Thoughts & Musings from James McNiven
Almost 158 years ago, on the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, as he watched a play. It could have been different. In March of 1858, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company was reorganized as the Seneca Oil Company, with New Haven CT banker James Townsend becoming President… Continue reading A Petroleum Strike Might Have Saved Lincoln
In 1832, a son, Octave, was born to the Chanut family in Paris. When Octave was six, his father, estranged from his wife, took him and sailed to New Orleans to teach at the newly-created Jefferson College. The deepening financial crisis following the 1837 Crash led to his soon losing his job, so he took… Continue reading Octave Chanute and the Wright Brothers
There is a famous Army recruiting poster from World War I that shows Uncle Sam in his current ‘look’. He is sternly looking and pointing at the viewer, and the caption below him reads “I Want You For U.S. Army!” Generally, all the representations of Uncle Sam since 1917, and including the one my son… Continue reading About Uncle Sam
You might want to follow this explanation on a map. How US 20 (America's longest highway and the subject of my book trilogy The Yankee Road) ended in Newport, or even at Yellowstone, is a complex story. First and foremost, it begins with boundaries. After the American Revolution, the British kept control over the eastern seaboard… Continue reading Boundaries
Something that seems to be left out of most accounts of travelling overland across the continent is how long it took, especially for those going west from the Mississippi River valley, and what the introduction of the railroad and then the automobile meant to the traveller. For the wagon going to Oregon, or the Mormon… Continue reading Some Rough Travel Comparisons
With the publication of Volume 3 of The Yankee Road launching August 2020 (here's a bit of the story behind US 20, America's longest highway. US 20 stretches across the United States nearly 3400 miles, from Boston to Newport, Oregon. It is a designation connecting a number of largely pre-existing roads rather than a singular… Continue reading The Creation of US20 – The Yankee Road
The Rock River issues from a swamp in central Wisconsin and its waters flow south, crossing under US 20 in northern Illinois near the John Huy Addams (Jane Addams’ father) homestead. It then begins to flow southwesterly, passing Grand Detour and Dixon before joining the Mississippi at a rocky rapids/falls in what is informally called,… Continue reading John Deere’s Steel-Tipped Plow
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?Jack Kerouac, On the Road What a long, strange trip it’s been…The Grateful Dead, Truckin’ Lowell is a former mill town to the north of Boston. It is named after Francis Cabot Lowell, who developed the first American textile mill in 1814. It is located… Continue reading Lowell, Jack and Me: An Excerpt from The Yankee Road – Volume 1
A long time ago, a friend introduced me to the story of the British writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor. At the age of 18 in 1933, being both charming and restless, he decided to walk alone overland from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He planned, if that is the word for it, on sleeping in… Continue reading Following Paddy’s Footsteps: Two European “Road Books”
"Not only for Cyrus’ sake did Xenophon march up toward the Persians. But in search of a road which led up to Zeus." Diogenes Laërtius Americans have added, in great numbers, to the road book literature. American stories of travel and roads have been conditioned by the general habit of a people constantly on the… Continue reading American Road Books
Old Professor by the Sea 