ALL NATIONAL HISTORIES ARE CONNECTED America’s Civil War Was A Global Event (#2) YOU’D BE SURPRISED The Battle of New Orleans (1862) The American Civil War. Germans started it. So did the Dutch. Definitely, the Dutch. Africans and Irishmen fought it. Britain helped finance it. Canada and Cuba watched its every advance and retreat with […]

CITY OF IDEAS Arcosanti THE FUTURE MAY BE HERE     You have never seen anything like Arcosanti.   It is an experimental city-of-the-future located in the Arizona desert, about 60 miles north of Phoenix on Highway 17. Arcosanti’s main buildings hang over a canyon wall like one of those hooked signs hanging off a […]

A FINE AMERICAN YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD OF Sam Mockbee FOUR PLANKS OF GOOD ARCHITECTURE A fine American you have never heard of is Sam Mockbee. Every other semester, I assign my EN 102 classes a research paper on architects. I assign each cadet to an architect, and task him or her with explaining to […]

NARRATIVES OF SUSPICION All Our Heroes are Detectives PARANOIA PRODUCES SOME GOOD LITERATURE Tom Durwood Mistrust of authority has always existed, I’m sure, but it seems to have blossomed in the twentieth century. Now it is everywhere, and the hero who can cure it – the detective – is, too. In her recent book, The […]

SPARK NEARER ULTOPTIMATE China’s Three Gorges Dam and That Turkey Sandwich You’re Eating TOM DURWOOD   A really big dam has risen half a world away. Its shadow is falling on your kitchen table, warns Evan D.G. Fraser. Seven thousand feet in length and 610 feet tall, the colossal hydroelectric Three Gorge Dam across the […]