6-minute Stories

Gratitude is what keeps us humble as we realize at any age how much of a role luck plays in our lives.

A native of Ohio, William Hildebolt shares a family story from the earliest days of his ancestors who have lived on and worked the same land near the Indiana border and kept up the family homestead for 200 years.

a foretaste of glory divine yet to come -

Artist, writer, and athlete Bill Gramley of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, recounts his discoveries of Southern cooking and describes the delectables offered up from the table set by his mother-in-law on a 1950s North Carolina farm.

This bonus episode shares some history from 50 years ago in April 1970 with relevance to our challenges across the world today. Certainly the first Earth Day would be a good guess, but this story is about the other event, the one you might remember or know of as a movie fan if not as a history buff.

Coming from the Mountain West fifty years ago, a new bride discovered what “small town” really meant in South Carolina.

This episode is the first of Season 2 and begins the sharing of stories from “That Southern Thing—living, loving. laughing, loathing, leaving the South,” the third anthology of the Personal Story Publishing Project.

This story of a great catastrophe was written three-and-a-half years ago about an event 350 years before that. We may find that today this story holds insights about our current challenge of facing down the Corona virus. You decide if it holds lessons for each of us and for all of us today from The Great Fire in London, 1666.

if these wall could tell our stories -

Kentucky writer Barbara Chandler wanders through an old family homestead of her childhood and reflects on years gone by and the people gone with them in the hopes of passing those memories onto to another generation.

North Carolina writer, teacher, and history-lover Gretchen Griffith recounts her family’s continual exploration of America’s beauty and history through their travelling game of finding and following those curiosity-piquing “brown signs.”

It was 250 years ago in early 1770, while liberty-minded American colonists in Boston were confronted by British soldiers in what became the Boston Massacre, that another story important to the origins of America was unfolding across the Appalachian Mountains. Daniel Boone was on his first expedition through the Cumberland Gap, exploring the wilderness frontier in Kentucky, writing another episode of our becoming America. (This story is a companion to “The Boston Massacre, 1770.”

BecomingAmerica250.com is a new project to help people touch history where it happened during the 250th anniversary of a Southern colonial odyssey, 1769 to 1789 as we were becoming America.

Becoming America -

Exactly 250 years ago this year occurred one of the most famous and least understood events in American history. And, just before it, a murder hardly anyone remembers. On the 250th anniversary of the funeral procession which helped galvanize patriotic spirits in Boston, hear one important story of our becoming America.