The American Story

Only devoted students of history have heard of him, but in the years leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, John Dickinson, next to Benjamin Franklin, was probably the most famous Am…

Sergeant York, the highest-grossing movie of 1941, opened in American theaters in July and was still playing after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. A biographical film starring Gary Cooper a…

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…

By summer 1776, the most powerful navy in the world was conveying the greatest British expeditionary force in history across the ocean to suppress the American rebellion. George Washington’s ragtag C…

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…

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…

Abigail Adams recorded that when her husband and Thomas Jefferson visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, Jefferson fell upon the ground and kissed it and John Adams cut a chip from Shakespeare’s chair. Je…

Every president since Lincoln has issued a Thanksgiving proclamation every year, but on September 25, 1789, when the U.S. House of Representatives had only been operating for about six months, not ev…

P.G. Wodehouse was one of the best writers in the English language in the 20th century and the funniest. He wrote nearly 100 delightful books, each one of which in perfectly orchestrated sentences, c…

USO stands for United Service Organizations, and it is a beautiful gem of American history and American civic life. It was created in early 1941, when America had not yet entered World War II, but co…

Until the election of 1860, the truths proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence had been the ground of American civic friendship, above all the central truth that all men are created equal. Fide…

The election of 1800 in America came after a decade of bitter and extreme party strife. Each side accused the other of aiming to overthrow the Constitution and preparing the way for tyranny. There wa…

Americans are being reminded how fragile and precious an achievement it is to establish the legitimate authority of government through peaceful and free elections. But there would be no ballots witho…

Streets and roads are very different animals. Willie Nelson sang, “I just can’t wait to get on the road again.” No one ever sang, “I just can’t wait to get on the street again.” Songs about country r…

Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin in 1901. In 1930, her performance in the film The Blue Angel made her a star. She moved to Hollywood, starred in six films, one of which earned her an Oscar nomina…

Benjamin Franklin ran away at seventeen with barely a penny in his pocket. Through hard work and his own genius, he made a life for himself in the printing trade, and was able to retire at the age of…

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 …

The Declaration’s great American proclamation that “all men are created equal” and the first three words of the Constitution—“We the People”—are profoundly connected. The relation between these two i…