It may well have been one of the best marketing ploys I’d ever come up with–get former Iowa Governor Robert Ray to come out west

You’ve probably never heard of Herman the German and likely never stopped to greet him in New Ulm, Minnesota. Then again, you could have driven

This summer, see if you can find your way to the Trail. You’ll have to hunt to find it, but here and there along the

When Julia Ward Howe sat down to refashion a much beloved Union battle hymn the troops called “John Brown’s Body,” she created new lyrics and

There’s something vintage Old Testament about the story, something decidedly like myth. But it happened; and just a bit north of Topeka, atop a hill

A century ago this month, my great-uncle came down with pneumonia. He was on his way to France to fight the Huns, WWI, the “Great

Fifty years after it went out of style, he still wore his hair–great hair, by the way–in a duck tail. Had he let it grow

The night Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, four of us—small-town, small-college, white boys—were following the Gulf’s eastern shore on an all-night trek from south

Not long ago, Sherman Alexie, among the most prominent Native American writers in America, lost his mother. He’d lost his father years before, but it