From the October 1990 issue of Chronicles. In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his...
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A Song in My Heart, A Hole in My Head
From the September 1991 issue of Chronicles. Eleanor Roosevelt and I go way back. My father taught me to read from a stack of her “My Day” columns in 1940. We happened to have a plentiful supply of “My Day” in the house because the doctor had refused to be responsible for my reactionary grandmother’s...
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Moi, le Déluge
“He was just five years old when Mattie Barry, seeking a fresh start in life, moved north with her son and two older daughters to Memphis. . . . Her husband had been killed a year earlier in Itta Bena. Neither Marion Barry, Jr., nor his mother, who now lives in Memphis, will talk about...
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A Song in My Heart, A Hole in My Head
Eleanor Roosevelt and I go way back. My father taught me to read from a stack of her “My Day” columns in 1940. We happened to have a plentiful supply of “My Day” in the house because the doctor had refused to be responsible for my reactionary grandmother’s blood pressure unless she stopped reading it....
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The Goading of America
Fisher Ames is the Founding Father who draws a blank. Few people today have heard of him, yet he wrote the final version of the First Amendment, and his speech on Jay’s Treaty, delivered when he was the leader of the Federalists in the First Congress, was called the finest example of American oratory by...
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Anglo-Americana
In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his government’s official neutrality, Tatnall replied: “Blood is...
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Hell Is Other People
Remember Kate Millett? She made the cover of Time in 1970 after her dissection of literary machismo, Sexual Politics, became a blockbuster best-seller and won her the title of leading feminist spokesperson. It didn’t last. Although she was married, she soon announced that she was a lesbian, which split the women’s movement and destroyed her...