Morgan Staub

Every student experiences the feeling at least once, staring into the stucco walls of a way-too-brightly lit classroom. They count down the minutes until the clock strikes three P.M., yearning to escape the burden of learning for the day. In 1888, the great poet William Wordsworth encapsulated the feeling of the school bell ringing in …

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out from St. Louis to explore the vast western portion of the Louisiana Purchase, neither of them knew exactly what they were getting into. Their objective was simply to map the territory and find a route leading to the Pacific Ocean, but their journey crossing to the West …

In 1972, a musician born Henry John Deutschendorf released a popular song celebrating the sublime peaks of his favorite state. It took him nine months to write and honored the inspirational nature of the mountains that dotted his homeland. The narrator tells the story of a man moving to a midwestern state, scaling its mountains, …

William Shatner famously would begin every episode of the classic sci-fi series Star Trek with the same monologue, opening with, “Space. The final frontier…” Not so fast, Captain Kirk. Seventeen years before Shatner first donned his Starfleet-issue golden sweater, another land was already called the “Last Frontier:” The state of Alaska, admitted into the union …

In 1849, James W. Marshall, a supervisor working on the construction of a sawmill outside of Sacramento, was examining his workers’ excavation of a riverbed the day before when he noticed them. Shiny shards of some glinting material, scattered along the river. Gold. In an instant, ankle-deep in the mud along the banks of a …

The great state of Utah has a simple motto, abstaining from the flowery Latin language of states like Michigan (“Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circumspice,” that is, “if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around you,”) and the ironclad absolutes of the New Hampshires of the world (“Live free or die.”). No, the motto of Utah …

On Saturdays in the fall, 90,000 screaming football fans pack the Memorial Stadium in downtown Lincoln, decked out from head to toe in red, cheering on their Nebraska Huskers. The stadium, for that one day, is the third-largest city in Nebraska, more populous than the city of Bellevue. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is renowned nationally …

A culture of competition has existed in Oklahoma since, at least, the late nineteenth century. After President Grover Cleveland issued a proclamation stating that the Oklahoman lands were available for cultivation and settlement, settlers rushed in from all over the map to see who could get there “sooner.” The state lovingly adopted the “sooner” moniker, …

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, once attempted to explain the relationship between siblings via a cosmic metaphor. “If parents are the fixed stars in the child’s universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres,” said Gopnik, “siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.” To …