After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army General George Marshall asked film director Frank Capra to create films for the 8 million men, many of whom had never seen a gun, who were being uprooted from civilian life, thrown into army camps, and sent to war. Marshall wanted Capra to make “a series of documented, factual-information films – the first in our history – that will explain to our boys in the army why we are fighting and the principles for which we are fighting.”

The Hollywood Western was a great achievement of American popular art—an epic of the eternal frontier, where trouble is always brewing and everything is at stake: the law is out of town, and if a hero doesn’t ride into your valley, you’re going to lose the things you hold most dear. On the eternal frontier, we are always faced with the problem of establishing and securing justice and peace. Because establishing justice and peace is a pressing and permanent human problem, the classic Western is eternally interesting. 

The classic Western novel Shane opens in a valley in Wyoming Territory in 1889. Trouble is brewing. The local big cattleman is finding the homesteaders a nuisance. He wants the whole range for his own uses and is bent on driving them out, whatever it takes. The land is theirs by right of settlement and guaranteed by the government, but the nearest marshal is a hundred miles away. Then a lone rider, Shane, rides into the valley. 

More than 4 million visitors come to Arlington National Cemetery every year from across America and around the world and, unless they have their own personal visit to make, the thing they most want to do is to climb the hill to the high ground of the Memorial Amphitheater and visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. 

Twenty-Twenty seems to have spread like a virus into 2021. A third of the way through the year and still across the country citizens bludgeoned into isolation, locked in their homes by the latest mandate, huddled around computer screens and cell phones hour by hour awaiting announcement of the next tribulation. It was too much to take in; disorienting to the soul. We fled in desperation to the free state of Florida.

Sports fairly practiced—especially individual sports—are a great meritocracy revealing, for all the world to see, the beauty of excellence. In American history, sports have also been an arena for the working out of the great American principle of “liberty to all.” Only by living up to this principle, which is the measure of America, is it possible for sports or any other pursuit to take a just measure of human greatness. Enter boxing great Joe Louis. This episode is in memory of Patrick J. Garrity.

One of America’s greatest and most beloved film directors, Frank Capra, was just six years old when he arrived in New York on a steamer from Sicily with his poor Italian immigrant parents in 1903. Growing up, he worked hard, excelled in school, and fell in love with American freedom and the American common man giving us such films as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” 

It is somehow always the best of times and the worst of times; but the winter of 1980 in America felt like it had more than its share of the worst. Unemployment was high; inflation was raging. An energy crisis produced gas rationing. Iran was holding 50 Americans hostage. President Carter said the nation seemed to be in a “moral and spiritual crisis.” Then, from a most unexpected place, America and the free world received a bit of good cheer. It came in the form of a young hockey team.

Why “the finest Shakespeare collection in the world” is in Washington, D.C.

Ely Parker was born in 1828 to Elizabeth and William Parker of the Tonawanda Seneca tribe of the Iroquois confederacy in western New York. Parker became a leader in his tribe at a very young age, trained as a civil engineer, and earned himself a reputation in that field. In 1857, when he was 29 years old, he moved to Galena, Illinois as a civil engineer working for the treasury department, and there his life took a fateful turn. He became friends with a fellow named Ulysses S. Grant.