When I was a child, back in the Parenting Stone Age (a.k.a. the Parentocentric Era), your parents were the most important people in the family. They paid the bills, bought your clothes, prepared the ...

If you grew up in the 1950s, your childhood probably included at least one treasured collection carefully stashed in a shoebox, cigar tin, or dresser drawer. From sports heroes to shiny pocket change, ...

The toys below were some of the decade’s biggest — and they’ve stayed popular ever since. Who’d have thought a basic potato ...

In a recent post I contended that a major cause of the continuous rise in teens’ suicides from 1950 to 1990 was a continuous decline over this period in opportunities for kids to engage in the sorts ...

Here’s a favorite childhood memory, and other memorable downtown Lancaster thoughts from the mid-1950s. I remember catching the 10:14 bus (that’s the time it stopped at Roseville Road and Lititz Pike) ...

My wife and I spent two days in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, recently. As we always do, we walked around my boyhood neighborhood _ the South-of-Broad historic district (back then, more ...

Kids in Mariruth Leftwich’s upcoming “Cooking Up History: Mid-Century Treats” class at Senator John Heinz History Center weren’t born yet when foods like Spam and Swanson’s frozen TV dinners first ...