I will admit that I resisted reading Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City and the Birth of American Fashion by fashion journalist Nancy MacDonnell, despite the fact that several people I admire recommended it.

I’m not sure why. Over the years I have happily gone down rabbit holes related to the social impact of sewing machines, the development of aniline dyes, and the rise of that astonishing new institution, the department store. This time last year I took you with me on an unintentional series of posts on changes in ladies’ lingerie.[1] I’m as big a sucker as anyone for beautiful historical clothing, beautifully displayed—especially if it comes with a side of historical context.

I finally picked up Empresses of Seventh Avenue because of the reading I am doing around 1) female entrepreneurs and 2) life in early 20th century New York City. It turned out that the book was not on-point for either subject, but MacDonnell caught my attention from page one with a short introduction that sets the stage with French dominance in the fashion industry, and the blunt statement “Then the Nazis invaded Paris, and everything changed.” I kept reading.

MacDonnell devotes a chapter to Louis XIV’s deliberate decision, aided by his powerful finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to reshape the damaged French economy by making France the arbiter of fashion and center of the luxury trades related to it.[2] She outlines the growth of fashion reporting from the fashion dolls of the seventeenth century to the illustrated women’s magazines that appeared as a result of new printing technologies in the mid-nineteenth century. She describes the industry of Parisian haute couture , the workings of the fashion industry in United States before World War II, and how the two intersected. I found all of it fascinating.

The heart of the book, however, is the designers who created the American Look during World War II and the journalists who, almost against their will, helped make New York a fashion capital that would rival Paris. She introduces vivid personalities with the skill of a novelist: the dueling editors of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, journalists who were enamored with French fashion and journalists who crusaded for American design, and American designers, who were often personalities in their own right. She describes the distinctive work of each designer, turning me into a Claire McCardell fan in the process.[3]

The Empresses of Seventh Avenue lost my attention after Dior introduced the New Look in 1947—not enough history and too many spot biographies of the designers of my teen years and young adulthood for my tastes. Nonetheless, I am glad I read the book and recommend it to anyone interested in clothes, fashion history, or stories of smart women making things happen.

[1] In case you missed them: The Secret Behind the Gibson Girl’s Shape. Ida Rosenthal: Dressmaker Turned Underwear Tycoon, and Lady Duff Gordon aka Lucile

[2] Fairy tale writer Charles Perrault  and his version of Sleeping Beauty make a cameo appearance. I love it when old interests unexpectedly collide with new.

[3] The cape coats!. The suits!  The practical pockets!

***

Recently a friend of mine texted me from Culloden in Scotland[1]–the battlefield where the Duke of Cumberland routed Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite forces and effectively ended the Jacobite cause. (Charles was later involved in a half-hearted French plan to invade England in 1759, but it came to naught.) She wanted to know if I wanted a Jacobite blue bonnet.

My answer–which didn’t surprise her–was no. Despite the fact that the exiled Stuarts clearly had the better legal right to the throne, I’ve always had a soft-spot for that hard-working sober-minded prince, William of Orange. And I’ve never had much use for Bonnie Prince Charlie–who I’ve always thought of as a putz rather than a failed romantic hero. (If you have strong opinions on the subject, feel free to yell at me in the comments below.)

Karin’s offer of a Jacobite blue bonnet led me to think about the fact that history buffs tend to chose sides. Sometimes it is because we agree with one side’s political position. Sometimes it’s because we have a family connection to one side of a conflict or a vested interest in the outcome. Sometimes it’s simply a question of who won. (Though Lost Causes also have their supporters.[2])

And sometimes it simply comes down to preferring one historical figure over another. In my graduate school days, classes on Victorian England quickly divided themselves into two camps on the question of who was the greatest Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli or William Gladstone. The members of Team Disraeli and Team Gladstone all had good solid arguments supporting their guy, but when you pushed them it eventually came down to a question of personality. [3]

Choosing sides isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as you realize you have a preference. In the end, no one writes objective history.

So tell me, oh Marginalia, what historical sides have you chosen and why?

