Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform w...
The neighborhood of Gramercy Park, where Edwin used to live, was built to look like London, which is to say that its considerable beauty is skin deep while its heart beats with the ugliness of monarch...
But the Grateful Dead, as the fanatic fans point out, are a way of life: someone else's. Twentieth-century teenagers, especially American ones, have been brilliant at creating their own culture, their...
Behind every bad law, a deep fear.
As if I was never nicknamed 'Wednesday' as in 'Adams'.
The cheapest, most pleasurable way for a country of strangers to get to know each other and the rest of the world is through reading.
With temperatures dropping, how could men without shirts expect to fend off opponents so blatantly well equipped with outerwear that they were nicknamed the redcoats?
While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.
When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal’s 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden...
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.
The most meaningful namesake by far is Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. Also known as Lafayette Park, this is the nation’s capital of protest, the place where we the people ga...
The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever t...
That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart.
Still, as a kid, History Repeats Itself terrified me, mostly because I was a God-fearing child. And I mean that literally. God scared me stiff, what with the turning human beings into salt and getting...
So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.
Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven.
Lafayette, I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence. Spoken like every only child ever. Lafayette
In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that o...
I wish that the founders had had the foresight to hang on to and enshrine another one of Independence Hall’s chairs, the one that Benjamin Rush mentioned in a letter to John Adams about how Thomas Jef...
I used to think John Waters movies were on the outlandish side until I came to Maryland. Klam and I stop for lunch at a dark roadside joint that feels like more of a throw-back than the Surratt House...