139 items
Senator Patrick McCarran (D−NV) was seething after Congress renewed the 1948 Displaced Persons Act in 1950. Incensed, McCarran wrote to his daughter: “I met the enemy and he took me on the DP bill. It’s tough to beat a million or more...
The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail
Sometimes excavating American history involves more virtual digging than it does plying the soil with trowels. Sometimes it’s less about reassembling broken pottery than it is about reassembling broken information that’s buried just...
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Frederick Douglass and the Dawn of Reconstruction
Historians today debate precisely when Reconstruction began, yet in many ways that is a very old discussion. At the time, its goals and focus were disputed, and even what to call the federal policy for the collapsing Confederacy was...
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Teaching the Revolution
For most Americans, young and old, the history of the American Revolution can be summed up something like this: In 1776, all the colonists rose up in unison to rebel against a tyrannical king and the horrible burden of unfair taxes...
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Mexican Farm Labor and the Agricultural Economy of the United States
In July of 1958, a Mexican man in Empalme, Mexico, died outside a recruitment center for Mexican men who wanted to participate in a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program. The program, designed and agreed upon by both the...
The Declaration of Independence and the Origins of Modern Self-Determination
Ask any American what the opening lines of the US Declaration of Independence of 1776 are and chances are they might reply, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then go on to recite its inspiring statements on human equality...
Venezuela’s First Declaration of Independence and US Republicanism: Convergences and Divergences
On the eve of the nineteenth century, Venezuela was a rich dominion of the Spanish Empire in South America. Coffee, indigo, and cacao, grown on large plantations and sold to European merchants, connected the rural region to the...
From Colony to Nation: Liberian Independence and Black Self-Government in the Atlantic World
The emergence of the independent republic of Liberia on the coast of West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century was a historically significant turn of events in several ways. Led by a Black American settler class that sought to rule...
The Will to Be Free: On the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” [1] His letter addressed his fellow clergymen amidst the...
Insurgent India: Purna Swaraj as Self-Determination
“At the stroke of midnight, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” These are the famous words of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, that began his resonant “Tryst with Destiny” speech of August...
Nancy Ward, Cherokee Beloved Woman
In 1755 a Cherokee woman named Nanye’hi accompanied a war party, which included her husband Kingfisher. At Taliwa in what today is north Georgia, the Cherokees engaged the enemy Creek Indians in battle. Nanye’hi crouched behind a log...
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Sitting Bull: Last of the Great Chiefs
Sitting Bull was the last of the great Indian chiefs to surrender his free way of life and settle on a government reservation. He belonged to the Hunkpapa tribe of the Lakota Sioux. The Lakotas numbered seven tribes, loosely...
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Indigenous Americans in World War II: The Navajo Code Talkers
In the summer of 1983, my son and I visited my father, Benson Tohe. He and other Navajo Code Talkers had recently been honored in Washington, DC, with a parade and given a medal for their service in World War II. That was the first...
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El enemigo de mi enemigo es mi amigo: Bernardo de Gálvez and the Battle That Saved the United States at Its Birth
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” goes the old adage, which is particularly apt when describing the relationship between Spain and the nascent United States during the War of American Independence. By 1775 when the war began,...
"All Should Have an Equal Chance": Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence
In many ways, the Gettysburg Address reflects the culmination of Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong admiration for the principles of the Declaration of Independence. As a young man in 1838, Lincoln responded to the wave of mob violence...
Diego de Gardoqui and the Beginnings of Spanish-American Diplomacy
Born into a prominent Basque family on November 12, 1735, in the province of Vizcaya, Spain, Diego de Gardoqui was a treasured son of Don José Ignacio Gardoqui y Azpegorta and his wife Maria Simona. Groomed to be a banker, he was sent...
Benjamin Franklin, Spain, and the Independence of the United States
On November 29, 1775, more than six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Congress’s Secret Committee of Correspondence gave instructions to Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee to travel to Paris to...
The Spanish Siege of Pensacola
In 1779, the king of Spain declared war on Britain. Like his ally the king of France, he decided to fight his British enemies while they were busy trying to defeat the American Revolution. As soon as he declared war, the Mississippi...
The Declaration of Independence: America’s Call to Arms to Spain and France
Early in the throes of the American Revolution in the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson was wrestling with a document to King Carlos III of Spain and King Louis XVI of France that would bring much-needed help to the embattled American...
Spain’s Black Militias in the American Revolution
In 1775, Virginia’s governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation offering liberty to all enslaved Blacks who would join Great Britain’s military forces and defeat the rebellious Americans fighting for their...
Felicitas St. Maxent, Wife of Bernardo de Gálvez: From French New Orleans Belle to Exiled Spanish Dowager Countess
When Marie-Felicité Saint-Maxent La Roche was born in New Orleans on December 27, 1755, her future looked easy to predict: a pampered childhood, an arranged early marriage to the scion of a wealthy family, the motherhood of many...
The Revolutionary Era West, before and after American Independence
In December 1772, a year before angry colonists heaved chests of East India tea into Boston Harbor, the British government seemed on the cusp of creating a new North American colony. Named “Vandalia,” in honor of Queen Charlotte’s...
The Proclamation, Reading, and Immediate Reception of the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence, which the Second Continental Congress adopted on July 4, 1776, is America’s birth certificate, and patriots greeted it with joy similar to that surrounding the birth of a child. The Declaration...
