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How to Commemorate 1776

Walter A. McDougall

Next year is America’s 250th anniversary, and President Trump has promised us a “spectacular birthday party.” The Semiquincentennial Commission is considering a number of grand plans: a “Great American...

Our Stillborn Renaissance

Walter A. McDougall

Waldo—as the seventeen-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson took to calling himself—was one of eight children raised by a stern minister given over to Unitarianism, that “feather-bed to catch a falling...