George Washington's Single Mom Has Gotten a Bad Rap

It may be Presidents Day, but a historian is singing the praises not of a president but of a president's mother. In an essay at the Conversation, Martha Saxton of Amherst College makes the case that Mary Ball Washington—mother of George—has been unfairly treated by mostly male historians over the years. "In the late 19th century, George's biographers began interpreting the few shreds of evidence about Mary—almost all of it from George—to mean that she was overprotective, possessive, and greedy," she writes. Saxton's research, distilled from her recent book on Mary, paints a much different picture. The author runs through Mary's life—orphaned by age 12 thanks to disease in the Chesapeake region, and later widowed in her 30s with five children.

• "(M)other and son were much alike in physical strength, in superb horsemanship, in irascibility, in penny-pinching, in the capacity for extraordinary persistence, and in their strenuous, lifelong efforts to maintain a measure of equilibrium. I believe that without Mary's brave, enduring, and self-denying mothering, we would not have had the brave, enduring, and self-denying man who led both the revolution and the optimistic experiment in governing that resulted."

Read the full essay, which notes that the pair shared one awful commonality: Both were slave owners.