Activity

So, of course, they show up in poetry. “I do not know much about gods,” wrote T. S. Eliot, who grew up along the Mississippi in Saint Louis, “but I think that the river is a strong brown god.” “Under various names,” wrote Czeslaw Milosz, who grew up in Lithuania along the Neman, “I have praised onl…

I am sure the natural world gave some pleasure to the people who worked the land for those four hundred years. But we will not find in the written record what sunlight looked like to them in the leaves of trees along the Rappahannock River in the spring, or what the sky looked like when tens of tho…

Sugar is not native to North America. It’s indigenous to South Asia. The Arabs took it from India to the East and Spain in the eighth century and Christopher Columbus brought it from Spain to Hispaniola on his second voyage, where, as he thought it might, it flourished and quickly became a cash cro…