Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful and worthy of our love.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

April 23rd is the date on which William Shakespeare's birthday is traditionally celebrated.

We release this episode in honor of the occasion.

Since Americans assumed their separate and equal station among the powers of the earth,

no other poet has so deeply penetrated and thoroughly inhabited the souls of the American people

as William Shakespeare.

I call this one The great author of America.

I sit with Shakespeare and he wincees not.

Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas.

Where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.

From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars,

I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will.

And they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.

So wed with truth, I dwell above the veil.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the souls of black folk.

In March 1879, an Amherst College senior attended a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson in College

Hall at Amherst College.

The senior, Henry Clay Folger, was inspired by the lecture to read more Emerson, including

a short speech Emerson had delivered in 1864 on the

Tertentenary of Shakespeare's birth.

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