Commodore Perry Chapter DAR, Memphis, TN

Commodore Perry Chapter DAR, Memphis, TN The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR or DAR) is a non-profit, non-politi

06/01/2026

🇺🇸 As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, most people will look for ways to reconnect with the founding story through monuments, documentaries, or familiar names.

One of the most compelling perspectives comes through 🌸Abigail Adams.

“A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams” by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie is written in her voice, drawing directly from her surviving letters. It places the reader inside the emotional and political reality of the American Revolution and the early republic - not as distant history, but as lived experience.

What emerges is not a simplified portrait, but a complex one: a woman navigating war, motherhood, grief, political philosophy, and the contradictions between the ideals of liberty and the realities of a new nation.

Abigail Adams is often described as a quiet force behind John Adams during his rise from lawyer to diplomat and President. She is also a foundational influence on John Quincy Adams, whose public life stretched across diplomacy, the presidency, and decades of abolitionist advocacy in Congress.

Her correspondence with figures like Thomas Jefferson reveals a mind fully engaged in the debates that shaped the country’s early direction - often holding firm positions on education, liberty, and the role of women in society long before those ideas were widely accepted.

What stands out most in this portrayal is not just political insight, but continuity of conviction: a belief in moral consistency even when the culture around her had not yet caught up.

She died in 1818, long before the political rights she argued for were recognized. Yet her voice, through letters and through this narrative reconstruction, continues to sit at the center of how we understand the founding era when viewed through a more complete lens.

For those looking to mark the 250th anniversary with something more personal than abstract history, this novel offers a way to see the Revolution not only through leaders and battles, but through the intelligence, restraint, and moral clarity of someone who helped shape it from within.

❤ FREE Virtual Author Event on Monday, June 8 at 5:30pm EST: https://ridgewoodlibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/stephanie-dray-author-visit-virtual/

05/30/2026

Make your voice heard today >>

05/27/2026

Revolutionary America is a documentary experience that tells the true story of the American Founding. Our ancestors risked their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” fighting for liberty in the American Revolution. Against all odds, they won.

05/26/2026

John Adams was an able man with many talents. Unlike his colleagues Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, however, Adams was not well-suited to be a diplomat. He did negotiate an important loan from the Dutch, but his two stints as a commissioner to France were failures that not only left him personally humiliated but jeopardized the alliance.

Notwithstanding his failures in France, Congress appointed Adams to be the new republic’s first Minister Plenipotentiary to Great Britain. Adams was thrilled to receive the appointment and was anxious to prove his merit as a diplomat. He arrived in London on May 26, 1785, two hundred forty-one years ago today.

Adams would spend the next three years in England, where he was mercilessly mocked and ridiculed by the London press. When his term ended, he had little to show for it.

What history remembers most about Adams’ time in London was an event that occurred in his first week there. On June 1, 1785, he became the first representative of the independent United States to have an audience with the King.

Adams was led into the formal reception room, where the King stood, surrounded by court officials who looked on in stony silence. Adams awkwardly bowed three times, as protocol required, approached the King and spoke the words he had carefully practiced and memorized:

“The United States of America have appointed me their minister plenipotentiary to Your Majesty. It is in obedience to their express commands that I have the honor to assure your majesty of their unanimous disposition and desire to cultivate the most friendly and liberal in*******se between Your Majesty’s subjects and their citizens….I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow citizens, in having this distinguished honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty’s royal presence in a diplomatic character; and I shall esteem myself the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty’s royal benevolence, and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor between people, who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood. I beg your Majesty’s permission to add that although I have some time before been instructed by my country, it was never in my whole life in a manner so agreeable to myself.”

George III’s response must have come as a great relief to Adams:

“The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be the minister. I wish you, sir, to believe, and that it be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power…. Let the circumstances of language, religion and blood have their natural and full effect.”

Seemingly to lighten the mood, the King added, “There is an opinion among some people that you are not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France.”

“I must avow to your Majesty, I have no attachment but to my own country,” Adams answered.

“An honest man will never have any other,” the King replied, with a slight nod that signaled the end of the meeting.

In obedience to protocol, Adams walked backwards out of the room (so as not to turn his back on the King), bowing three more times as he exited.

There would continue to be strained relations (and another war) between the two countries, but in time the sentiments expressed by John Adams and George III that day would prevail, so that by the 20th century the U.S. and Great Britain were close friends and allies.

The portrait of John Adams is by Mather Brown from 1785. The portrait of George III is by Johann Heinrich von Hurter from 1781.

05/26/2026

From the depths of the Great Depression rose one of the greatest engineering achievements in American history. 🇺🇸

Built in less than five years, Hoover Dam stands as a lasting symbol of American innovation, grit, and determination. Thousands of workers and families came to Black Canyon to help turn a bold vision into reality.

During Memorial Day weekend, the Bureau of Reclamation joined leaders from Nevada, Arizona, and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority at Hoover Dam to honor the men and women who gave their lives in service to our country and help launch the road to America250 with one of the most ambitious patriotic installations ever displayed at one of America’s most iconic landmarks.

The special light display will illuminate Hoover Dam nightly through Saturday, July 4th.

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