Presidents Day is unique among American holidays in providing the opportunity to remember and appreciate why George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — whose birthdays fall in February — were the two greatest U.S. presidents. While Washington was the founding father…
As the luminous Texas writer John Graves observed a few years back: The Unco Guid and the Rigidly Righteous, in one or another not necessarily religious hue, dominate our time as shrilly as they ever dominated [Robbie] Burns’ Scotland. The…
George Washington will be booted from the church he helped to found in Alexandria, Virginia. To understand what’s happening, we have to go back more than 100 years. In 1870, the clergy and communicants of Christ Church, an Episcopal congregation…
In these very — I mean very — weird times of ours, few phenomena appear weirder than what I would describe as the mania for pulling down or otherwise removing memorials to dead Confederates. New Orleans has done it. My…
Where better to start a tour of the American Whiskey Trail than at Mount Vernon? George Washington often has been called the father of our grand nation — the prototype of this new man, the American. Appropriately, he owned a…
In the Revolutionary War as well as the formative years of our nation’s independence, no one played a bigger role than George Washington. The late historian James Flexner called him “the indispensable.” Without his leadership, it is hard to imagine…
Moving into the White House has got to be a daunting task. All those rooms and corridors to navigate. All those staffers’ names to remember. All those previous executive orders to rescind. But, decisive though he appears to be, President…
In George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, he argued that of “all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” In Barack Obama’s farewell address, he congratulated himself for undermining them. He identified America’s…