A couple years back, I wrote a story about William Henry Harrison, the shortest serving president in US history. I visited his mausoleum and a monument to the man outside of Cincinnati, and had a grand time learning and writing about this basically forgotten president outside of trivia contests. (Read the story here.) And then,…
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. I’ll admit a few things here. Boise, Idaho has never been on my travel radar. I doubt I’d have been able to point to where the city was on a map of Idaho before coming. And prior to this trip to visit friends who…
On the morning of September 14, 1814, a 35 year old Francis Scott Key stood on the British warship HMS Tonnant. He was there to negotiate for the release of an American prisoner captured during this, the third year of the War of 1812. During the prior day, and throughout the night, a British fleet…
The Ohio Statehouse is a beautiful building. The crown jewel of downtown Columbus - itself a reasonably pretty place, although mostly empty on the day of my visit - it gleams white behind carefully planted flowers and trees. Its rotunda, built without a full dome, is iconic atop the columned facade. Inside, the building is…
Last year, I learned and wrote about William Henry Harrison, the shortest-serving US President, from his memorial outside of Cincinnati. (Click here to read that piece.) So when planning my trip to Cleveland this year, it came as a pleasant surprise to me that America’s second shortest-serving President, James Garfield, had his memorial there, along…
In his 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding describes what happens when the worst of human nature comes to a tiny island paradise. Rather than work together, a group of people devolves into little better than animals, descending into a savagery that undoes any attempts at civility. And so it could have been…
For most of human history, the concept of “value” was immediate. My goat has value because it can be traded for x amount of money now, or because it will feed my family for x amount of time now. And for most of human history, that was the way we assigned value to nature. An…
For the entirety of my life, Canada and the US have had a close relationship. We have been military allies, trade partners, diplomatic supporters… and we have been each other’s top travel destination. In a brief few months under the current American administration, those things seem to have changed. We hear anecdotes of anger on…
Sometimes one is so caught up with the beauty of this place that one can easily forget it is a country. Yes, the Bahamas is indeed an independent country, although some tourists might consider it just a vacation playhouse for Americans, or an extension of Britain. Both of those can be understood, at least to…
In December of 2019, I officially became a German citizen, reclaiming the rights denied to my family by the Nazis. I received my passport in early 2020, just in time for the world to shut down. But once it reopened and international travel resumed, I found myself in new territory. I now possessed two passports,…