230 items
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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The Spectacles of 1912
The presidential election year of 1912 began with one unprecedented spectacle, ended with another, and sandwiched a few more in between. In February, former president Theodore Roosevelt stunned the country by challenging President...
The Puritans and Dissent: The Cases of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson
Every society constructs what one scholar has called a "perimeter fence," which sets the boundary between actions and beliefs that are acceptable and those that are not. [1] This is as true of the United States in the twentieth...
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Native American Discoveries of Europe
Native Americans discovered Europe at the same time Europeans discovered America. As far as we know, no birch bark canoes caught the gulf stream to Glasgow, and no Native American conquistadores planted flags at Florence, but just as...
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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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Coming to America: Ellis Island and New York City
New York City is a kind of archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the American mainland. There are some forty islands in the city beyond Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long...
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Why We the People? Citizens as Agents of Constitutional Change
"We the People?" asked Patrick Henry at the Virginia convention to ratify the new Constitution in 1788. "Who authorized them to speak the language of ‘We the People,’ instead of ‘We the States’?" [1] Looking back, we can be grateful...
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Thomas Jefferson and Deism
Of all the American founders, Thomas Jefferson is most closely associated with deism, the Enlightenment faith in a rational, law-governed world created by a "supreme architect" or cosmic "clockmaker." For many modern Americans, deist...
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San Francisco and the Great Earthquake of 1906
At the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco still reigned as the major seaport on the Pacific coast. The city traced its origins to 1776, when a Spanish expedition planted a mission and a military post at the end of the...
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The History of Women’s Baseball
From 1943 to 1954, "America’s pastime" was a game played in skirts. At its peak in 1948, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) fielded ten teams in midwestern towns like Rockford, Illinois (Peaches); South Bend,...
Getting Ready to Lead a World Economy: Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century America
When Jefferson won the presidency in 1801, his victory had an economic impact as great as the political one. The establishment of the new government under the Constitution twelve years earlier had laid the foundation for an integrated...
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The Righteous Revolution of Mercy Otis Warren
Seven months after British Regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, three months after King George III declared the colonies in a state of rebellion, and a month after British artillery leveled the town of Falmouth (now Portland,...
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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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Lockean Liberalism and the American Revolution
The town of Boston took an important step toward rebellion on November 20, 1772, by adopting a declaration of "the Rights of the Colonists" drafted by Sam Adams, the firebrand of the Revolution. Adams summarized these "Natural rights"...
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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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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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A New Era of American Indian Autonomy
The American West is home to the majority of America’s Indian Nations, and, within the past generation, many of these groups have achieved unprecedented political and economic gains. Numerous reservation communities now manage...
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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...
Transcontinental Railroads: Compressing Time and Space
Many of our modern clichés about the impact of technology, particularly about the consequences of the Internet and telecommunications, first appeared as clichés about nineteenth-century railroads, particularly the transcontinental...
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Race and the American Constitution: A Struggle toward National Ideals
James O. Horton was the Benjamin Banneker Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History at George Washington University and historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He edited,...
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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Female Trouble: Andrew Jackson versus the Ladies of Washington
Andrew Jackson was mad. It was February 1829, a wintry day in Washington, DC, and President-elect Jackson was in a fury about the public’s reaction to his Cabinet announcements. To be fair, Jackson was already angry when he arrived in...
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The New Deal, Then and Now
Well before Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the New Deal was emerging as an instructive model for those trying to understand, and address, what is now known as the "worst financial crisis since the 1930s." But is the New Deal in fact...
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A History of the Thanksgiving Holiday
Thanksgiving stands as one of the most American of holidays, an autumnal ritual fixed in the imagination as honoring the piety and perseverance of the nation’s earliest arrivals during colonial days. But what were the origins of this...
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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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The Years of Magical Thinking: Explaining the Salem Witchcraft Crisis
Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from semi-mythical events such as the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and Salem witchcraft....
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The Culture of Congress in the Age of Jackson
During an 1841 debate in the House of Representatives, Edward Stanly of North Carolina said something derogatory about Virginian Henry Wise. A few minutes later, Wise walked over to Stanly’s seat. After some "earnest, and excited...
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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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Pledging Their Fortunes: The Professions of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
Within the historical literature, the professions of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence has not received nearly the same attention paid to the framers of the US Constitution. In his Economic Interpretation of the...
The Education of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence
We call them “The Signers,” and that’s what they did. They signed the Declaration of Independence. They were fifty-six men, signing in an age that prized beautiful penmanship as a mark of a fine education and the social rank that came...
James Wilson: Scottish Immigrant, Pennsylvania Statesman, Signer of the Declaration, and Framer of the Constitution
James Wilson’s impact on the founding of the United States was significant. One of only six individuals to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he helped create the nation and its enduring institutions....
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...
Voices of Democracy: Jovita Idár, the Idár Family, and the Struggle against Juan Crow
In August 2023, the US Mint will release the Jovita Idár quarter, “the ninth coin in the American Women Quarters Program” authorized by Public Law 116–330. On its website, the Mint states that Idár’s “ideas and practices were ahead of...
"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...
Abraham Lincoln's "Apple of Gold": The Declaration of Independence
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” [1] So Abraham Lincoln began the most famous speech of...
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