Sandra Day O’Connor came out of nowhere to become the first woman on the Supreme Court and, eventually, the most powerful woman in Washington, D.C. Maybe the most powerful ever.

What made O’Connor a great American was not the causes for which she used her clout—those were, in fact, varied and not particularly lofty. It was her attitude about how to use it. In a steadily polarizing country, O’Connor held out for compromise, incrementalism, and flexibility. As the unpredictable centrist member of a nine-member court often split between four liberals and four conservatives, she leveraged a strategic asset—her vote—to preserve equilibrium.

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On the evening of September 11, hours after the Twin Towers fell, members of Congress assembled on the steps of the Capitol to address the nation. The leaders of both parties spoke, and everyone observed a moment of silence for the dead. Then, as the press conference was breaking up, someone started to sing. In the video, you can’t hear the first line. But people join in by the second and soon, everyone is singing. Dozens of members of Congress—Republican and Democrat, black and white, left and right—stood together, arm in arm, in an impromptu patriotic hymn.

The song they spontaneously chose was not “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful,” 19th-century songs by heritage Americans. It was “God Bless America,” written by a Jewish immigrant at the end of World War I to express his love for his adoptive nation. On that terrible day, only Irving Berlin’s words could begin to mend what had been broken.

Berlin was born Israel Baline, one of eight children of cantor Moses Baline and his wife, Lena. In 1893, when Israel was just 5 years old, the Balines left their Russian shtetl to come to America. Like many such families, they were Jews fleeing pogroms. Berlin’s sole memory of his Russian life, biographer Lawrence Bergreen wrote, was of “lying on a blanket on the side of a road, watching his house burn to the ground.” Days later, the family packed and left.

Young “Izzy’s” professional career began at 13, after the death of his father left the family in dire straits. He sang for sailors and prostitutes in the saloons of New York’s infamous Bowery, then became a singing waiter in Chinatown. In 1907, his employer gave him a chance to write a song of his own. “Marie from Sunny Italy” made him just 37 cents, but marked the debut of his professional name: Irving Berlin. Within four years he would have his first big hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

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Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Today’s essay is something a little different—a remembrance of not one, but 36 great Americans.

In the final minutes of Flight 93, after learning that other hijacked planes had already been used as weapons, its passengers did something extraordinary. They took a vote. Facing almost certain death, they did not defer to the loudest voice or the strongest person in the cabin. They did not panic or submit. Instead, they gathered information, debated their options, and made a collective decision about how to act. It may be the most consequential act of democratic self-government in American history—and one of the least understood. —The Editors

Everyone who lived through the September 11 terrorist attacks knows the story of Flight 93. But I came to see this moment differently after visiting the Flight 93 National Memorial in Stoystown, Pennsylvania, about 70 miles east of Pittsburgh, not far from the Maryland and West Virginia borders. My visit was transformative, perhaps the most profound history-based civics lessons I have ever experienced.

The visitor center, a concrete structure featuring large glass windows, overlooks the crash site and contains the memorial’s educational components. It’s a solemn place, with very little noise or chatter. The main exhibit features a precise timeline of Flight 93, with humanizing details that deepen the experience for those who steel themselves to read them. A careful perusal of the displays brings to light details easily forgotten after 25 years. These facts deserve our careful attention as we evaluate our collective civic engagement while celebrating the 250th birthday of our nation.

At 8:42 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93 departed Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, bound for San Francisco. At 9:28 a.m., the plane was hijacked by four men, a Lebanese citizen and three Saudi nationals, wielding knives, including at least one box cutter. After a struggle, the terrorists took control of the cockpit, incapacitating the pilot and co-pilot. A flight attendant and a first-class passenger were most likely murdered soon thereafter. The hijackers then forced the surviving 32 passengers and four crew members to the back of the plane.

This is where the terrorists made a tactical error. No doubt they believed that by keeping the passengers at the rear of the aircraft, they would have the freedom and the secrecy they needed to steer the plane toward its intended target in Washington, D.C. But they fundamentally misunderstood the United States and its citizens.

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I love Martin Scorsese because he’s a great example of states’ rights. Because the Founding Fathers understood one thing: Where you were born, that’s where you died. People live in Ohio. They are Ohioans. That’s it. And if you leave to go west, you don’t come back.

Martin Scorsese doesn’t make movies about New York—he paints moving masterpieces set in New York. He makes a fire escape on Kenmare Street look like The Garden of Earthly Delights. Every stoop or fire hydrant his camera catches is a love poem. That should be enough for anyone, right? To have a place they are from and be able to convey the beauty of it to the world.

