“Hello cousin Brad. Just letting you know that Dad died this morning. The last of that group of Bakers. Glad you got to visit. Love Connie.” I received the text at 9:33 pm last night as my wife and I sat on the couch watching television. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to think […]
The difference between Bob and I was just a matter of degree. Our lives had taken on eerily similar trajectories. Yet an objective observer would have likely said my life was empirically better. The difference between my cousin and I was this: I carried a deep-seated shame that he didn’t know.
This blog is primarily about the Appalachian experience as it relates to my work on So Far Appalachia: An American mythology as told by the Bakers of Beckinghamshire. If I do my job well, though, that story will touch on larger American themes. While I haven’t had the chance to watch this Frontline piece yet, it’s […]
‘Hollow’ debuts on W.Va. Day, screenings Saturday, via the Seattle PI Hollow the Film, via the project’s webste Hollow is a hybrid community participatory project and interactive documentary where content is created “for the community, by the community.” The project combines personal documentary video portraits, user-generated content, photography, soundscapes, interactive data and grassroots mapping on […]
Since we no longer have our Blu-Ray/DVD player, PBS hasn’t given me any way to watch The Appalachians or Appalachia, two mini-series documentaries on the people and the region. As such, I’m stuck watching part one of The Appalachians (thanks to YouTube). If you happen to know where I might purchase digital versions of these […]
I came across this map at Business Insider, and I had to share it. Linguists have looked at the speech patterns associated with 22 different words, and mapped dialects in the U.S. This is a wonderful way to illustrate how different we are despite our common heritage.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my friend, Lali, with whom I shared a very intense friendship twenty years ago. We had one of those inexplicable connections that tethered us together for years. As I was traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I wondered if maybe her family was from here since this is Mennonite country […]
The most common question I ask myself while researching: Why? This seems like an easy question, but it’s precisely the easiness of it that causes you to continually return to it. If you can answer a series of repeated whys (along with a few whens) you can construct a meaningful timeline of not just what […]
“If you do it will be, in the writer’s opinion, almost a copy of the German jaeger rifle because these Bakers were making guns from 1717-1754 — the earliest gunsmiths I have found in this area of Pennsylvania.” — Sam Dyke, 1972. “The Baker Family of Gunsmiths in Lancaster, County 1717-1754 The problem with history […]
I arrived in Lancaster just a little after noon today after surviving a drive that took me through the foggy Appalachia mountains, torrential rain down pours, and hours of driving time without mobile cell service. As some severe weather is headed my way, I skipped some of the preliminary research today and instead got my […]
This Sunday, I’m packing up my car and heading east to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is the home of American gun making. The reason: before the Bakers settled in Clay County, Kentucky, the family lived in Lancaster, where they helped make the Pennsylvania Rifle (also known as the Kentucky Rifle or the hog rifle). According to […]
The Reverend John Jay Dickey was a traveling minister who spent a good deal of time both chronicling his journeys through the mountains of early America and his attempts to set up churches in schools in towns. The Dickey Diaries paint an amazingly clear picture of the daily life (and frustrations) he observed. Each time […]