If you need a little poetry in your life—and who doesn’t?—Billy Collins can be a good place to start. Collins writes unblushingly to attract new readers to poetry and to encourage those who have given up to come back. And he is famously funny. So much so that, because he reads his poems so amusingly and his readings have been so successful and well-attended, he has been called—not always as a compliment—a “stand-up poet.”

If you are walking down Broadway in St. Louis on your way to BB’s Jazz, Blues, and Soups, you will awaken to many American memories, among them a poem you probably already knew.

When you visit the historic Mound Cemetery in Marietta, Ohio, the guidebook informs you that, in addition to the ancient burial mound, the cemetery “contains more Revolutionary War officers’ graves than any other graveyard in the United States.”

As a Captain of Volunteers in the Black Hawk War, the 23-year old Abraham Lincoln managed in a desperate moment to keep some hard-bitten men—who had elected him—from committing murder. They had chosen him as captain because he was the best man among them, the one most worthy of their esteem. Lincoln earned it in no small part by outrunning, outboxing, and outwrestling them, but they knew, when they listened to the better angels of their natures, that there were much more important reasons to esteem him.

The young Ehrich Weiss needed money, but he lived for fame. By the time he was 17, he had decided how to get it—he would become Houdini.

What is it that makes a Marine’s Marine?

“He looked as if he would know exactly what to do, if awakened suddenly in the night, ready for anything”

This story is the sixth in a series of seven about an immigrant boy who became my good friend and holds a special place in the history of the Claremont Institute. They learned from this Hungarian immigrant that they are the fortunate of the earth and that their great good fortune lies in the country into which they were born

This story is the fourth in a series of seven about an immigrant boy who became my good friend and holds a special place in the history of the Claremont Institute. He always regarded the human mind as free to be determined by the truth about the greatest questions

This story is the second in a series of seven about an immigrant boy who became my good friend and holds a special place in the history of the Claremont Institute. It was spring, 1946, and Albert Camus was in New York City on the only visit he would ever make to America