Part one in a series As a battlefield guide at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park (FSNMP), I frequently speak with folks who’ve come to the battlefields because they’ve read The Killer Angels, which in […]
Chris Mackowski
Telling History vs. Making Art: An upcoming series at S&R
Introduction to a series As part of my doctoral work, I recently did some work that focused on Civil War literature. I use “literature” in a broad sense to cover fiction, nonfiction, and […]
Big Meadow in the crepuscular hour
It’s the time of change. Autumn. Dusk. 6:40 p.m. The crepuscular hour. Everything’s on the cusp of being something else. I don’t know what has compelled me to drive to Big Meadow […]
Exploding the myth of progress
Tom Wessels had to pull over when he heard President Bush’s statement: “Economic growth is the key to environmental progress.” As an ecologist, Wessels was stunned. Bush’s comments, made on Valentine’s Day […]
The colors of change in the time of leavings
Autumn lends itself to metaphors of change because it plays itself out so brilliantly. Here in northwestern Pennsylvania, for instance, the hillsides boil with color. The change metaphor seems so common for […]
The way of the world and the time of leavings
She puttered around the house until well after midnight last night, washing one more glass, folding one more t-shirt. Later, she found another to fold. She also found, like an afterthought, a […]
The congress of cats in the crepuscular hour
On my walk this evening, far out in the country, I came across a sight I was probably not meant to see: a congress of cats gathered in the road. Three of […]
Remembering the Indianapolis: "We delivered the bomb"
As landlocked as it is, some 650 miles from the Atlantic and 1830 miles from the Pacific, Indianapolis isn’t the first place I think of when I think of battleships. Then again, […]
A beautiful, despairing journey with a coal-black horse
There’s a kind of myth-making happening in Robert Olmstead’s novel Coal Black Horse. Published in 2007, I had the chance this past week to journey with the horse once more, and it was […]
Old Kinderhook, 150 years later
I’ve been passing by the highway exit for the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site, outside Albany, NY, for the better part of four decades, shuffling back and forth between family in […]
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