If the news that the U.S. Treasury plans to put a woman’s image on the new $10 bill takes you by surprise, you’re behind the curve. Last spring, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., proposed legislation that would direct the secretary of the treasury to create a panel of citizens to recommend a female subject for U.S. currency—but it was for the $20 bill, not the 10. 

MOUNT VERNON, Mo.—Ralph Manley, 91, lives in a home with about 200 other veterans, about half of whom fought in World War II. Seventy-one years ago today, Manley jumped out of a plane and parachuted into Normandy, France, as part of the Allies’ D-Day invasion that turned the tide of the war.

“War is hell, ma’am,” Manley told me. “It’s awful.” But he would do it all over again, he said, to protect the cause of freedom.

Seventy years ago today, bells of celebration rang across Europe on V-E Day, marking the final allied victory over Nazi Germany. But before the bells of victory rang out, the U.S. military relied on another kind of music to encourage the troops. Music from back home was recorded and sent overseas on Victory Discs, or V-Discs.

The government produced V-Discs specifically for the entertainment of troops overseas. The recordings were not commercially available in the U.S.

MARDIN, Turkey—The hill country of Tur Abdin rises above the Tigris River valley in southeastern Turkey, watering lands also soaked in blood. Tur Abdin means “mountain of the servants of God” in Syriac, the dialect of Aramaic that’s been spoken here since before the time of Jesus. From the hillsides of Mardin, a city of 90,000 still dotted with some of the oldest churches in the world, churches where Scripture still is read in Syriac, the flat grassy plains stretch east across Syria and to the deserts of Nineveh in Iraq.

When Japanese torpedoes sank the battleship USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, 429 sailors and Marines lost their lives. In the years immediately following the war, only 35 crew members were positively identified and buried. The other service members’ remains were eventually interred as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.

War in the Middle East has threatened not only millions of people but important artifacts as well. In 2009, Swiss authorities halted the sale of a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet—a lump of clay the size of a business card—minutes before the end of its eBay auction. They feared the seller had illegally obtained it from Iraq. This year, an exhibition at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” includes a cuneiform tablet from about 15 years after the 586 B.C. conquest of Jerusalem.

In honor of Presidents Day on Monday, we bring you the chapter on George Washington from Marvin Olasky’s The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton, originally published in 1999 and now out of print. —Mickey McLean

Despite the “I cannot tell a lie” legends, few of young Washington’s neighbors saw him as a candidate for storybook sainthood. His life was a struggle to become a man of one piece, with private and public lives in harmony.