Showing Archived Posts

American High School

Posted December 2nd, 2011 at 4:46 pm (UTC-4)
1 comment

  I don’t know if there’s anything in the world that quite compares to a high school football game in the smaller towns of America. I went to Macomb, Illinois the other day and the first thing I noticed when we drove into town were signs saluting the local high school foot ball team, the […]

Raining and Straining

Posted October 2nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

Last time, while enjoying my way across South Dakota, I mentioned that my ultimate destination was Seattle, Washington.  Just as life is (hopefully) a marathon, not a sprint, my goal was to amble around all three of the Pacific Northwest states a bit in order to refresh my impressions of them.  Seattle was the finish […]

South Dakodak

Posted September 24th, 2009 at 4:41 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

If you’re like me, you sometimes look back at an earlier period in your nation’s history and think, “Those were the days!”  We romanticize the slower pace and what today seems like their relative innocence — even if reality was something else again.  I’ve already told you that I sometimes linger over old photographs — […]

WisSCONsin

Posted September 9th, 2009 at 3:02 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

On a just-completed cross-country trip, Carol and I drove, languidly and admiringly, through a tidy place full of cheery people, picture-postcard farms with bright-red barns, and white-fence towns with names like Oconomowoc and Ashwaubenon — Indian words that locals articulate as fluidly as they order a beer and a brat. That’s brat as in bratwurst […]

Formidable Footpath

Posted August 27th, 2009 at 1:15 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

I want to tell you all about the Appalachian Trail from experience, for I have hiked it. Layers of fog greet A.T. hikers in the Appalachian Mountains. Well, not all 3,400 kilometers, or 2,100 miles, of it. More like 10 miles, some of it in my street shoes, thereby learning the first lesson of traversing […]

The Plain People

Posted August 13th, 2009 at 7:27 pm (UTC-4)
2 comments

Carol and I recently visited the land of the Plain People in Holmes County, Ohio, just down the road from the ordinary, middle-sized cities of Akron and Canton. These neatly tied shocks of barley epitomize the look of the countryside in Ohio’s Amish country This is “Amish country,” the largest, if not richest, concentration of […]

Our Temple of Radio

Posted July 30th, 2009 at 6:53 pm (UTC-4)
2 comments

Let’s say you’re a longtime, enthusiastic Voice of America listener who has the opportunity to visit the United States, and someone like me, right now, informs you that there’s one place in America where you can find: There’s even an interstate highway sign pointing drivers to an amazing VOA complex • the site where VOA […]

Noble Barns

Posted July 24th, 2009 at 3:58 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

Everywhere Carol and I go — well, maybe not everywhere — we look for old barns. Georgia farmers haul fertilizer to their barn — by horse wagon, you will note — in 1940 “Old barn” is nearly redundant, unfortunately, since just about every barn is old. As “Market to Market,” the online weekly journal of […]

The New Prometheus

Posted July 17th, 2009 at 4:31 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

Journalists are taught to “peg” our stories to something. We mustn’t just wade into a topic for no reason but should reference a breaking-news development to explain why in the world we’re writing a particular story. It would be perfectly OK to compose a “sidebar” about, say, marshmallows if a marshmallow factory has just exploded. […]

Cause Celebrity

Posted July 10th, 2009 at 1:28 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

What’s the difference between a prehistoric dinosaur and a journalist dinosaur? A prehistoric dinosaur didn’t know it was a dinosaur. The “bullpen” at the New York Times in September 1942, my birth month. For the benefit of our young readers, the instrument in the foreground is a “rotary” telephone, and those things spread across the […]

Ted Landphair

About

This is a far-ranging exploration of American life by a veteran Voice of America “Americana” reporter and essayist.

Ted writes about the thousands of places he has visited and written about as a broadcaster and book author. Ted Landphair’s America often showcases the work of his wife and traveling companion, renowned American photographer Carol M. Highsmith.

Ted welcomes feedback, questions, and ideas. View Ted’s profile. Watch a video about Ted and Carol by VOA’s Nico Colombant.

Photos by Carol M. Highsmith

Calendar

March 2024
M T W T F S S
« Nov    
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031