The excavation of 400-year-old graves from America’s first permanent English settlement has opened a rare window into the country’s early years. Archaeologists on Tuesday announced their discovery of four skeletons they say belonged to early leaders in Jamestown, Va. One was the colony’s first pastor, and the others a British knight and two military captains.

It’s two weeks since the Supreme Court rocked American evangelicals by nationalizing same-sex marriage. It’s also 150 years since the greatest inaugural address ever given. Abraham Lincoln at his second inaugural culminated his attempt to find meaning in the Civil War by finally trusting God—and we can learn from his conclusions.

Here’s a key section:

Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, wrote George Santayana. And I say, history would be easier to learn from if we could keep our meddling hands off it.

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.