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Jack and Bobby. You see those bouncy, boyish nicknames and know exactly who I mean—you picture their faces, you hear the famous voices that went with them. I wonder, What keeps us turning back to them? The truth is, we never turned away.

Maybe it’s the drama of their deaths. John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the great formative moment of the Boomer generation. It gave birth to the myth of the ’60s, those few short years we compulsively revisit in our movies, our television shows, and our fashion. The notion that he would have avoided the Vietnam War had he lived, that we could have had the sunny part of that decade without the darkness, is one of the rare historical counterfactuals widely believed to be true.

Whether Bobby’s 1968 bid for the presidency would have succeeded is somewhat mythical too; he was winning primaries before they truly mattered. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, his main rival for the nomination, was seen as heroic by anyone who remembered his stand for civil rights when it divided the party in 1948. He also had more than enough support among the party bosses who would pick the nominee in the literally smoke-filled rooms. But his death shrouded him in permanent possibility.

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In the mid-1970s, a sturdy, vivid, and largely untroubled American author, by then dead, left a gift for me in my middle school library.

Standing up on its hardback edges atop a table that the librarian, desperate for TV-obsessed boys like me to read anything, had marked “Good and Easy Reads” was John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America.

It caught my eye one random Monday because the night before my father, in his imposing way, had made me watch the movie The Grapes of Wrath. My father’s stern tendencies rarely packed the warmth of generosity, but this time was different. The edict opened my eyes, my mind, and my heart to the grandeur of John Steinbeck.

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America was going places in the first half of the 19th century, and thanks to Elisha Otis, the booming young democracy got serious about going up.

Elisha Otis, born in 1811 in Vermont, was a farm boy more interested in agricultural equipment than in raising crops. At 19, he took his mechanical instincts off to Troy, New York, an important node in the second American revolution, this one industrial. There he set up factories for manufacturers, and everywhere saw opportunities for improving the world. He was, in the words of historian Jason Goodwin, “a stern and righteous churchman, and his Puritan God gave him a furious sense of imperfection. Almost everything he saw could be done better—faster, cheaper, more accurately—and he went at it with the energy of a man possessed.”

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It would be hard to come up with a more quintessentially American figure than Louis Armstrong. Growing up dirt-poor in a section of New Orleans—Storyville—largely populated by prostitutes, he became the first black entertainer to be truly embraced by Americans, whether white or black. Indeed, at the height of his fame, he was the most beloved entertainer in the world. A self-taught trumpet player, he practically single-handedly transformed jazz, as the critic Gary Giddins once wrote, into a music whose “undeniable splendor projects an equally undeniable spirit of freedom.” His voice—”a bruising, teasing, gravel-throated everyman” (Giddins again)—could not have been more different from contemporaries like Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. Yet in 1964, his recording of “Hello, Dolly” knocked the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” from the top of the charts.

Satchmo, as everybody called him, was a complete original. He believed in “the curative power of pot,” as one writer put it, which he smoked daily. He was never not himself, always ready with a joke or funny remark—some blue, some not—with a casual, unfiltered style that people couldn’t help but warm to. Once, during a concert in England, he dedicated a song to King George V with the words, “This one’s for you, Rex.”

He loved America—why else would he claim to have been born on July 4th? (he wasn’t)—but he didn’t shy from criticizing it when he felt it was important to do so. In 1957, for instance, when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had the National Guard block nine black students from entering a white high school, Armstrong spurned a planned State Department–sponsored tour of the Soviet Union to protest the federal government’s laggard response. “The way they are treating my people in the South,” he said, “the government can go to hell.”

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In 1958, the journalist Harry Golden published a book of essays under the title Only in America. The essays are no longer of interest, but the title lives on. Only in America, I believe, could an athlete like the baseball player Sandy Koufax emerge. After pitching for the Brooklyn and (when the team moved west) Los Angeles Dodgers between 1955 and 1966, Koufax’s career was cut short at the age of 30 by pain in his left, or pitching, elbow. Before that he had won all the awards and prizes offered by the game of baseball, including being named Most Valuable Player in 1963.

