Ryan Cole is a writer who contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2008 and 2015. His pieces for the magazine covered a range of cultural and historical topics, with a particular interest in American history and the legacy of figures like George Washington.
In the early 1920s, a small pack of American Legionnaires convened a regular card game above the Princess Theatre in downtown Bloomington, Indiana. During one session, a member of the group mused, out of the blue, “It would be kind of nice to be president of the United States, wouldn’t it?”
In the fall of 2012, a few days after Hurricane Sandy touched ground, Chris Christie received a phone call from Air Force One concerning New Jersey’s relief efforts. On the other end were two very important Americans: One was, of course, the president, Barack Obama; the other was the Boss, Bruce…
The adulatory use of the word “cool” is often credited to Lester Young, the tenor sax man, but the provenance is somewhat murky. Less uncertain, however, is that the term, no matter its definition, is a description many seek: from celebrities posturing on screen and in print to the rest of us…
When John Hay’s name is mentioned today, it is often as a footnote attached to the names of the two giants he worked for, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. But he was much more than an associate of great men. Hay was a creature now mostly extinct on our national stage: a genuine man of…
Louis Serurier, a French diplomat stationed in Washington in the early 19th century, observed that the War of 1812 lent America “what it so essentially lacked, a national character founded on a common glory to all.” The American war effort was hardly flawless, and the final outcome may have been…
In 2010, the New York Daily News printed a slightly scandalous scoop: George Washington had racked up over $300,000 in late fees on a copy of the Swiss philosopher Emer da Vattel’s The Law of Nations, borrowed from, but never returned to, the New York Society Library in 1789. When James Rees, Mount…
William McKinley (1843-1901) once wrote that “the march of events rules and overrules human action.” In the case of his presidency, and its untimely end, those words were prophetic.
Philadelphia
When Mitch Daniels took office as Indiana's governor in 2005, he inherited a transportation system in crisis. The state was a whopping $2.8 billion short of resources for its roads.