I was born in the hospital that served our largest stone and last remaining moat-encircled bastion, Fort Monroe, Hampton Roads, Virginia. A stone’s throw away, 235 years earlier, the head of the most infamous pirate of colonial waters, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard (1680-1718), was skewered on a pike at the mouth of the Hampton River. Blackbeard’s fearsome reputation,…









