Nature was a big part of our childhood. We loved to be outside, so it was a thrill when we moved out of the city to a new subdivision springing up from land that had grown crops and fed horses and cows for over a century. A small creek ran ...

Punishment in early American life was often public and quite humiliating to the offender. The Puritans of New England believed what God said, taking their laws directly from the bible. Drunkenness, fornication, and even smoking brought down the gavel as fast as stealing from a neighbor.  Scarlet letters were worn ...

I loved our flashcard tests in third grade when we were learning our multiplication tables, and my favorite test was the Friday spelling test, because I was much better at spelling than I was at some of my other subjects! I always fared well in the spelling bee at school. ...

Prudence—not a common word in today’s culture, yet a word all can live by and see good days. Prudence is caution, the ability to foresee and avoid an evil thing.  It was a word so valued in early American life that is became a popular girl’s name during the 17th ...

Most of us  learn things from our father as little children that we draw upon later in life, often coming to the realization that we learned patience, or fairness, or empathy from the man we looked up to the most. When I had a challenging day caring for my three ...

Auld Lang Syne began as a poem, penned in 1788. It told the story of two old Scottish friends with a history together that was worth remembering. As they sat and drank a cup of cheer, they remembered the past with fondness, for old time’s sake—or in their native tongue–auld ...

There was a time in history when making it to the teenage years was a milestone, a time when one in three infants died before they learned to walk. In the early centuries of American life, big families were the norm because all mothers knew that they would bury at ...

As the ship christened Wolf traversed the Atlantic in 1720, a young woman aboard named Elizabeth Wilson gave birth to a baby girl.   While she lay recovering from the birth, counting her little daughter’s fingers and toes and admiring her Irish red hair, a band of vicious pirates forced their ...

“Faith is like radar that sees through the fog—to the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.”   Corrie Ten Boom   As World War II raged on throughout Europe, Corrie Ten Boom and her family could not put their faith in what their eyes could ...

Ann was beautiful, with long, auburn hair and fair skin. She was kind-hearted, a soft whisper of a pioneer woman, like her name. She was 16 in 1829 when she traveled from Kentucky with her parents, James and Mary Ann Rutledge, and her nine siblings, to the open prairie of ...