Over the years, I have often run across a photograph that is inevitably mislabeled as…
In an issue of The New York Times on February 20, 1899, there was a…
When John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, drafted a memoir about his…
In the Iowa town where I grew up, the city’s public schools were called Washington,…
In 1961, the American writer MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977) published a book about Iowa history called…
Frank Lloyd Wright and Grant Wood differed in significant ways. And yet, as artists and…
In the spring of 1891, a 72-year-old woman was mailing a letter at the post…
In the spring of 1994, when I was in my 40s and had moved back…
The technique of sandpainting is as old as the hills, in the sense that it…
As a high school student in Iowa, I was an avid follower of MAD Magazine.…
The American writer Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, across the river from Pittsburgh.…
In the final decades of the 19th century, the Aesthetic Movement was regarded by some…
Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in November 1835, coincident…
Clemens Gretter was the (unheralded) artist who drew the newspaper cartoons for Robert Ripley’s Believe…
In 1887, 26-year-old Alice Moore resigned as a primary school teacher in Cedar Falls and…