Baseball is a game dominated by statistics, and in his last six seasons, Koufax established himself statistically as among the greatest pitchers, if not the greatest, in the long history of the game. He threw 40 shutouts and averaged more than nine strikeouts a game. He led the National League in earned-run average in each of his last five seasons. Three times he won the pitchers’ Triple Crown—for the most wins, lowest earned-run average, and most strikeouts in a season—and three times the Cy Young Award. (An old joke asks who is the only great pitcher never to win the Cy Young Award? The answer: Cy Young.) Koufax threw four no-hitters in four seasons, and on September 9, 1965, he pitched a perfect game, facing only 27 opposing hitters.

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There are signs that Americans are finally warming up to the country’s semiquincentennial, and there’s a tantalizing array of events nationwide over the next month. (We can’t be the only folks excited about a tall ships parade!) Alongside the outdoor fun, though, there’s a glut of articles and books considering the ideals of the American revolution and the men behind them. Given how much is out there on the great men who founded America (including Jonathan Horn’s Free Press newsletter, This Week in American History), we thought we’d try something a little different for our final countdown to the country’s big birthday. This month, we’re taking a break from the Founders to celebrate some of the Americans the revolution enabled over the last 250 years.

The idea is not to downplay the brilliance of the names that you usually see on a list of Great Americans. It is to acknowledge a few names that are less familiar, but nonetheless helped make this country what it is. Did the inventor of air conditioning, Willis Carrier, not have as profound an effect on the country as anyone who, like Mr. Smith, went to Washington? So, while we will continue to revere Lincoln and Washington, it’s time for a little love to Sandy Koufax, Louis Armstrong, and John Steinbeck.

We’re not trying to come up with a definitive list of the greatest Americans who ever lived. We’re offering something more personal: a writer we love on an American they love. Every weekday between now and July 4.

To kick things off, we’re allowing ourselves one essay on one of the great men who founded this country: the historian Jane Kamensky, president and CEO of Monticello, on Thomas Jefferson’s misgivings about over-reverence for the Founding generation. Read Kamensky’s piece below, and then look out for our series on Great Americans starting in The Front Page tomorrow. —The Editors

By 1826, Thomas Jefferson knew his sun was setting. He turned 83 in April, rheumatic, dyspeptic, and fever-racked. The letters he wrote that year—169 of which survive—are haunted by debt and by death. “I must meet what futurity has in reserve for me,” Jefferson told his grandson Francis Eppes in March.

A week later, he wrote his will. Around the same time, he designed his tombstone. It was to be a simple obelisk six feet tall—less than his own human height—and feature an epitaph listing three accomplishments curated from four decades in public service “& not a word more.” Posterity would see him claim credit for the American Declaration of Independence, that avatar of self-government; for Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom, an originary statement of freedom of conscience; and for the University of Virginia, a beacon of citizen education. Author, Jefferson called himself in the inscription, and Father. Not founder, much less Founder. Across the vast course of his correspondence, Jefferson used that f-word just a handful of times, most often to talk about the working of iron.

As he mused on his own ending in 1826, Jefferson was also keenly aware that the Declaration of Independence, whose drafting he had come to count as his greatest contribution to the nation and indeed to the world, was approaching the ripe age of 50. For some time, he had kept track of the dwindling number of its living signers: In 1812, he thought there were seven, as he tallied for John Adams. A year later, he counted four, or possibly six. “I am the only one South of the Potomac,” Jefferson supposed. In his last public letter, penned on June 24, 1826, Jefferson described the pride he felt as “one of the surviving signers of an instrument, pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world.” There were then only three. On July 5, the day after Jefferson and John Adams both perished, only Charles Carroll of Maryland endured.

It had long been the ideals, not the author, which Jefferson wanted Americans to revere. “I have declined letting my own birthday be known, & have engaged my family not to communicate it,” he had written in 1803, toward the end of his first term as president. He felt “disapproving” of any attempt to transfer “the honours & veneration for the great birthday of our republic, to any individual, or of dividing them with individuals.”

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Every year on Memorial Day, the nation pauses to remember and mourn the millions who have lost their lives in the service of our country. This year, the meaning of the day is especially acute. War continues to rage in Iran, where at least 13 American service members have been killed. Many more U.S. soldiers are stationed in countries across the globe.

It is all too easy to take for granted our freedoms as Americans. And it is even easier to misunderstand or ignore the realities of the wars fought to keep those freedoms alive. Free Press contributor Elliot Ackerman understands those realities all too well. A Marine Corps veteran and former intelligence officer, Elliot served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan—before returning home to become, among many other things, a novelist.

