Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 117.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and we are recording this episode on May 24th,

2023, in Austin, Texas.

This episode is a sidebar, which is our term for an episode that is off the timeline of the history of the Americans.

Really our way of signaling that the episode need not be listened to in sequence.

Before we jump in, a quick announcement, we will do the aforementioned meetup for Austin and other Central Texas area listeners at 5.30 p.m. on Thursday, June 1st, 2023, at Better Half Coffee and Cocktails, 406 Wall Street, Austin, Texas. For those of you don't know it,

Better Half is attached to a brewery, so in addition to a full bar, there's a pretty good beer

selection. It's essentially on Fifth Street, about a mile east of Mopac. You can't make reservations

there, but as I did in Washington,

I'll plan to get there early and turf out a couple of picnic tables. Please let me know by email or

direct message if you think you can make it. I hope you can. And don't worry if you can't get there

at 5.30, I'm sure we'll be there until 730 or 8 at least as we were in Washington.

Okay, I normally don't give trigger warnings at the beginning of an episode, but in this one,

I'm going to say some nice things about Harvard. I'll try not to overdo it, but forewarned is

forarmed. Memorial Day is, or at least used to be, an occasion for

giving speeches. Many of them have been very moving. Some of them were moving when given, but

ring out of time for those of us who read them in our own day. Some of them are interesting because they offer us a glimpse of how an earlier generation

confronted its own defining challenge.

A speech of this last sword is the subject of this episode.

On May 30th, Memorial Day, 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts,

delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge.

The speech, known as the Soldier's Faith, is in and of itself fascinating

...