I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.
Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural d...
Everyone says that love requires the utmost honesty, but that’s not entirely true. Once I knew that my father was suffering for my sake—really suffering—I learned that love, especially the parental ki...
A humble, bootstrappy patriot, Knox wooed, then married Lucy Flucker, the highbrow daughter of the Loyalist governor of the province of Massachusetts.
It requires all my philosophy, and all my piety' to make peace...
Disunity is the through line in the national plot—not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people’s privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington’s army, plus the king of France...
[I]deas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences.
Yes, they’re a little biased there, I agree. Mike smiles at this understatement, knowing as I do that saying they’re a little biased in Mudd’s favor at the Mudd-family-run Mudd home in Maryland is lik...
Vergennes proposed clandestine aid to the rebels to avoid stirring up an overt war with Britain and to shore up the enemy of France’s enemy, advising, The courage of the Americans might be kept up by...
Then, as if getting blown up is not enough to worry about, after I take a seat on the steps, I get a look at the choir. Thirty singers and from where I’m sitting, it looks like only two of them are bl...
The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an elect...
The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top
The fact that a child that age was allowed to go out looking for the four-legged serial killer that the king has dispatched his personal gun-bearer to track down speaks of an older, hands-off parentin...
It is unfair of me to say so, but the slogan Booth shouted from the stage of Ford's Theatre, the over-blown, self-important, pseudo-Shakespearean blather, being etched on the sign marking his death fe...
In the gravedigger scene in act V, Hamlet looks upon an anonymous skull and jokes that even Alexander the Great decomposed into dust that could have been used to plug a beer barrel. But when Hamlet is...
I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed Bible commu...
I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian En...
I ask about the Quakers’ silent services. She describes them as not so much the absence of talking as the presence of god. Interesting. Hers is a more poetic, more profound description than what I cal...
As the starstruck Lafayette later described his first glimpse of Washington, It was impossible to mistake for a moment his majestic figure and deportment; nor was he less distinguished by the noble af...
Abraham Lincoln had a soft spot for deserters, whom he called his legs cases. Though many of his military commanders grumbled about Lincoln’s leniency — traditionally, runaways were shot — the preside...