Showing Archived Posts

Raining and Straining

Posted October 2nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm (UTC-4)
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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)
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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 — […]

The Plain People

Posted August 13th, 2009 at 7:27 pm (UTC-4)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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 […]

What’s in a (Nick)Name?

Posted July 2nd, 2009 at 1:06 pm (UTC-4)
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The College of William & Mary, America’s second-oldest college (after Harvard), whose graduates include two U.S. presidents and 16 signers of the Declaration of Independence, is one of several academically superior schools of higher education in Virginia. But William & Mary, chartered in 1693 by Britain’s King William III and Queen Mary II, is also […]

IX at 37

Posted June 26th, 2009 at 1:10 pm (UTC-4)
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“Time will show that this is the most important law in our culture over the last 40 years,” USA Today columnist Christine Brennan wrote recently. The most important? That must be some kind of law! Brennan is a sports columnist specifically, and like it or not — and there are plenty in both camps — […]

Hatred and Tranquility

Posted June 19th, 2009 at 7:39 pm (UTC-4)
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A week or so ago, when I heard that an 88-year-old virulent white supremacist had shot and killed a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a few blocks away, my thoughts drifted to a serene spot — an almost eerily peaceful, contemplative patch of green — 2,200 kilometers (1,340 miles) away in […]

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

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