At some point while I was kid, I developed the idea that teenagers lived in some type of nirvana. It was a world where you had freedom and mobility—cruising in cars and staying up late—but without the crushing load of responsibilities that made adults so boring. I got...
I’m not sure there’s any point to speculating as to why Regency England is such a popular subject for modern Americans. Suffice it to say that I, like so many others, know far more about what life was like in London during the Regency period than I do about what life...
When representatives of the British colonies signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Benjamin Franklin is reported to have joked “we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” But despite the humor, the threat was real. Signing...
Today people come to the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina to enjoy the rugged beauty and, in a few places, an obscene amount of tourist trap attractions. It is easy to imagine the days when the people who lived in the hills were isolated...
Last week when I was working on a craft project with kids at church, I offered them the choice of using white paper or card stock with a tan swirl pattern designed to look like parchment. I was guessing that in in the time of Jesus, paper hadn’t been invented yet. But...
Hammocks in Florida are not always fabric loungers attached to trees. Sometimes, the term instead refers to the trees themselves. A hammock is strand of hardwood trees with a dense canopy that provides shade and serves as home to an array of animals and plant life....
Over the years, I have written a few blog posts focused on some of the worst fashion ideas in history. And I had a lot to say, because the ideas were really that bad. But I missed one. And it was a doozy. I completed missed a fashion trend that maimed and killed...
On a trip to Colorado years ago, we visited a site with replicas of ancient American cliff dwellings. The site is commonly decried as fake, but we enjoyed the opportunities to climb through the semi-accurate replicated dwellings, and we particularly enjoyed all the...
The recent funeral of Queen Elizabeth II broke with a 300-year-old British tradition started by George III. His predecessor and grandfather, George II had a large and public funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1760. That would be the last time the 11th Century icon hosted...
Since I live in a beach town, it should be easy to find a bathing suit that fits, right? It isn’t. I can find thousands of t-shirts that mention the word “ocean,” but nothing comfortable to wear in the actual ocean. But it used to be so much worse. When...
