A long time ago, I got interested in a people called ‘Yankees’. You can read about them in the Introduction and first two chapters of The Yankee Road. It happened that as generations of Yankees moved West, they went in a direction that largely parallels old US 20. So, I decided that this road,…

My American Road Books by Jim McNiven This is a condensed extract from the Introduction to my The Yankee Road, volume one of which has just been published by Wheatmark. Americans, have added, in great numbers, to the road book literature. American stories of travel and roads have been conditioned…

With July 4 coming up, I thought I’d revisit a classic American symbol. There is a famous Army recruiting poster from World War I that shows Uncle Sam in his current ‘look’. He is sternly looking and pointing at the viewer, and the caption below him reads “I Want You For U.S. Army!”…

The word ‘road’ can be used in a lot of ways. In The Yankee Road, I use it to mean a physical road, in this case a mostly 2-lane highway designated as US 20 in 1926 and added to in or about 1940, extending from Boston to Newport, Oregon. But more so, I see…

Robert Goddard was the quintessential Yankee inventor. Born in 1882, he was raised and lived much of his life in Worcester, Massachusetts. Goddard was a sickly boy who fell behind in school and did not graduate until he was twenty-two. Spending lots of time home in bed, he became a voracious reader, and was…

Labor Day has come and gone. For many people I know, this is really New Year’s Day. The summer is a wind-down from teaching and the campus is quiet; there are even available parking spaces. Then, all of a sudden, the place is full of people, mostly milling about in dazed confusion. I…

A Civil War Result: Yankee Presidents If you aren’t sure if the Yankees won the Civil War, all you have to do is dig around some genealogical data. Here is what I found on the Presidents who were elected or came to the office on the death of a President from 1869 until…

Right around Christmas 2015, I received an email from a reader of The Yankee Road who said her mother had worked with Dr. Gregory Pincus when he was developing ‘the pill’. I thought I’d rewrite a little piece from Chapter 8, leaving out the notes, to summarize the story. As early as 1913,…

This is a piece I finished a short while ago from a Volume 2 chapter levered off the Kent State University tragedy in 1970. The focus is on ‘militias and armies’: Perhaps the climax of the militia as a traditional military formation came at the outset of the Civil War. Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth…

Lately, I have been looking at the life of Henry Flagler as a lever into the development of the American tourist industry. Flagler essentially started the tourist towns and cities along the Florida Atlantic coast, connecting them with his own railroad. If you ever go to Palm Beach, stop by the Flagler Museum there.…