pettigrew

Dakota Pettigrew: Words worth remembering — The enduring experiment

March 12, 2025

On Thursday morning, Nov. 7, 2024, New Yorkers — and general readers everywhere — who grabbed a copy of The New York Times were greeted with a historic front page.

Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — The greatness of Jimmy Carter

January 29, 2025

The crowd roared, stymieing the opening words of an awkward statesman from Georgia who stood before the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Thursday, July 15, 1976, to accept the party’s nomination for president of the United States.

Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — the purpose of government

January 21, 2025

On Tuesday, March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson delivered his first inaugural address. The day “dawned cloudy,” Irwin Hoover recalled, “but the weather cleared and by mid-morning it was warm and comfortable.”

Dakoda Pettigrew: Ask Not

November 5, 2024

A bitter snowstorm dropped six inches of snow on America’s capital city the day before Inauguration Day. “Many of the pre-inaugural social affairs had to be canceled,” The New York Times wrote on Friday, January 20, 1961, adding that the snowfall had “snarled traffic, disrupted air and highway travel and chilled thousands of visiting Democrats.”

Dakoda Pettigrew: Democracy’s heart, the heart of Lincoln

October 30, 2024

“It is for us the living,” Abraham Lincoln said on Thursday, November 19, 1863, of the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — a perennial choice

August 6, 2024

“America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young President, but for itself,” the journalist James Reston wrote in a special to The New York Times, which, on Saturday, November 23, 1963, bore the haunting headline “Kennedy is Killed by Sniper.”

Dakoda Pettigrew: American Insights — Lincoln at Independence Hall

May 22, 2024

The president-elect reached Philadelphia at 4 p.m. on Thursday, February 21, 1861. In response to warm greetings, Lincoln told a crowd that he hoped “to restore peace and harmony and prosperity to the country.” He added, however, “I shall do nothing inconsistent with the teachings of those holy and most sacred walls” of Independence Hall. “I have never asked anything that does not breathe from those walls,” Lincoln said. Paraphrasing Psalm 137, he added, “May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I ever prove false to those teachings” of the Constitution and the Declaration.