Westward Expansion
In which a History In the Margin’s Reader Recommends a Book
One of the pleasures of writing History in the Margins is the opportunity to have conversations with readers “off the page.” Jack French is a long-time reader who often has an interesting point to make or a story to share. (Some of you may remember the guest post he wrote several months ago about the…
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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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