Bestselling author Amity Shlaes will be the keynote speaker at the Ethan Allen Institute Jefferson Day Dinner Oct. 2 at the President Calvin Coolidge Historic Site in Plymouth.

Ruth Reynolds Freeman of Burlington, a pioneer woman architect, also pioneered the design of the passive solar home.

Vermonter Louise McCarren remembers New York City, September 11 2001.

The life of Daisy Tuner of Grafton, daughter of a freed slave, has been told in a graphic “comic book.”

Vergennes elected a black man sheriff for 26 years, beginning in 1879.

Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001), has ended her long-serving role as a trustee of the Vermont Arts Council.

Six years before the Battle of Bennington, the Green Mountain Boys were born when a handful of Vermonters frustrated the plans of a posse of New Yorkers in the “Breakenridge Stand-off.” Re-enactors and historians will celebrate the 250th anniversary of this little-known but important event Sunday, July 18.

My fellow Vermonters, today as we gather to celebrate the glorious history of the Fourth but we too wonder about our nation’s future. Let us take some consolation that many celebrants of bygone Fourths questioned if their nation would long endure.

In 1861 Gen. John Wolcott Phelps of Guilford had no authority to actually free slaves, but his tract became known as the Phelps Emancipation Proclamation.

The state’s first glassworks opened along the shores of Lake Dunmore in 1813. The lakeside workings, variously referred to as either the Vermont Glass Factory or Lake Dunmore Glass Company, consisted of a large factory complex that stood near today’s Sunset Lodge.

The oldest of the four chaplains on the USS Dorchester —Methodist minister George L. Fox—was from Thetford. When America had entered World War I, he had enlisted in the Marines at 17. Trained as an ambulance driver, he won a Silver Star on the Western Front for rescuing a wounded soldier from a battlefield full of poisonous gas—despite the fact that he had no gas mask. He stood just five feet seven; after Pearl Harbor, Reverend Fox enlisted in the Army the same day his 18-year-old son Wyatt, who survived the war, joined the Marines.

There was a lump in my throat as I sat in the stands at the Recreation Field when I saw this elderly, slightly overweight man, stroll, with a slight shuffle, to the mound with a borrowed glove on his left hand and toss the ball from the pitcher’s mound to the Mountaineer’s catcher. It was apparent that he no longer had a blazing, big-league fastball, but his pitch, slightly wobbly and off center, did reach the catcher mitt on the fly and was softly embraced. And I instantly thought back to memorable and poignant times of decades ago, when I sat transfixed, watching this ace take on my beloved Dodgers.

 In cooperation with the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation, UVM gave a group of civil engineering students an important task to prepare renovation plan for one of Kent’s Corner buildings. 

A recent rediscovery of a classic, 19th-century fossil site in northwestern Vermont is giving paleontologists a better understanding of Earth’s earliest lifeforms.

This bank vault is empty, a relic of a history almost invisible to passersby. The one-time bank vault within the Bank Block is a welcome sight for most. Visitors entering Village Eclectics 2 have a hint to its presence in the form of a dollar sign engraved in the granite keystone of the building that once stored the riches of 19th and early 20th century Bradford businesses.

A Vermont wooly mammoth fossil, discovered in a railroad right-of-way at Mt. Holly near Rutland, is still helping paleo-researchers understand what life was like in the Ice Age.

Vermonters and New Yorkers know much about French explorer Samuel de Champlain from his brief exploits along the shores of the great lake that now bears his name. The French explorer made it at least as far south as the future sites of forts Crown Point or Ticonderoga; he most likely battled native people along the lakeshore, in 1609, somewhere near the sites of the famous 18th-century British citadels.

Rutland-born Brig. General Edward Hastings Ripley attained the rank at age 25, and along with Gen. George Armstrong Custer, was among the nation’s youngest generals ever appointed in the War Between the States.