American History
Road Trip Through History: Little House in the Big Woods
I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, not far from Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, lived from 1897 to her death in 1957. I remember being thrilled when my family took a day trip to visit her home, probably in the late 1960s soon after it was made…
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From The Archives: Lincoln’s Greatest Case–Sort of
One of the recurring themes this fall as we worked our way along the Great River Road, crossing the Mississippi back and forth between Iowa and Wisconsin was, in fact, the question of crossing the river. We think of “bridge-building” as a metaphor for bringing communities together, but the construction of real-life bridges was often…
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Road Trip Through History: Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover, Or a Museum By Its Website
It probably comes as no surprise to those of you who have been hanging out here in the Margins for a while that I am a fan of local history museums. What a museum chooses to focus on can tell you how a community or a region defines itself. Even a museum that seems at…
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