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...
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...
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...
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.
Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor. In
In the end, both sides wanted what the Pilgrims had been looking for in 1620: a place unfettered by obligations to others. But from the moment Massasoit decided to become the Pilgrims’ ally, New Engla...
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 United States had been created through an act of disloyalty. No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over...
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...
Paul Revere Jr., with whom I had lunch at Spanky’s Clam Shack in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunning. Fam...
For the future welfare of the settlement, it was essential that all the colonists—Leideners and Strangers alike—learn to live together as best they could. This nonjudgmental attitude did not come natu...
When he had learned in the fall of 1778 that she was critically ill, he rushed from New York back to their home in Culford, a small town about a hundred miles to the northeast of London, arriving shor...
When an enlisted man sees his commanding officer lose his head entirely…, Private Taylor wrote, it would…demoralize anyone taught to breathe, almost, at the word of command.
Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea, For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me. But every now and then I shall like to see his face, For it always seems to me to bea...
That Church according to Church is too brave, too cunning, and too good to be true is beside the point. America was destined to become a nation of self-fashioned and self-promoting men. What makes his...
As Smith later wrote, much of the suffering that lay ahead for the Pilgrims could easily have been avoided if they had seen fit to pay for his services or, at the very least, consult his map. [S]uch h...
As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, All mortal greatness is but disease.
A total of about 200,000 Americans had served in the war, but that did not mean the rest of the country of about 3 million would show them any gratitude or respect. Americans in 1783 were desperate to...