This ghost town once produced 200 million dollars in gold. {© John Drew 1992)   In Arizona, as elsewhere in the Southwest in the 1800s, towns sprang up overnight when miners struck gold (or silver, or copper). When the mines were "played out," the townspeople disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. Only their buildings […]

The United States has a high divorce rate: Ap­proximately 1 in every7 2 marriages ends in divorce. One result of this high divorce rate is that many American children live in single­parent families. Although some women wait until their thirties to have their first child, other women become mothers while they are still teenagers. Many […]

Early Influences Elvis Presley was bom in 1935, in East Tupelo, Mississippi. His family was poor. They moved to Memphis, Tennessee in search of better opportunities. What influenced Elvis and his music? First, there was his mother Gladys. For his eleventh birthday, Elvis wanted a rifle. Gladys con­vinced him to get a guitar. Then there […]

Crater Lake Crater Lake, in Oregon, is famous for its clear, blue waters. It is also famous for the way it was formed: About 7,000 years ago, Mount Mazama, a volcano, erupted. Its walls col­lapsed, forming a basin. The basin filled with rainwater and became Crater Lake. This long-ago volcanic eruption probably caused human deaths. […]

The ivy walls of Harvard University Just across the Charles River from Boston is Cambridge, America’s most famous student town. Cambridge is sometimes called the birth­place of American intellectual life: It has the nation’s oldest university, Harvard University, founded in 1636. Cambridge remains a center of intellectual life, especially since it’s also home to MIT, […]