Crossing Divides

<p>On Thanksgiving Day in 2016 Vernon Benjamin aged 70 loaded his pickup with supplies for the protesters at Standing Rock opposed to a new oil pipeline and left his home in upstate New York for a journey across America unlike anything he'd ever done. He cared deeply about Native American causes. But Trump had won the election. The country was falling apart. Benjamin had always been a journalist a historian a poet. Now could he be an activist who put his heart and soul on the line? What he found at Standing Rock and in himself changed his life.</p><p><br></p><p>Vernon Benjamin was the author of <em>The History of the Hudson River Valley: From Wilderness to the Civil War</em> and <em>The History of the Hudson River Valley: From the Civil War to Modern Times</em>.</p>