The Declaration’s forgotten (non)signer: John Dickinson’s missing 1776 signature haunts his legacy

Portraits of a red-headed Thomas Jefferson, left, and John Dickinson, right, by by Charles Willson Peale are seen at the ...

America’s greatest piece of writing

Thomas Jefferson was tasked with drafting a wartime document declaring independence. How did it become one of history’s most enduring symbols?
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies

Is this sentence in the Declaration of Independence really the greatest ever written?

I can’t think of a more fitting celebration of this Fourth of July than a reading of Walter Isaacson’s thin volume “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.” Isaacson is an influential public scholar and ...
The Economist

Transforming the cradle of the Confederacy

When he first moved to Montgomery, it didn’t have a single marker that mentioned “slavery”, yet had 59 monuments to the Confederacy and three high schools named for its war generals and soldiers. This ...