About 20 Pearl Harbor survivors are expected to attend ceremonies Friday in Hawaii to remember the thousands of men killed in the Japanese attack 77 years ago. But for the first time, no one who survived the bombing of the USS Arizona will be present. The Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines in the attack, the greatest number of any ship. All five of the remaining Arizona survivors are in their 90s, and none could make the trip to Hawaii this year, mostly for health reasons.

I recently spent 12 vacation days on a World War II tour in Europe, retracing the steps of Winston Churchill in London, the Allied troops in Normandy and Bastogne, and Adolf Hitler in Munich. 

Company came for dinner last night, and the train went by as we talked long into the evening, the same train my brother said had gone in one ear and out the other, pantomiming as he stumbled sleepless from the guest room that time he came to visit. It’s too close to the house. The neighborhood is used to it, of course, to the point of not hearing, just as you don’t see notes stuck too long to the refrigerator.

Alabama is no stranger to a triple-digit heat index. It’s what makes the cotton grow and what brings tourists to its beaches. Even so, on Coosa Street in downtown Montgomery this August, visitors waiting to enter the new Legacy Museum appeared ill-prepared for the stifling temperatures. They fanned themselves with brochures collected from the visitor’s bureau and rolled up their shirt sleeves. A few blocks away, the heat also worked on ticket holders at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. In that outdoor structure, history—the full weight of it—hung as heavy as the humidity.

In September 1918 the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. Some boys pasted a diamond-shaped sticker onto their baseball bats: “Speed! Aim! Ambition! Make a good ball player. Liquor injures all three. Ask the Red Sox.” It was a time of wild baseball optimism in Massachusetts—yet the next World Series win wouldn’t come until 2004.

Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, begins the evening of Sept. 9. This is the 70th year of Israel’s existence, which owes much to the support various camps of U.S. Christians have given it—for various reasons.

Some Christians are supersessionists who say Christians have replaced Israelites as God’s people. Most still cheer for Israel because it is a David amid Goliaths. Others, dispensationalists, say the spiritual sons of Abraham have not replaced the physical sons, so the land of Israel is still the Jewish inheritance.

Thirty years have gone by since Ronald Reagan in 1988 spoke to students at Moscow State University. At a time when the Soviet Communist Party still claimed to be the vanguard of wisdom, Reagan said, “Freedom is the recognition that no single governmental authority has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious.”