The Lemur‘s America 250-themed print issue is due to hit shelves soon. Before then, we thought we’d give devoted Lemur readers—who have stuck with us after the past couple of dry posting months—a sneak peek at what we’ve been working on this semester.
The following are 250-word articles on overlooked, underappreciated, or unique moments in American history. So far, America 250 culture has been disappointing, ranging from predictable political appropriation to anodyne reflections on Bunker Hill and the “arc of the moral universe.” At The Lemur, we went in a different direction: starting not from the premise that our country is good or evil or perfect or imperfect, but from the premise that America is just really, really interesting. These short essays fit into our broader approach to America 250 as an exercise in engaging with all that fascinates us about American history, whether it makes us want to wave flags or burn them. We hope you enjoy.
First, a table of contents.
- American and Ireland: A Deeply Personal Story…………………………………Nathan Hertzberg
- Credit Card Clubbers………………………………………………………………………………Luis Pintak
- My Lai’s Forgotten Heroes……………………………………………………………………..Ameera Mehan
- What’s more American than College Football?…………………………………..Manu Datta
- Is Toby Keith our generation’s Francis Scott Key?………………………………Emily McDermott
- The Mason-Dixon Line……………………………………………………………………………Trevor Darr
- Peanuts………………………………………………………………………………………………………Lauren Vandivier
- America at Fever Pitch: A Brief Eulogy for the Grateful Dead………….. Cara Eaton
- “Wall Street Under Oath”………………………………………………………………………….Zachary Partnoy
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American and Ireland: A Deeply Personal Story, by Nathan Hertzberg
“No country contributed more to building my own than your sons and daughters.”
- John F. Kennedy, 1963 address before the Irish Parliament
In February of 2025, Elon Musk’s DOGE put thousands of federal workers on administrative leave. Despite receiving some separation pay, these career civil servants’ careers in the federal bureaucracy were effectively ended. This move set my family on a new and unlikely journey. The easiest place for my Dad to transfer employment was Ireland, so they moved there, started my brothers in Irish school, and traded my five-hour drives home for winter break with seven-hour flights across the Atlantic.
In the 1840s, Irish emigrants fleeing the Great Famine packed into poorly ventilated steerage holds on cargo ships. Food rations were meager, time on deck rare, and typhus and cholera rampant. The vessels were christened “Coffin Ships.” The Irish who survived filled the Northeast, were vilified by nativists and barred from much legitimate employment. Yet their hands built the Erie Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge, and much of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Americans like my family traveling to Ireland now don’t have to face these odds. We journey not on coffin ships, but commercial airliners; not to tenements, but to furnished apartments. And not only do we not encounter signs declaring “No Americans Need Apply,” but we bring with us money and financial influence. American corporations headquarter in Dublin for “tax purposes.” Americans in Ireland build stock portfolios and web apps, not bridges and railroads.
The Irish built America with the indomitable spirit that kept them alive for centuries under English oppression. When Americans make the reverse trip, do we arrive as builders the way the Irish once did, or as a strange, inverted echo of the past?
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Credit Card Clubbers, by Luis Pintak
In 1949, three men came together in a New York restaurant and forged a shrewd idea for the daily consumer. Okay, actually the idea of a credit card wasn’t that new. Bloomingdale, McNamara, and Snyder combined the idea of gasoline cards and credit cards used by retailers.
These venerable clubbers of chivalry founded a credit card company, Diners Club, and created a network in the U.S. First used in restaurants, later in shops and hotels, this card was in fact a book with all participating enterprises. Then the futuristic plastic boom came, and the simplistic piece became a growing power and the key to… money.
Their fame was soon overshadowed by Visa, Mastercard, and—lest we forget—American Express (we know who plays the cards here). And despite witty scholars’ prognosis that Brother Debit will triumph, our flat friend has persisted through history, economic calamity, club visits, and champagne parties. ATMs and debit cards remain rather a hit in Europe (oi!), and in some German hipster cities I’ve witnessed cash still top the credit flow.
And while some countries still admire analog technology, the credit card is now available in virtual format, gives you a sweet score, and offers flattering protection. Just swipe, type, swap, switch, tap, sing, sigh, or insert. Feel blocked? No worries, you won’t remain single. You know us, and we know you (even more). Don’t forget your CVV, dude.
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My Lai’s Forgotten Heroes, by Ameera Mehan
“It looks to me like there’s an awful lot of unnecessary killing going on down there. There’s bodies everywhere. Something ain’t right about this.”
