That Steuben, who needed a translator, what with his English vocabulary consisting almost entirely of swear words, ended up being the perfect hire to upgrade the Continental Army should rattle every s...
Technically, it's a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.
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.
Since the lunchroom does no significant harm to the caverns' ecology, I'd like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don't have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoyin...
Radio is the playground of coincidence.
Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth. With God’s help, of course, but God...
Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and d...
Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to...
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, on the other hand, was more of a make-your-own-destiny type of fellow, disobeying orders from the king and abandoning a pregnant girl for an entirely optional adventure.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, Washington wrote. For, happily, t...
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 the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the northeast’s power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli...
In his reply, Washington acknowledged his fellow Americans’ fatal tendency of disunion. The
If we fail in our negotiation, Greene told Lafayette en route to d’Estaing’s ship, we shall at least get a good dinner. Washington should have chosen Greene, not Sullivan, to steer this mission. Besid...
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.
I wish that in order to secure his party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle...
Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.
Earlier yet, in 1917, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp claimed to have found a fossilized human footprint from the Triassic period—the imprint of a shoe made of stitched dinosaur hide. This...
Congress was soon neck-deep in arrogant boobs whom Beaumarchais or Deane had promised high ranks and higher salaries. Men cannot be engaged to quit their native country . . . in a cause which is not t...