History
A Drink and a Laugh
Small world. Today, President Biden met with President Putin, the United States and Russian leaders holding summit under a tense and fragile relationship. But some things never change. Today, I’m reading a book by a former Secret Service agent recalling…
The President’s House
For the record, if you read 1,350 densely-worded pages for hours and hours and hours, marking up every page with lines and notes across two volumes, in less than three weeks, your eyes might actually struggle. It’s like watching television…
The Unwanted Memoir
People tend to believe that notoriety sells books, that if you have a name and a title in Hollywood, in politics, in business, that you’ll probably get a bestseller. Others think that just getting a book in print makes you…
Does It Even Matter?
The following images (plus the one above) reflect 10 presidents, 10 quotes, and the presumption of truth. Each of them are from posters I once made and placed on the wall of my web design classroom, back in 2018. The…
Rolling in their Graves
On the day we arrived in Virginia, last Saturday, the Richmond cemetery that houses Jefferson Davis, two presidential graves, and thousands of confederate soldiers had been roped off as a crime scene. Aging and irreplaceable crosses and headstones had been…
Jefferson’s Monticello
“Each generation is as independent as the one preceding, as they were of all which had gone before them. It has then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its…
Madison’s Montpelier
Here lies and here lived James Madison, a man who embodied our nation’s idyllic contradictions, our belief in equality and our conflict with slavery and racism, our right to republican self-defense and our eventual function as a world power, our…
Jefferson’s Tuckahoe
First stop on our Presidential Trip through Virginia was Tuckahoe Plantation, Mr. Jefferson’s boyhood home. The mile or two drive off the main road is not only picturesque, but it set the stage a residence far removed from the difficulties…
The Quintessential Optimist
Reading a presidential memoir, for any American, is normally an act of retroactive curiosity. And no one does it quickly. The pages are densely littered with information no longer relevant to anyone but the most issue-specific historians. But when those…
Home of the President-Elect
The last time I drove through Scranton, I made a point of visiting the Mall at Steamtown, trying to snag a picture in front of The Office sign. At the time, that felt like the biggest draw to this big…