Those words were spoken by U.S. Army helicopter pilot Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. flying over Quảng Ngãi province, South Vietnam, on March 16, 1968.
What Thompson had observed was the My Lai massacre, the most infamous war crime committed by the U.S. military in Vietnam. Transporting Viet Cong suspects for interrogation, Thompson noticed unarmed civilians—including women and children—below, and marked their locations with green smoke to signal for help. After refueling and returning, he noticed that the people in the places he had marked were dead.
Thompson radioed for help. Conflicted and enraged, he did not let blind duty restrain him from intervening. Thompson used his helicopter to shield civilians and children pursued by American soldiers. Thomspon even instructed his crew to aim their guns at the soldiers should they open fire. He then evacuated the wounded, saving a boy from the carnage and flying him to the ARVN hospital. 30 years later, Thomspon and his crewmates, Andreotta and Colburn, were awarded the Soldier’s Medal, the US Army’s highest award for bravery not involving direct enemy contact. While we should never forget the criminals of My Lai, nor should we neglect to remember Thompson’s heroism in this darkest of moments. His courage should remind us that “warriors” are not the only heroes in our armed forces.
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What’s more American than college football?, by Manu Datta
Eight of the ten largest stadiums in the world are dedicated to the same sport: college football. That alone says something. American college football is an extraordinary institution, over 150 years old and one of the few spaces of unique American history, tradition, and culture. College football remains a powerful force in American culture for good reason. For fans it can provide a link to one’s alma mater or home state. Fans’ relationships with college football teams can be meaningfully personal—they are allegiances you are more likely to share with your friends and family than professional or political bonds.
Even within the world of sports fandom, college football runs deeper. It’s unlike pro teams, which are often owned by investment groups or powerful families, and operate in a cutthroat financial ecosystem in which teams can be moved and renamed. Colleges are bigger than just sports— they’re where you might have met friends or your spouse or connected with employers, and large institutions wherever they are. That loyalty produces tradition: fight songs, first-down chants, touchdown rituals, mascots, and rivalries.
Yes, other countries have their sports. But football is different. It is slow, technical, measured, and obsessed with incremental progress. It is also unapologetically commercial, drenched in advertising and money at every level. That’s deeply American. College football captures something real about the American character: belief in competition, spectacle, money, tradition, and the idea that effort can still matter.
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Is Toby Keith our generation’s Francis Scott Key?, by Emily McDermott
The shockwaves of 9/11 cascaded throughout American life of , including in e genre of country music. From Daryl Worley to Alan Jackson, just about every major artist was releasing American anthems. But one song, “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue” (COTRWAB), by Toby Keithoutshined the rest and became an iconic emblem of the post-9/11 era. Writing about from his own experience growing in a military family, Keith composed a battle cry that can stir up patriotic fervor evenin the most reluctant participant in American nationalism.
Toby Keith’s father, a Korean War Veteran who lost his eye in service, had tried to get his son to perform USO tours throughout his career, something Keith never felt compelled to do until the attacks Keith used COTRWAB not only as a way to inspire the troops and capture the feelings of a nation, but also to honor his dad. His pride for his father and unabashed raw emotion rings true in the song. As the tempo of the song increases, so does Keith’s emphasis on the resolve of the American people.
Despite its polarizing nature, COTRWAB became a beacon of strength at a time of weakness and has since gained canonical status as an American anthem. Now, every time I hear the opening notes of Keith’s acoustic guitar, I’m reminded of the lives lost for our freedom, and of the strength and resilience with which our nation came back after such a tragedy.
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The Mason-Dixon Line, by Trevor Darr
The Mason-Dixon Line always felt to me like something lost within a generation, although I couldn’t say which. For me, a Virginian through-and-through, it was less a lived boundary than a fact to memorize – objective rather than subjective. The division between North and South reduced to a straight line, unremarkable in a country now crowded with them. It seemed incidental that British astronomers had once drawn it in the 1760s, plumb-bobs and all.
Much has been made of the Mason-Dixon Line as a part of the machine that bleached the atrocities of colonialism into the fabric of America under the banner of reason. If that is true, then the notion of America as a nation founded on Reason is itself a fabrication. Yet what deserves equal attention is how unprecedented this act was. For most of human history, borders followed rivers, mountains, or nothing at all. Even the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, an early success of modern cartography, feels antique by comparison. The Mason-Dixon Line was different: a deliberate, scientific imposition of a straight line across 233 miles of land, an achievement conceivable only in a “new world.”
