Mossbunker Review

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...

Can the fate of a nation really be glimpsed in something as small as how people eat in a restaurant? In this episode, I begin with a recent article’s claim about Britain’s decline, confirm it with a single, questionable observation in Glasgow, and then slow down long enough to ask what I am actually doing. Drawing on years of study, travel, and my own unlikely journey through the great libraries o...

What would you do if a man walked into your local coffeehouse and announced, “I am the center of the universe”? You might smile, dismiss him, or wonder what he meant. In this episode, we use that strange moment to explore a serious idea drawn from a prominent historian: that while the scientific revolution removed us from the physical center of the cosmos, the rise of historical consciousness remi...

This bonus episode recalls my only trip to the Final Four, in 1964, when, as an eight-year-old Kansas State basketball fan, I watched Tex Winter’s Wildcats fall just short against a UCLA team under John Wooden. From a seat behind the wrong bench, I witnessed the small details that hinted at something looming, the beginning of a dynasty and the end of an era for K-State, and the realization that so...

What do Martin Luther, a college cheer, and a boy running loose in Kansas City have in common? More than you might think. In this episode, I tell the story of the day my brother may have knocked down the governor of Kansas, and use it to explore a deeper question: how do we actually know what happened in the past? Along the way, we move from memory to evidence, from hearsay to history, and discove...

In this episode, Dr. Liam remembers a boyhood summer in Kansas when the Kansas City Athletics filled his imagination, and baseball seemed to explain the world. Inspired by trips with his father to Municipal Stadium and by the legend of his Uncle Henry, a former minor leaguer, a young dreamer set out to build a neighborhood ballpark in the weeds behind the family farmhouse. What followed involved a...

In this episode, Dr. Liam recalls a Fourth of July family reunion in Kansas in 1962, when his father dimmed the lights and introduced the clan to the wonders of a Kodak Carousel 550 slide projector. What began as a proud presentation of family photographs soon revealed something deeper. Slides were selected, rearranged, mislabeled, corrected, and occasionally replaced as new experiences and perspe...

Before the Ides of March became a synonym for betrayal, it was simply a full-moon marker in the Roman calendar. In this episode, we step back into the ancient world to explore how the Romans structured time through the Kalends, Nones, and Ides, and how their lunar, religious, and civic rhythms shaped political life. What did it mean to count backward toward fixed anchor days? How did a luminous mi...

In this episode of Mossbunker Review, we step into the middle of March and into two scenes of political drama separated by nearly eighteen centuries: the Roman Senate on the Ides of March and the Stockholm Opera House on a masked night in 1792. What connects Julius Caesar and Sweden’s Gustav III? Both centralized power. Both believed in the force of public presence. Both were warned. And both fell...

What does a fourth-century Roman emperor have to do with March Madness? In this episode, historian Dr. Liam follows an unlikely but revealing thread from Emperor Constantine, through the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla, to James Naismith’s original rules of basketball, exploring how authority is claimed, how documents earn trust, and how careful reading can quietly upend entire traditions. Blen...

What do historians and mystery writers have in common? More than we might think. In this episode, we take a close, historically conscious look at Dorothy L. Sayers’s Documents in the Case, an unusual and experimental detective novel written without a narrator, without a detective, and entirely from letters, reports, and witness statements. Reading the book as both a mystery and an archive, we expl...

The final episode of The Darnley Affair: A Historical Whodunnit steps back from suspects and speculation to ask how historians judge events that resist definitive proof. Reflecting on the aftermath of Darnley’s murder and the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, Liam J. Atchison and Athanasios Arkoudos explore how political narratives harden into historical memory—and why unresolved cases may teach us mo...

In the second episode of The Darnley Affair: A Historical Whodunnit, Liam J. Atchison and Athanasios Arkoudos turn from the crime itself to the figures who stood to benefit from it. Examining Mary, Queen of Scots, the Earl of Bothwell, the Earl of Moray, and the wider political forces at work, this episode explores motive, opportunity, and power without collapsing complexity into accusation. The r...

In this first episode of The Darnley Affair: A Historical Whodunnit, historian Liam J. Atchison is joined in conversation with Athanasios Arkoudos to revisit one of the most notorious and least resolved murders of the sixteenth century: the death of Lord Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. Beginning with Mary’s troubled reign, her disastrous marriage, and the violent court politics that culm...

Why do American old men love talking about the Civil War, and why does Shelby Foote’s name always come up? In this episode, I finally give in to the gentle pressure of the Council of Old Men and read Foote’s monumental Civil War: A Narrative. Along the way, I reflect on what Foote gets brilliantly right as a storyteller, where his affection for the past sometimes softens hard truths, and why histo...

In this episode, Dr. Liam begins a sporadic series of conversational stories about Professor Athanasios Arkoudos, a prairie-bred historian with a fondness for strong coffee, precise questions, and ideas that refuse to disappear just because they appear on ingredient labels. Through informal dialogues, small domestic scenes, and the gentle sparring of a seasoned mentor and an attentive student, the...