I’ve asked the same question in this space half a dozen different ways—but here it is again: If, by merely snapping your fingers or waving a magic wand, you could take the society and culture you live in today back to some earlier point, what date would you choose? If you could rewind the video recorder we call “America’s History” and be awarded a second chance, what would you pick as your new starting point?

Or, to put it more succinctly—and more bluntly—where did we go so wrong?

Three Februarys ago we published the chapter on George Washington from Marvin Olasky’s The American Leadership Tradition, originally released in 1999 and now out of print. Here, in honor of the upcoming Presidents Day, is a shortened, updated version of Marvin’s chapter on Abraham Lincoln. —Mickey McLean

Last year’s nightclub shooting in Orlando killed 50. The Oct. 1 concert attack in Las Vegas left 59 dead. Terrorist murders are a special horror, but the good old days also had their share of terror resulting from man’s cupidity and stupidity—and Tuesday is the 75th anniversary of a Boston horror with a death toll of 492.

Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? In Russian history, not just bony fingers, as in the old American country song, but a bullet in the back of your head.

Nov. 11, the date on the cover of this issue, is a day to remember veterans. Almost 900 died in the 1945 wreck of the USS Indianapolis, the worst naval sea disaster in American history, but 317 survived. Here are stories based on new interviews with some of them.

Peering into the churning, oil-slicked sea far below him, Marine Cpl. Edgar Harrell clung to the port rail of the sinking ship and faced his own death. It was 12 minutes after midnight on July 30, 1945, and the Navy cruiser, USS Indianapolis, was dead center in the Philippine Sea.

“The revolution devours its children” (Jacques Mallet du Pan, 1749-1800).

“But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15).

Amelia Earhart may have survived her plane crash into the Pacific Ocean and instead died as a Japanese prisoner, according to new evidence revealed in advance of a History Channel documentary. The film, set to air Sunday, argues Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands, where the Japanese military picked them up and held them as spies.