Thirty-five years ago this week, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun delivered the majority opinion in the case of Roe v. Wade, finding for Norma McCorvey, a 23-year-old divorced mother who had challenged the constitutionality of a Texas statute that criminalized abortions except when the life of…
December 25, 1776. On that cold and blustery Christmas Day, the fate of the new American republic hung in the balance. The previous summer, some 30,000 British troops had arrived in New York Harbor and proceeded to rout Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army at the battles of Long Island,…
When Tom Brokaw began talking with longtime friends and colleagues about writing a book about Baby Boomers, many of them responded with nervous laughter: “What are you going to call this one? The Worst Generation?”
The reference, of course, is to his best-selling The Greatest Generation, which…
In May 1844 dozens of prominent Americans crowded into the chambers of the United States Supreme Court, then in the Capitol Building in Washington, to see Samuel F. B. Morse instantaneously send a message to a colleague in Baltimore. Morse’s device, a study in cogs and wires, represented a new age…
A distinguished historian expertly assesses what the Founding Fathers and their generation achieved—and how they could have done better.
Many years after playing their famed roles in promoting revolution and republicanism among the dispersed peoples of colonial North America, John Adams and…
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, in American politics, frontrunner status isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Take the example of George Romney, the popular three-term governor of Michigan (and father of the current presidential candidate Mitt Romney), who many insiders expected would easily lock…
Recalling his small-town upbringing in Ohio before the Civil War, the novelist William Dean Howells remarked that he had led something of a dual existence, sometimes devoted to a “world of foolish dreams” that the adults in his life tried to impose on him, but just as often spent with other…
Twenty-nine years ago today, on June 6, 1978, California voters approved by a two-to-one margin a revolutionary ballot initiative known as Proposition 13. Aimed at curbing the growth of state government, the measure slashed property taxes by an average of 57 percent, limited property-tax rates to…
A new counterpart to John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.
Imagine an embattled man named George with a Southern twang serving the last two years of his second term as President. His reputation as a wartime leader once earned him immeasurable public acclaim, but an unpopular foreign policy,…
In his 1997 box-office hit Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers plays an MI-6 agent cryogenically frozen in 1967 and awoken 30 years later. Boarding an airplane for the first time, he cries, “Here’s the stewardesses! Bring on the sexy stews!” “Excuse me,” one of them replies. “…
