And so the annual circus continues, and we have slipped another rung. The 2023 State of the Union Address on Tuesday night was marred by heckling, and what’s left of our republican norms is slipping between our fingers. If Jefferson Was President Today, He Would Have Made It an Email The first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, delivered their State …
We lose a lot in our understanding of the Founding Fathers, says John Ragosta, a historian at the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, when we see them only as marble statues. They were real people who made mistakes and who got mad at one another. Patrick Henry so angered fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson in 1781, Ragosta maintains, that …
The election of 1800 was the first time power was transferred from one political party to another. The first president, George Washington, and the second, John Adams, were both Federalists, so there was not much to transfer in the spring of 1797 when Washington retired to Mount Vernon for the last time. As the first U.S. vice president, Adams considered …
President George Washington declared Nov. 26, 1789, the fourth Thursday of November, to be celebrated as a day of American thanksgiving. Try to imagine how much Americans of 1789 had to be thankful for: Just six years earlier, they had fought and won a war for their independence, to create their own country. Just two years earlier, they had adopted a Constitution, …