Popular Culture
History on Display: Suffs: The Musical
Earlier this week, a friend and I attended a performance of Suffs, Shaina Taub’s award-winning musical about the women’s suffrage movement, which I’ve wanted to see ever since it opened off-Broadway in 2022. The short version? Suffs did not disappoint. I laughed. I cried. I cheered. So did everyone else as best I could tell.…
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Molly Pitcher(s?)
In 1876, caught up in the patriotic excitement of the first centennial of the American Revolution, the people of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, raised a stone inscribed “Molly Pitcher” over the previously unmarked grave of a local resident, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley (ca. 1754–1832). In the years before her death, Hays claimed to have served at the…
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In Pursuit–Version 2
The phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is, I believe, one of the few portions of the Declaration of Independence that most Americans can recite from memory.[1] It is no surprise that two groups have chosen “In Pursuit” as the title for history-based projects For America 250. I reviewed one of those projects…
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