The historian Richard J. Ellis, author of the 2005 book To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance, acknowledges that the oath is “paradoxical and puzzling,” but he also ...

It was the spring of 1954, and Congress had voted, after some controversy, to insert the phrase into the Pledge of Allegiance, partly as a cold war rejoinder to "godless" communism. We kept ...

But while I really enjoyed Christmas carols, I was an earnest little kid, and very attached to my identity as Jewish, so when it came to lyrics in ... and reciting the pledge at council meetings ...