Popular Culture Library

Travel back in time where the past greets you on the fourth floor in the Ray and Pat Browne Library within Bowling Green State University’s Jerome Library. This Popular Culture treasure was established in 1969, two years after the $4.6 million new campus library opened its doors in November 1967. Library founder Dr. Ray Broadus Browne (1922-2009) envisioned a space within the new library to acquire and preserve research materials about American Popular Culture. The […]

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Columbus or Indigenous Peoples’ Day

In 1937 Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared October 12 a federal holiday.  I grew up knowing it as Columbus Day in honor of Christopher Columbus. In recent years pushback from the Native American community has led numerous communities to rename it as Indigeneous Peoples’ Day, now noted on calendars as the second Monday in October. I have a vested interest in this issue for two reasons. I now live in the city named […]

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Family Are Forever

John Denver has a line in Rocky Mountain High about  “going home to a place he’d never been before.” That is what I did a couple of weeks ago, only I went east to Plymouth, MA rather than west to Colorado for a family reunion. I spent Saturday afternoon and evening with distant cousins I’d never before met in person. Knowing we shared at least two ancestors in common gave us a starting place to […]

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Ohio Library Tour – Newark

Ohio has over 250 public library systems. My friend Lisa made a list of them, organized by county. Last weekend we launched our Ohio Library Tour, intending to tour as many of them as time and gas money permit. First up on our Ohio Library Tour was the Licking County Public Library in Newark, a community of 50,000 a short drive east of Columbus. My mother was born in Newark, but we chose the city […]

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Labor Day 1620

Labor Day in 1620

Welcome to an end-of-summer rerun of the “Labor Day 1620” article I ran a few years ago. As you read this, I’m in New England preparing to finally meet up with a group of Brewster descendants for my first attendance at their triennial Elder William Brewster family reunion. I hope to come home with many new Brewster relatives in my contacts list and more stories to share with you about the history beyond this fascinating […]

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