[1] Not quite as exciting as the time she called me from Tipu Sultan’s palace at Seringapatam.  While I occasionally grumble about feeling like my cell phone is a leash, there is something pretty cool about getting instant communication from far flung historical sites.

[2] Which brings us back to Bonnie Prince Charlie. I have to give the man credit for persistence.

[3] Me? I vote for Sir Robert Peel. Call me contrary.

Sir Robert Peel

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In a recent blog post, I introduced you in passing to activist and journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. As is so often the case, Vorse is worth a closer look.

Born to an upper-middle class family in Amherst, Massachussets in 1874, Vorse was a prolific and high-profile novelist, labor journalist, and activist.*

In 1896, after a period of studying art in France,* she continued her studies at the Art Student’s league in New York City, which had a reputation for progressive teaching methods and radical politics. She soon discovered that she had no real talent for art and took up progressive causes, including women’s suffrage, in place of painting.

Vorse was married twice—to journalist Albert Vorse in 1898 and radical journalist Joseph O’Brien in 1912—and widowed twice. Both Vorse and O’Brien supported her writing and shared her progressive values.

Her career as an activist and journialist blossomed after O’Brien’s death in 1915.

That year she joined with a group of left-wing writers, including John Reed, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser and Edna St Vincent Millay, to found the Provincetown Theater Group., which was dedicated to showcase new American talent outside the rules of the commercial Broadway theater.

In the early years of the First World War, she and other progressives formed the Women’s Peace Party, with the goal of bringing the war to an end. She was one of the party’s delegates to the 1915 International Conference of Women in the Hague.

More importantly, at least in terms of the impact she made, she also turned to serious journalism. She already supported herself as a writer of short stories for women’s and general interest magazines and of romantic fiction novels, which she later dubbed “lollypops.”** Beginning in 1916, she traveled across the United States and Europe reporting on social justice issues, with an emphasis on the impact of events on woman and children that was unusual in labor journalism at the time. Her work appeared in a wide range of mainstream publications including the New York Post, Harper’s Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, McClure’s Magazine and even McCall’s.

Her biographer Dee Garrison summed up her journalism career: “Across the space of half a century, wherever men and women battled for a wider justice, she was apt to have been there.” She reported on striking miners in Michigan and striking textile workers in New Jersey and South Carolina.She covered the Scottsboro Boys’ trial in Alabama and the battle between coal bosses and miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, where she was run out of town by thugs working for the bosses. She reported on the United Auto Worker’s strike in Flint. Michigan, in 1937 and on the steel workers’ strike in Youngstown, Ohio, where she was grazed by a bullet fired by company guards. She reported on conditions in Stalin’s Russia and Hungary under Béla Kun—experiences that led her to write in her diary “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be, but I am a communist who hates Communists and Communism.” In 1952, she wrote an extensive and hard-hitting investigation of dirty politicians and organized crime on the New York and New Jersey water front.

Her career as a journalist ended in 1959, at the age of 85, when she suffered a stroke on her way home from reporting on a textile workers’ strike in North Carolina.

* I am fascinated by the number of privileged children of the Gilded Age who devoted themselves to social change.

**Much like novelist Graham Greene, who dubbed his thrillers “entertainments,” as opposed to what he believed were his more serious novels dealing with issues of faith and politics. Subjects that also play an important role in his thrillers.

First up, a book review from 2021:

I love this cover!

Let me start with the short version: Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read in a while.

Here’s the long version:

In 2017, former Sports Illustrated journalist Alexander Wolff  set out to explore his family’s German roots. The result is an extraordinary mixture of memoir, journalism, history, and an up-close look at one family’s complicated relationship with Nazi Germany.

