PatrickMead.net

In an age and time when people are frightened by 3rd grader’s drawings of a soldier and when Nickelodeon bans all Speedy Gonzales cartoons as offensive to Mexicans even as Mexicans pick Speedy Gonzales as their favorite cartoon character of all time, it might be surprising to some to know that, once upon a time, [...]

Even those who have only dipped a toe into hidden history know the story of St. Brendan. His name is sometimes spelled Brenden or Brandon, but “Brendan” appears most frequently in the medieval manuscripts that survive to this day. And there are a lot of them — 120 manuscripts still survive to tell his story.
Brendan [...]

One of the most fascinating characters in history is also one of the least known — Prince Henry St. Clair. I will do some blogs on him when we get around to the Templars. For now, you need to know that Henry was an exceptionally powerful figure in Scotland. When the Templars were banned and [...]

The Albans entered the British Isles as the ice sheets retreated around 7000BC. (all dates are up for grabs. I’m just using the most generally accepted dates) They maintained a presence there until 900AD when the fall of the Pictish kingdom of Scotland resulted in their removal from history. The Picts, also, lost their place. [...]

This sounds very suspicious and I am checking to see if our collective legs are being pulled, but this appeared in the UK Daily Mail, a center right daily. For years, people have found interesting blocks of stone in patterns that suggest roads and small homes all over the Caribbean Sea, especially off the Bahamas. [...]

On Friday, I went to the University of Michigan and had dinner with about 150 students who are members of the Asian InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The lovely Kami was able to go with me and we had a fantastic night. Everyone was all dressed up and the ballroom at Palmers Commons was decorated within an [...]

Hidden history will come back in a couple of days. If you are looking for last minute — but meaningful — gifts for Christmas, let me suggest a couple of books written by Rochester folk.
Debbie Haskell is one of our members who had a different response than most to the events of 9/11. She committed [...]

I’ve got a half hour or so today so I’ll write a new blog even though I just wrote yesterday. Don’t get used to that! My schedule continues to grow busier as our staff and economy shrinks.
Want to start a fight? Ask four or five historians or anthropologists (or linguists or geographers) where the Celts [...]

Phoenician settlements have been found along North and West Africa as well as throughout Europe. They were gifted sailors but, as I said last time, jealously guarded their ship building techniques, their navigational science, and their trade routes. No one could follow them past the Strait of Gibraltar until the fall of Carthage in 146BC. [...]

I wrote quite some time ago about Kennewick Man, a skeleton found in a washed out bank of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. The discovery caused a huge stir in legal and political circles that shows no sign of slowing down even today, 13 years after he was found. The skeleton was almost entirely [...]