Glitch Baum's List: American History

Johan and Abigail Adams and their children.

Robert Siegel talks with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.

A lot of holidays have traditional foods that are symbolically, if not literally, related to the point of the celebration: eggs and spring vegetables for Easter evoke the idea of rebirth; Thanksgiving tables groaning with fall foods recall the harvest feast that spared the newly arrived Pilgrims from starvation. But Independence Day, the commemoration of the birth of the United States, has no equivalent dish. Maybe that’s because the foods that sustained the American patriots—mostly preserved meats and flavorless flour cakes—wouldn’t exactly make for great backyard BBQ fare.