And thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man’...
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?
When Lafayette visited Monticello in 1824, his old friend Thomas Jefferson toasted him: When I was stationed in his country for the purpose of cementing its friendship with ours, and of advancing our...
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...
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 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 true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.
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 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 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 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...
Steuben explained to his friend, You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he does it; but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and then he does it.
Married to a naval commander who happened to be Benjamin Franklin’s great-great-grandson, Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be list...
Lafayette, I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence. Spoken like every only child ever. Lafayette
In the forensics novels the contents of a victim’s pockets on the night of her death Say Something about her character. My Ford’s Theatre ticket stub and Jimmy Carter key chain say that I am the corni...
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'm not really the scented envelope kid of girl, preferring instead to send yellow Jiffy-lite mailers packed with whatever song is on my mind.