I’ve written about Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff before, but after watching his questioning of Jay Clayton, President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence (DNI), I think he deserves another look—particularly in comparison with Atticus Finch, the central character in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The comparison is not exact, nor should it be. Atticus is a fictional Alabama...

There’s a moment in Cool Hand Luke when Luke, played by Paul Newman, is returned to a prison camp after escaping. Determined to break his will, the guards order him to dig a hole. After the hole is dug, another guard instructs him to fill it in. Dig. Fill. Dig. Fill. The exercise is not about punishment. It’s about submission....

I recently read a book by a man who has learned some of life’s hardest lessons and, by his own account, is still learning them every day. He is not an evangelist. He is not selling salvation. He is not offering a miracle cure for what ails us. The lessons he shares come from his own life—one very different from mine....

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things—not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” When John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University in 1962 and said those words, he was not merely talking about rockets, astronauts, or beating the Soviets into space. He was speaking to something larger in the American...

Much has been written about George Washington, our first American president: his command of the Continental Army, his leadership in the fragile birth of a new nation, and his presidency. But less attention has been paid to Washington the person, the private Washington, whose conduct set a standard that may be even more urgently needed today. At a time when...

Today, America is 250 years old. This Fourth of July, amid deep national division, it seems worth asking a simple question: Which of our country’s monuments speaks most clearly to the promise of America? It sits in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, dedicated in 1886 as a tribute to freedom and democracy. For...

Conclusion: The Words That Made Us and Still Must.  In December of 1776, the Revolution was not moving toward triumph. It was close to collapse. Washington’s army was exhausted. Enlistments were running out. Men who had already given much were being asked to give more. Then Thomas Paine’s words were read aloud… …  “These are the times that try men’s...

Part 2: Common Sense Are we still capable of that kind of clarity when it matters most? There was a moment in the birth of the country when uncertainty did not simply fade; it was confronted. Not with noise or outrage, but with moral clarity. A moment when a divided people were forced to face a harder question: not what...

For the most part, my high school history classes consisted of names, dates, documents, and battles. What I’ve learned since then — through historians like Doris Kearns-Goodwin, David McCullough, Ken Burns, and others — is that history comes alive when we discover the human stories behind the events. One of those stories belongs to John Hart of New Jersey, a...

Lately, I’ve been reading more history, mostly to educate myself. But the other night, I opened Lord Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution and didn’t get far before I sat up in bed. I was reading about France two centuries ago, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the comparisons to Washington today. To be honest, most of what I remember...