The American Story

The American story isn’t just history. We write the American story ourselves every day with the choices we make as individuals and as a country.

The beautiful 17-year-old actress Madeleine LeBeau fled Paris in June, 1940, just hours before the Germans marched in. Like thousands of other refugees, she and her husband made their way with forged…

One of the most popular films in Hollywood history, “Casablanca” seems to be composed of one famous line after another. For over 75 years, it has inspired us to stand up and sing in defiance of tyran…

Among the many challenges to the statesmanship of the framers of the Constitution, none was more fundamental or intractable than the problem of slavery. On August 21 the Constitutional Convention, me…

Jefferson drafted the Declaration, a committee reviewed it, corrections were made, and on July 2-4, Congress—in the midst of much other pressing business of fighting a war—edited it into the final fo…

Slavery has been around since the beginning of human history. It was practiced among the native peoples of north America before and after Europeans arrived, and it was legal in every American colony …

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams celebrate their last Fourth of July.

Twenty-Twenty seems to have spread like a virus into 2021. A third of the way through the year and still across the country citizens bludgeoned into isolation, locked in their homes by the latest man…

Among many days worthy of remembrance, one that is often forgotten is June 8, 1789, when James Madison, in the first Congress under the newly ratified Constitution, addressed the House in a historic …

John Wayne began life as Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. After his family made its way to L.A., and an injury sidelined him from USC football, he began working full-time as a prop man for movie s…

More than 4 million visitors come to Arlington National Cemetery every year from across America and around the world and, unless they have their own personal visit to make, the thing they most want t…

One of America’s greatest and most beloved film directors, Frank Capra, was just six years old when he arrived in New York on a steamer from Sicily with his poor Italian immigrant parents in 1903. Gr…

Hedy Lamarr was born to Jewish parents in Austria in 1914. She became an actress and married by the time she was 20. In 1937, she escaped her domineering husband and rising anti-Semitism in Europe, a…

Israel Beilin was five years old when he and his family arrived in New York and, like the rest of the family, he spoke only Yiddish. With the help of Ellis Island clerks, printing accidents, and his …

Why “the finest Shakespeare collection in the world” is in Washington, D.C.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has been called, “the most popular poet in American history.” When Longfellow wrote, few Americans remained who had a living memory of the American Revolution. With his poe…

Ben Hogan and “the purest stroke I’ve ever seen”

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." This episode is in loving memory of Merle Whitis.