This is a brief piece from Imprimis, a 10-times yearly publication of Hillsdale College. It’s available for free on line (there’s a link at the website in the upper right and they don’t spam you) to anyone with an email address. I’ve been a subscriber for nearly 40 years (I still get mine by mail, LOL).
This article tells the stories of three great friendships, Helen Keller and Mark Twain, John Ford and John Wayne, and U. S. Grant and Ely Parker, an American Indian during the American Civil War. You might be surprised at the similarities, as well as the differences, in the relationships.
Excerpt: Every generation of Americans, from the beginning, has had to answer for itself the question: how should we live? Our answers, generation after generation, in war and in peace, in good times and bad times, in small things and in great things through the whole range of human affairs, are the essential threads of the larger American story. There is an infinite variety of these smaller American stories that shed light on the moral and political reality of American life—and we keep creating them. These fundamental experiences, known to all human beings but known to us in an American way, create the mystic chords of memory that bind us together as a people and are the necessary beginnings of any human wisdom we might hope to find.