They saw him standing here

George Harrison, the first Beatle in America, left his footprints all over southern Illinois

The 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first visit to America will be commemorated in February 2014. The Liverpool lads, shortly after their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reached t

Lithuanians in Springfield

New historical marker commemorates the heritage of a proud community

The placing of a church cornerstone is an act of faith. For the founders of Springfield’s St. Vincent de Paul Lithuanian Catholic Church it was an act of survival. Exiled from their tiny homelan

Shadows of the Motherland

Russian Orthodoxy in downstate Illinois

T he trained eye rarely misses them: three-barred crosses and primitive, colorful icons, occasionally spotted in roadside cemeteries and out-of-the-way chapels from Chicago to Carbondale

Filling Lincoln’s shoes, size 14

Grave robbers and academics

Fascinating book recounts the struggle for rich cache of Indian artifacts

Untitled Document The subtitle of David LaVere’s Looting Spiro Mounds is a footnote to perhaps the greatest public grave robbery in history: Howard Carter’s 1924 disc

Guy Noir meets El Presidente

And finds himself compared to the Prairie Troubador

It was a strange, serendipitous Springfield moment, an unlikely conjunction of comets and pinto beans. But it happened last Tuesday afternoon, just as the downtown parking

Found and lost

Archaeologist briefly uncovers cornerstone of Springfield commerce, then reburies it.

For archaeologist Robert Mazrim, director of the Sangamo Archaeological Center in Elkhart, last weekend's dig in downtown Springfield was simply another revelation of Illinois' all-but-forgotten prair