By Nancy Spannaus July 4, 2019—There was perhaps no more ardent supporter of the Declaration of Independence than Abraham Lincoln. He saw the Declaration as the moral foundation of the nation, upon which the Constitution was based. Thus, no matter how much the United States population fell short of its […]
By Nancy Spannaus June 16, 2019—In my Internet scanning today, I happened to note that it is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech, which was given at the Illinois State Republican Convention in 1858. This was the convention which nominated Lincoln to run against Stephen Douglass for […]
By Nancy Spannaus May 20, 2019–George Washington’s “Grand Idea” of uniting the country through developing the Potomac River as the gateway to the West, was the subject of a lively book talk last night. Author Joel Achenbach spoke to a group of approximately 30 people about his book The Grand […]
Part I. Ben Franklin and Massachusetts Lead the Way By Colin Lowry March 19, 2019 In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams, is a paragraph condemning King George III of Britain for the crime of promoting and enforcing the […]
A Book Review by Nancy Spannaus No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding Sean Wilentz Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2018, 349 pp. March 5, 2019—I can say without hesitation that anyone writing about the history of slavery in the United States should read […]
By Nancy Spannaus Jan. 30, 2019—Abraham Lincoln was right when he declared that, at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the Constitution, it was widely expected that slavery was on the wane, and would soon die out. That broad sentiment is actually a matter of […]
By Nancy Spannaus Nov. 12, 2018—Three days ago, my husband and I attended a local event sponsored by the Edwin Washington Project, a non-profit devoted to documenting the history of education during the era of segregation in Loudoun County, Virginia, where we live. The speeches on the struggle waged to […]
Up From Obscurity: The Influence of Lincoln’s Early Life on His Thought and Politics (The following speech was presented on Feb. 11, 2018 by Michael Lynch, director of the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee.. The venue was a meeting of MOLLUS, the Military […]
By Rochelle Ascher A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 1 1809-1849 By Sidney Blumenthal Simon & Schuster, 2016, 576 pp Feb. 10, 2018–As someone who has made the study of Abraham Lincoln a major part of my adult life, I can say that this book is one […]
By Nancy Spannaus Dec. 12, 2019—While the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and most politicians brag that the American economy is doing just fine, a study released November 19 by two non-profits provides new information to the contrary: More than two million Americans lack access to clean water. The report “Closing […]
By Nancy Spannaus Nov. 30, 2019—On November 26, the American Medical Association issued a dramatic new wake-up call to Americans about the rising death rates which have made the United States the only industrialized country in the world with a declining life expectancy. The AMA’s “Special Communication” was an article […]
Hamilton’s Economics Aimed to End Slavery
By Nancy Spannaus October 23, 2019—Growing publicity for the off-Broadway play “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” which seeks to rebut the presentation of Alexander Hamilton as an abolitionist, has inspired me to write my own rebuttal. I assert that Alexander Hamilton’s economics aimed to end slavery, from the very beginning, […]