For a special section that will tout the National Book Festival next month, the Washington Post has invited authors who are speaking at the festival (including moi!) to write a piece about “what book is most dog-eared in your library — and why.” Though I was eager to use this opportunity to write for a wide audience, the assignment was…

James Madison and Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip, had this much in common:  they both concluded that we are the problem. Kelly issued his most famous pronouncement — “We have met the enemy and he is us” — on a poster for the first Earth Day in 1970.    For those of us sweltering through…

David O. Stewart, novelist?  Pretty soon.  The following notice just ran on Publishers Marketplace: “Author of SUMMER OF 1787, the recently published AMERICAN EMPEROR, on Aaron Burr, and a forthcoming history of James Madison, founder and president of The Washington Independent Review of Books David Stewart’s MR. BINGHAM’S SECRET, about a deathbed confession that reveals…

Wednesday marked the 208th anniversary of the duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, former Secretary of the Treasury.  In the dawn hours, each traveled to a lonesome outcropping of New Jersey’s Palisades to try to kill each other in a savage ritual. Burr succeeded, dispatching his long-time nemesis with a pistol shot…

Three recent events reinforce the wisdom of this remark by William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun.  First, the New York Times is starting a series of pieces to be written by Adam Goodheart and Peter Manseau that will aim at correcting the historical statements, misstatements, and abuses of this political campaign season.  Titled “History Corrected,”…

This coming Sunday’s New York Times Book Review begins with an interview of General Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, in which he reveals that The Summer of 1787 is on his bedside table! I should let General Powell speak for himself: What book is on your night stand now? “The Summer of 1787,” by…

This October, I will be exploring a new way to share history, as the featured lecturer on a Chesapeake Bay cruise of the Yorktown.  The journey will start in Philadelphia, head to Annapolis and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, then the James River and Richmond, and finally finishing up at Mount Vernon and Alexandria.  The full itinerary, which will…

Two hundred twenty-five years ago today, several dozen worried Americans met in Philadelphia to change the American government.  Some of the delegates to that 1787 convention intended only to rewrite the Articles of Confederation, which had been in effect for only six years but already were failing.  Others aimed to scrap the Articles entirely and…

What can a writer do when someone else takes his work without admitting it?  That’s the question posed in a poignant and measured piece posted today by Richard Labunski at the History News Network. In 2006, Labunski published James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights.  As part of that book, he addressed…

I agree with Don Gallagher of Lititz, PA:  It’s time to honor Thad Stevens. While working on Impeached, my book about the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, I developed a powerful respect and affection for Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, the “Radical” Republican from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Even though he was never Speaker of the House of…