Parties Where Talk Turns To Battles and Books

In this important election year, how one plans to spend the national holiday of Presidents Day is worth consideration.At two civic-spirited parties on Wednesday night, guests with some authority offered ideas.The mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, said he would use Monday to continue his reading of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. “For me, Presidents Day is an opportunity to rest, pull back, and reflect on the great leaders of our past. I am obsessed with history,” Mr. Booker said.He was at the Twenty Four Fifth ballroom, where he’d just finished a speech related to the present election season. “Change will never roll in on the wheels of inevitability. It has to happen by our own will,” Mr. Booker said to about 200 young professionals. The event was a fundraiser for the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit founded by New York-based Samuel Heyman to encourage young people to work for the federal government (which could be described as a way to celebrate Presidents Day every working day).Uptown at the New-York Historical Society, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough suggested appropriate ways to spend the holiday, namely visiting historical sites related to the Revolutionary War.“One could go to Fort Greene Park and see the monuments there and pay honor to the 8,000 men who died on the British prison ships; or to Green-Wood Cemetery, where the Battle of Brooklyn was fought,” Mr. McCullough said. He also noted Fraunces Tavern and the Morris-Jumel Mansion, where George Washington lived during the war.“Or walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses the river at exactly the point where they made their night escape. Or throw the kids in the car and drive down to Mount Vernon. It’s the closest thing Washington did to an autobiography. It’s his great creation. He was an avid architect, landscape designer, and an interior decorator. He saw to every last detail.”And what will Mr. McCullough be doing on Presidents Day? “I will be reading books by James Fenimore Cooper, which are a tribute to the American spirit.” Mr. McCullough was speaking while seated in between a fellow Mainer, Linda Bean, the granddaughter of L.L. Bean, whose Port Clyde Lobster company has just started selling lobster stew on QVC, and the co-founder and president of the Constitutional Sources Project, Lorianne Updike, described quite rightly by Mr. McCullough as “the star of the evening.”The Constitutional Sources Project organized the celebration to launch the addition of Washington’s papers — more than 20,000 documents — to its Web site, ConSource.org. The site compiles images of original documents related to the Constitution, such as the Federalist Papers, and has just launched a proofreading tool allowing the public to help proofread transcripts of the original documents.The celebration started in the afternoon, with Mr. McCullough teaching an online class on Washington to more than 200,000 students, and culminated with the dinner at which Mr. McCullough spoke to ConSource donors and corporate supporters from Verizon and the History Channel.Ms. Updike’s suggestion for marking the holiday was to adopt one of the documents on the ConSource Web site. The fee is $250 for a year, or $1000 for a permanent adoption.Or, one could repeat the menu of the ConSource dinner, which was designed as a meal that George Washington himself might have enjoyed. It included braised beef with potato and onion casserole served with corn bread and a dessert called Washington’s Favorite Pumpkin Pie.agordon@nysun.com

Parties Where Talk Turns To Battles and Books

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