If you think the only place to get vegetables is at the grocery store, prepare to be amazed and on the way to some degree of self-sufficiency. In the wartime years of the 1940s, many people started “Victory Gardens” as a way to grow their own vegetables. The concept faded as grocery stores popped up…

Upon seceding from Britain, her thirteen former colonies immediately began to lay the foundations of an independent humanities tradition. One could argue, of course, that the process of creating a uniquely “American” literature was already well underway long before the Revolution even began—with William Bradford’s “History of Plymouth Plantation,” for example, or the poetry of…