--the need to examine completely divergent viewpoints: not to debunk them, but hopefully to learn from them. One historian who always teachs me to re-frame the familiar is Francis Jennings--one of America's leading scholars on Native American studies. About a decade ago, Dr. Jennings wrote The Creation of American: Through Revolution to Empire , and I have been reading it again as I somewhat unsuspectingly agreed to conduct several in-service trainings for History Teachers in the colonial/revolutionary period this fall [I thought I was agreeing to do the Civil War era; really do have to learn to read the fine pr...

I have a weak spot for the sea. I have always lived near the sea and love the people who live on it. When I was a boy, my grandfather told me stories of the four great Queens who ruled a pirate kingdom in Thailand. I came to love the Queens of Pattani in Southern Thailand through his stories; during Pattani's golden age the reign of its four successive queens from 1584,were known as Raja Hijau (The Green Queen), Raja Biru (The Blue Queen), Raja Ungu (The Purple Queen) and Raja Kuning (The Yellow Queen), where the kingdom's economic and military strength was greatly increased to the point that it was able to fight off four major Siamese invasions with the help of the eastern Malay kingdom of Pahang and the southern Malay Sultanate of Johore. After the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767 to the forces of Burma, King Taksin asked for military assistance from Pattani against Burma but the Sultan did not send help to him. After the founding of the Chakri dynasty Rama I sent Prince Surasi to p...