Bill Kemp

It seems like a new biography of President Abraham Lincoln comes out every few years, trying to discern new perspectives of his time and character. Lincoln himself didn't write much about his life, so what he did put down on paper has an outsized importance.

Human beings have marked the turning of the year with many different traditions over thousands of years. Some practices have fallen out of favor. Today, American society celebrates on New Year’s Eve, and not New Year's Day, though this was not always the case.

Christmas in America wasn't always the huge festive cultural movement we know today. The Puritans made the celebration of Christmas illegal. They thought such demonstrations were sacrilegious.

In the early 1800s, supply chains were a lot shorter, but the lack of mechanized transportation sometimes made it tremendously difficult to bring goods to market. Yet, a regional — edging toward national — marketplace did thrive.

The sudden freeze of ’36 came with a vengeance. It was like a wild prairie fire that snipped everything in its path. And woe to him who was far from human habitation.

By now, most people know the Rivian story in which a scrappy startup electric automaker brought a mothballed Mitsubishi plant back to life, hired 8,000 people, and has now gone on to make more than 100,000 vehicles. Fewer may know Rivian was not the first electric automaker in Bloomington-Normal.

Alpheus Pike campaigned in the eastern theater of the war and, after two years and nine months of service, was captured in May 1864 at a battle near Drewry’s Bluff in the Bermuda Hundred campaign and was sent to a notorious Confederate prison camp.

Illinois high school basketball teams are grinding through the late parts of their seasons as the state tournament approaches early next month. In this episode of our series McHistory, we learn about the longest-running annual basketball tournament in the state — 112 years and counting.

Most people know about the letter a little girl wrote to the New York Sun newspaper in 1897 asking whether Santa Claus is real. It prompted the famous response, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." Bloomington-Normal children encountered their own slightly more intrepid version of that idea a couple decades later.

The words of a World War II prisoner of war from Normal show a grim situation filled with privation, guard brutality, and occasional diversions. This comes from Robert S. Hall’s wartime journal, recently donated to the McLean County Museum of History.