The American Story

This episode is about an American warrior and the warship that carries on his name. The ship and her crew operate in more than 48 million square miles of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The area is mo…

Isabella Beecher was outraged like many of her Boston neighbors by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850. The new law, part of the Compromise of 1850, required citizens in free states to assist …

Helen Keller was 14 years old when she first met the world-famous Mark Twain in 1894. They became fast friends for life. Keller, who was deaf and blind, loved to listen to Twain tell his stories by p…

A little humor can help get a country through hard times.

The Congress of the United States named him “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen”

Among the countless millions of human events postponed, rescheduled, or cancelled in the long hard year 2020, one was a gathering scheduled for an eight square mile volcanic island in the Pacific Oce…

Young Abraham Lincoln does some good in the Blackhawk War.

The son of an Italian immigrant, Vincent Thomas Lombardi was born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1913. He played guard in the famed Seven Blocks of Granite offensive line of Fordham University in the 1930s …

About the standard by which Americans judge the success and failure of their experiment in self-government

On New Year’s Day 1863, President Lincoln signed the proclamation he had promised a hundred days before. Lincoln understood better than anyone the constitutional challenges to emancipation. He took t…

January 1, 1942 had been set aside by President Roosevelt as a Day of Prayer. He had good reason for doing this; it was a dark time. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor just a few weeks before. Th…

From August to the last week of December, as David McCullough writes, “1776 had been as dark a time as those devoted to the American Cause had ever known.” As the year ended, despite the stunning and…

Often our New Year’s resolutions are lighthearted, and usually, the flesh being weak, they are fleeting. Before Valentine’s Day or maybe even before Epiphany, we have slipped back into our old ways. …

At the time of the American founding, celebrations of Christmas in America varied widely, from Puritans and Quakers who shunned or ignored it, to other Protestants and Catholics who honored it in the…

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 …

December 7, 2021 is the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into World War II. It is one of many days in the American year that inspire reflection on the most…

In January, 1835, the first volume of a book named Democracy in America was published in Paris. It was a great critical and commercial success. The author, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de T…

Sarah Josepha Hale was born in New Hampshire in 1788. In an era when the average American life expectancy was forty years, she lived until 1879—91 years—and has been remembered by posterity primarily…

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.

“Chesty” Puller was a Marine’s Marine. To this day, in Marine Corps boot camp, recruits are exhorted, “Do one more for Chesty! Chesty Puller never quit!” His combat service record is astonishing: he …