Danny Freedman

Danny Freedman is an award-winning writer and editor based in Memphis, Tennessee. 

Unfinished pencils at the Musgrave plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee—“The Pencil City.”

See Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories

The family-owned facility in Tennessee produces more than 70 million pencils annually

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The Remarkable Effort to Locate America's Lost Patents

An 1836 blaze destroyed thousands of records that catalogued the young nation's ingenuity, but recent discoveries indicate that originals may still exist

“Bless whoever it was who came up with the idea,” jazz historian Dan Morgenstern says in a Smithsonian interview about Armstrong’s rendition of the holiday chestnut.

The Little-Known Recording of Louis Armstrong Reciting 'The Night Before Christmas'

Shortly before he died, the jazz legend offered his own rendition of the classic holiday poem

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