Two biographical narratives stand at the heart of Endpapers. Wolff’s grandfather, Kurt Wolff, was a leading publisher of contemporary literature in Germany, publishing authors whose works would later be burned by the Nazis. ( Think Kafka, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass.) In 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, he fled Germany with his wife Helene and took refuge in the United States, where they founded a new, equally influential, publishing house, which served as gateway for introducing American audiences to major European authors in translation, including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.*  They left behind Kurt’s family from his first marriage, including Wolff’s father, Niko. Niko served in the German army, spent time in a POW camp and emigrated to America in 1948, with a little belated help from his father. He became a chemist with Dupont and assimilated to a degree Kurt never managed. But he never told his son about his wartime experience. And Wolff didn’t ask.

In the course of tracing their stories, Wolff discovers family secrets. He learns the intricacies of which family members escaped being labeled as Jewish by the Nazis and which did not. He realizes how deeply his grandmother’s family, the Mercks of Merck Pharmaceuticals, were involved with the Nazis. He takes a fascinating and horrifying detour into the tragedy of the 1972 Olympics in Munich.** And he eventually confronts the questions of guilt, shame and accountability that many Germans of his generation struggled with decades earlier and the larger questions of “moral inheritance” in general.

Ultimately, Endpapers is not only the gripping story of one family’s history, but an important exploration of our collective responsibility for the past.

* They also published Anne Morrow Lindbergh, which I find somewhat ironic given Charles Lindbergh’s political positions.

**It turns out that a security specialist hired by the Olympic Committee to “tabletop” the event predicted the murder of the Israeli Olympians in the Olympic Village with frightening accuracy in one of several worst-case scenarios. The committee chose not to act on them.

* * *

CODA: Endpapers is a prime example of why I always read the acknowledgements. Wolff buried some good stuff in the midst of the usual “thank-you” list, including a brief discussion of historical novels that shaped his feel for the period and this gem:

Nor could I have told this story without two other women close to Kurt and Niko, my grandmother Elisabeth Merck Albrecht and step-grandmother Helen Mosel Wolff. Their voices underscore how much this narrative, despite its patrilineal spine, owes the women of our family. It is a truism borne out to me repeatedly over years of writing about sports figures, many of them alpha males reluctant to reveal their vulnerabilities: all praise to the mothers and sisters and wives who dress the skinned knees, keep the scrapbooks, vividly recall the failures and thus better sense the full arc of a story.

Sing it, Mr. Wolff!

This morning, I sat down to redress that oversight. As a first step, I googled the book so I could find a bit more about Lipstadt. Right there on the front page of results was my review from 2020. Huh?

I don’t know how I failed to find it before,[1] but I think it is worth sharing again. As far as I’m concerned Beyond Belief remains the best book out there on the question of what the American public knew about the Holocaust and when they knew it.

I am currently taking notes on a pile of secondary source that I read over the last few months. I stuffed them full of sticky tabs as I went and moved on. On the surface, it’s not the most efficient way to do research, and I don’t always have the time to do it. But when time allows, I find it tremendously valuable. Coming back to the material a second time with a fresh eye and more information allows me to make connections that I didn’t make the first time. Re-reading is like re-writing as far as I’m concerned. It’s where the magic happens.

I just finished my second pass on Deborah Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief: the American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. The first time through it didn’t even occur to me to share it with you.[2] And yet, and yet: it is important, not only for understanding how Americans could have remained ignorant of the Holocaust at the time, but also as a starting point for the mindset that makes today’s charges and counter-charges of “fake news” possible.

The work had its roots in the classroom. After Lipstadt told her class that detailed information about the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jews had been available to the Allies very early in the war, one of her students angrily responded “But what did the public—not just the people in high places—know? How much of this information reached them? Could my parents, who read the paper every day, have known?”

Lipstadt argued that a great deal of information was available. American reporters who were stationed in Germany until the United States entered the war had reported on the Nazis in detail, including information about Germany’s persecution of the Jews.

The student wasn’t convinced. “No,” he said. “I can’t believe people could have read about all this in their daily papers.”

Beyond Belief began as Lipstadt’s attempt to prove that she was right. Her final conclusion, which she offers to the student in her acknowledgements: “I was right, but so were you.”

