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Every generation of Americans has been faced with the same question: how should we live? Our endlessly interesting answers have created The American Story. The weekly episodes published here stretch from battlefields and patriot graves to back roads, school yards, bar stools, city halls, blues joints, summer afternoons, old neighborhoods, ball parks, and deserted beaches—everywhere you find Americans being and becoming American. They are true stories about what it is that makes America beaut ...
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. Growing up, he worked hard, excelled in school, and fell in love with American freedom and the American common man giving us such films as “Mr. Smith Goe…
Great American philosopher, Lorenzo Pietro Berra, more commonly known as Yogi Berra, was a baseball legend. As a player with the New York Yankees, he won Ten World Series championships, with 18 All-Star games, three Most Valuable Player Awards, 358 home runs and 1,430 runs batted in, which earned him a place in the Hall of Fame. After his playing c…
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, and made her way to America, where she became a Hollywood star celebrated as the most beautiful woman in the world. During WWII, in hopes of aiding Amer…
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 own American ambition, his name would become Irving Berlin, and he would become a master of the American language and one of America’s greatest songwri…
Why “the finest Shakespeare collection in the world” is in Washington, D.C.
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 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride” he succeeded in preserving part of that heroic memory in verse for many generations to come, the way Homer did for ancient Gree…
Ben Hogan and “the purest stroke I’ve ever seen”
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." This episode is in loving memory of Merle Whitis.
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 more than 14 times the size of the continental United States; it includes 36 maritime countries, 50% of the world’s population, and the world’s 5 largest…
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 in the recovery of fugitive slaves under penalty of stiff fines or imprisonment. Isabella was fully occupied looking after her eleven children, but she…
Helen Keller was 14 years old when she first met the world-famous Mark Twain in 1894. They became fast friends for life. Keller, who was deaf and blind, loved to listen to Twain tell his stories by putting her fingers to his lips. As she said of Twain, “He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measur…
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The American Story
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The Great Depression and the Cowboy Philosopher
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A little humor can help get a country through hard times.
The Congress of the United States named him “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen”
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 Ocean. The gathering was to be a “Reunion of Honor” commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima.…
Young Abraham Lincoln does some good in the Blackhawk War.
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 before going on to become one of the greatest coaches of all time in any sport. His name is synonymous with winning. His steadfast spirit inspired the …
About the standard by which Americans judge the success and failure of their experiment in self-government
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 the greatest care to draft the proclamation in terms that could be defended before the highest court in the land. Then in the last weeks of his life, he…
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Silver Markers on a Pew: American New Year 1942
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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. Then Hitler declared war on the United States. America was suddenly at war with the greatest military powers in Europe and in Asia. British Prime Ministe…
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 historic victory at Trenton the day after Christmas, there was good reason to fear that Washington’s army would dissolve and with it any hopes for the…
Often our New Year’s resolutions are lighthearted, and usually, the flesh being weak, they are fleeting. Before Valentine’s Day or maybe even before Epiphany, we have slipped back into our old ways. But these lighthearted resolutions reflect a deeper, more serious impulse.
At the time of the American founding, celebrations of Christmas in America varied widely, from Puritans and Quakers who shunned or ignored it, to other Protestants and Catholics who honored it in their own Christian ways, to those who spent the day in “riot and dissipation,” like an ancient Roman Saturnalia. But E Pluribus Unum—out of many one—was …
Among many days worthy of remembrance, one that is often forgotten is June 8, 1789, when James Madison, in the first Congress under the newly ratified Constitution, addressed the House in a historic speech. The government had been operating for only a few months. Several states had submitted proposed amendments to the Constitution which Madison enc…
December 7, 2021 is the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into World War II. It is one of many days in the American year that inspire reflection on the most violent and determinative human event: war—and the art of war that aims to control and direct that most uncontrollable human undertaking.…
In January, 1835, the first volume of a book named Democracy in America was published in Paris. It was a great critical and commercial success. The author, a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville, became a celebrity and was awarded cherished honors and prizes. And his book stood the test of time. Almost two hundred years later, it is …
Sarah Josepha Hale was born in New Hampshire in 1788. In an era when the average American life expectancy was forty years, she lived until 1879—91 years—and has been remembered by posterity primarily for two things: the poem popularly known as “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and the American tradition of Thanksgiving. Hale made herself “one of the most i…
The American story isn’t just history. We write the American story ourselves every day with the choices we make as individuals and as a country.
“Chesty” Puller was a Marine’s Marine. To this day, in Marine Corps boot camp, recruits are exhorted, “Do one more for Chesty! Chesty Puller never quit!” His combat service record is astonishing: he is the most decorated Marine in history. Chesty insisted that he did not love fighting. But if there was a fight, he wanted in on it, and he generally …
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 visas and all the complications, uncertainties, and delays imaginable in wartime. Just two years later, still only nineteen, Madeleine LeBeau would pl…
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 all see in these strange days, that time—with thanks to Mr. Shakespeare—is out of joint. Madison and Lincoln would join Silent Cal in reminding us—to tak…
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 experts the “obverse” is the front and the “reverse” is the back of something. Why bring up heraldry experts? Because heraldry is the discipline of designi…
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 the Constitution began pouring into the press even before the Constitution was made public. In response, over the next 8 months, 3 founders, under the…
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 thousands of these men, women, and children were forced into what were called “reeducation” camps. Many risked their lives and fled, including Binh and M…
“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 (or experts either)—struggled to figure out what, if anything, science and the experts wanted the rest of us to do. Following science and experts turn…
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, what is the essential and beautiful goodness in the country that makes it worthy of love. Understanding this and helping others understand it is the mo…
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 the Constitution they had drafted to become the Supreme Law of the land. This was the end of one historic deliberation, but it was the beginning of ano…
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 responders who risked and gave their lives trying to save others.
“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 with the most famous statue in America. But that is usually where the familiarity ends. Many serendipities would be needed before these lines would com…
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 of Liberty, a project of mere mortals, has been around only since the end of the nineteenth century. But it came along and suddenly forever became part …
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 Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where he remained principal for the rest of his life. By the time Frederick Douglass died in 1895, Washing…
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 term as the first President of the United States. The letter ranks high among the documents affirming and defining the unprecedented American experiment…
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, meeting in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, officially took up a provision that forbade the Congress they were designing forever …
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 form. They made important changes, including deletion of a passage denouncing the king of Great Britain for imposing the slave trade on America. This del…
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 in the years prior to the American Revolution. Then a great historic change began, a revolution in the hearts and minds of the British colonists that w…
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? The body of a country that has lost its soul, unless we do something about it. Our greatest enemy is the bad ideas that have miseducated Americans so t…
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, who were being uprooted from civilian life, thrown into army camps, and sent to war. Marshall wanted Capra to make “a series of documented, factual-in…
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 hero doesn’t ride into your valley, you’re going to lose the things you hold most dear. On the eternal frontier, we are always faced with the problem of e…
