Westward Expansion
Road Trip Through History: The Genoa National Fish Hatchery and the Black Hawk War
Here’s what I knew about the Black Hawk War at the beginning of our most recent travels along the Great River Road: it was a small scale war between Native American tribes and American settlers in the upper Midwest prior to the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln fought in it as a member of the…
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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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From the Archives: Custer’s Last Stand?
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and five companies of the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry died at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Unlike D-Day, it’s not the kind of historical event that generates lots of anniversary coverage. (Though I suspect it will garner some attention on its 150th anniversary in…
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