Mossbunker Review

After the strong response to last week’s reading of “Naboth’s Vineyard,” Dr. Liam returns to Melville Davisson Post with one of his favorite Uncle Abner stories, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. A brutal man is found shot dead inside a bolted room, two different people claim responsibility, and every obvious explanation collapses under examination. What...

In this episode, Dr. Liam reads Melville Davisson Post’s “Naboth’s Vineyard,” one of the finest Uncle Abner stories. A farm hand stands accused of murder, a young woman makes a shocking confession, and what appears to be a solved case begins to unravel when Uncle Abner sees what everyone else has missed. The story becomes a meditation on evidence, justice, public authority, and the danger of mista...

Melville Davisson Post is largely forgotten today, but his Uncle Abner stories remain one of the most unusual achievements in early American detective fiction. Abner is a Bible-reading cattleman from the Virginia mountains who solves murders, exposes fraud, and pursues justice in a world where formal law is often weak or distant. In this episode, Dr. Liam explores how Post combined legal experienc...

Melville Davisson Post is largely forgotten today, but at the turn of the twentieth century he was one of the most inventive writers working in the mystery genre. Long before Perry Mason, Post created Randolph Mason, a brilliant and deeply unsettling lawyer whose clients were often plainly guilty and whose genius lay in showing them how the law might fail to punish them. In this episode, Dr. Liam...

In 1946, Winston Churchill stood before a small audience in Fulton, Missouri and said something that would echo for forty years: an iron curtain had descended across Europe. But the speech he called The Sinews of Peace was never meant as a prophecy of permanent division. Dr. Liam argues it was an old Victorian's case for building enough strength to negotiate without fear. Not to fight, but to parl...

Dr. Liam reflects on what it means to be born in another century. The simple purchase of an Apple Watch to pair with his iPhone sparks memories of a very different world: the Cuban Missile Crisis, backyard fallout shelters, and a childhood lived in the shadow of nuclear war. From there, he discusses idea of a "short twentieth century" running from 1914 to 1989, coving seventy-five years that amoun...

“A man walks into a coffeehouse” is no joke. In this  redux of an earlier episode, Dr. Liam uses a little coffeehouse mischief to explore the idea that human beings stand at the center of what they know, and why that esoteric idea is so important. The Scientific Revolution taught us that Earth is not the physical center of the cosmos, but we can never step outside ourselves and observe the past fr...

Long before Dr. Liam knew Salt Creek Valley as the home of a rival grade-school basketball team, another boy was growing up there and learning some of the skills, relationships, and hard lessons that would shape the man later known as Buffalo Bill Cody. In this episode, Liam returns to the country north of Leavenworth, Kansas, where young William Cody learned horses, encountered Native people, bec...

A sixth-grade basketball rivalry, a mysterious bottle of “energy” tablets, twenty-two points in one half—and five fouls before the second half even began. Dr. Liam returns to the Salt Creek Valley of his Kansas childhood, where a humiliating afternoon against the hated rivals from the north became one of those stories that only gets better with age. But beneath the basketball and Three Stooges hum...

In April 1882, a twenty-seven-year-old Oscar Wilde carried his gospel of beauty into Kansas and discovered that the Sunflower State was not entirely prepared for an Irish aesthete in velvet breeches. Following Wilde through northeastern Kansas, Dr. Liam explores the strange collision between the Victorian Aesthetic Movement and the practical sensibilities of the American Midwest. Many laughed at W...

Before William Tecumseh Sherman became one of the Union’s most formidable generals, he was a melancholy banker, a restless businessman, and a thoroughly unhappy lawyer in Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr. Liam traces the unlikely prewar career of a man who often seemed badly placed, yet kept learning, organizing, observing, and preparing for work he could not yet foresee. Sherman’s story offers a wry and t...

When his wife, Precious, asked from her hospital bed, “Liam, was it worth it?”, she was asking whether a lifetime invested in people had truly mattered. In this deeply personal companion to The Family We Need, Dr. Liam reflects on the extraordinary friends who became family, and the surprising wealth revealed when a life of hospitality, storykeeping, and faithful friendship reaches its final chapt...

