Aug 31, 2021

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses . . .” These are among the most world-famous lines of any work of American literature, and whoever hears or reads them identifies them immediately with the most famous statue in America. But that is usually where the familiarity ends. Many serendipities would be...

Aug 24, 2021

The Statue of Liberty has come to seem as much a part of America as the Grand Canyon. The oldest rocks of the Grand Canyon were formed by forces of nature some two billion years ago, and the Statue of Liberty, a project of mere mortals, has been around only since the end of the nineteenth century. But it came along and...

Aug 17, 2021

Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Franklin County Virginia just a few years before the Civil War began. With heroic determination, he got himself an education and went on to found the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama, where he remained principal for the rest of his life. By the time Frederick...

Aug 10, 2021

Every year in August, the oldest synagogue in America—Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island—holds a public reading of a letter written by George Washington to the congregation early in his first term as the first President of the United States. The letter ranks high among the documents affirming and defining...

Aug 3, 2021

Israel Beilin was five years old when he and his family arrived in New York and, like the rest of the family, he spoke only Yiddish. With the help of Ellis Island clerks, printing accidents, and his own American ambition, his name would become Irving Berlin, and he would become a master of the American language and one...