Baptism by Firehose
Welcome to baptism by firehose, the emotional conclusion to a weeklong annual spiritual convention for the congregants of the United House of Prayer for All People in Washington, DC, on the last weekend of August.
Story Archive
Community
Crime and Punishment
Witness Unprotected
2502 Pomeroy Road in southeast Washington, D.C. is a lonely, dark place at night. A long road up a steady hill, turning into the apartment complex there’s only one way in and one way out. It’s the perfect place for a murder or revenge.
Alcatraz
Alcatraz Island, located in the San Francisco Bay a little over a mile offshore from San Francisco, California, is home to the now closed Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary and the site of the oldest operating lighthouse on the West Coast of the United States.
Culture
Legacy of the Black Cowboy
The nation’s only touring African American rodeo, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo has brought bulldogging, roping, bareback bronco riding, bull riding, barrel racing and other events to cities across the nation for 27 years.
The Old Order
The farmlands of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Ontario are among the most productive in North America. Many of the farmers in these areas are different, but different by choice. They are Old Order Mennonites, sometimes called the “Plain People,” and they trace their heritage back hundreds of years.
Big Top Dreams
The Cole Bros. Circus was the oldest, American Circus performing under the Big Top. W. W. Cole, who inaugurated the Cole Bros. Circus title in 1884, began his circus career in 1871, amassing fortune and fame by bringing to cities and villages the most astounding marvels of the day. Cole Bros. stopped touring in 2016.
Shadows of the Gullah Geechee
When slavery was abolished in 1863, the Gullah Geechee people of the Sea Islands settled in the lands they once worked as slaves when plantation owners abandoned their property. They continued their traditions and created their own communities steeped in religion and African traditions. They are known as Gullah in North and South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia and Florida.
Discourse and Dissent
Yearning to Breathe
Clouds of tear gas drifted across the warm early summer midnight air like a misty fog in a mysterious horror movie. Ominous. Powerful.
Economy
Searching for Dream Street – Monessen
Monessen was created by steel magnates who built mills along the Monongahela. By 1930, more than 20,000 people lived in Monessen. Workers here made steel for Chrysler cars and cables for the Golden Gate Bridge.
Searching for Dream Street – Clairton
Clairton, a city in Allegheny County, Pa., along the Monongahela River, is home to the United States Steel Clairton Works, the largest coke manufacturing facility in the United States. The city is still trying to recover from the decline of the steel industry.
Searching for Dream Street – Braddock
Braddock, a city in Allegheny County, Pa., along the Monongahela River, is home to the United States Edgar Thompson Works. The city is still trying to recover from the decline of the steel industry.
Rankin – Searching for Dream Street
Searching for Dream Street – Rankin The Carrie Furnaces were built in 1881 as part of U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works, a sprawling 400-acre complex that spanned both sides of the Monogahela river. They produced up to 1,250 tons of steel a day until 1978 when they were closed. While the majority of the site was razed for a shopping center, …
Searching for Dream Street
The suburban towns along its iconic three rivers, helped make Pittsburgh an industrial powerhouse, driven by an influx of foreign-born workers at the turn of the 20th century. Immigrants filled jobs in the mills, where steel was forged for the aircraft and battleships that helped win two world wars.
But as you drive through these towns today, it’s clear they have been largely forgotten. Once bustling shopping corridors are all but empty. The company homes where mill workers raised their families are showing their age, and residents still reminisce about the “good old days” before the mills shuttered.
Searching for Dream Street – Aliquippa
In 1909, Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation (J&L), which already had a mill on the south side of Pittsburgh, wanted to expand, so it purchased land along the Ohio River near the town of Woodlawn about 25 miles downriver from Pittsburgh. The company expanded the town, building homes and businesses to accommodate the workers of what would become the largest steel mill in the world, stretching for 7 miles along the riverfront.
Environment
The Long Struggle To Save Florida’s Manatees
Florida is in the middle of a massive manatee die off. More than 1,100 manatees died in 2021, shattering annual fatality records for the iconic species and erasing more 10% of the estimated population. The sharp uptick in deaths is due to the pollution-fueled collapse of seagrass beds on Florida’s east coast.
The Silencing of Florida’s Springs
Florida has more than 1,000 known freshwater springs, one of the densest concentrations of springs in the world. Springs are Florida’s original tourist attractions and for centuries, visitors have flocked to them to marvel at the billions of gallons of cool, clear water that gush out of the porous limestone aquifer every day.
