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The South, repatriated ex-slave Ned Douglass lectured his Louisiana neighbors in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is “yours because your people’s bones lays in it; it’s yours because their sweat and their blood done drenched this earth.”
The latest U.S. census confirms that the grandchildren of the Southern diaspora are [...]

These days I care more about the results of local sporting events than I do national or out-of-state elections, but I was pleased that Golden Staters put Jerry Brown back in the governor’s chair.
Brown’s austere unhipness has always appealed to me, despite the soporiferous Linda Ronstadt, despite his “explore the universe” vapors, [...]

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mother was a pacifist, a breed common in the Middle America of yore, before war became the national religion. Her son left Kansas to climb the martial ladder of the Department of War, whose motto, suggested Declaration of Independence signatory Benjamin Rush, should have been “A Widow and [...]

My lovely literate wife Lucine—“Armenian for Darlene,” I type out of habit, and wince at the thought of the shoe flying across the room—recently reviewed for the local library one of those pop-anthropological books in which a big-city reporter spends a few weeks in a small town and lives to tell the [...]

Note to readers on the Chelsea (Village) Green: This was first published* last month, but I present it here as a how-do to fans of the Vermont Lake Monsters. The soul of baseball is in places like Batavia and Burlington—and on the sandlots and in pick-up games everywhere. To hell with the major leagues; Long [...]