the quick Sliver

Why did the woolly bear cross the road? This time of year there seem to be armies of black-and-brown-banded fuzzy caterpillars crawling across streets and sidewalks everywhere. They are nature’s fastest caterpillars, capable of traveling over a mile a day. So you’ve probably wondered, where are they all headed in…

In New Jersey, a soldier’s blood runs blue. Back in 1673, the little town of Piscataway was at the bleeding edge of the British-American frontier. The Raritan River runs west from there up into the Jersey high ground, and in the summertime the natives would commonly come down it to…

So there was this guy from New Hampshire. He moved to Seattle. Then, during the Yukon Gold Rush, he went north in search of riches. In 1897, his exploits were featured in an article in the New York Sun that included his comment that he had named a prominent mountain…

I wrote the below way back in 2014. Since then, this little brand has exploded, and today is the sponsor of the Mayo Bowl, in which the coach of the winning team in the SEC/ACC tilt in Charlotte gets a 5-gallon bucket of condiment dumped on his head. So, yeah,…

In the month of July, Thomas Jefferson wrote a Declaration. But it wasn’t in 1776, and it wasn’t about Independence. It was a year earlier, on July 6, 1775, when Jefferson and John Dickenson wrote, “The Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” explaining the position of the Second Continental…

By now you’ve heard about the flooding and devastation all along the eastern seaboard. But what happens when all that water hits the largest nature preserve in the continental United States? Glad you asked.Head on over to Forty-Something for an explanation, and if you read to the end, you’ll be…

This is how an army begins. On June 14, 1775, in response to the events of Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted to create the Continental Army out of the militia units surrounding Boston. To lead it, they unanimously appointed George Washington of Virginia to be…

We return you now to the Summer of Sweetness… …which was in the year 1496. Christopher Columbus, returning from his second voyage to the West, had brought back some unique items including parrots, tomatoes, tobacco, pumpkins, and a strange plant with a spiky top that looked like a crown. When…

This is the story of an American Patriot. He was from New Haven, CT, and his father died when he was very young; as a result, he could not afford to attend Yale with his cohorts. This left him with a sense of insecurity that he overcame by sailing on…

Now is a particularly good time to celebrate Mexican-American relations. Let’s go back to the spring of 1862, when the United States of America was getting its butt kicked by the Confederate States of America, and it looked like either England or France would enter the war on behalf of…