What makes us who we are?  Is it our families, our economic backgrounds, our schooling?  Most often, of course, it is all those things.  For Thomas Jefferson, however, one influence stood out above the others.  “I thank on my knees,” he wrote in his autobiography, “him who directed my early

This week I received a special present in the mail, a copy of a book my grandfather learned to read from, a primer called The Overall Boys.  Published in 1905, The Overall Boys tells the story of four brothers, Jack, Joe, Tim, and Ted and their friends Molly and May. 

I do not know how many times I have heard and said that we are living in unprecedented times, or that the events surrounding our lives are unprecedented.  Of course, sometimes they feel as if they are. In the past 10 months we’ve witnessed the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, riots, and a presidential election resulting in

One Sunday morning in September of 2017 I was enjoying a peaceful beginning of the day watching CBS Sunday Morning.  With the kids off at Sunday school it was my one respite in the week.  Steve Hartman’s contributions to the magazine television program are always my favorites and inevitably a

Barney: A Soldier’s Story In May of 1944, my Great Uncle Fredrick “Barney” Coalwell shipped off to England and a few months later was fighting in France in Company E of the Fourth Ivy Division.  His parents, my great-grandparents, Minnie and Herbert (known as “Mom and Pop”), were living in

Recently, I was reading the speech President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to give on that fateful day in Dallas nearly 57 years ago. In it, he had written that “leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” Currently, I am teaching a course on American Politics.  I am proud