A Work In Progress

One would figure that I would have more than enough time on my hands these days to keep American Voyages up and running, what with the wintery winter we have been experiencing in these parts lately.  My usual natural distractions are buried beneath the snow, at least right outdoors anyway (the local fens look amazing, especially where the Red-twig Dogwood, Cornus Sericea, just pops out of the scenery during these lean months).  The truth is that due to such an opportunity, I have retreated deep into the world of research, much of it historical.  Often times this is spurred on by political disruption which makes me all the more eager to brandish the sword of knowledge against hecklers fighting for political parties, or worse, sides caused by those parties so that politicians can profit off of partisan sentiment.  These days, though, I find myself absolutely blessed by the affordable bounty of used-bookstores in the area, particularly within the giant den of learning known as Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Yes, it can be a den of other things as well, but at least where there are parades there sometimes tend to be books and thinkers of all stripes too. 

So I figured we can go in two directions now, that of shorter posts which the blog experts claim are important for holding attention, supposedly being as effective as shorter pod-casts.  A few of my short posts have caught decent attention, but by and large my most followed, and thus I assume most interesting, posts have been longer affairs.  While hardly exhaustive posts on even the most diminutive topics, I figured they should be halfway well-informed.  As such, these posts deserve research, and maybe such research can come across in more book reviews.  Don't expect footnotes anytime soon, though, as that would mean I would have to really start focusing research (I dip from a huge buffet) and spend a lot more time than the already extensive duration I spend editing the blog.  Anyway, keep checking around this thing.  I think every month or so I will update where we we have been and where we are going, just to keep things rolling:

Currently my post direction seems to be focused on:

-The American South
-Black history
-Things Palm, Magnolia, and Rhododendron
-Charleston, Charleston, and more Charleston

My current research is absorbed in:

-Colonial settlement and expansion
-Religious development in North America inclusive of Mexico
-The National Road
-19th century environmentalism
-Whatever I can get my grubby fat fingers on
-Native plants in Britain and Ireland 

Oh, you want a picture of something anyway?  Fine.  Have a weird piece of my childhood curiosity:

I think this was in Chillicothe, Ohio, important First Born town since ancient times and now mostly home to large prisons and a fascinating national park site. 

American traffic lights always looked both cheap and cool to me.  In Ontario we have expensive steel poles with boring looking red on top-green on bottom lights.  Going down to Florida I always got a tickle out of the lights strung on wires with a lot of lights involved to tell you when to turn right, left, backwards, up, or whatever.  Michigan has a dearth of these lights, which always convinced me that it was halfway between Canada and the United States but part of neither.  Clearly one had to go to Ohio or New York to see real American lights, and thus somehow the real United States.  You know, for an imaginative ten year old.