Curated playlist
American Presbyterians
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound together. In 1909 he wrote it plainly. "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is…
- Donald TrumpDonald Trump was born on the 14th of June 1946 at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York, the fourth child of a family that was already wealthy. He would grow up in a 23-room mansion, become a millionaire in inflation-adjusted terms before…
- James StewartJames Stewart gave away his only competitive Academy Award. He won Best Actor for the 1940 romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, then handed the statuette to his father, who set it in the window of the family hardware store in Indiana,…
- Benjamin HarrisonBenjamin Harrison holds a peculiar distinction in American history: he is the only person to have served as president between two terms of the same opponent. In 1888, he defeated the incumbent Grover Cleveland. Four years later, Cleveland…
- Dwight D. EisenhowerDwight David Eisenhower drafted a message he hoped no one would ever read. On the eve of the D-Day landings on the 6th of June 1944, he wrote a short statement taking full personal responsibility if the assault on Normandy failed. 'If any…
- Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson was three years old when he heard a man outside the Augusta parsonage announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. That earliest memory shaped everything: a boy growing up in the…
- Buzz AldrinBuzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on the 21st of July 1969 (UTC), nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong first touched the surface. His first words, spoken into the silence of the lunar landscape, were simply: "Beautiful view."…
- John Foster DullesJohn Foster Dulles died on the 24th of May, 1959, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, having resigned as Secretary of State just weeks earlier as bone metastasis consumed what remained of his health. He was 71. Funeral services were held…
- David LettermanDavid Michael Letterman was born on the 12th of April 1947, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and over the next six decades he would reshape what American late-night television could be. He hosted 6,080 episodes across two shows, surpassing his…
- Douglas MacArthurDouglas MacArthur was born on the 26th of January 1880 at Little Rock Barracks in Arkansas, the son of a Union Army captain who had earned the Medal of Honor at Missionary Ridge. He would go on to hold commands that no American soldier had…
- George B. McClellanGeorge Brinton McClellan arrived in Washington in the summer of 1861 as the man the Union had been waiting for. He had won the only land battles of the war so far, newspapers were calling him "the Napoleon of the Present War", and crowds…
- Mark David ChapmanMark David Chapman stood outside the Dakota apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for most of the day on the 8th of December 1980, talking to fans and the doorman, waiting. Around 5 p.m., he held out a copy of John…
- John C. BreckinridgeJohn C. Breckinridge announced Abraham Lincoln as the winner of the 1860 presidential election on the 13th of February 1861. He had run against Lincoln in that same race. He came in second in the Electoral College with 72 votes to…