History

Though he never sought the spotlight nor learned to play guitar, Leo Fender’s creations, including the Telecaster, Precision Bass, and Stratocaster, opened the door for countless young players—and for a revolution in music.

“I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston. “We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.”

Rejewski, Rózycki, Zygalski, Turing, Knox, and other Bletchley Park code breakers used their brains to defeat the brawn of one of the biggest ideological threats to human life in the 20th century.

“This is a picture,” reads one description of Emmanuel Leutze‘s masterpiece, “by the sight of which, in this weary and exhausted time, one can recover health and strength. . . . [It] has power to work upon the hearts, and inflame the spirits of all that behold it.”

The intelligence, passion for ideas, and interest in moral foundations demonstrated by FEEcon speakers and attendees give lovers of liberty reason for optimism.

John H. Patterson showed the world what so many “greedy industrialists” are made of: an enduring will to remake the world as it could and should be—and on their own terms.

Tim Blake Nelson’s excellent play retells the story of one of the West’s first great philosophers—Socrates.

Joan of Arc refused to live as a helpless bystander in the face of adversity. Instead, she fought for a primitive but admirable conception of freedom.

John Marshall patiently upheld the principle of dual sovereignty and set vital legal precedents for America in her infancy.

Despite the graft of a few pseudo-businessmen, the First Transcontinental Railroad was a profoundly life-enhancing demonstration of human ingenuity.