1: “Monday, July 1st, 1776, began hot and steamy in Philadelphia, and before the morning was ended a full-scale summer storm would break,” David McCullough writes in his Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography John Adams.

John Adams, then one of Massachusetts’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress, was up before sunrise. 

Early that morning, he wrote a long letter to Archibald Bulloch, the new president of Georgia: “This morning is … continue reading