The book consists of a detailed look at who reported what and when, what their editors did with it after they reported it,[3] and how readers responded. Some of the most powerful portions of the book, and the ones that I think are most important for us today, discuss what Lipstadt describes as “the barriers to belief.” The most critical of these was a legacy from World War I. Stories of German atrocities were reported in the first World War that later proved to be false. The result was an attitude of what journalist and historian William Shirer called “supercynicism and superskepticism” about reports of atrocities. As a group, Americans said “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” unfortunately, this time the stories were true.

Be warned, Beyond Belief is not an easy read. Lipstadt’s style is clear, but her work is dense with data. Nonetheless, I found it a worthwhile read for reasons well beyond my current research.

[1] Stressed, stretched, and tired perhaps.

[2] I don’t normally discuss purely academic works of history here in the Margins. They have a different purpose and a different audience and occasionally are just plain hard to read.

[3] Important stories often got buried deep in newspapers. Editors (and sometimes reporters) added seeds of doubt to the reported stories. And some papers didn’t run the stories at all.

Earlier this week, a friend and I attended a performance of Suffs, Shaina Taub’s award-winning musical about the women’s suffrage movement, which I’ve wanted to see ever since it opened off-Broadway in 2022.

The short version? Suffs did not disappoint. I laughed. I cried. I cheered. So did everyone else as best I could tell. There was one moment when much of the audience gasped.[1]

Suffs :The Musical begins in 1913,[2] just as radical young suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977)[3] is about to divide the suffrage movement with her demands for more aggressive action, including an unprecedented suffrage march in Washington on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration. Taub follows the movement through the final passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Paul is the central character, set in counterpoint to and often conflict with Carrie Chapman Catts (1859-1947), then 54 years old, successor to Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, and later the founder of the League of Women Voters. The two leaders embody two generations of suffragists with very different styles and strategies.

That description may make Suffs sound a little dull. It is anything but. Taub has built a powerful, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking historical drama about the suffrage movement. Paul and Catts are surrounded by a coterie of brilliantly characterized historical suffragists, including a fiery Ida B Wells, each of whom dominates the stage at least once over the course of the show, bringing to life the divisions within the movement. “Why are you fighting me? I’m not the enemy” is a powerful refrain between different members of the movement that Taub returns to again and again. Woodrow Wilson, who is in fact the enemy they are all fighting is pale and unenergetic, by contrast—clearly a deliberate choice.

Suffs ends with both triumph and the recognition of work left undone: making it a perfect show to attend as part of the Semiquincentennial.[4] Definitely worth seeing if it comes your way.

[1] Nope, not going to tell you. Just because we all know how the story ends doesn’t mean I’m willing to spoil surprises along the way. Which makes writing this harder than it would be if I felt free to share delightful moments.

[2] Sixty-five years after the suffrage movement began at the Seneca Falls convention—a fact that Taub skillfully shares with the audience in the opening moments of the show in the form of a speech by long-time suffragist Carrie Chapman Catts. It’s a critical point: the question of waiting for change and not being willing to wait anymore is a theme that Taub returns to over and over again.

[3] I must admit, I was stunned to learn that Paul lived and worked well into my lifetime.  Progress in women’s rights remains relatively new, and fragile.

[4] Can anyone spell that right on the first try?

I was familiar with much of the material because I have spent the last few years reading, writing, and now talking about the issues the exhibit covers. And yet, some of the details were new to me, and some that I was familiar with hit me hard all over again. Here are some of the things that caught my attention in particular:

• In November, 1938, American newspapers ran front page stories and banner headlines about the violence of what became known as Kristallnacht. In a Gallup public opinion poll conducted several weeks later, ninety-four percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. In that same poll, seventy-one percent did not want the United States to admit more Jewish refugees, a position that was clearly reflected in our immigration policies at the time.

• In late 1943, officials in the Treasury Department learned that the State Department had been blocking reports about the mass murder of Jews.[1] Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau went around the State Department and took the information directly to President Roosevelt in January, 1944. Roosevelt then signed an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving some 200,000 refugees.

