Sublime

In the French-Indian War, Brother George Washington was shot no less than five times in a single battle. His thick coat stopped four of the bullets and one went through his hat. If that wasn't enough, in the same battle he had two horses shot out from under him. Observing this, one Indian Chief said he thought Washington's God must be protecting hi

T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt

Once in office, and freed from Southern obstructionism after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and his Republican majority unleashed a blitz of prodevelopment legislation almost without parallel in American history—a “second American Revolution,” in the words of historians Charles and Mary Beard. The Republican achievement has been obscured by the

The bloodiest combat unfolded at Chatterton’s Hill. In the first wave of attacks, Captain Alexander Hamilton, positioned with two fieldpieces on a rocky ledge, sprayed the invading forces with deadly fire, driving them back. After regrouping, the British grenadiers and Hessian soldiers forded the Bronx River and bravely clambered up the wooded slop

In Braddock’s crushing defeat, Washington had established an indelible image as a fearless young soldier who never flinched from danger and enjoyed a special intimacy with death. He had dodged so many bullets that he might have suspected he would escape the ancestral curse of his short-lived family. To Jack, Washington speculated that he was still

At one point he told Cowley that the man he would most like to resemble was Major General John Aaron Rawlins. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Rawlins was “the most nearly indispensable” officer of General Grant’s staff. It was his job to keep Grant sober; edit his important papers and put them in final form; apply tact and persis

Until reinforcements arrived, Washington was woefully shorthanded. He had fewer than 9,000 men, with 2,000 too sick to enter combat. Meanwhile, he steeled himself for the advent of 17,000 German mercenaries who would form part of a gigantic expeditionary force—the largest of the eighteenth century—that might total 30,000 soldiers. When this first w

The Senate, William S. White, the body’s most prominent chronicler, wrote in 1956, is “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.” Not just revenge, unending revenge. When the Senate convened in 1957, the gavels of its great standing committees were still overwhelmingly in the hands of the South, and no end to that revenge seemed i

He would honor Perkins five years later by dedicating The Old Man and the Sea to him.