“A career filled with night raids, long-distance patrols, and clandestine asset meetings does, at first glance, seem to have little to do with a career spent sitting at a desk day after day dreaming up a story,” Elliot wrote for us last year. But, in fact, as you’ll find in his essay below, the two have everything to do with each other. Today, Elliot marks Memorial Day by reflecting on his relationship with fellow veteran-turned-novelist Karl Marlantes—and on the extraordinary relationship between storytelling and war.

—The Editors

In 1984, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote an essay about the war in Vietnam—more specifically, about the role literature might play in reconciling the country as it reckoned with the war. She interviewed a series of veterans turned authors, including a young Tim O’Brien, who was still six years away from publishing his seminal work, The Things They Carried.

Kakutani noted that several fine works of fiction had emerged from the war, but no masterwork. Perhaps, as Vietnam veteran and author Philip Caputo told her, it was still too early: “Tolstoy wrote about Napoleon’s invasion some 60 years after it happened,” Caputo said, “and it may be that that kind of perspective on Vietnam can come only with the passage of time.”

In the end, Caputo was right: That Vietnam war masterwork wouldn’t come until 2009, when Karl Marlantes published Matterhorn, a 600-page epic that took him 35 years to write. Matterhorn is the War and Peace of the Vietnam War. The novel follows a company of Marines as they take and try to hold onto a jungle-covered hill that gave the book its title. Marlantes, who graduated from Yale and dropped out of a Rhodes Scholarship to volunteer in Vietnam, followed Matterhorn with the nonfiction work What It Is Like to Go to War, an equally profound meditation on violence, society, and homecoming.

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When it comes to the Declaration of Independence, the preamble gets all the love. But historian Robert Parkinson argues the 27 grievances that follow are the real heart of the document. These grievances not only laid out the reasons for a revolution, but galvanized the American people to take up arms against the crown.

Parkinson has spent 25 years studying the Revolutionary period. His new book, Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence, arrives just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration—and it argues that we’ve been reading that document wrong for most of those 250 years.

In this episode of Breaking History, Parkinson explains what the Continental Congress actually debated and deleted from Thomas Jefferson’s draft, why one delegate made sure race would be the last and most explosive grievance on the list, and why those grievances—written in panic and desperation in the summer of 1776—feel urgent today.

Listen to their conversation below, or scroll down for an edited transcript.

This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Eli Lake: Let’s get started. We make a big deal about the preamble and its connection to the Scottish and English Enlightenment and John Locke and the history of the idea of freedom. I gather that your book says the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War is about far more mundane issues. What do you mean by that?

Robert Parkinson: For a lot of Americans—probably not the majority of your listeners, but a lot of Americans across the country—the opening paragraphs of the Declaration are all there is to it. The bit about self-evident rights and pursuit of happiness and unalienable rights, that’s about it. They don’t know that there is a list of 27 grievances in the Declaration. The opening paragraphs are almost entirely Jefferson—other than a few snippets done by [Benjamin] Franklin and [John] Adams in their first round of editing.

But there’s a lot that’s actually edited out; about 470 words are taken out from the rough draft Jefferson turns into Congress. Congress spent a lot of time thinking about how to get this statement, this mission statement, exactly right. And where they did most of their work was in the grievances themselves. So if they thought that was the part that needed the most attention, I think we should think about that as well.

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On July 17, 1955, Ronald Reagan stood near a mocked-up wood-plank town in Anaheim, California, where a 13-star flag flew incongruously over an “Old West” landscape, and introduced the world to Disneyland. He had been invited by Walt Disney himself to co-host the park’s live ABC broadcast, alongside Art Linkletter and Bob Cummings—three Hollywood actors who seemed to embody a wholesome, all-American ethos. From the imagined past of Frontierland, the show leaped ahead to Tomorrowland, set in the far-off year of 1986, emphasizing the technical marvels yet to come: nuclear energy harnessed for civilian purposes, human beings riding rocket ships into space. Disney foretold great things for a 1980s in which the United States would serve as “a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.” But even he could not predict the most important political fact of the age: that his genial co-host would become president.

Southern California was a strange place to build a park about the past, because the region at the time was all about newness and abundance and growth. For a lot of its history, Orange County had been Southern California’s version of flyover country: a vast agricultural expanse between two desirable places, Los Angeles and San Diego. But Disneyland was changing that. Before long, 50 miles south of deep-blue Hollywood, Orange County would become a region famed for its right-wing politics—but also for its mythmaking skills. Those two things, it turned out, went naturally together.

