and see a fire burning in town. - Stephen E. Ambrose

I had come to take Roosevelt for granted,” Webster wrote his parents, “like spring and Easter lilies, and now that he is gone, I feel a little lost.

The author of the Declaration of Independence threw up his hands at the questions of women’s rights…Jefferson‘s attitude toward women was at one with that of the white men of his age. He wrote about almost everything, but almost never about women, not his wife or his mother and certainly not Sally Hemmings…In America, Jefferson noted with approval, women knew their place, which was in the home and, more specifically, in the nursery. Instead of gadding frivolously about town as Frenchwomen did, chasing fashion or meddling in politics, American women were content with “the tender and tranquil amusement of domestic life” and never troubled their pretty heads about politics.

There are trees growing in Philadelphia (at Fourth and Spruce Streets) and the University of Virginia (at Morea, a guest house) today that grew from the cuttings Lewis sent.14 And as historian Michael Brodhead notes, this was the beginning of “a rich, almost uniquely American phenomenon: the military naturalist.