The Presidential museum turns five

Abe World opened five years ago this month, on April 19. Drawing on all the dark arts of electronic hucksterism, the new museum was to transform Springfield into a Mecca for patriots who would make th

Cloudy thinking from the Sunshine State

Illinois was demographically if not geographically a Southern state in its early years, and has long suffered from innovations in the civil realm imported from the land of molasses and mosquitoes. The

Reuniting learning and labor

Redirecting Illinois spending on higher education

Facing nearly half a billion dollars of unpaid bills from the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois says it will probably have to raise tuition nearly 20 percent over the next four years. Taki

Protecting the protector

The case for restoring the old state armory

One is always saddened to see an old friend left helpless in the hands of fate, even if that friend fills half a city block. As did so many of my generation, I spent dozens of happy hours at the Illin

Safe passage

Getting tourists off at the Dana-Thomas House

In March a busy Springfield learned that the Dana-Thomas Foundation, the private nonprofit guardian of the state-owned and Wright-designed Dana-Thomas House at Fourth and Lawrence, had bought a two-st

Is this any way to run an election?

The need for new ways to select public officials

The only suspense come election time in places such as Russia and Belarus and almost any of the Central Asian republics is not who wins but by how much. Government leaders bully, they bribe, they ban

How to say ‘What do we owe?’ in Mandarin

Local schools think about teaching China’s official language

If enough middle and high school students sign up for it, the Springfield and Ball-Chatham public school districts may offer instruction in Mandarin Chinese, the simplified official Chinese dialect us

Drawing the line?

Springfield as a border town on the North-South divide

Maybe it was the recent election of Richard Nixon to the White House that left me looking to the past rather than to the future in 1974. That was the year I published Honest Abe’s Honest Almanac

Giving immortality to their littleness

Gov. Thomas Ford’s history of Illinois politics

Illinois has a very short list of distinguished governors and a somewhat longer one of able historians. The list of distinguished governors who also are able historians is very short indeed. Only one

What about the banjo?

A Springfield grade-schooler confronts American folk songs

When I was a student, I was introduced to the concept that the simplest-sounding phrases had irreconcilable and contradictory meanings that rendered interpretation impossible. No intellectual test was