Lafayette Square

Gil Klein | November/December 2021

After an illustrious career in the Navy, Stephen Decatur died in his home on Lafayette Square following a duel with Commodore Barron.

Editor’s Note: Gil Klein is the author of

Lafayette: A Hero Among Heroes

Harlow Giles Unger | Summer 2021

No figure in the Revolutionary era inspired as much affection and reverence as Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette

Editor’s Note: We were disappointed when individuals protesting racial injustice last May spray-painted monuments in Lafayette Park, as we wrote at the time, since the vandalized statues of Lafayette, K

Vandalism in Lafayette Square

Edwin S. Grosvenor | June 2020

Both our Constitution and our historic monuments were trashed during recent protests.

We wonder which is worse: authorities abusing our Constitutional rights or protesters wantonly damaging historic monuments dedicated to young revolutionaries such as Lafayette and Kosciuszko?

Special Section: America 50 Years Ago

Edwin S. Grosvenor | June 2020

The year 1970 was a watershed, so we asked several thoughtful writers to reflect on key events.

Some of us remember dreaming, fifty years ago, of a computer small enough to fit in our home. And a telephone without wires.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.