Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
George Washington
A curious discovery on the Florida seashore, when a water cannon destroyed a suspicious package later found to contain miniature portraits by the celebrated American painter Gilbert Stuart
Without his brilliance at espionage, the revolution could not have been won.
VOTER TURNOUT MAY BE DOWN IN RECENT YEARS, BUT THE INVOLVEMENT OF THE COMMON CITIZEN HAS GROWN TO FAR SURPASS ANYTHING THE FOUNDING FATHERS EVER DREAMED OF.
THE FIRST ANNUAL AMERICAN HERITAGE GREAT AMERICAN PLACE AWARD
Photographs by Robert Benson
CAPT. LOUIS FRAN’OIS BERTRAND DUPONT D’AUBEVOYE, COMTE DE LAUBERDIÈRE, served the patriot cause in the Revolution, did all he could to teach Virginians proper French manners, made love to the local women, and found every American inferior. Except for one.
“In 1492, Christophe Colomb discovered America!!
DURING THIS TRIP, HE GAVE THE NEW nation a new industry, wrote a proto-guide to New England inns and taverns, (probably) did some secret politicking, discovered a town that lived up to his hopes for a democratic society, scrutinized everything from rattlesnakes to rum manufacture, and, in the process, pretty much invented the summer vacation itself.
BY THE END OF THE FIRST CONGRESS, IN THE SPRING OF 1791, Thomas Jefferson badly needed a vacation. The first Secretary of State disliked the noise, dirt, and crowds of the capital, Philadelphia, and the cramped routines of office work.
The ambassador from an infant republic spent five enchanted years in the French capital at a time when monarchy was giving way to revolution. Walking the city streets today, you can still feel the extravagant spirit of the city and the era he knew.
Paris is every day enlarging and beautifying,” Thomas Jefferson noted with satisfaction during his residence there as minister to France. The city under construction was a delight to Jefferson, the art patron and amateur architect.
The English writer G. K. Chesterton once observed that journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
An interview with Bill and Hillary Clinton
On a busy Wednesday morning last August, President and Mrs. Clinton found an hour to speak with me in the Oval Office of the White House.
No Chief Executive has ever made it out of the White House without being scalded.
Remember Admiral Bobby Ray Inman? He was the Clinton Secretary of Defense-designate with a short fuse and an even shorter career as a nominee.
Once seen as a vice and now as a public panacea, the national passion that got Thomas Jefferson in trouble has been expanding for two centuries.
“I’m dad-gum disgusted at trying to police every half-square and every half-house,” Senator Huey Long told a radio audience in Louisiana in May 1935. “You can’t close gambling nowhere where the people want to gamble.”
A scholar searches across two centuries to discover the main engine of our government’s growth, and reaches a controversial conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies.
Americans invented the grand hotel in the 1830s, and, during the next century, brought it to a zenith of democratic luxury that makes a visit to the surviving examples the most agreeable of historic pilgrimages.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, a story went around Connecticut about a pious old woman who was berating her nephew for being such a rake. And an aging rake, at that. “But we’re not so very different,” he insisted.
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
Gilbert Stuart flattered himself that the prominent men and women whose portraits were his fortune admired him almost as much for his good manners and genial gossip as for his skilled artist’s hand.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
The two-party system, undreamt of by the founders of the republic, has been one of its basic shaping forces ever since their time.
They’re at it again. As I write, a big, well-barbered pack of would-be presidents has already finished months of pestering the famously patient citizens of New Hampshire for their votes.
The Cold War was an anomaly. More often than not, the world’s two greatest states have lived together in uneasy amity. And what now?
Exactly 200 years after George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States and 300 years after Peter the Great’s ascent to the Russian throne, a new chapter opened in the history of the relations of the two greatest states of the wor
To the end of his life, America’s most notorious traitor believed that he was a primary hero of the Revolution.
Shortly after noon on Thursday, April 20, 1775, a weary post-rider swung out of the saddle at Hunt’s Tavern in New Haven, Connecticut with an urgent message from the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence.
200 years ago, the United States was a weakling republic prostrate beneath a ruinous national debt. Then, Alexander Hamilton worked the miracle of fiscal imagination that made America a health,y young economic giant. How did he do it?
One price of political greatness is to be forced to campaign even long after death. The Founding Fathers, particularly, have been constantly dragged from their graves for partisan purposes.
Not every memorable historic moment is on a grand scale. Here is a look at some of the bizarre, true sidelights that add sparkle to the larger picture.
On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall, then serving as the new nation’s temporary capitol.
Both admirers and detractors have invented myths about our first president. A famous biographer tells of his years spent trying to separate fact from fiction.
Anyone who has the temerity to set out in quest of a true understanding of George Washington undertakes a perilous adventure that requires climbing over hallucinatory mountains and penetrating ghost-ridden forests.
When President Washington proclaimed the first Thanksgiving, the anti-Federalists complained it usurped States’ Rights
When the French Revolution broke out 200 years ago this month, Americans greeted it enthusiastically. After all, without the French, we could never have become free. But the cheers faded as the brutality of the convulsion emerged, and Americans realized that they were still only a feeble newborn facing a giant, intimidating world power.
There were two great revolutions against European monarchs in the late eighteenth century. In the first, the French nation helped Americans achieve their independence from George III.
In the summer the stretch of the Delaware River north of Trenton, New Jersey, is as alluring as any place in the country.
James Wilson was an important but now obscure draftsman of the Constitution. Carry Wills is a journalist and historian fascinated by what went on in the minds of our founders. The two men meet in an imaginary dialogue across the centuries.
His red judge’s robe looked faded and theatrical by daylight. People at the bus stop stared at him, and his face flushed near the color of the robe. But he busily ignored them.
A fond, canny, and surprising tour of the town where the Constitution was born
Two hundred years ago Philadelphia was the natural place for the constitution-makers. There was nothing unexpected about that. Philadelphia had one hundred years behind her that were as respectable as they were impressive.
The framers of the Constitution were proud of what they had done but might be astonished that their words still carry so much weight. A distinguished scholar tells us how the great charter has survived and flourished.
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