By Ray Hill The best-selling author Pearl Buck once wrote, “If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday.” History is comprised of the high and the low and everything in between. The “great” historical figures every child (at least in my day) grew up...
When the Mountain State had Three Senators “History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveler.” Historian Henry Glassie. By Ray Hill Sorting through history is rather like finding an...
By Ray Hill Burnet Rhett Maybank — his very name evokes the old Southland of books and stories. So, too, did his life story. Maybank’s middle name was for his mother’s family; Andrew Rhett had been a major in the Confederate Army. Burnet Maybank was the scion of a...
Politician from the Prairie: Harlan Bushfield of South Dakota By Ray Hill Harlan John Bushfield served only a single term in the United States Senate, but he made quite an impression on his home state of South Dakota in a relatively short period of time. Bushfield...
By Ray Hill Joseph Rosier was an unlikely United States senator and only reached that body because of his personal friendship with Matthew Neely. Matthew Mansfield Neely held sway for decades as both a perennial candidate for public office and unlike most perennial...
By Ray Hill There was a time when people engaged in voting a straight ticket, meaning they voted for every candidate of one political party or the other. There have also been election cycles where a tidal wave of support empowered one party or the other. 1920 was such...
By Ray Hill There are those who remember Paul Wellstone, the United States senator from Minnesota, who died, along with his wife and daughter, while campaigning for reelection in 2002 when his chartered airplane crashed. Wellstone, however, was not the first United...
By Ray Hill There was a time in our country’s history when Adam Clayton Powell was the most powerful Black person in America. The memory of Powell has dimmed somewhat, although he has been the subject of documentaries, movies, and even more recently, is portrayed as...
By Ray Hill Noah M. Mason of Illinois looked like precisely what he was: an old schoolteacher. Diminutive in stature, white-haired and frequently with a stern expression etched into his face, Noah Mason served for twenty-six years as a congressman from Illinois. ...
James W. Wadsworth of New York By Ray Hill The name James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. is rather reminiscent of “Gilligan’s Island” and Thurston Howell III. To say that James Wadsworth was well-connected is likely a gross understatement. His grandfather, James S. Wadsworth,...
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