The American Story

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army General George Marshall asked film director Frank Capra to create films for the 8 million men, many of whom had never seen a gun,…

The Hollywood Western was a great achievement of American popular art—an epic of the eternal frontier, where trouble is always brewing and everything is at stake: the law is out of town, and if a her…

The classic Western novel Shane opens in a valley in Wyoming Territory in 1889. Trouble is brewing. The local big cattleman is finding the homesteaders a nuisance. He wants the whole range for his ow…

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…

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…

Sports fairly practiced—especially individual sports—are a great meritocracy revealing, for all the world to see, the beauty of excellence. In American history, sports have also been an arena for the…

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…

It is somehow always the best of times and the worst of times; but the winter of 1980 in America felt like it had more than its share of the worst. Unemployment was high; inflation was raging. An ene…

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

Ely Parker was born in 1828 to Elizabeth and William Parker of the Tonawanda Seneca tribe of the Iroquois confederacy in western New York. Parker became a leader in his tribe at a very young age, tra…

This story is about a teacher from a college in the East who was inspired by her travels West, especially by her experience summiting Pikes Peak, to write a poem that became an American anthem. 

The “real American Revolution,” as John Adams said, took place in the minds and hearts of the American people in the years leading up to 1776. This Revolution of thought gave birth to a Revolution of…

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…

Late in 1939, the eminent Hollywood movie director John Ford, who happened also to be an officer in the Naval Reserve, began organizing and training what became the Eleventh Naval District Motion Pic…

It’s not every day that a poet sits down and writes a poem that becomes a national hymn. But that’s what happened to Julia Ward Howe in November 1861. The country was a year and a half into the Civil…

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…

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…

Chuck Yeager was born in West Virginia in 1923, was shooting and skinning squirrels and rabbits for family dinners by the time he was six, flying fighter planes in WWII by the time he was twenty, fle…

A poem comes to a poet, and he sends it orphaned out into the world, to take its chances. It never knows who or what it might inspire or how it might become part of the world it has stepped into. Hen…

By July 1776, American revolutionary John Dickinson maintained that he did not entertain any doubt whether America should declare independence, only when. He opposed, in his words, “only the time of …