March 6, 2017, had an ominous feel about it. The day was unusually warm for March and by 11 o’clock, the wind was howling out of the southwest, gusting to 50 mph. Everyone living on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle was aware that, for three days, the National Weather Service had issued red flag warnings for this day: extreme danger of wildfires.

“Diversity” on campuses and in companies these days emphasizes race and ethnicity but tends to leave out religion and worldview. “Diversity” in philanthropy, though, brings in all of the above, and that’s been a great strength in American giving. Even though the federal government has become the gorilla in everyone’s living room, we still allow room for ordinary individuals to be generous and creative in their small-scale but big-hearted love of mankind.

This week’s edition of our Saturday Series begins the Book Idea Giveaway (BIG) that we’ll have periodically. I have a list of books I’d like to write but will never get to, so I’ll throw suggestions into the public domain from time to time, in the hope someone will run with them.

I’ve written books on poverty-fighting history based on library research, but Peter Cove has lived that history: His introduction to Poor No More: Rethinking Dependency and the War on Poverty—WORLD’s 2017 Book of the Year in the Understanding America category—begins, “Nearly half a century ago, I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted as a foot soldier in America’s War on Poverty.” Cove once embraced conventional government-centric solutions, but he realized their inadequacy and founded

Rupert Sheldrake is a British scientist who holds a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge University and the author of an intriguing book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (Crown Publishers 1999).

Booker T. Washington died in 1915, and for several decades afterward he was the most-quoted African-American leader. His autobiography, Up From Slavery, is still worth reading. I’ve referred to it 10 times in WORLD Magazine over the years, and we’ve listed it as one of the top 40 books of the 20th century.

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