The Line helped establish a culture where measurement trumped thought. The Homestead Act polygonalized indigenous land; standardized testing came to govern education; the abstract market subsumed everything else. It would be naïve to trace this all to one pre-independence surveying expedition. Still, the central dogma persists: if we can measure something precisely, ethics are lost in the margin of error.
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Peanuts, by Lauren Vandivier
Who is Mr. Peanut? One could argue that he is nothing more than a corporate symbol, his elegant cartooned form beckoning to you from tempting tins of nuts. But could there be more to Mr. Peanut than a price tag? I’d argue that he is a quintessentially American character, one who belongs among the ranks of our great folk heroes. There’s Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and our little shelled friend.
Peanuts were introduced to North America by enslaved West Africans in the 1700s and for 100 years remained the runt of crops. In the antebellum South, they were planted primarily to fix nitrogen levels in the soil and were dismissed as a snack for livestock and the poor. It was not until Civil War diets and George Washington Carver that peanuts became the superstar we know today.
Nowadays, the peanut is often found beneath our feet—crushed on the ground at a baseball game, littered around the sticky floor of a Texas Roadhouse, fruiting below the ground. The peanut’s species name is even hypogaea, from the Greek for ‘under the earth.’ But while peanuts may literally be beneath us, they remain an important part of our culture. Through the centuries, the peanut has snuck its way into America’s favorite pastime and the centerpiece of every lunchbox. Peanuts now sit on shelves in every grocery store and inside the cup of the most popular candy in America. It’s the classic American dream, a real American success story.
But what do I know?
I’m allergic.
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Americana at Fever Pitch: A Brief Eulogy for the Grateful Dead, by Cara Eaton
There’s scant more American in spirit than the world the Grateful Dead built, a world of wide-eyed nomads trekking the country, losing themselves in rock, and dabbling in love and other drugs. You may know them as the soundtrack of your uncle slamming Miller High Lifes on the porch, or the red-and-blue skull dotting the bumper of the Volkswagen tailgating you—or, perhaps, the greatest Americana of the last century. The glossy, commercialized veil the Dead has assumed today feels like a faint echo of that freedom. And quelle honte—libertarian misfits are half-convinced Jerry Garcia (RIP) would shill for Trump.
But put yourself back in the seventies, when the Dead played Duke five times. Better yet, imagine their iconic 1978 Cameron Indoor Stadium gig at Dear Ol’ Duke. The only campus event, according to a contemporaneous source, “that generated such a close-knit community at Duke besides the basketball games.” Our little school, united by sweaty, homegrown rock. Taste the percussion—the incessant rhythm. Americana has reached a fever pitch.Maybe our generation can’t quite reach that singular electric jolt of the Dead’s “hippie ballrooms,” except through a neo-Proustian flash of an omnipresent stealie or dancing bear (We Are Everywhere, as Deadheads say). But give an inch. Maybe you, reader, don’t catch their vibe. Yet I command an open mind and a modicum of grudging respect. The Grateful Dead weren’t the best at what they did; to paraphrase a concert promotion, they were the only ones who did what they did. Pure, restless invention.
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“Wall Street Under Oath”, by Zachary Partnoy
Who would have thought that an ex-Tammany, night-school-educated, Sicilian-American assistant DA would end up doing more than anyone else to expose the villains of the 1929 stock market crash? In lengthy, dramatic hearings for the Senate commission dedicated to unearthing the causes of the crash, chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora brilliantly humbled and humiliated the masters of Wall Street—including Charles Mitchell, the head of National City Bank, Thomas Lamont, the dominant partner at shadowy J.P. Morgan, and the Whitney brothers (finance bros to end all finance bros).
Pecora’s skillful questioning radically transformed how Americans perceived these powerful men. Once the heroes of the country’s sustained financial boom (in Pecora’s words, “the demigods of Wall Street, men whose names were household words, but whose personalities and affairs were frequently shrouded in deep, aristocratic mystery”), Mitchell and Co. wilted in the face of Pecora’s fierce attacks, which revealed to the public for the first time the depths of Wall Street’s underhandedness.
In the 21st century, our congressional hearings have become post-modern puppet theater. In January 2024, we got a hearing that forced Mark Zuckerberg to publicly apologize to parents of children harmed by Facebook, but it wasn’t until verdicts that came out after I started writing this article that Meta will be legally obligated to pay for its child safety negligence.
The Pecora Commission showed us that, in a certain cultural and political context, congressional hearings can create real and lasting change.
There’s hope, but even Ferdinand Pecora couldn’t do this alone.
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