This story is about a teacher from a college in the East who was inspired by her travels West, especially by her experience summiting Pikes Peak, to write a poem that became an American anthem.

The "real American Revolution," as John Adams said, took place in the minds and hearts of the American people in the years leading up to 1776. This Revolution of thought gave birth to a Revolution of words and deeds; and Revolutionary thought, word, and deed together became the American Founding, a "human event" unsurpassed in the history of the world. This Founding remains eternally the earthly source of all America's blessings of liberty. It is also America's eternal earthly measure of itself.

This episode is about an American warrior and the warship that carries on his name. The ship and her crew operate in more than 48 million square miles of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The area is more than 14 times the size of the continental United States; it includes 36 maritime countries, 50% of the world's population, and the world's 5 largest foreign armed forces.

Late in 1939, the eminent Hollywood movie director John Ford, who happened also to be an officer in the Naval Reserve, began organizing and training what became the Eleventh Naval District Motion Picture and Still Photographic Group. Their mission would be to record on film the history of the war that was coming. From Pearl Harbor to VJ-Day, Ford and his crews traveled the world, from Midway, to North Africa, to Normandy, documenting the great battles of the war, often heroically.

It's not every day that a poet sits down and writes a poem that becomes a national hymn. But that's what happened to Julia Ward Howe in November 1861. The country was a year and a half into the Civil War when she and her husband visited Union Army camps with a friend, passing time in the carriage singing army marching songs, including the popular "John Brown's Body." The friend suggested that Mrs. Howe consider writing her own, more elevated, lyrics to the song. And she did.

Hedy Lamarr was born to Jewish parents in Austria in 1914. She became an actress and married by the time she was 20. In 1937, she escaped her domineering husband and rising anti-Semitism in Europe, and made her way to America, where she became a Hollywood star celebrated as the most beautiful woman in the world. During WWII, in hopes of aiding America's war effort, Hedy invented a technology that would eventually be used in cell phones, GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. She had beauty and brains in spades.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has been called, "the most popular poet in American history." When Longfellow wrote, few Americans remained who had a living memory of the American Revolution. With his poem, "Paul Revere's Ride" he succeeded in preserving part of that heroic memory in verse for many generations to come, the way Homer did for ancient Greeks, or Shakespeare for Englishmen in more recent times.

Chuck Yeager was born in West Virginia in 1923, was shooting and skinning squirrels and rabbits for family dinners by the time he was six, flying fighter planes in WWII by the time he was twenty, flew 127 missions during the Vietnam War, retired as a highly decorated brigadier general in 1975, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But what made Chuck Yeager famous was something he did between wars, as a test pilot.

A poem comes to a poet, and he sends it orphaned out into the world, to take its chances. It never knows who or what it might inspire or how it might become part of the world it has stepped into. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Building of the Ship" made its way from schoolboys to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Churchill and the world. It continues to inspire lovers of liberty everywhere.

By July 1776, American revolutionary John Dickinson maintained that he did not entertain any doubt whether America should declare independence, only when. He opposed, in his words, "only the time of the declaration, and not independence itself." His reasons for this opposition were weighty, well-considered, and shared by many. For one last time, he presented those reasons to his fellow delegates in the Continental Congress.