• More than half of all Americans heard Edward R. Morrow’s broadcast from the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1945. Before that, reporters had told Americans over and over about the brutality of Nazi oppression, against Jews, communists, political dissenters, and others, but many Americans had found it all too easy to disbelieve. Now that was impossible. As Life magazine summed it up, “Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”

• A story I am very familiar with, but think it is important to emphasize whenever possible: After the liberation of Ohdruf, General Eisenhower visited the camp. The visual evidence and verbal testimony of the brutality of the camps made him ill. But he had no doubt of the importance of his visit. “I made the visit deliberately,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall three days later,” in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”

Not an easy story to read. Too important to dismiss.

The exhibition is nearing the end of its second tour of libraries in smaller cities, but you still have six months to track it down. You can read more about the exhibit and see the tour schedule here.

[1] I have unsubstantiated thoughts about how the demographics of the State Department contributed to this.

Here in the United States, we’re heading into the July 4th weekend–a holiday that expands or contracts depending on where in the week it falls.

It’s also a holiday where the meaning of what we are celebrating is often lost in the celebration itself.

In the past I’ve used this post to remind all of us of this ideal which stands at the core of who we are:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This year, I’d like to remind you of another quotation from our history, the words written on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! “

Over the years, we’ve had trouble living up to both ideals. Over the years, some heroic figures have fought to keep them alive.

See footnote 1 below

In 1876, caught up in the patriotic excitement of the first centennial of the American Revolution, the people of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, raised a stone inscribed “Molly Pitcher” over the previously unmarked grave of a local resident, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley (ca. 1754–1832). In the years before her death, Hays claimed to have served at the Battle of Monmouth, on June 28, 1778, carrying water to the artillerymen, including her husband, William Hays. When Hays was wounded and unable to continue, she stepped in as an impromptu member of the artillery team. A hundred years after the fact, she looked like a shoo-in for the legendary figure of Molly Pitcher.[1]

One resident of Carlisle, Jeremiah Zeamer, editor of the local newspaper, felt strongly that McCauley should not be so honored. He wrote to Congressman Marlin E. Olmsted that local townswomen remembered McCauley as “a vulgar, very profane, drunken old woman.”[2]

Despite Zeamer’s objections, there is no reason to think McCauley’s account wasn’t true. A similar story appears in the memoir of Joseph Plumb Martin, published in the 1830s under the name Private Yankee Doodle. Writing about the Battle of Monmouth, Martin mentions

one little incident [that] happened during the heat of the cannonade, which I was eyewitness to. . . . A woman whose husband belonged to the artillery and who was then attached to a piece in the engagement, attended with her husband at the piece the whole time. While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage then [sic] carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else, and continued her occupation.

He does not name this irrepressible artillery woman, and there is no direct evidence linking her with McCauley. (On the other hand, there is no evidence that Martin’s unknown woman wasn’t McCauley, either.) But there is a bawdiness to the story that seems in keeping with Zeamer’s later complaints. Moreover, the fact that the Pennsylvania legislature granted her a pension for her services during the war, which may well have included carrying water to the cannon, lends credence to the story.

But McCauley isn’t the only serious candidate for the title.

Margaret Corbin (1752–1800) is known to have wo-manned an artillery piece on the field at least once.[3] Corbin followed her husband, John, from one military camp to another during the American Revolution. They were both on the field at the Battle of Fort Washington in New York City, on November 16, 1776: John as an artilleryman and Corbin as a water carrier.[4] When enemy gunfire killed her husband, Corbin took his place at the cannon. She didn’t stop until she was wounded by a blast of grapeshot that mangled her shoulder and left breast. After the battle, the British captured Corbin near her cannon; both the British and the Americans treated her as a combatant prisoner of war. Released on parole, she was assigned to the Continental Army’s invalid corps until mustered out of the army in 1783—raising the question of whether she enlisted alongside her husband.[5] After the war, Congress awarded Corbin a wounded soldier’s pension.[6] In 1926, Corbin’s remains were transferred from Highland Falls, New York, to the government cemetery at West Point.

