We have just passed the autumn equinox of 2025, and are just 3 months away from 2026, which has been identified nationally as the quarter millennium of America’s origins — this ongoing experiment in republican democracy. As historians go down research rabbit holes (one thing just constantly leads to another), the rabbit hole I’ve tunneled has arrived, this week, to a couple different collections of essays. Starting from the present, the first collection is John Leonard’s edited volume of These United States: Original Essays by Leading American Writers on Their State Within the Union (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003) and, what I’ve been enjoying all the more, is what editor Daniel H. Borus scooped together with the collection of These United States: Portraits of America from the 1920s (Ithaca, New. York: Cornell University Press, 1992).

The essays are just that, what is within the subtitle of the two works: a writer was found or identified of each state in the Union. And they were asked and/or commissioned to produce a work on their state of the state. In the 1920s, 49 essays were collected (no Alaska and Hawaii yet in the nation, but they provided the State of New York with two essayists). I found this larger collection of essays through the earlier location of Willa Cather’s 1923 essay “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle” (which resonates today). Rolling north to south on the Great Plains, and then the north to south western states, the 10 writers and essays go like this:

1. Robert George Paterson “North Dakota: A Twentieth-Century Valley Forge”
2. Hayden Carruth “South Dakota: State without End”
3. Willa Sibert Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle”
4. William Allen White, “Kansas: A Puritan Survival”
5. Burton Rascoe, “Oklahoma: Low Jacks and the Crooked Game”
6. George Clifton Edwards, “Texas: The Big Southwestern Specimen”
7. Arthur Fisher, “Montana: Land of the Copper Collar”
8. Walter C. Hawes, “Wyoming: A Maverick Citizenry”
9. Easley S. Jones, “Colorado: Two Generations”
10. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, “New Mexico: A Relic of Ancient America”

Rather than trying to punch out any more blog analytics here, I’m going to take the rest of this morning to pick up at the 4th listed essay above, as I’ve been digesting them in the order listed above. More to report on a bit later.