Tag: Slavery
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Bermuda Shorts, Part 3 (The Outsider )
As a complete outsider, I didn’t know exactly what to expect when we landed at L. F. Wade Airport on the far eastern end of the archipelago. Sure, I’d thumbed through the guides and scoured the Intertubes although that never truly compares to being there on the ground. I tried to avoid being overly touristy.…
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Making Guinea Bissau
I dug a little deeper into the visitor logs after I finished celebrating Twelve Mile Circle’s millionth visitor. Years ago I used to highlight the initial visitor from each nation. However, I stopped that after I’d attracted people to the site from just about everywhere. Nonetheless, there were a few stubborn holdouts and the logs…
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American Angola
I discovered distant relatives during my ongoing family research who lived in Angola, New York about a century ago. That seemed like an odd location for a town to carry such a name. I wondered if it could have been a coincidence. Maybe early settlers corrupted a Native American word used by the Iroquois who…
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Riverboat Adventure, Part 4 (History)
The rich history of the Lower Mississippi valley didn’t start with the Europeans. What they left behind however became an indelible legacy along the banks of a river that mirrored the growing pains of a nascent nation. These continued to reverberate into modern times. We attempted to immerse ourselves in various facets spanning multiple centuries.…
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Erasing Van Buren
Political debates come and go. What happens, however, when people live in a place named after a politician they despise? That doesn’t happen very often anymore. Just about every geographic location got its name a long time ago, at least in the United States. The nation expanded furiously in the first half of the Nineteenth…