That should have been the end of her story. But confusion about identity is a central part of the Molly Pitcher name and legend. In 2016, workmen disturbed the remains. Examination by a forensic anthropologist revealed the bones to be those of an unknown middle- aged man. Corbin’s bones are nowhere to be found.

In addition to Hays and Corbin, there are accounts of an unnamed woman who fired a cannon at the Battle of Fort Clinton in the Hudson River Valley in October 1777. There may be at least one more Molly Pitcher whose story remains untold.

Excerpted from Women Warriors: An Unexpected History

[1] The first known use of the name is a painting titled Molly Pitcher, the Heroine of Monmouth, by Nathaniel Currier, of Currier and Ives fame, dated 1848, seventy years after the battle.

[2] Not that vulgarity, profanity, and/or drunkenness preclude heroism. Zeamer believed those qualities did, however, preclude being honored with public monuments when so many “Revolutionary heroes who led useful and respected lives” remained obscure.

[3] Known in the camps as “Dirty Kate,” she was no more respectable than McCauley. With the (possible) exception of officers’ wives, the women who followed eighteenth-century armies were rough around the edges, if not all the way to the core.

[4] The nature of eighteenth-century artillery is important to understanding the Molly Pitcher story. In order to be sure no sparks or hot embers remained in the breech, gunners swabbed out muzzle-loading cannons with wet sponges after each round was fired before they loaded the next powder charge—adding fresh powder before extinguishing embers from the previous round was a short path to “kaboom!” A well-organized artillery battery had casks of water nearby for the purpose of wetting the sponges. But not every team was well organized. Armies were taken by surprise. And casks ran dry over the course of hours of battle. Women in the army’s camp often performed the hazardous job of carrying water to the artillery line—in buckets, not pitchers. Firing a cannon was not a one-woman job—it took at least three people. When a gun crew lost a man, it’s a fair assumption that the woman who brought the water knew enough to step into the breach as a rammer or a sponger. (Though she probably didn’t know enough to perform the mathematical calculations required to place a cannonball on target. A difficult skill to pick up on the fly.)

[5] It’s possible. Some women’s names appear on the rosters of local militia.

[6] And a complete set of new clothes! Not a standard benefit for veterans of the time.

I reviewed one of those projects on my previous post.  On to round two!

I first became aware of More Perfect, [2]  a bipartisan alliance of presidential centers, foundations and sites, and its  In Pursuit project several months ago when writing friend Heath Hardage Lee announced that she was contributing an essay on Pat Nixon to the project. She was rightly excited by the prospect.

The project’s director, Dr. Colleen J. Shogan, former archivist of the United States, describes In Pursuit as “the most ambitious history-based civics project in the United States for 2026.” The project begins with the idea that American democracy is an evolving experiment, in which each generation reinterprets the country’s founding principles in response to new challenges. Its goal is to consider the most important lessons of American’s last 250 years, looking through the lens of presidents and first ladies. Under Hogan’s direction, a cohort of historians, journalists, public servants, and former presidents and first ladies have contributed short essays about each of our presidents and selected first ladies. The first essay, on George Washington, written by George W. Bush, was released on February 16; the final essays, on the Obamas, will release on the week of December 7. The project includes a podcast, with Shogan in conversation with historians and journalists, talking about their subjects in more depth than a 1200 word essay allows.

Fascinating as the inhabitants of the White House are, I think some of the most important historical lessons could be drawn from less elevated perspectives. That said, several months ago, I realized just how little I know about most of the first ladies. This is an excellent chance to learn more. I’ve enjoyed the essays thus far– the most recent essay, on Julia Grant, was an eye-opener. I will continue to follow along as new essays and podcast episodes are released.

You can find more about In Pursuit here

[1] I would like to claim I can recite the entire thing, but in reality I peter out after “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another….” Then my brain skips down to “We hold these truths to be self evident.” What about you?

[2] Another quotable phrase, this time from the preamble to the Constitution—the Founding Fathers could really write.