Quotes from Sarah Vowell

And the Americans were told they were going to attack this heavily defended position with unloaded muskets, just with their fixed bayonets. It was a nighttime attack and they didn't want to be shooting each other. They were commanded by that gentleman on your ten-dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton, the future secretary of the Treasury.

Hamilton, aware the war was winding down and that this was likely his last shot at glory, went over Lafayette's head and appealed to Washington, who overruled Lafayette and allowed Hamilton to lead.

If Americans can transform Memorial Day, technically a remembrance of all our war dead ever, into the official kickoff of summer, we can handle adapting one demoralizing battle into a wholesome, chipper get-together.

The victory at Trenton boosted morale among the troops, the Congress, and the people to a degree possibly unwarranted by winning back a town in New Jersey, what with it being a town in New Jersey.

One of the French officers was horrified that at a dinner in Washington's tent, His Excellency served the meal not in a succession of courses like in civilization. Apparently Washington "gave, on the same plate, meat, vegetables, and salad." On the same plate? Were these Americans people or animals?

With only sixty men to hold off four hundred Americans, the British commander of the redoubt, a Major Campbell, surrendered to Laurens. Afterward, when an unhinged captain from New Hampshire threatened Campbell with his bayonet, Hamilton stepped between them, because rules were rules.

on the illusive "Monsieur Hortalez." When my friend Steven and I went looking for the building one afternoon, we came to the address at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple and realized we had been there before.

Washington was referring to his military family or aides-de-camp, the same way John Adams described the aide Alexander Hamilton as "one of General Washington's Family." So when Washington said "family," he meant "chummy minion." The orphaned Lafayette heard "son.

Freedom of the press, the surest guaranty of the rights of man.

As if I was never nicknamed 'Wednesday' as in 'Adams'.

To me, the highlight of the event is watching a reenactor in a long striped dress sitting alone on a blanket, winding yarn. Absorbed in the task of wrapping strands of wool around her hand, she never looks up. Watching her is so mesmerizing and oddly sacred that it never occurs to me to interrupt her and ask her name or how she got into the yarn-winding reenactment biz, maybe because she isn't recreating; she is creating.

You think this is a mess? New York is a mess! Why should it matter if I spill anything inside? The whole city is a dump! I'm not pretending the inside is any different from the outside anymore!

If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her? This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.

On October 1, Lafayette mailed Adrienne a bubbly update about the progress of his apparently adorable wound. "The surgeons are astonished by the rate at which it heals," he cooed. "They are in ecstasy every time they dress it, and maintain that it is the most beautiful thing in the world.

In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that our Revolutionary War had on our French allies, "What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government—their cutting, not their sewing.

Jeff Davis's name they'll proudly praise, ah ha, ah ha And Lincoln's tomb will be disgraced, ah ha, ah ha The nation's flag will lose its stars The stripes they'll change to rebel bars And we'll all wear gray if the Johnnies get into power

One of the slight variances between the Stalwarts and their fellow Republicans the Half-Breeds is that the Half-Breeds, partly out of frustration with the Civil War sainthood of Grant, were clean-shirt guys more interested in stumping for mild civil service reform—a platform whose merit would make for a less stirring campaign song. A bureaucrat should pass a test, hurrah, hurrah!

This is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

For the better part of the 1990s, it seemed like the only Americans who publicly described themselves as patriots were scary militia types hiding out in the backwoods of Michigan and Montana, cleaning their guns.

The eyes of all people are upon us. And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it's still shining—because we never turn off the lights in our torture prisons. That's how we carry out the sleep deprivation.

Washington wrote. "For, happily, the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.

One of the advantages to visiting historic sites as opposed to merely reading about them is the endearing glow of hometown pride.

disunity is the through line in the national plot—not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other's nerves is our right.