The American Story

When you read Abraham Lincoln, you somehow become more than yourself, you become better. And his words want to be read aloud, too. Start with the Second Inaugural—so beautiful—and the Gettysburg Addr…

Each year on April 15, all players in Major League Baseball turn in their regular uniforms and wear one adorned with the number 42. On no other day does any player wear that number; it has been perma…

The detective hero, and the detective novel, are not an American invention. But a few authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler made them as American as apple pie. The attitude of Chandler’s…

If you need a little poetry in your life—and who doesn’t?—Billy Collins can be a good place to start. Collins writes unblushingly to attract new readers to poetry and to encourage those who have give…

If you are walking down Broadway in St. Louis on your way to BB’s Jazz, Blues, and Soups, you will awaken to many American memories, among them a poem you probably already knew.

Things happen to a town, and then it’s never the same. Or it’s the same in some new way. Whatever it was before, it’s hard to think of it now without the new thing. Like the Parthenon in Athens or th…

When you visit the historic Mound Cemetery in Marietta, Ohio, the guidebook informs you that, in addition to the ancient burial mound, the cemetery “contains more Revolutionary War officers’ graves t…

There is more of Charlie Brown in most of us than there is Abraham Lincoln or Michael Jordan. We identify with his failures and suffer with him. But it isn’t just his failures. Charlie Brown is resil…

As a Captain of Volunteers in the Black Hawk War, the 23-year old Abraham Lincoln managed in a desperate moment to keep some hard-bitten men—who had elected him—from committing murder. They had chose…

Beginning in a rented circus tent, a team of unconventional aeronautical engineers design generations of American military aircraft

The young Ehrich Weiss needed money, but he lived for fame. By the time he was 17, he had decided how to get it—he would become Houdini. 

A boy from a village in India makes his way to America and finds a bit of heaven on earth

What is it that makes a Marine’s Marine?

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

“He looked as if he would know exactly what to do, if awakened suddenly in the night, ready for anything”

This story is the seventh in a series of seven about an immigrant boy who became my good friend and holds a special place in the history of the Claremont Institute. Let’s begin by daring to question …

This story is the sixth in a series of seven about an immigrant boy who became my good friend and holds a special place in the history of the Claremont Institute. They learned from this Hungarian imm…

This story is the fifth in a series of seven about an immigrant boy who became my good friend and holds a special place in the history of the Claremont Institute. I never knew so much hog in a man

This story is the fourth in a series of seven about an immigrant boy who became my good friend and holds a special place in the history of the Claremont Institute. He always regarded the human mind a…