The Coherence Portfolio (TCP) Tools for Continuity in Communities

American Studies

I trained as a historian of early America and spent the first part of my professional life studying how Americans made knowledge, institutions, communities, and arguments about themselves. Then I wandered off.

These writings mark a return of sorts—not to the academy exactly, and not necessarily to the questions I left behind. Some begin with old research. Others begin with birds, disability, religion, technology, a town meeting, a building, or something else that makes America suddenly seem strange enough to investigate again.

The category is intentionally broad. American Studies was always most interesting to me when it allowed different kinds of evidence and different ways of knowing to collide: history with literature, institutions with lived experience, archives with landscapes, serious scholarship with the peculiar things people actually do.

After a long absence, I find myself interested in those collisions again.

This is where that work will accumulate.

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Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822. Peale pulls back the curtain on a cabinet of American wonders: art and animals, science and history, national heroes and ordinary visitors, all occupying the same room. An appropriately unruly entrance to American Studies. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection), 1878.1.2.

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GolfQuest

Golf is an unusually productive place to pay attention.

A round lasts for hours. People walk together, separate, regroup, compete, tell stories, offer advice, remember old shots, misremember older ones, and occasionally encounter wildlife with strong territorial opinions. Courses are landscapes, businesses, communities, ecosystems, and elaborate machines for producing stories.

I rediscovered golf largely through my son. As he became more serious about the game, I started following along—first as a parent, then as a spectator, and eventually as a wheelchair-driving narrator who discovered there was considerably more happening out there than the score.

GolfQuest is where I follow those things.

The writing ranges across players and families, courses and clubs, equipment and performance, access and architecture, work and mentorship, travel, rituals, institutions, and the peculiar folklore golfers manufacture whenever reality proves insufficient.

Some pieces are about golf. Others begin there and wander somewhere else. A surprising number involve birds.

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SwimStory

A pilot supporting teams, families, and long-standing community sports programs.

SwimStory is a lightweight storytelling and memory platform designed to support community swim teams and similar organizations whose strength lies in continuity rather than scale. Many teams run smoothly year after year but struggle to preserve their history as families cycle through, volunteers change, and informal knowledge disappears. SwimStory provides a simple way for teams to collect, hold, and share short stories, memories, and moments that otherwise get lost.

• Stories are short and optional
• Participation is open and non-competitive
• No technical expertise is required
• The system works alongside existing team websites and registration tools
• Support intergenerational memory
• Reduce burnout among volunteers
• Give new families an easy way to understand team culture
• Preserve continuity without creating new obligations

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TownStory

A pilot in civic memory and shared local narrative.

TownStory is a civic storytelling pilot focused on how towns remember themselves—and how those memories affect decision-making, trust, and participation.

Local governments and communities often face conflict not because people disagree about facts, but because shared history is fragmented, forgotten, or privately held. TownStory creates a structured but low-pressure way for residents to record and revisit lived experience connected to specific places, events, and moments of change.

TownStory does not aim to resolve disputes or determine outcomes. It provides context, not verdicts. Participation is voluntary, and stories are treated as lived accounts rather than evidence or argument.

• Preserve local memory before it disappears
• Make past decisions legible to new residents
• Reduce unnecessary conflict caused by missing context
• Support a sense of shared ownership over time

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BirdQuest

Essays, observation, and attention as practice.

BirdQuest currently exists as a body of essays and observational writing rooted in birding, natural history, and attention to place.

BirdQuest uses birds and field observation as a way to think clearly about continuity, patience, and perception in a distracted age. The work draws on traditions of natural history while explicitly incorporating the realities of disability, stillness, and constrained movement.

At present, BirdQuest is not a platform and not a program. It is allowed to remain unsettled while it develops. Over time, it may inform educational, ecological, or civic work—but it is not required to scale in order to matter.

Like the other TCP projects, BirdQuest values restraint. Some work needs time, quiet, and room to remain unfinished.

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