The two presidents Southern California gave America both understood this instinctively. Richard Nixon and Reagan each built a national career on invoking a version of the American past in which the specificities of historical context mattered less than the big picture. For Nixon, progress meant proclaiming a “New American Revolution” on the eve of America’s bicentennial while dismantling the federal programs that had built the postwar middle class. For Reagan, it meant recapturing a lost optimism and an old-fashioned faith in America as an exceptional nation. Both men were less interested in history as it actually happened than in history as it felt—and Orange County, a place that had built itself almost entirely from scratch, turned out to be exactly where the myth of America’s future was getting made.

I’m a historian—and historians tend to be myth-busters. With the country’s 250th birthday on the horizon, I figured it was a good time to step out of the ivory tower and check in with the past as it exists here and now, at the museums and monuments and roadside attractions where Americans go to learn about their history. After all my travels—to Davy Crockett’s Tennessee and Texas, to the real Erie Canal, to the birthplace of the American automobile and the actual Old West—I couldn’t miss out on Disneyland, the single most influential historic attraction in U.S. history.

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There was a time when Americans celebrated great industria…

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While the wealthy of the medieval world did build for the living, it was overwhelmingly through the church and with an eye on the next world. The great cathedrals of Europe, the monasteries, and the hospitals were ecclesiastical enterprises, funded by a combination of royal grants, aristocratic patronage, and the steady accumulation of tithes. When secular wealth entered the picture, it was through mercantile families like the Medicis that turned wealth into symbols of political power. Politics, religion, and great earthly works were closely entangled for a millennia.

All that changed in the new world. America had no church establishment to staff hospitals and schools, no aristocracy to endow them, and no monarchy to hand out charters. What we had was money: made fast by men who had often started with nothing and found themselves, as the republic matured, in possession of fortunes they could neither spend nor comfortably hoard. They took upon themselves the public works that in the Old World were the work of the nobility and the church.

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There’s a well-kn…

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It was a marvel of vertically integrated manufacturing and the greatest expression of Henry Ford’s philosophy of mass production and mass consumption. But for many of its workers, it was dehumanizing work. Ford liked to hire recent immigrants, as they were less likely to complain about their conditions. Rivera was a Marxist. His frescoes, immense, ominous, and admiring, capture the moral complexity of Fordism. The photographer and painter Charles Sheeler had a very different response to River Rouge. He was captivated by its geometry and efficiency, and painted it as if it were a quaint New England port, serene and stripped of human strain.

Among America’s greatest entrepreneurs, there are those whose achievements, however great, are difficult to grasp. What will ultimately be left of Bill Gates’s Microsoft or Larry Ellison’s Oracle besides the wealth they generated? Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is a financial concern, holding stock in companies whose hard assets were built and are controlled by others. There are great financial traders like George Soros, masters of capital flows; and technologists like Mark Zuckerberg who conjure clouds and streams of invisible connection. Then there are the titans who change our physical world: the Builders.

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For expelling the British from Boston in March 1776, George Washington received many plaudits: the thanks of the Massachusetts legislature; the promise of a medal from the Continental Congress; and his very first college degree—an honorary doctor of laws from Harvard College. Unfortunately for all involved, when a representative from Harvard called to present the degree on April 4, he discovered he was too late: Washington had already left town hours earlier for New York City. Credit the Ivy League of old with at least trying to honor the military.

Although there were credible reports of the British sailing for Nova Scotia, Washington could only guess where they would strike after refitting there. Trying to think as the enemy would, he bet on New York City for the exact reasons the British had longed eyed the place: its reputation as a bastion of loyalism and its strategic location at the mouth of the Hudson River. As a glance at a map will show, the British could use that waterway to help link up with their forces in Canada while using its eastern bank to quarantine the particularly rebellious New England colonies from the rest. New York City, Washington wrote, “is the object worthy [of] their attention, and it is the place that we must use every endeavor to keep from them.”

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Invoking Dr. King in any conversation about the act of protesting is appropriate because he is the Henry Ford of protesting. Of course, Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did Dr. King invent protesting. But Ford taught the world how to efficiently build a car by applying his assembly line idea to the process. Similarly, Dr. King taught Americans how to properly protest by applying his philosophy of nonviolence to the act of resistance.

The last few years have seen a potent number of protest movements sweep America: Black Lives Matter, the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, the “Free Palestine” movement, the “No Kings” rallies, and the ongoing protests against the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All claimed to be acting in the great spirit and grand tradition of Dr. King. But the only thing these have in common with the protest demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement is that they gathered a crowd of people together.

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