This summer, see if you can find your way to the Trail. You'll have to hunt to find it, but here and there along the way you’ll find stone markers, set down a century ago to memorialize a highway that…
When Julia Ward Howe sat down to refashion a much beloved Union battle hymn the troops called "John Brown's Body," she created new lyrics and a bold new score that, almost magically, became as deeply imprinted on America's soul as…
There's something vintage Old Testament about the story, something decidedly like myth. But it happened; and just a bit north of Topeka, atop a hill along the road, a somewhat unkempt highway marker tells part of the story, the part…
A century ago this month, my great-uncle came down with pneumonia. He was on his way to France to fight the Huns, WWI, the "Great War." That illness set him behind the rest of his platoon, but he caught up,…
Fifty years after it went out of style, he still wore his hair--great hair, by the way--in a duck tail. Had he let it grow a little longer, he might have passed for Sikh and never worn a turban. He…
The night Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, four of us—small-town, small-college, white boys—were following the Gulf's eastern shore on an all-night trek from south Florida to New Orleans. It was spring break, 1968, only a few months from the…
The first matter of business when white folks came to the region was roughing out claims so they knew where each of the others was going to put down roots. Once that task was done, some of ye olde pioneers…
Mildred Armstrong Kadish, in Little Heathens, her darling memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the Depression, claims that her family had only two oil lamps before rural electrification. It's unimaginable to think of how dark their world must…
When James Fenimore Cooper complained about the novel he was reading, his wife told him to put up or shut up, to just go ahead and write a better one himself. That tiff launched Cooper’s career, a novelist sometimes considered…
