Not far from where I live in east central Illinois, the father of Abraham Lincoln lies buried. Though I’ve lived out here in this open land for more than two decades, I had not visited Thomas Lincoln’s grave until last year, after my father...
Like her character, Mandy Ringer, in Sapphira and The Slave Girl, Willa Cather was “born interested.” She wrote from many vantage points: autobiographical, historical, male, female. She understood that producing literature was not finding...
I celebrated Thanksgiving Day 1967 in a sandbagged underground bunker at a Marine outpost called Con Thien on the southern edge of the Vietnamese demilitarized zone. It wasn’t much of a celebration. I’m told that in Vietnamese Con Thien mea...
Even now, after a century and hundreds of studies, we can draw no coherent picture of the slaveholders of the Old South. Instead, our images are kaleidoscopic, fragmentary, contradictory. These men appear, alternately, as tyrannical and...
Sadly, Emily Couric did not live to see a final season of life; her hair never turned gray and her figure never went slack, After a gallant 15 month battle against pancreatic cancer, she died at age 54 on October 18, 2001. A Democrat, she...
Joan Givner’s biography of Katherine Anne Porter possesses this “passion for life”; it is a full and moving dramatization of an inner portrait of Porter as she fought to establish an artistic integrity for herself against the most unlikely...
No American of any century has excelled in a greater number of diverse areas than a New Englander named George Perkins Marsh, who was born in the town of Woodstock, Vermont in 1801. Marsh is best remembered today for his pioneering book on...
The people who built The Great Wall are now building The Great Dam—the world’s greatest. The reservoir will flood an area 370 miles long. Disappearing under water will be 890 square miles of farmland. Totally or partially, 13 cities, 140...
