John Sledge
The Fall of Mobile
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, on April 12, 1865, Confederate Mobile surrendered to Federal troops. The city’s strategic...
Westward Expansion
West Mobile. Where is it exactly? What comprises it? What are we to make of it? Questions like these periodically arise as Mobile continues...
Marked by Excellence
Big, colorful and visible from blocks away, simple cut-metal markers designate Mobile’s most historic and beautifully restored properties. From downtown Dauphin Street...
Those Rare Mobile Winters
Mobile has four seasons, wags say – early summer, middle summer, late summer and January. By this calculus, February shouldn’t...
Young Pioneers
Jean Baptiste Le Moyne,  Sieur de Bienville, Founder Young adults have long played important roles in Alabama’s Port City. In fact,...
Guiding Light
On a clear day, it can be spotted from the Fairhope Municipal Pier, a little geometrical oddity standing on the horizon, ...
Reader's Choice
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War has been marked by an avalanche of good books. Besides the...
That Old Mobile Joy
It was a bleak December afternoon — overcast, chilly, the light rapidly fading. We were driving on one of Downtown’s less favored...
The Streets of Victorian Mobile
Following the Civil War, Mobile was slow to recover, but as the decades passed, things steadily improved. Business and civic leaders...
Wilde Card
One of 19th-century Mobile’s most colorful and memorable visitors was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. The flamboyant Irishman was touring the United States in...