Blogroll

Goodbye, South Dakota

At 12:55 pm CDT on Friday, May 27, my status as a lifelong South Dakotan ended. I crossed the state line en route to the city in which my wife and I now live. Two of our three daughters and our granddaughter live in the university town larger than Sioux Falls.

Family was the […]

From 19th Century Russian terrorist to South Dakota college professor

As an initial aside, this post embodies what one can learn learn from just one sentence in a book.

While reading The Romanovs, a nearly 800 page tome on the dynasty that ruled Russia for four centuries, there was a paragraph on page 465 about the head of the Narodnaya Volyaan (“People’s Will”), a terrorist […]

I never knew I was in the militia

I recently read that many states have laws that automatically make virtually all men between certain ages part of that state’s “militia.” South Dakota is one of a number of states where the automatic membership arises from the state Constitution.

Article 15, ยง 1 of the Constitution says, “The militia of the state of South […]

Popularity causes welcome problem for Historical Society Press

Around 1930, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote an autobiography about her and her family’s pioneer experience. No one would publish it. Wilder ended up using it as a source for her wildly successful Little House series. Turn the clock ahead 80 some years and things have changed dramatically. The autobiography was finally published late last year […]

The annual question

Some things have never changed in my nearly 60 years in South Dakota. One is the question that pops up When winter’s cold arrives each year. “Why in the hell do I live here?” In fact, when I think about it, it comes to mind any number of times between November and April.

Don’t get […]