As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, All mortal greatness is but disease.
Illusive
You are fighting for what you can never obtain, and we are defending what we never mean to part with.
W
When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen’s deaths in Massachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why wha...
Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Bosto...
Suppose it were possible to conceive that a president and council of one of the united states were the persons with whom those other means have been used—what would be the line of conduct they would p...
Philip’s local squabble with Plymouth Colony had mutated into a regionwide war that, on a percentage basis, had done nearly as much as the plagues of 1616–19 to decimate New England’s Native populatio...
Over the next hundred years, more gold would be extracted from a single mine in the Black Hills (an estimated $1 billion) than from any other mine in the continental United States.
No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt.
Midshipman Edward Pellew was in the British boat right behind Arnold's. The American general had escaped, but in his haste he had left behind his stock and buckle, which Pellew took as a keepsake. Yea...
Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.
Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the...
Faint heart never won fair lady, he wrote; neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village.
During the forty-five months of World War II, the United States lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population; during the Civil War the casualty rate was somewhere between 4 and 5 percent; du...
As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens’ commitment to one another.
A Puritan believed it was necessary to venture back to the absolute beginning of Christianity, before the church had been corrupted by centuries of laxity and abuse, to locate divine truth.
. . to voice private sympathies in the context of an official proceeding would require Washington to become, in his own words, 'lost to my own character.' Here, in this reference to character, Washing...
The greatest danger to America’s future came from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At
And the University of Pennsylvania, he penned a memoir of his time in America. Shortly after marrying the twenty-eight-year-old Marie Brigitte Plunkett,