All Posts By

James C. Schaap

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Phil

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

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What I learned on Spring Break, 1968

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

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The river in winter

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

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A Lenten Triptych from York, NE

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

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Local Sodbuster Makes Good

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

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“An Outburst of Prayer”

[It was not my intent to use this poem today, but Matthew’s comments yesterday offered an opening. Jelle Pelmulder, Sioux County’s (IA) first school master, wrote

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Couteau de prairies

  I wasn’t born and reared here. My home–I’m not sure how anyone finally defines that word–is really the western shore of Lake Michigan, where sunrise

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Massacre of the Innocents

Coventry, England, a city of 250,00 in the West Midlands, boasted significant industrial power when the Europe went to war in 1940, industries Hitler wouldn’t

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