For all his devotion to higher education, the road my grandfather took to the bachelor’s degree was long and winding. As I wrote in Part One of this post, he had only a ninth grade education when, in 1917, at the age of 20, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War I and spent […]
When my grandfather, Russell W. Wallis, died in Richmond, Virginia, on March 27, 1985, at the age of 88, I was 23 years old and living in Washington, DC, just two hours away. It was the closest I ever lived to him. I moved to DC in January of that year and struggled at first to find work. […]
For more than forty years now, my family has vacationed in a small cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near the tiny village of Laurel Springs. We built the cabin in the early 1970s, though we began visiting the area long before that. My father first came with my mother and sister in […]
The Raleigh, North Carolina, of my childhood and youth was a constantly growing, ceaselessly expanding boom town. Every day, it seemed, some new shopping mall, office complex, or housing development opened; every week, a new road or highway was cut through the landscape; every year, the population swelled, and the town’s borders reached further out […]
In August, 2006, when I moved to Massachusetts from Wisconsin to take a job at the state university in Amherst, I signed a year’s lease on half a duplex in Northampton, across the Connecticut River and about eight miles from my new office. Although I probably could have found a place closer to campus, I […]
For most of the past 150 years, the world has known the poetry of Emily Dickinson almost entirely through the genre of the individual lyric poem. Even during her lifetime, the few instances when her work appeared in print (in every case, apparently, without her foreknowledge), it was through the medium of the single, stand-alone […]
Soon after Emily Dickinson died, in May, 1886, at the age of 55, her younger sister Lavinia found a locked box in the second-floor bedroom of the house they shared in Amherst, Massachusetts. Inside were more than 1,500 original manuscript poems, half of them neatly copied onto folded sheets of stationary and bound into small […]
Although the idea is hardly “sweeping the nation,” there are probably more efforts underway right now to form new, breakaway states, and even new republics, within the United States than at any other time since the Civil War. According to a recent article in The Daily Beast: Five counties in Maryland want to form their […]
In the fall of 1961, my family moved from Greenville, South Carolina, where I was born in June that year, to a little town in east Tennessee called LaFollette, where my father had his first medical practice. LaFollette was a poor, rural community; and my father, 30 years old and just a year out of […]
When I was growing up in North Carolina, it was sometimes said that slavery only really existed in the eastern part of the state; the western part was historically a land of small farms, tilled by their owners, a place more like Vermont, geographically and ideologically, than South Carolina. It was something of a shock, […]
The trip to northwest Rowan County, North Carolina, in the summer of 2007 was valuable in several respects. I learned my way around the Third Creek community. I took photographs, several of which turned out to be useful in later research. And I visited the graves of the three individuals I most wanted to learn […]
The European settlement of North Carolina’s piedmont took place primarily in the mid-eighteenth century, when Scotch-Irish and German migrants, travelling south from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and other points north, passed through the Shenandoah River Valley of Virginia and entered the wide, thinly-settled region of North Carolina that lay between the seemingly inhospitable mountains to the west […]
City of Rhetoric 