In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.
Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle...
A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher compla...
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.
I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Saw...
All those adorable towheaded kids in the promotional film are going to turn thirteen. Once a family member hits puberty, odds are that everybody is not going to have the same ideals. Unless everybody...
I have this recurring nightmare in which I have to move back in with my old college roommates. I'll admit, that's what I was expecting to find at Oneida. The 19th century equivalent of sharing a house...
Because of the city upon a hill sound bite, is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might hav...
Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.
Take for example the commencement address he [James Garfield] delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880. ... The only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker para...
Lafayette took umbrage - just gobs and gobs of umbrage - at the patriots' vilification of his countrymen for leaving Newport.
There's nothing more depressing than bad capitalism.
The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.
For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our great...
You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was the border state, a schizophrenic no-man’s-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart.
I don't have a driver's license (phobia).
There are people who look forward to spending their sunset years in the sunshine; it is my own retirement dream to await my death indoors, dragging strangers up dusty staircases while coughing up one...
In Woody Allen movies people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or Holocaust documentaries talking up media theory to pass the time. At 16 that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I ca...
A man without birth, without courage, without conduct. For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master.