Our National Cemetery and Its Honored Dead: The African American History of Arlington
Adapted by permission of Ric Murphy from his book, Section 27 and Freedman’s Village in Arlington National Cemetery: The African American History of America’s Most Hallowed Ground (McFarland & Company, 2020), co-authored with...
Polish Political Exiles and the Legacy of the American Revolution in the Antebellum US
In the second of the Cabinet rap battles in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton wage a fiery debate in 1796 about whether the US should honor its old treaty obligations to a newly...
파도와 메아리: Waves and Echoes of Korean Migration to the United States
According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay...
The Repeal of Asian Exclusion
The United States excluded Chinese people beginning in the late nineteenth century and expanded its ban to all Asians in the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts. In addition to creating a national origins quota system best known for...
The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
The United States harvested a bumper crop of good immigrants in 1955. About 1,000 highly educated Chinese gained citizenship, including acclaimed scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs such as the architect I. M. Pei, the...
Inventing American Diplomacy
In 1783, the expatriate artist Benjamin West began what became his most memorable painting, "The Peacemakers." West intended to produce a group portrait of the diplomats whose negotiations resulted in the Treaty of Paris of 1783, but...
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Teaching American History to Muslim Exchange Students
Everyone knows that the election of 2004 marked a pivotal turning point for the American people. That point was brought home forcefully by the experience of teaching American history that summer to a group of twenty-one young Muslim...
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Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy
Henry Kissinger is one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the Cold War. He participated as a soldier, scholar, and statesman in many of the most significant policy debates of the period. He acted as an intellectual,...
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The Colonial Virginia Frontier and International Native American Diplomacy
Telling the story of Native Americans and colonial Virginians is a complex challenge clouded by centuries of mythology. The history of early settlement is dominated by the story of a preteen Pocahontas saving the life of a courageous...
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Born Modern: An Overview of the West
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go. At various times places now considered as thoroughly eastern as western Pennsylvania, western...
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The Great Debate: Kennedy, Nixon, and Television in the 1960 Race for the Presidency
Imagine the setting. Since soon after the close of World War II, the United States had been engaged in a heated Cold War with the Communist Soviet Union. Within the previous four years, Soviet tanks and troops had crushed a democratic...
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Unruly Americans in the Revolution
Nearly all of the blockbuster biographies of the Founding Fathers—whether the subject is George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams—portray the vast majority of ordinary Americans as mere bystanders. Although the authors of...
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The United States and China during the Cold War
The Cold War Comes to Asia In the closing years of World War II, American military and diplomatic representatives in China recognized that civil war was likely to erupt between the Nationalist-controlled government headed by Chiang...
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From These Honored Dead: Memorial Day and Veterans Day in American History
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the prop osition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether...
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Avast! How the US Built a Navy, Sent In the Marines, and Faced Down the Barbary Pirates
In October 1784, an American merchant vessel, the Betsey , was on a trade run from her home port of Boston to Tenerife in the Canary Islands when she was approached by an un-flagged vessel. Suddenly, "sabers grasped between their...
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Lincoln’s Interpretation of the Civil War
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for the second time. The setting itself reflected how much had changed in the past four years. When Lincoln delivered his First Inaugural Address, the new Capitol dome, which...
The Filibuster King: The Strange Career of William Walker, the Most Dangerous International Criminal of the Nineteenth Century
On November 8, 1855, on the central plaza of the Nicaraguan city of Granada, a line of riflemen shot General Ponciano Corral, the senior general of the Conservative government. Curiously, the members of the firing squad hailed from...
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Cold War, Warm Hearth
In the summer of 1959, a young couple married and spent their honeymoon in a fallout shelter. Life magazine featured the "sheltered honeymoon" with a photograph of the duo smiling on their lawn, surrounded by dozens of canned goods...
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Lincoln at Cooper Union
In March 1860, just a few weeks after returning home from his triumphant visit to New York to deliver his Cooper Union address, Lincoln went on the road yet again. He traveled up from Springfield, Illinois, to Chicago to complete...
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Perils of the Ocean in the Early Modern Era
A traveler considering an ocean voyage around 1600 had much to contemplate. Voyage by voyage, explorers and colonists alike needed knowledge about the seas and lands in the Atlantic world. Unfortunately, information was never shared...
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FDR and Hitler: A Study in Contrasts
The Great Depression and World War II were events in world history, but they touched different countries in sometimes dramatically different ways. To paraphrase Tolstoy, many peoples suffered, but every unhappy people was unhappy in...
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Indian Removal
In 1828 pressure was building among white Americans for the relocation of American Indians from the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. A student at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation, which lay within...
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The Civil Rights Movement: Major Events and Legacies
From the earliest years of European settlement in North America, whites enslaved and oppressed black people. Although the Civil War finally brought about the abolition of slavery, a harsh system of white supremacy persisted thereafter...
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The World War II Home Front
World War II had a profound impact on the United States. Although no battles occurred on the American mainland, the war affected all phases of American life. It required unprecedented efforts to coordinate strategy and tactics with...
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Women and Wagoners: Camp Followers in the American War for Independence
An old tune called "The Girl I Left Behind Me" tells of a lovelorn soldier yearning to return home to his waiting fair maid. Although there is a good chance that this song was fifed during the Revolutionary War, the earliest...
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England on the Eve of Colonization
When James VI of Scotland and his entourage began his journey south to take up the crown of England in April of 1603, it looked as if the ancient enmity between the two realms had finally been swept away. With England’s aristocratic...
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