USA

My Netflix DVD queue contains 47 movie titles. At a rate of about one viewing per week, it would take almost a year to get through my whole list, if I weren’t always growing it. Often, I’ll add a movie and shoot it directly to the top. The list remains roughly the same length, and…

At least seven celebrities have vowed to leave the USA, if a Republican is elected president. This type of attitude can destroy America. The degree of division in the United States makes it unlikely that our country will be able to prevail over the long term. Republicans against Democrats. Liberals against conservatives. America is in…

I recently began reading a book that I picked up at a library sale last summer, called Helen and Teacher by Joseph P. Lash. Within the first few pages, I learned about the woman whose education paved the way for Helen Keller’s fame. Here are seven facts about Laura Bridgman: 1. Laura Bridgman (1829-1889) was the first deafblind person to become famous,…

I’ve been hearing, and you have, too, about Obama’s proposed changes to the path to citizenship. As I listened, I realized that I didn’t know much about what it takes to become a U.S. citizen, so I really didn’t know what Obama was changing about the process. I figured the best thing to do was to…

Over the past few months, we’ve been hearing a lot about President Obama’s executive action on immigration. There are several parts to this action, including strengthening our borders, making illegal immigrants accountable for their actions, and streamlining the immigration process. Having recently researched what it currently takes to become a citizen, I thought I would like…

Most of us think of Presidents’ Day as a day off of work or a day that you check your mailbox and the mail hasn’t come. Here are some other facts about this national holiday that you might not have known and links to interesting articles about each. 1. Presidents’ Day is celebrated on the third…

Some men might have rejoiced over a physical defect that would keep them out of World War II. Take Donald Michaels, the conscientious objector who was sentenced to three years in a Federal penitentiary for refusing to go to war. A minor physical deformity, like a crooked finger, could have saved him a lot of trouble.…

I first met Chris Dubbs in 2005, when I left my job as grant writer at Gannon University for another position. Chris was my replacement, and over lunch one day, I shared as much as I could with him about the grant-writing landscape at Gannon. So when I recently saw a notice about his latest book, America’s U-Boats:…

The day was November 22, 1963, and I was getting pretty comfortable in the third month of first grade at Our Lady of Peace. I had been so lonely the previous year, when we moved back to Erie from California, and my brothers left me every day for school. OLP didn’t have kindergarten in those…

Ever since my son and his wife moved to Washington, DC, about two years ago, we’ve made the six-hour trip to visit them every few months. Each time, we’ve considered taking a detour to visit the Flight 93 Memorial in southwestern Pennsylvania, but we never seemed to have the energy to add an hour or…