Teacher and Author
I was in Boyds Mills, Pennsylvania, attending a nonfiction writers’ workshop on August 4, 2014, the one hundred year anniversary of the start of World War I.1 I announced the fact to my fellow attendees. Thus began a four-and-one-third-year centennial … Continued
Change was long overdue. The stock market had crashed in Hoover’s first year as president. Prospects looked bad for the next two years before turning truly dire in 1931. Democrats, who hadn’t held power since the war, knew their time … Continued
CHARLESTON (WV), November 3, 1918 — “I’ll bet you young nurses had your hearts set on going overseas, wearing romantic Red Cross uniforms, to nurse our soldiers, didn’t you?” Major Maxwell, we might imagine, was dressed in full military uniform, … Continued
The question under consideration in Worcester v. Georgia, 1832, was Cherokee sovereignty. Did a Georgia state law that led to the imprisonment of Samuel Worcester and ten other missionaries violate Cherokee sovereignty? Cherokee leaders were sure that it did, based … Continued
Outgrowing schoolbook understandings is a lifelong endeavor. We were all taught the injustice of the Trail of Tears, but there is more to the story. How many of us grow up to examine its complexities? With the arrival of John … Continued
As 1918 progressed and the Allies gained new strength with the arrival of American troops, Fritz grew desperate. He dropped propaganda leaflets from the air onto American positions, hoping to sow doubt among this freshest enemy: “To the Colored Soldiers … Continued
Jan had an appealing, occasionally disarming, frankness. She told it like it was. She didn’t care for sports stories or teen romance, and didn’t mind saying so. In critique sessions, no detail was too small to escape her notice. She … Continued
On D-Day, September 26, 1918, Allied artillery shelled enemy trenches, beginning at Zero Hour, 4:00 am. Infantry units went “over the top” an hour and a half later, crossed No Man’s Land and attempted to take those same trenches. Zero … Continued
After four years of stalemate on the Western Front, four years living underground and fighting over the same few square miles of cratered earth, the Allied armies were on the move, pushing back the German armies toward the border. The … Continued
Watched The Great Ziegfeld last night. The movie, produced in 1935-36, was an homage to the recently departed impresario. (He had died barely three years earlier.) It was also a lifeline for his indebted widow, Billie Burke, who sold the … Continued