I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race.
I like that the Mall serves as our national Tuppaware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever.
I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I th...
I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.
However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic body crystals, flag stickers you attach to your skin....
Enter Henry Knox. The twenty-five-year-old bookworm approached Washington and volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the equipment. Washington approved the cockamamie mission. And so, that Nov...
By journey's end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling...
Americans’ fatal tendency of disunion.
After he finishes his song, I ask him, Sir, were you just playing ‘Lean on Me’? That’s right! he answers, thrilled. Now, whenever I think of Mudd and his house I hear that song, hear Mudd serenading t...
Joie de vivre.
Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.
Whether or not the United States has saved the world, it did save France a time or two. When the American Expeditionary Forces commanded by General John J. Pershing came to the aid of France during Wo...
To Arendt’s point about post-revolution stability deriving from pre-revolutionary experience in self government, it’s worth remembering that two of Henry’s less chatty fellow burgesses became the firs...
There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord's Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help the visitor understand how hard it must ha...
The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph—I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence—applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic an...
The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there readin...
The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave, he wrote. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficien...
The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beac...
The last line of Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen is addressed to the American people and their congressmen. As they deal with me and my people, kindly, generously, and justly, so may the Great Ruler...
The historical periods I like to learn about aren’t so much costume dramas as slasher flicks. The French Revolution is a favorite because it features the beloved plot of carnage in service of democrac...