On July 2, 1776, in a letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams wrote: This second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

As it turned out, Adams was nearly right about this, [...]

A series on the stuff that delighted us on the Internet this year.

Watergate, The Night Stalker, the Church Committee, Rod Serling's "Night Gallery," the Pascagoula Abduction and the Jonestown Massacre: this was my 1970s youth. My mom, who recalls taking pro-communist flyers from Lee Harvey Oswald outside the downtown New Orleans building where she worked as a secretary, once lifted a tobacco pipe left behind by Jim Garrison at a cocktail party, and kept it in a place of honor. My dad would occasionally reference the mysterious classified part of his job at NASA in Texas, on the team that prepared the Eagle [...]

Sarah Palin's memoirs will be released next week! To prepare, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.

If you publish a memoir before the age of fifty (as Richard Nixon did in 1962, as Sarah Palin will in 2009), you must live the rest of your life in rivalry with it.

Because you turn fifty, and then sixty, and then seventy, and then eighty (as Richard Nixon did in 1993, as Sarah Palin may in 2044), and like any reflective citizen, like any complicated soul, you modulate your opinions, you undertake works and pleasures, you prove your mettle, you reveal your great self. You [...]

Two hearts, separated by time and history, yet united by later time and later history: This is the story of America's most beloved public figures, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, and the deep relationship they shared.

It was a different time, in the 1990s, and our society was not ready for these two men to publicly show such affection for one another. Like so many before them, Clinton and Nixon confined their relationship to letters and the occasional televised media event at the White House. Correspondence between the two star-crossed presidents is part of a new exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.

"If there's one thing you can say about Romney in his career as a politician is that there is nobody who he doesn't consider expendable, whether that is a staffer, a friend, an ally, or any particular group of constituents who presume to think that, just because they elected him, he owes them something. He is Nixon without the awesome, class-bred insecurities. Nixon knew when he was being vicious. He gloried in it. The White House tapes drip with his self-indulgent tough-guy crap through which you can see the quivering little grocer's son. That insecurity may be the only thing that saved the Republic. Willard Romney never has known that [...]

It was 40 years ago when humans last made the effort to visit another heavenly sphere, on the Apollo 17 mission that launched on this day in 1972. But astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt didn't just walk on the lunar surface—they also drove around in a dune buggy, and also skipped around while singing songs. Nixon was so angry about this expression of joy that humans were banned from every visiting the moon again.

"When I compare the monstrosity of Lincoln Center with the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, I realize how decadent the modern art and architecture have become." -Recently released documents from the Richard Nixon collection show the 37th president to have been something of an aesthete, and not actually wrong about everything.