American History

Road Trip Through History: The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum

May 23, 2013

Recently My Own True Love and I took a week-long road trip that looped down the Mississippi, across to Little Rock, through northwest Arkansas, up to Kansas City and back to Chicago.  For much of the trip, historical sightseeing was out of the question. All we could do was make lists of sites and museums [...]

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Road Trip Through History: The Vandalia Statehouse State Historical Site

May 7, 2013

The first thing you need to remember about the old state capitol building in Vandalia, Illinois, is that it is NOT called the Old Capitol.* The Old Capitol, which is not as old as the state capitol building in Vandalia, is in Springfield. What can I say? Stuff doesn’t always make sense. Vandalia became the [...]

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Road Trip Through History: America’s First Interstate

April 11, 2013

George Washington was a road builder long before he was a nation-builder. As a young officer under the ill-fated General Braddock, he helped construct a military road from western Maryland to Pennsylvania.* As president of the new United States, he dreamed of a trans-Appalachian road that would unify the new nation and aid westward expansion. [...]

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History on Display: The Unexpected DeMoulin Museum Celebrates Invention, Imagination,and Industry

March 26, 2013

I freely admit that I visited the DeMoulin Museum in Greenville, Illinois, with a certain amount of trepidation. Over the years My Own True Love and I have visited plenty of small private museums that were founded to showcase an individual’s passion. All too often, they are sad, weird, and incoherent.* A museum devoted to [...]

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Eighty Days

March 19, 2013

On November 14, 1889, Nelly Bly, reporter for the popular newspaper The World, sailed from New York on the trip that would make her famous: an attempt to travel around the world in less than eighty days. Eight and a half hours later, unknown to Bly, the literary editor of the monthly magazine, The Cosmopolitan, [...]

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Road Trip Through History: Cahokia Mounds

March 2, 2013

  My Own True Love and I have put in thousands of miles over the years on I-55, the highway that leads from Chicago to Saint Louis. We’ve stopped at many historical sites–along the way and off the path. One of my all time favorites is Cahokia Mounds–the site of North America’s first city. Our [...]

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In Search of Hiawatha

January 8, 2013

Several months ago, on a visit to Fort Michilimackinac, I was startled to read an exhibit sign that referred to Hiawatha as a real person. As far as I knew, Hiawatha was the fictional hero of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem: “By the shore of Gitche Gumee” and all that. On the other hand, as [...]

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Home Front Girl

December 27, 2012

A couple of weekends ago–in between baking ham, slicing sweet potatoes, chopping cranberries and rolling out biscuit dough– I gave myself the treat of reading Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature and Growing Up in Wartime America. And a treat it was. Born in 1922, Joan Wehlen, later Joan Wehlen Morrison, grew up [...]

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The Barbarous Years

December 20, 2012

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 is the third volume in historian Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the growth of British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bailyn discusses the settlement of British North America within the context of both the Native American cultures [...]

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Log Cabins: Two Ways

September 14, 2012

I always learn something new when My Own True Love and I head out on a Road Trip Through History.  Our recent expedition to Colonial Michilimacinac was no exception. I learned that eighteenth century cooks dried pumpkins as well as apples* and used pig bladders to seal crocks of prickled vegetables. I had long known [...]

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