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...
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...
I intended to write about why we sing the song “Jingle Bells” at Christmas, but after doing some research, I now wonder why we sing the song at all. If people knew the origin of Jingle Bells, it would disappear faster than you can say “cancel culture.” Jingle...
