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 […]
History Does Not Come in Black and White By Nancy Spannaus Oct. 11, 2019—The first issue of the revived Bulletin of Loudoun County History is a “must-read” for those seriously committed to achieving racial harmony in the United States. Three of the articles in the yearly journal focus on the […]
By Nancy Spannaus Oct. 13, 2019—If one is to take the actions of the Federal Reserve since Sept. 17 into account, the United States banking system (and perhaps the global one) has already entered into a new systemic crisis. The Fed is issuing tens of billions of dollars a day […]
The Declaration, Through Lincoln’s Eyes
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 […]