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Before the notion of separating church and state took root in the U.S., "meeting houses" that combined both dotted the New England landscape. Built by townships, often paid for by taxes, and home to Sunday morning sermons as well as weekday commerce, these handsome structures played a central role in states like Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Photographer Paul Wainwright has devoted himself to capturing large-format portraits of these buildings today. In many of the pictures, he shoots the meeting houses in black and white, capturing their strikingly modern look against the sky and clouds. In others, he uses color to highlight their gleaming white clapboard walls. In all of them, he conveys the classically American look of the design. As Paul says, "There is something moving about a structure that has long outlived the community to which it was familiar, surviving lonesomely in a new age, the life of which it has no part." May these photos help the meeting houses to find new community and worldwide respect.

Popular fiction has doomed the cemetery to a reputation as a creepy, dark place where evil things are bound to happen. But we suggest you leave the terrific tales to horror novelists and view graveyards with a different perspective. This site provides a fascinating place to start your peace-making journey with cemeteries. Attempting to document every pre-1860 gravestone in Cape Cod, Robert Paine Carlson has produced a site that brims with historical import. Begin your trip inside these rock-laden yards with the quick tour of gravestone styles from 1683 to 1799 and then wander over to look at styles from 1800 to 1900. After boning up on the basics, we recommend poking through his extensive catalogue of photos from a variety of Cape Cod's final resting places. Read the maudlin inscription on Rebekah Jenkins' headstone, marvel at the grandeur of Ebenezer Crocker's massive stone, or peep at the creepy skull adorning Job Avery's marker. In a time when anything over 25-years-old is considered to be of historical import, Carlson's dutiful work in documenting these true American relics should compel you to leave your fear at the cemetery gates.

For the past several years, StoryCorps has created citizen historians out of everyday folks. Armed with simple microphones and tape recorders, people have captured over 8,000 stories of their lives, about traveling in the South during segregation, being identical twins, or surviving Hodgkin's disease. Excerpts are available on this site, and you can browse the short audio clips by topic. Family members often share quirky, moving stories about growing up or home and place. Questions about who you are lead to intriguing stories about businessmen, transsexuals, immigrants, and survivors. September 11 and Hurricane Katrina stories are both represented, too. Like what you've heard here? You can get involved and record your own. Everybody has a story to tell for the ages, and the StoryCorps Archive will be housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.