History
The Story Behind the Story of "The Shopkeeper of Alsace." Part 1.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how stories come to us. Sometimes, they arrive fully told, from prologue to The End, in one complete waterfall. Sometimes they reach out to us hesitantly, in little pieces…a photograph, a memory, a question…. breadcrumbs put on our path, but it’s up to us to notice them. My forthcoming novel,The Shopkeeper of Alsace, came to me in breadcrumbs. The first dropped before me in the mid-1980s, when I was an exchange student in Strasbourg, France. That’s the capital of Alsace, an eastern province right on the Rhine River and the German border.
Deep Underground: Inside the Infamous Maginot Line
I've long been fascinated by this chain of more than two dozen fortified bunkers built along the border between France and Germany, built to protect France from German invasion after World War I. the Maginot Line was a massive military miscalculation. In the spring of 1940, Germany simply went around it, through Belgium and into Northern France.
A NH writer ahead of her time: Sarah Josepha Hale
Sarah Josepha Hale was an author, poet, magazine editor, and activist, born in 1788. Her work had enormous national impact despite the times, when society strictly limited “acceptable” roles for women.
Meeting America's Favorite Fighting Frenchman: My Encounter with Revolutionary War Hero, the Marquis de Lafayette
Meeting America's Favorite Fighting Frenchman: My Encounter with Revolutionary War Hero, Marquis de Lafayette