America is 243 years old today.
And while, naturally, the founding fathers get most of the press on the Fourth of July, let’s not forget that over those two and ahalf centuries, the United States has produced some great letter-writers.
In the 1990s, a young author and historian named Andrew Carroll undertook a very ammbitious task: he set out to find, and publish, hundreds of extraordinary letters that actually span over 350 years of American history.
I talked with him in 1999: