Maine is not only white with snow this time of year, racially it is also one of the whitest states in the nation with close to 98% of its residents identifying themselves as Caucasian. So any opportunity for exposure to cultural diversity is both welcome and needed in the Pine Tree State. The conjunction of […]
landscape
Yankee
My Christmas Wish List
In truth, there is nothing I want for nor anything I want for Christmas this year other than to have my three daughters home for the holidays, but a few days ago I found myself wandering around Portland on errands and stopped in at a couple of art galleries. I would have stopped at more, […]
The Williams College Museum of Art has mounted a series of late fall exhibitions that celebrate and provide context for its 1878 William Morris Hunt masterpiece “Niagara Falls,” a symphonic oil of one of America’s iconic landscapes. Hunt (1824-1879) was a Vermont native who became a celebrated Boston portrait and landscape painter. A Strong Impression: […]
Magazine
Mary’s Farm | The Ice Storm
A first-hand account of the December 2008 ice storm that left 400,000 New Hampshire households without power.
Jump In! at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts (through October 31) in downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is a multimedia exhibition featuring more than 20 regional artists, all of whom in one way or another celebrate water in the landscape. The show is just the latest in a lively series of exhibitions, concerts, performances, festivals and […]
Someone from, say, Kansas might laugh at the notion, but there was a time when Vermont merited the nickname “breadbasket of America.” During the 19th century, farms around New England devoted significant acreage to wheat; in the 1850s, Vermont alone boasted about 40,000 acres of wheat-growing land. However, as transporting grain from the Midwest became […]
Producer/Director Ken Burns describes his work as “emotional archaeology.” For nearly 30 years, Burns has unearthed compelling, surprising, complex stories surrounding seemingly well-documented subjects. His newest film, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a six-part, 12-hour series, is scheduled to air on PBS stations beginning Sunday, September 27. We spoke with Burns in his office […]
Magazine
The Leaf Seeker: Jeff Folger
It’s the church steeple that causes Jeff Folger, a.k.a. Jeff “Foliage,” Yankee‘s compulsive foliage blogger, to spin his red Silverado pickup truck around the town green of Brooklyn, Connecticut. The steeple is an unusual one, with a rectangular base giving way to a mansard-roof cupola covered in copper sheathing. And more to our purpose, it […]
“Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature”: Cicero said it, and Bradford Washburn lived it. A pioneering mountain climber, pilot, mapmaker, geologist, and founder of Boston’s Museum of Science–Washburn was all of these. This New England-born explorer was also a prolific artist behind the lens of a camera, capturing some of the […]
New England
Ziplining Through Color
When you’re afraid of heights, a thin grated walkway pegged 40 feet up a tree is an uncomfortable place to find yourself. It’s even less comfortable when everyone around you expects you to jump off it–but that’s exactly what I signed up for here at Alpine Adventures’ zipline course, on Barron Mountain in the White […]
There’s a reason this stretch of highway–some 200 miles from Massachusetts to Lake Memphremagog–has been called the best foliage drive in VT, and even the most scenic in all of New England.
Maine
Trap Day on Monhegan
SLIDE SHOW: Trap Day on Monhegan No one goes till everyone goes. That’s the way it’s always been on Trap Day on Monhegan, when the island’s lobstermen first set their traps off the darkened shoreline of one of Maine’s most storied offshore communities. Over the years, Monhegan has maintained very different lobstering traditions from anywhere […]