I cover the upcoming Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, and its mission to revive appreciation for religious liberty. "Local Projects, a design studio that worked on the September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York City, is designing exhibits for the center. Founder Jake Barton says the goal of many interactions will be to help visitors see “how their values connect them to other Americans present and past.” Working on the project, he says, gave him a new perspective on

I discuss teaching U.S. history through primary sources at Great Hearts schools: "As for the particular question of teaching American history, Bergez admits there’s something paradoxical about applying a classical approach. Ancient thinkers like Thucydides thought history was not simply old things being displaced by new things, but “something permanent and perennial revealing itself.” But Americans often think of themselves as an exception or aberration. This nation is “A New

"The best plaque at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination has little to do with the fashionable ensemble it accompanies. It instead takes the fact that designer Rossella Jardini is riffing on the starched cornette of the Daughters of Charity (think The Flying Nun and you’re on the right track) to launch into an anecdote about Charles de Gaulle. Apparently, the statesmen felt such affection for the Grey Sisters’ traditio

National Review asked me to write about how to teach U.S. history to young people. I was happy to do so! In the piece I set out a person-fir

"I used “Maryland, My Maryland” as an opening number for a production of Julius Caesar I directed earlier this summer (with the lyrics modified to “Roman land, my Roman land”). It seemed to fit the impetuous idealism of Caesar’s killers and the pride of those reactionary aristocrats in their homeland. Some members of my cast were surprised when I explained the song’s real history. They had assumed from its lyrics it was a song of the American Revolution. Weren’t the first lin

"Aaron Burr, Hamilton’s narrator and Hamilton’s killer, complains that Hamilton has been “seated at the right hand of the father,” elevated to Washington’s side. The Trinitarian image is ironic: Though Washington is a godly man and father-figure, Hamilton isn’t quite a spotless lamb. Inaugurating the role, Miranda played his protagonist as an irrepressible motor-mouth, committed to his ideals, hungry for fame, and susceptible to his passions. Hamilton’s involvement in America