D.G. Martin

“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” These words from Isaiah 6:8 inspired the daughter of a pre-Civil-War Southern slaveholder to travel to Africa as the wife of a Baptist missionary to...

What could you learn from a trip down the Cape Fear River? Starting, say, at a few miles below Jordan Lake where Haw River joins Deep River to form the Cape Fear, canoeing downstream and passing by Raven Rock State Park before...

Famed Chapel Hill author Elizabeth Spencer has proved a North Carolina rule again. “Ninety is the new 60.” Or 50. Spencer, like academic leader William Friday and historian John Hope Franklin a few years earlier, shows that the...

When politics is the topic, there is always more to talk about. So it is with the book on North Carolina politics that was the subject of a recent column. I keep going back to East Carolina University Professor Tom Eamon’s The...

Just in time for the new year, a new book puts modern North Carolina politics in perspective. The Making of a Southern Democracy: North Carolina Politics from Kerr Scott to Pat McCrory, by East Carolina University Professor Tom...

Should we look to Germany for a better way to organize our government? Our parents and grandparents from the “Greatest Generation” would be shocked at the idea that the country they fought so hard to defeat would have the kind...

Do people in North Carolina remember Thomas Wolfe, their once famous son, author of Look Homeward, Angel, whose books helped many of us get through the transformation from childhood to adulthood and opened the door to an...

Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot? Most Americans who were alive on Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they got the awful...