Health and Wellness
COVID Flags of Remembrance
American artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg was the creator of “In America: Remember,” a public art installation on display from September 17 to October 3, 2021, in Washington, D.C., to honor Americans who died in the COVID-19 pandemic. It served as a memorial where people gathered to weep, share stories and embrace as they sought solace.
Invisible Monster
In a faraway land across a vast ocean, in a place called Wuhan, it was the dead of winter when the rumors of sickness and death first appeared like a whisper in the falling snow.
Healthcare in Rural America
They came through the hollers with the winding clear streams, lush overhanging trees and ancient rocky hillsides wet with dew and morning fog. They drove in old jalopies and walked over the mountain roads. They came from Haysi, Dante, Big Stone Gap, Wise and other small towns near the Kentucky border too small to have a name.
Rural America Under the Influence
In southwest Virginia, amongst the graves, a soft weeping can be heard through the rustle of leaves in the trees. Debbie Stanley is bowed down, crying on the gravestone of her son, Jessee James Stanley, on the one-year anniversary of his death.
Healthcare Never Never Land
Remote Area Medical (RAM), is a nonprofit volunteer medical relief corps based in Knoxville, Tennessee, RAM provides free health, dental and vision care to people in remote areas of the United States and around the world.
Immigration
The Dangerous Quest for Asylum
Flashlights appear in the of darkness at midnight on a riverbank in Roma, Texas and the first sound that breaks the stillness is usually a baby crying. Then the inflation of a rubber raft that soon carries a slice of desperate humanity, women and children mostly, across the Rio Grande from Mexico to their American Dream.
El Norte: The Americans
On the outskirts of Garden City, Kansas, along the smooth two-lane road, past the silos and the grazing cattle, a few semi trucks are parked in the dusty gravel lot below the tall, yellow Super 8 sign.
El Norte: Dispatches from the US-Mexico border
There, in the desert the dark storm clouds drifted across the jagged horizon. The July air was dry as a bone. On the hot ground, the rock and cactus, through the high thorny brush she sat silent, crouched low, her hair wild from the helicopter above, her brown eyes squinting in the desert light.
Politics
Last Days
For years during his administration, President Donald Trump claimed that the only way he could be denied a second term was if the election was rigged, thus laying the groundwork for his “stop the steal” campaign after the votes were counted.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, died as a result of complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas at her home in Washington, D.C., on September 18, 2020 surrounded by family.
Former President George H.W. Bush Dies
George Herbert Walker Bush, died November 30, 2018 at the age of 94. Bush served as the 41st President of the United States from 1989 to 1983, and as the 43rd Vice President of the United States from 1981 to 1989 under President Ronald Reagan.
Religion
Baptism by Firehose
Welcome to baptism by firehose, the emotional conclusion to a weeklong annual spiritual convention for the congregants of the United House of Prayer for All People in Washington, DC, on the last weekend of August.
Roadside America
South of the Border
You can see the 200-foot tall Sombrero Tower from over a mile away as you cross the border on interstate 95 from North Carolina into South Carolina, but billboards have been announcing its sighting from as far away as Virginia. When you get closer you see Pedro, an almost 100-foot tall statue of a Mexican bandito and your host at South of the Border.
The Homefront
A Child’s Pilgrimage
I met Brittany Jacobs in Section 60 on Memorial Day 2012. It was the first time she had seen her late husband’s headstone. When I first saw her, she was crying as she clutched her 17-month-old son Christian at the gravesite.
ZIPCODE USA
46402 – Gary, Indiana
The brainchild of the Catholic Affairs Committee, the Knights of Columbus had planned to erect a series of large crucifixes throughout Lake County, Indiana. The crucifixes were described as memorials “to Americans who gave their lives in this country’s wars” and also “carry a religious message to the thousands of motorists who will pass by them” on US 20.
94108 – San Francisco, California
Graffiti adorns the windows of the Paulist Center Bookstore, a Catholic church shop located in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
15010 – Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania
A patron leaves the holiday decorated Nero’s Lounge and Restaurant in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
46406 – Gary, Indiana
Tyrone sells newspapers in the morning from the median of Route 20 on the western edge of Gary, Indiana.