Monday Morning Poem: Haunted House

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Here was a place where none would ever come
For shelter, save as we did from the rain.
We saw no ghost, yet once outside again
Each wondered why the other should be so dumb;
And ruin, and to our vision it was plain
Where thrift, outshivering fear, had let remain
Some chairs that were like skeletons of [...]

Monday Morning Poem: Ghost House

by Robert Frost
I DWELL in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and [...]

It’s Fall: A Little More Halloween Reading

Food for the Dead by Michael Bell
Scarier because it’s real……

New England folklorist Michael Bell spent some time in Eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island, interviewing people who still have direct connections to a little known outbreak of vampire beliefs a little more than 100 years ago. Food for the Dead, admirably researched, presents a series [...]

Monday Morning Poem: A Time to Talk

by Robert Frost
When a friend calls to me from the road    
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, ‘What is it?’
No, not as there is a time talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up [...]

The Resting Place of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

Just about a year ago, long time friend Ken generously agreed to post an photo essay about scenes from the Civil War, then and now. This has deservedly become one of the most popular posts on You’re History, and if you missed it, you can find it here. This summer, Ken and Eileen made [...]

Crazy Lorenzo Dow: American original

During the 19th century, many an American mother named her new baby boy Lorenzo Dow, after a flamboyant preacher from Connecticut. The namesake of all these sons was born in Coventry in 1777, where he spent his youth much tormented by religious uncertainties. At the age of 21, he joined the [...]

Blackfly Festival 2009 – you’re invited

The Sixth Annual Adamant Blackfly Festival & Parade
“Downtown” Adamant, VT
Saturday, May 16, 2009

Mark your calendars, stock up on repellant, and start mixing up the paper mache: the date for the seventh annual Adamant Blackfly Festival has been set for Saturday, May [...]

Bad Girls: Anne Hutchinson, “American Jezebel”

“You have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.” So spoke John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Colony, at the trial of Anne Hutchinson, Newtown (later Cambridge), 1637.
For more [...]

Modern Lit: An a Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clark

Whose story is this, anyway?
The Pulsifer family epitomizes the word dysfunctional. Not abusive, exactly, but profoundly disconnected. Their son, Sam, whom they’ve raised mostly via assigning him books to read, is an ex con, an “accidental” arsonist whose fire at the Emily Dickenson house killed a tour guide and her husband. Sam served [...]

Maine Temperature conversion chart

60 above zero
New Yorkers try to turn on the heat….
People in Maine plant gardens.
50 above zero
Californians shiver uncontrollably…….
People in Maine sunbathe.
40 above
Italian cars won’t start…..
People in Maine drive with the windows down.
32 above
Distilled water freezes…..
Moosehead Lake’s water gets thicker (for non-Mainers, this is a lake in Maine)
20 above
Floridians wear coats, gloves and woolly hats…..
People in [...]