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

The first matter of business when white folks came to the region was roughing out claims so they knew where each of the others was

Mildred Armstrong Kadish, in Little Heathens, her darling memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the Depression, claims that her family had only two

When James Fenimore Cooper complained about the novel he was reading, his wife told him to put up or shut up, to just go ahead