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Washington biographer Dennis Pogue, vice president of preservation at Washington’s home of Mount Vernon, reveals that the father of the nation lost his first campaign in 1755 to the House of Burgesses largely because he didn’t put on an alcohol-laden circus at the polls. That year, Washington got 40 votes. The winner, who plied voters with beer, whiskey, rum punch, and wine, got 271 votes.

A quick learner, Washington won three years later with the help of alcohol. “What do you know, he was successful and got 331 votes,” says Pogue, author of the new book Founding Spirits: George Washington and the Beginnings of the American Whiskey Industry. He spoke about his research Monday night at an event sponsored by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and the National Press Club.

The historic cache of more than 30 post-war diaries of Hitler’s death camp doctor Josef Mengele could fetch up to $1 million at auction Thursday in part because new and shocking translations of the “Angel of Death” reveal his continued hatred of Jews as well as disdain for former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, his own homeland after World War II, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and even the children in his new South American home.

2003 story on Katrina Leung, Chinese-American double agent whose story of espionage, intrigue and seduction got a hat tip from Cracked.com’s The 7 Craziest Things Ever Done to Get Laid.

Analysts say that the decline in superpower support for these smaller states has placed unpopular governments in greater peril. “These revolts and uprisings over the past two decades have been allowed to happen because the stakes for the superpowers are much, much lower than they were during the Cold War,” says Peter Zeihan, the vice president for analysis at the private intelligence group STRATFOR. “During the Cold War, it was always important for the superpowers to unconditionally back their allies, even if that meant looking the other way. You would never have had a situation like we now have in Egypt during the Cold War, because the U.S. would simply turn a blind eye to a crackdown in the streets of Cairo and urge that the situation be resolved quickly.”

“The Vikings are poster children for environmental destruction,” said John Steinberg, a research scientist at the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They were burning and chopping as fast as they could, and during a time of variable climate. What they did really came back to haunt them. That’s why it’s important that we understand how the environment responded. It can help predict what might happen to us.’’

Few speeches pass the test of time. Today’s landmark address lingers as moldering rhetoric, the esoteric purview of specialized scholars, or fades from memory entirely. The speech that resonates decades later is rare—more so when two such addresses occurred within days of each other.

Yet this month we mark the 50th anniversary of two such addresses. The first, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, on Jan. 17, 1961, drew relatively little attention at the time but gathered prophetic force over the years. Three days later, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address hit the nation like an energy bolt, galvanizing a generation.

A half century later, the speeches remain relevant.