When my wife, Precious, died, I expected grief to teach me about loss. Instead, it taught me something unexpected about friendship, family, and the wisdom our ancestors may have understood better than we do. Drawing on C. S. Lewis, Erasmus, John Lukacs, and the New Testament, this essay explores why modern assumptions about family often fail us in the final chapters of life and why the Christian t...

As a boy growing up on a small Kansas farm, I was convinced our old milk house was haunted. One summer evening, I heard an eerie sound that reminded me of bagpipes coming from a mysterious box addressed to my father. What followed was one of the most frightening and, in the end, one of the funniest adventures of my childhood. Like good history, the truth turned out to be far more interesting than...

n this final episode of Precious’s hospital story, Dr. Liam tells how the last day came sooner than expected. As kidney failure and brain swelling overtook the remaining hopes for more time, friends from Arnold arrived, the ICU doctor offered hard but merciful guidance, and Liam spent the last half hour beside the wife he had loved since 1978. This episode is a tender account of grief, faith, frie...

In this third episode of Precious’s hospital journey, Dr. Liam tells the story of the frightening turn that came when Precious stopped breathing, returned to the MICU, and entered a period of waiting that no husband would ever choose. As doctors used plasma exchange, watched her liver numbers, pursued a biopsy, and searched for the reason she would not wake, Liam found himself living between medic...

As his wife’s battle with acute liver failure enters a more uncertain stage, Dr. Liam reflects on the difficult balance between hope and waiting. In this deeply personal episode, he introduces the remarkable team of liver specialists he affectionately calls “The Seven Wise Men" and shares what he is learning about liver biopsies, plasma exchange, transplantation, and the remarkable capacity of the...

In this personal episode, Dr. Liam steps away from the usual old-codger historical ramble to tell the story of his wife Precious’s sudden move to the Medical Intensive Care Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. What begins as a three-in-the-morning hospital transfer becomes a reflection on helplessness, love, medical uncertainty, the need for meaning, and the kindness of friends, nurs...

While sitting beside his wife during a difficult hospitalization, Dr. Liam discovers that hospitals are full of stories, though most arrive only in fragments. A sentence drifts through an open doorway. A nurse makes an odd remark. A family member says something hilarious, mysterious, or alarming, then disappears down the corridor before the rest of the conversation can be heard. In this episode of...

A tornado warning in a modern hospital hallway sent Dr. Liam’s mind back sixty years to another storm, another warning siren, and one of the most unforgettable afternoons of his childhood. In this 1966 Tornado Anniversary episode of The Mossbunker Review, Dr. Liam reflects on the legendary curse of Burnett's Mound, the devastating Topeka tornado of 1966, and a much smaller tornado that gave his fa...

A Popular Mechanics headline about a “lost section of the Bible” sent Dr. Liam down an unexpected trail of thought about manuscripts, media, memory, and the modern habit of mistaking headlines for understanding. In this episode of The Mossbunker Review, he reflects on how stories are simplified in retellings, why clickbait often distorts historical thinking, and what historians mean by “proportion...

In this episode of Mossbunker Review, I remember my Uncle Henry, the most interesting man in our extended family, and the person who first taught me that the world was far larger than the boundaries of my Kansas neighborhood on Maple Avenue. Henry had played minor league baseball, built grandfather clocks, studied languages, read thick novels, listened to shortwave radio broadcasts from around the...

In this episode of The Mossbunker Review, Dr. Liam reflects on a frustrating yet revealing attempt to uncover his family’s history. What began as a simple genealogical conversation with his father opened into larger questions about memory, silence, war, generational pain, and why so many families lose their stories within a generation or two. Along the way, Liam explores the hidden cost of treatin...

In this episode of Mossbunker Review, Dr. Liam reflects on his father’s unlikely interest in beekeeping and how those afternoons among the hives shaped his understanding of history long before he ever became a historian. What began as a boyhood chore in rural Kansas became a lifelong lesson in stewardship and respect for things we did not create. Along the way, Dr. Liam explores why “storykeeping”...

What happens when we stop treating history like a pile of facts and begin seeing it as a human story? In this episode of Mossbunker Review, Dr. Liam argues that history is personal, relational, and participatory. From Martin Luther’s troubled conscience to the letters of John and Abigail Adams, from Ken Burns documentaries to Holocaust testimony archives, this episode asks what it means not merely...