Rebecca Burgess

Read history: so learn your place in Time; / And go to sleep: all this was done before.

Read history: so learn your place in Time; / And go to sleep: all this was done before.

A non-veteran, senior-level Obama appointee to Veterans Affairs (VA) is President Trump's appointee to be the next VA secretary. If confirmed by Congress, current VA Under Secretary of Health David Shulkin will be the first non-veteran to lead the department since President Reagan elevated VA to…

Perhaps he had some intimation that he would soon be dead. He’d seen the Persians sack Athens and had fought against Darius at Marathon and Xerxes at Salamis, but when Aeschylus submitted what would be his last plays to Athens's prestigious public festival, his theme was neither war nor empire but…

Democratic lawmakers might be the last group of people you'd expect to denounce the Declaration of Independence for asserting each single human being's equal claim to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, such is the story coming out of Louisiana this week. Democratic…

When row upon row of neighborhood homes continued to display the nation's flag in the weeks after 9/11, it seemed confirmation enough that the proud public spiritedness of the World War II years had reemerged from the attics of a younger generation's hearts. Also a WWII veteran, the late…

Dissenting from his eight fellow Justices in 1964, John Marshall Harlan II accused the Warren Court of stretching the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause on the judicial activism rack. Essentially, Harlan argued, the "One Person, One Vote" doctrine—as the Reynold v. Sims ruling quickly became…

President Eisenhower’s Commission on Veterans’ Pensions–the Bradley Commission—voiced concern in 1956 that if exclusive emphasis was placed on granting generous post-service benefits to prospective soldiers, then military service would become a mere negotiated economic relationship between the…

When thought-smiths have forged on the comfortable anvil of peace the belief that all war and conflict is wicked, foolish, and on the brink of extinction, then pain becomes the meaning of evil and rejecting evil becomes the revolt against pain in all its forms. Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell…

While many critics skewer President Obama’s recent amnesty-granting executive action, D.C.’s municipal lawmakers have their own plans for the next battle on the immigration-citizenship front. Invoking considerations of fairness and justice against “anti-immigrant hysteria,” D.C. council member…