Remember “the look” from childhood? It could be scary, but it could also be a strong deterrent from getting into mischief or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Most of our parents were really good at it! Teachers often had some of those same looks, turning their attention ...

Consider the life of a pioneer wife. They rose before the sun, often weary from the last day’s work. They pinned their long hair back from their faces, dressed in their layers, and pulled on an apron to start another day. Many of them had traveled long journeys just to ...

The local newspapers of the early 20th century were filled with town gossip, wedding announcements, death notices, and stories of gay parties. When my great grandparents packed all of their belongings, leaving Illinois for a rural life in northern Indiana in the spring of 1912, they received a lovely farewell ...

Remember the monsters of childhood, those dark figures with long, spindly fingers, or the giant, hairy beasts that popped out from behind a closet door or a tree in your backyard? The illusive boogey man has terrified children around the world since the 1500s. I remember stories about this dark, ...

Traveling across the sea to foreign ports in search of fabrics, teas, shoes, and the fine wines of France, must have seemed a romantic venture to the young mariner in 19th century America!  But for the wife of a seaman, the romance of a sea life was as far away ...

Springtime has always brought the promise of new life and the end of another brown, barren Illinois winter. The first tulips begin to pop open; trees get their first, almost invisible green buds, and soon, green grass springs up to carpet over the brown stuff on the ground. I remember ...

Abigail Smith was lively, opinionated, and intuitive from her youth. She was just 15 when her future husband, John Adams, first laid eyes on her. He was drawn to Abigail’s qualities from the beginning. When they married in 1744, she had his ear in the decisions he would be faced ...

In the days of the Victorian era, a picnic in the English countryside was a fine affair. Baskets were carefully packed with meats such as lamb and beef, often put between hearty pieces of wheat bread and garnished with cheeses, lettuce, and celery. Drinks included lemonade and ginger-beer, as well ...

The farm my dad was raised on during the years of the Great Depression didn’t have indoor plumbing, but it did have two beautiful apple trees in the front yard that gave the best yellow delicious apples ever. So enticing was the fall bounty that Dad would climb the trees ...

The American idea of the Valentine’s Day card came about in 1847, when Miss Esther Howland of Summer Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, received a Valentine greeting all the way from England and decided after admiring it that she could make a better one.  She set about assembling cards with lace ...