pettigrew
Pettigrew book on sale Aug. 13
History reminds us that Americans are just people: capable of love and hate, compassion and cruelty, failure and greatness. There is no special virtue in our blood. As Calvin Coolidge observed, it is not ancestry but ideals that animate the American soul.
Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — Lincoln’s pledge, and ours
The words of the Psalmist were on his mind. “If I forget thee,” Abraham Lincoln thought, speaking not at this moment of God’s Law but of the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence (the same thing anyway), “let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Dakota Pettigrew: American Insights — Lessons of 1856
History is, at its root, a grand painting of human nature in all its ugly colors and forms, a Greek tragedy that shows us at our best and worst.
Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — Words worth remembering from Tessie’s fate and ours
The morning was sunny and clear in a fictional New England village “with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day.”
Dakota Pettigrew: Words worth remembering — The enduring experiment
On Thursday morning, Nov. 7, 2024, New Yorkers — and general readers everywhere — who grabbed a copy of The New York Times were greeted with a historic front page.
Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — The greatness of Jimmy Carter
The crowd roared, stymieing the opening words of an awkward statesman from Georgia who stood before the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Thursday, July 15, 1976, to accept the party’s nomination for president of the United States.
Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — the purpose of government
On Tuesday, March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson delivered his first inaugural address. The day “dawned cloudy,” Irwin Hoover recalled, “but the weather cleared and by mid-morning it was warm and comfortable.”
Dakoda Pettigrew: Ask Not
A bitter snowstorm dropped six inches of snow on America’s capital city the day before Inauguration Day. “Many of the pre-inaugural social affairs had to be canceled,” The New York Times wrote on Friday, January 20, 1961, adding that the snowfall had “snarled traffic, disrupted air and highway travel and chilled thousands of visiting Democrats.”
Dakoda Pettigrew: Democracy’s heart, the heart of Lincoln
“It is for us the living,” Abraham Lincoln said on Thursday, November 19, 1863, of the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — a perennial choice
“America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young President, but for itself,” the journalist James Reston wrote in a special to The New York Times, which, on Saturday, November 23, 1963, bore the haunting headline “Kennedy is Killed by Sniper.”
