Berlin Trip Takes Me to the Site of the First Shooting Along the Wall Talk about timing. I spent the last two weeks in Austria and Berlin, in part to do research for my new novel on the Berlin Wall, The Puzzle People (which explains why I have not done a blog for...
Phoenix Dust Storm Hearkens Back to the Worst Hard Time If you haven't seen the incredible images of the recent dust storm that swept across Phoenix, check out this YouTube video. It brought to mind a book that I read last year, The Worst Hard Time, an award-winning...
Caldecott Honor Book Joins The Disappearing Man in Canton Festivities I first came across Henry Brown's incredible story while visiting Cincinnati for the premiere of the VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. At the time, I was a VeggieTales writer,...
It Took One of the Craziest Games of All Time With baseball's All-Star game just around the corner, I can't resist a bit of baseball history--one of the most bizarre games in the long history of the game. I am a White Sox fan, but this game involved the...
If Only Henry Brown Had a Computer Game... I couldn't resist this curious bit of news. A friend recently sent me an article about a man who is shipping himself in a box from Bald Knob, Arkansas, to Portland, Oregon, beginning July 7. That's right: A seven-day...
When Western Illinois Tried to Split From the Union Some have described it as our 51st state. But others have called it a republic, which tried to secede from the Union in 1971. Whatever it was, state or republic, people knew it as Forgottonia. Forgottonia was...
Going Out on a Limb to Stop a Fast-Growing Crime: Modern Slavery Miller McKim would never forget the day that a Richmond shoemaker named Samuel Smith showed up at his Philadelphia office with a most improbable proposal. He wanted to ship a human being--a slave...
Free Blacks Lived on the Edge Between Slavery and Freedom When Henry Brown arrived in Richmond in 1830 at the age of 15, the city boasted a population of roughly 16,000--half of which were African-American. There were 6,345 slaves in Richmond, but there were...
Big Brother Takes a Big Hit in 1989 George Orwell didn't quite get it right. His landmark novel, 1984, describes the 1980s as a time in which Big Brother is all-seeing and all-controlling. Little did he know that the 1980s would be better known for taking Big Brother...
The Clothing of Slaves Bloomed on Sundays Henry's face lit up when he spotted the mystery girl coming straight toward them, with a friend flanking her on either side--all of them carrying white parasols and all wearing flowered and feathered bonnets. The girl's bonnet...