On This Fourth Of July 2019

To my fellow Americans, wherever you are in the world, Happy Independence Day. 🙂

The 2018 National Birthday

What Americans celebrate today is not national perfection, but independence as a nation-state.

“From one End of this Continent to the other”

Happy U.S. Independence . . . weekend! Future U.S. president John Adams, who had persuaded the younger and largely unknown Virginian Thomas Jefferson to draft the independence declaration because - among other reasons - Jefferson had a knack with a quill, had foreseen almost exactly what independence day would develop into as a national holiday: …

Circle Of Thirteen

Happy Fourth of July!: Uh, sorry. Of course that's not the current version of the U.S. flag. I'm spending way too much time lately in the 1790s. 😉 We've never been perfect. We never will be. What we must always do, all we can do, is simply strive to be better than we were or …

“Land of lovely dames”

A bit more "history." Please don't run for cover. I think you'll find this amusing - especially given this is 4th of July weekend in the U.S.: That excerpt is from a recent biography. The first part is from a 1782 letter written by the subject while he was traveling; the second half is from …

Happy Independence Day, 2014

A few thoughts on today's U.S. Independence Day. It's an extra-special one for us because it's my wife's first as a U.S. citizen. And she is - as you know if you visit regularly - British. It's also the first one for some time in which we are actually physically present in the U.S. We …