Many history majors have a hard time landing good jobs — or any jobs at all — out of college. Today’s big guns — business and entertainment — don’t pay much mind to what happened long ago. But it’s a good thing a few historians did find jobs and are fact-checking our tales about the […]
Only in America: Thanksgiving Fact, Fiction
Posted November 19th, 2010 at 1:01 pm (UTC-4)
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Here, There, Everywhere
Posted September 10th, 2010 at 2:36 pm (UTC-4)
I’ve been buzzing about the country for the past three weeks, getting as far from our Washington, D.C.-based home as the northwestern tip of the other Washington in the Pacific Northwest. Over the next few posts, I’ll tell you about some places and things I encountered in this 11,000-km journey, and about the joys of […]
The Endless West
Posted January 21st, 2010 at 11:34 pm (UTC-4)
Many moons ago, I posted a blog called “Where the West Begins.” It pointed out that at one time or another, just about every town west of the Mississippi River has claimed to be the jumping-off point for a trip through that immense region of romantic legend. My choice was Fort Worth, Texas, since, as […]
BYEW-tiful Beaufort
Posted October 16th, 2009 at 5:36 pm (UTC-4)
Carol and I have visited Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, many times. Sizeable yet quaint places, both of them, storied in history and full of old fortifications and photogenic magnolias (Charleston) and tidy squares filled with oak trees draped in Spanish moss (Savannah). Yet every time we go to either place or tell friends […]
Raining and Straining
Posted October 2nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm (UTC-4)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 […]
