The Fate of Liberty: American New Year 1777
From August to the last week of December, as David McCullough writes, "1776 had been as dark a time as those devoted to the American Cause had ever known." As the year ended, despite the stunning and ...
29 Des 20206min
Victory or Death: American Christmas 1776
By summer 1776, the most powerful navy in the world was conveying the greatest British expeditionary force in history across the ocean to suppress the American rebellion. George Washington's ragtag Co...
22 Des 20208min
John Wayne
John Wayne began life as Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. After his family made its way to L.A., and an injury sidelined him from USC football, he began working full-time as a prop man for movie st...
15 Des 20207min
War and Peace
Among the countless millions of human events postponed, rescheduled, or cancelled in the long hard year 2020, one was a gathering scheduled for an eight square mile volcanic island in the Pacific Ocea...
8 Des 20206min
Relics and Reverence
Abigail Adams recorded that when her husband and Thomas Jefferson visited Shakespeare's birthplace, Jefferson fell upon the ground and kissed it and John Adams cut a chip from Shakespeare's chair. Jef...
1 Des 20206min
To Give or Not To Give . . . Thanks
Every president since Lincoln has issued a Thanksgiving proclamation every year, but on September 25, 1789, when the U.S. House of Representatives had only been operating for about six months, not eve...
24 Nov 20206min
Thank God for being an American
P.G. Wodehouse was one of the best writers in the English language in the 20th century and the funniest. He wrote nearly 100 delightful books, each one of which in perfectly orchestrated sentences, ca...
17 Nov 20206min
For the Troops
USO stands for United Service Organizations, and it is a beautiful gem of American history and American civic life. It was created in early 1941, when America had not yet entered World War II, but cou...
10 Nov 20208min
