The leftmost column of names on the Declaration of Independence belongs to Georgia. New Hampshire is over on the right, John Hancock sits alone in the middle underneath the text in no column at... Read More →
The first American presidency started late because of the weather. The Confederation Congress had scheduled the inauguration for the first Wednesday in March 1789, and then, in the National Archives’ own account, “the early... Read More →
One hundred and twenty-six years separate the first of these colonies from the last. Virginia’s settlers landed in 1607; Georgia’s did not arrive until 1733. The gap shows. When the First Continental Congress met... Read More →
The number everyone quotes is twelve. Twelve Titans, twelve original gods, neat and clean. It is the kind of satisfying round number that mythology teachers write on whiteboards and tourists read on plaques at... Read More →
Most people know Ares. The brooding Olympian with the spear and the bad reputation - disliked by his own parents, repeatedly humiliated in battle, and somehow still managing to be one of the most... Read More →
Say “pyramid” and most people picture exactly one place: Egypt. Maybe they conjure the Great Pyramid of Giza, rising from the desert like a limestone mountain someone forgot to erode. It’s an understandable reflex.... Read More →
On March 10, 1956, a B-47 Stratojet left MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and headed east across the Atlantic, bound nonstop for an overseas base. Somewhere over the Mediterranean it simply failed to... Read More →
There is a painting in the Capitol Rotunda, twelve feet by eighteen, that shows neither a battle nor a signing. John Trumbull’s ’General George Washington Resigning His Commission,’ painted between 1822 and 1824, catches... Read More →
On January 24, 1801, weeks from the end of his presidency, John Adams wrote to a Quaker correspondent named George Churchman and set down a sentence almost none of the men around him could... Read More →
William Henry Harrison died at the White House on 4 April 1841, the first of the presidents to die in office, and in dying he exposed a sentence nobody had read carefully enough. The... Read More →
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