Last month, I wrote about the rise of John D. Rockefeller. In this concluding essay about his life we’ll see how he tried to move “from success to significance,” as the title of one popular business book puts it. That’s partly a misnomer, because Rockefeller’s success was significant in improving the lives of millions who used his oil in their lamps and eventually in their cars. But with great profits came great responsibility to use money discerningly—and tycoons seem to fail at that more than succeed.

Materialist historians see economic conditions as the main instigators of innovation, but the Bible emphasizes the significance of individuals. Judges, for example, is mostly a series of capsule biographies, not a chart of how many plows the Israelites had.

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.