The American Story

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…

I had some time on my hands, and before I knew it, I had time on my mind. Time flies, marches on, and sometimes just stands still. You can buy time, be on borrowed time, or run out of time. We can al…

Turning to the back of the American one-dollar bill, I behold on the right side the “obverse” and on the left side the “reverse” of the Great Seal of the U.S. I pause to mention that to heraldry expe…

In September 1787, a new Constitution had miraculously come forth from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. But it would remain mere paper until ratified by 9 of the 13 states. Criticism of…

After the American defeat in Vietnam in 1975, the communists confiscated the homes, businesses, property, and savings of those south Vietnamese supposed to be “counterrevolutionaries.” Hundreds of th…

“Follow the science” and the “experts”—became popular maxims in America in the strange years 2020 & 2021, as government bureaucrats, politicians, media stars, and celebrities—themselves no scientists…

The first duty of civic education is to teach each new generation of Americans what it is about the country that makes it worthy of the last full measure of devotion; or in my odd way of putting it, …

September 17 is Constitution Day in America because on that day in 1787, after 4 months of deliberations, the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Independence Hall in Philadelphia proposed …

Twenty years have come and gone since September 11, 2001 became “9/11.” It is a day not just for mourning victims but for honoring heroes, those on Flight 93 and the many civilians and first responde…

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses . . .” These are among the most world-famous lines of any work of American literature, and whoever hears or reads them identifies them immediately …

The Statue of Liberty has come to seem as much a part of America as the Grand Canyon. The oldest rocks of the Grand Canyon were formed by forces of nature some two billion years ago, and the Statue o…

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County Virginia just a few years before the Civil War began. With heroic determination, he got himself an education and went on to found the Tuskegee…

Every year in August, the oldest synagogue in America—Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island—holds a public reading of a letter written by George Washington to the congregation early in his first t…

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 …

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 …

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.

America’s greatest enemy is not the Chinese or the Russians, or some other foreign tyranny—though they might indeed kill us if we continue so fecklessly to defend ourselves. But what will they kill? …