Hey friends. It’s my great joy and privilege to write and send you these emails – two a week for years, and more recently just one per week. I am told people read less than they did a decade ago, which grieves me, but hey… FYI, I am polishing up the final draft right... “Don’t know much about history… Looked at the pictures, then I turned the pages.” So goes the Art Garfunkel remake of the old Sam Cooke song “Wonderful World.” I fell in love with History as a subject because I lucked into some extraordinary teachers in high school... Where were you on Saturday for the 250th? Where were you (if you even existed!) on the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1976? I was a summer intern at the Indian Trail United Methodist Church, and the pastor assigned me the... When worship ended on Sunday, September 16, 2001, a man rushed toward me, his hands rifling through pages of a hymnal, asking why we’d not sung “God Bless America.” Then a bit befuddled he asked “What number is it anyway?” I said “Sir, it’s not in the hymnal. Irving... The idea of “rights” was hot in 1776. Thomas Paine’s wildly popular Common Sense was published in January, fueling the public’s demand for their rights. George Mason authored and led the adoption of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in June. The Declaration of... If I mentally type “July 4” into the search engine of memory in my soul, I find words from the 76th anniversary of 1776 that haunt and move me. In 1852, Frederick Douglass (for me, the only orator in American history I’d place in Lincoln’s league!) was invited to give... I can’t think of the significance of July 4 without looking to Abraham Lincoln. July 4, 1863 was the day after the defeat of Robert E. Lee’s army at Gettysburg, and the day of Ulysses S. Grant’s victory at Vicksburg. The tide had turned. Lincoln was asked to make a... Last month, I explained how the “hornet’s nest” of rebels around Mecklenburg County (where I live in North Carolina) who were early to the freedom bandwagon, were primarily Scots Presbyterians. They were by nature and habit allergic to all governmental authority.... If the delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 could have peered into the future, would they have trembled a little over how many lives would, over time, be lost because of the existence of this new country? Somewhere around 25,000... While the delegates were drafting and signing the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, quite a crowd had gathered outside the courthouse. There was a buzz of heightened anticipation that something big was about to transpire. Thomas Polk, the founder of Charlotte... 