Lee wrote, [and] lament with you that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage. . . . Eternal defeat and miscarriage mus...
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...
THAT SPRING WASHINGTON received a letter from Lafayette, who had long since returned to France. Now that peace was looking like a certainty, he had a wild scheme to propose: the two of them should buy...
The Pilgrims had come to America not to conquer a continent but to re-create their modest communities in Scrooby and in Leiden. When they arrived at Plymouth in December 1620 and found it emptied of p...
The Pilgrims’ descendants have proven to be, if nothing else, fruitful. In 2002 it was estimated that there were approximately 35 million descendants of the Mayflower passengers in the United States,...
The sperm whales' network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In the...
This is also the story of two British generals. The first, Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his government’s unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in...
Bloc, effectively guaranteeing that
Wishing thee a short and prosperous voyage, with a full portion of happiness we remain thy friends. In
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.
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...
Custer wrote, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the r...
It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip’s War, with over half the slaves coming from Plymouth Colony alone. By the end of the war, Mount Hope,...
Nickerson began to understand, as only an adolescent on the verge of adulthood can understand, that the carefree days of childhood were gone forever: Then it was that I, for the first time, realized t...
Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;
Robinson’s fierce quest for spiritual purity had been tempered by the realization that little was to be gained by arrogance and anger.
THE PILGRIMS HAD BEEN DRIVEN by fiercely held spiritual beliefs. They had sailed across a vast and dangerous ocean to a wilderness where, against impossible odds, they had made a home. The purity of t...
The whaleman’s rule of thumb was that, before diving, a whale blew once for each minute it would spend underwater. Whalemen also knew that while underwater the whale continued at the same speed and in...
Sutler
The greatest danger to America’s future came from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At
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