168 items
To read the text and hear the poem click here. Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S....
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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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...
Early America’s Jewish Settlers
If you had the opportunity to create a new society from scratch, to build its institutions and establish its social structure from the ground up, how would you go about doing it? This is one of the most fruitful ways for teachers and...
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America and the China Trade
On a quarter-mile strip of land in the bustling city of Canton (Guangzhou), China, trade was conducted between merchants from China and the eastern seaboard of America, beginning in 1784 and lasting until the mid-nineteenth century....
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Motor City: The Story of Detroit
"You can see here, as it is impossible to do in a more varied and complex city, the whole structure of an industrial society." So wrote essayist Edmund Wilson, reporting on a visit to the Motor City in the 1930s. As the capital of...
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Reconstructing the West and North
In 1865 the Radicals of the Republican Party regarded the Northern victory in the Civil War as a “golden moment” to remake the Republic. The Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, and, so they thought until Andrew Johnson...
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Globalizing Protest in the 1980s: Musicians Collaborate to Change the World
"There something’s happening here," Stephen Stills sang in "For What It’s Worth," a 1966 song about a confrontation between students and police in Los Angeles. And for a time, there was. Radio stations filled the air with protest...
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...
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...
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...
The 1965 Immigration Act: Opening the Nation to Immigrants of Color
Americans might think their country has always been open to all, but until 1965 people who were not white or did not come from northern or western Europe were not welcomed as immigrants. Only with the passage that year of a new...
Technology of the 1800s
In his classic study, Democracy in America (1835–1840), Alexis de Tocqueville titled one of his chapters "Why the Americans are more Addicted to Practical rather than Theoretical Science." He observed that the political and social...
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The Great Depression: An Overview
Herbert Hoover got many things wrong about the great economic calamity that destroyed his presidency and his historical reputation, but he got one fundamental thing right. Much legend to the contrary, the Great Depression was not...
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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 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...
Advice (Not Taken) for the French Revolution from America
"I come as a friend to offer my help to this very interesting republic," wrote the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette from aboard the Victoire as it sailed from France across the ocean to the rebellious British colonies in the...
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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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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...
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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The Origins of the Transcontinental Railroad
The completion in 1869 of the first transcontinental railroad—the Pacific Railway, as the combination of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific was called—created two of the most iconic symbols in American history. The first is a...
Education Reform in Antebellum America
Education reform is often at the heart of all great reform struggles. [1] By the 1820s Americans were experiencing exhilarating as well as unsettling social and economic changes. In the North, the familiar rural and agrarian life was...
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Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad
On a brisk May afternoon, in the high desert of Utah, the shrill tap of the telegraph key simultaneously announced the completion of North America’s first transcontinental railroad to cities across the United States. Immediately...
Women of the West
Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...
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