PARKINSON’S DISEASE: My Fear Of a Demon Iremember three things about Sundays in a small Southern town in the 1950s—church, Sunday dinner, and afternoon visits to relatives and friends. Those visits were an ordeal for children. Warned in advance by my parents to behave, I fidgeted and squirmed as I sat through seemingly hours of boring adult conversation.

2008: Ralph Stanley
  2007: Mark R. Warner
  2006: Dan Jordan
  2005: Elizabeth Haskell
  2004: Lora Robins
  2003: Oliver W. Hill Sr.
  2002: John T. Hazel Jr. and William A. Hazel
  2001: Brenton S. Halsey
  2000: Alson H. Smith Jr.
  1999: Timothy J. Sullivan

It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision that led Charles F. Bryan Jr. down a career path to history. He credits the constant exposure to the past from the environment in which he grew up—a middle Tennessee antebellum home, arrowheads found as a child at a nearby creek, stories of the Civil War passed down to him from his grandfather.

On every island I visited during a recent Caribbean trip, I saw poignant reminders of once-mighty empires and fierce conflict. From the massive El Morro in San Juan to a modest battlement on tiny Bequia, abandoned forts and long-silent cannon serve as symbols of the Caribbean’s significance three centuries ago. Caribbean sugar became a source of vast wealth in Europe, and control of the region’s islands required significant civil, naval, and military resources from Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain—the superpowers of their time. Now a tourism Mecca, the Caribbean once was as strategically significant as the Persian Gulf is today. One of the largest sea battles in history was fought near beaches now crowded with sunbathers.