Birthdays in our family when I was a kid growing up were no big deal. Mother might bake us a cake. Nannie and Paw Summers, my maternal grandparents, always sent us a card with a dollar bill slipped into it. (On their limited Social Security checks, that was a great sacrifice because they did the same for each of their grandkids, and that added up.) But that was all we came to expect. There were no gifts, no parties. Well, we were promised two parties--one when we were six years old and...

Sometimes short, pithy quotations make one pause and think. That often leads to self-examination. And self-examination sometimes leads to...

It was 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918. At that precise day and hour, the guns that had raged and thundered across the fronts in the...