The Holyoke Range is a modest line of mountains, 9.5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, that runs east-west through the towns of Hadley, South Hadley, Amherst, Granby, and Belchertown in western Massachusetts. Although its tallest peak is only 1,106 feet above sea level, the range appears taller because it rises so abruptly from the […]
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 […]
Perhaps the most memorable character in Tune In, the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s projected three-volume biography of The Beatles, is not a person at all but a place – Liverpool, England. Given the fascinating personalities involved here, that says a lot. But the fact is: funny, drunk, dirty, old Liverpool permeates every aspect of […]
For all of 2012 and most of 2013, I could look out the window of my office on the west side of Bartlett Hall, on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and watch the new residential campus of our Commonwealth Honors College going up across Hicks Way. The pace of construction was astounding […]
It was late August, 2006. I had just moved to western Massachusetts, and I needed to figure out how I was going to get to work every day from my home in Northampton to my office at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, seven miles away. In the weeks leading up to the start of fall […]
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 