Travel

ABOVE PHOTO:  Civil Rights Center By Renée S. Gordon “South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.”  –W.E.B. DuBois In 2014, the New York Times named Atlanta one of the “52 Places to…

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ABOVE PHOTO: American Visionary Art Museum By Renée S. Gordon “Face it, Baltimore is a unique city — from its history to its people to the Bawlmerese dialect.” –Baltimore Sun Baltimore, Maryland owes its location to a river that flows into the Chesapeake Bay Watershed at the Inner Harbor. The presence of the Jones Falls River…

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ABOVE PHOTO:  National Railroad By Renée S. Gordon Maryland has been unique in American history from the time of first European contact. It went unnoticed by the Spanish explorers and it was not until John Smith and 14 men set out on two voyages in 1608 that the waterways were sighted and documented.  During these…

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ABOVE PHOTO: Schoolhouse By Renée S. Gordon “On a lonely road quite long ago, A trav’ler trod with fiddle and a bow; While rambling thru the country rich and grand, He quickly sensed the magic and the beauty of the land.” –Arkansas State Song The Ozarks is both a physical and cultural land mass located…

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ABOVE PHOTO: Hemingway House By Renée S. Gordon “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”  –Ernest Hemingway The Arkansas Delta is an alluvial plain 250-miles long and from 12 to 91 miles wide and covers one-third of eastern Arkansas. It is best defined as the land around the waterways that…

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ABOVE PHOTO: Joe Louis Fist sculpture By Renée S. Gordon “You took our country from its infancy, into industry and your name still carries with it the idea of a nation built on steel, muscle and sweat.”  –Eminem, “Letter to Detroit” The first multi-million dollar industry in the New World was the fur trade. As early…

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By Renee Gordon “When the working day is done, Girls – they want to have fun, Oh girls just want to have fun” –Cyndi Lauper Girlfriends gathered together to shop, swap stories, trade beauty tips and explore areas of personal interest even prior to European contact and the Age of Exploration. Native Americans met annually…

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ABOVE PHOTO:  Slave Market By Renée S. Gordon Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa and invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD. The Moors rapidly conquered Al Andalus, as they called the region, and established a capitol at Cordoba and ruled Spain for the following 800-years. The seeds of the Moor’s…

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ABOVE PHOTO:  Castillo View By Renée S. Gordon King Ferdinand granted Juan Ponce de Leon a license to explore the area of the New World west of Puerto Rico on March 3, 1513. He, accompanied by three ships, landed on the eastern shore of Florida on Easter Sunday, March 27, 1513 and established Spain’s claim…

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ABOVE PHOTO:  Kaufman House By Renée S. Gordon “We would also again bring into your view a plan for the gradual abolition of slavery, so disgraceful to any people and more especially to those who have been contending in the great cause of liberty themselves…..” –James McLene, Cumberland County Representative, February 15, 1779 Cumberland County…

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