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On Election Day, it is easy to believe one ballot cannot matter. In 1874, 1994 and 2006, ordinary voters overturned majorities that looked permanent. The power was always ours. The question is whether we use it only to swing back and forth, or to carry the country somewhere together.

Sourced from the National Archives, the U.S. House of Representatives (history.house.gov) and U.S. Senate historical records, the U.S. Census Bureau and Ballotpedia for the 1874, 1994, and 2006 election results, and the National Archives, the U.S. Senate, and the Brennan Center for Justice for the Nineteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Cover images: left, "Opening ballot boxes," Bain News Service, circa 1915–1920, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-25364. Right, a registry clerk at the polls during local elections in Lowell, Massachusetts, November 3, 1987, Lowell Folklife Project collection (AFC 1987/042), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

Narration is AI-generated using a voice model trained on the author's own voice.

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Noah Webster spent twenty-six years giving a scattered people a common language, and he won. What we are losing now is not the words but the common ground beneath them.

Sourced from the Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society, Encyclopædia Britannica, the U.S. Census Bureau's historical statistics of the 1790 census, the New Netherland Institute, and Noah Webster's own Dissertations on the English Language and the 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language.

Cover image: frontispiece portrait and title page, Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, New York: S. Converse, 1828. First edition, University of California Libraries copy, via Internet Archive. Public domain.

Narration is AI-generated using a voice model trained on the author's own voice.

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October 3, 1803. We remember Samuel Adams as a firebrand, mostly because his enemies drew the portrait and we hung it in the hall. What he actually built was a committee whose only job was to write letters.

Sourced from the Massachusetts Historical Society (John Adams's diary, December 1765), Founders Online at the National Archives (John Adams to William Tudor, February 9, 1819), the Boston Committee of Correspondence's 1772 pamphlet, and histories of the committees of correspondence from Encyclopædia Britannica, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and George Washington's Mount Vernon.

Cover image: "View of Faneuil-Hall, in Boston, Massachusetts," drawn by W. Pierpont, engraved by Samuel Hill, March 1789. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-45571.

Narration is AI-generated using a voice model trained on the author's own voice.