Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-c...
If half of the two thousand warriors fired ten arrows each during the engagement, that would have been a total of ten thousand arrows,
I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that...
We interact with one another as individuals responding to a complex haze of factors: professional responsibilities, personal likes and dislikes, ambition, jealousy, self-interest, and, in at least som...
There was a saying on the island: [I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.
After seventeen days, one of the crew suggested that they cast lots. As it turned out, the lot fell to the man who had originally made the proposal, and after lots were cast again to see who should ex...
They were too focused on their own inner lives to appreciate the subtleties of character that might have alerted them to the true motives of those who did not share in their beliefs. Time and time aga...
Chase’s ability to adjust his manner of leadership to the needs of his men begs comparison to one of the greatest and most revered leaders of all time, Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Brown made a claim that possibly hit a little too close to home. 'Money is this man's god,' the handbill read, 'and to get enough of it, he would sacrifice his country.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote the following year, the moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that...
We all know the story: how a defiant and undisciplined collection of citizen soldiers banded together to defeat the mightiest army on earth. But as those who lived through the nearly decadelong saga o...
This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by...
The day before, they had started eating the saltwater-damaged bread. The bread, which they had carefully dried in the sun, now contained all the salt of seawater but not, of course, the water. Already...
The act of self-expression—through writing a journal or letters—often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears.
Stephen Hopkins was making his second trip to America. Eleven years earlier in 1609 he had sailed on the Sea Venture for Virginia, only to become shipwrecked in Bermudaan incident that became the basi...
I’ve always known that I had the happy facility of making enemies of any one I ever knew,
When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendous...
Resumed
To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor. In