Under the Gables

Giving Thanks by Horace Pippin, 1942 Horace Pippin was an African-American painter, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania,  in 1888, 10 mi...

  Portsmouth Street by Childe Hassam, 1917   It turns out that Americans who can afford them are getting tired of McMansions--the ex...

While I have not been seeking it, I have come across  information about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and life in Ohio in the 1830s ...

  Caldwell Church Soup Kitchen in Brooklyn, N.Y., manned by church volunteers.   I have always believed in the now-old-fashioned imp...

In Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood , author Steven Mintz reports that the kinds of blended families we see today were comm...

  The Iowa prairie as it might have looked when the Able McLaughlins farmed it in the mid-19th century. Margaret Wilson won the 1924 ...

A little friend who loves to do the dishes. She and my daughter (r) had just made a cake.     More from Living with Children by Mrs....

The Kidder Family, profiled in the Wall Street Journal for its use of workplace methods to make their family life happier and still p...

Golden Afternoon by Thomas George Sotter, 1935 Recently a friend asked me which country I would most like to visit and I answered Monta...

The Golden Rule by Norman Rockwell In today's Wall Street Journal today Laura Kreutzer, assistant managing editor of private equit...

New England Interior by Edmund Charles Tarbell, 1906. I wonder if the interior that is the actual subject of this painting is the private...

Monument to Mrs. Julia Dent Grant in Galena, Illinois. This statue of Julia Dent Grant, I believe, shows the vitality of the beloved wife of...

The Breakfast Table by John Singer Sargent, 1883 . (As always, click on the paintings to get a better view.) Not everyone's breakfast is...

John Garfield as Mickey Borden "Hmmm," says Mickey Borden, the cynical composer, when he first walks into the home of the musical ...

In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding , on the night before the wedding, all the family has gathered at the Fairchild house for a family celeb...

Christmas Eve by Carl Larsson The number of people in the United States who live alone continues to climb and stands now at 27%, still lower...

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty was a joy to read, although sometimes the syntax took some getting used to. The style is brisk and breezy but...

For the first time in at least two decades, the Wall Street Journal reported January 6, the American population under the age of 18 years ...