To most Americans the Great Plains are the Great Flyover, or maybe the Great Drivethrough. Viewed from a window seat the plains seem nearly devoid of interest, something to get across enroute to someplace far worthier to explore or live in. Yet anyone who has spent time on the plains knows better. Walk around in western Nebraska or the Texas panhandle and you will find a geography that is mixed and surprising and sometimes disorienting. Most people consider plains history much like the land—flat, featureless, and undeserving of more than a glance between sips of a soda. But...

In the late fall of 1983, the US Congress passed a bill declaring the third Monday of January each year as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on November 2, 1983, fifteen years after King’s assassination. Passage of this bill had not been easy, as some conservatives and southern members of Congress had issued strong objections to it. During the debate in the Senate, Senator Jesse Helms, Republican from North Carolina, delivered a speech declaring that although there was no evidence that King was a member of the Communist Party, some...

One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington. For Wheatley, who arrived in Boston on a slave ship at the age of seven or eight in 1761, nothing might have seemed more improbable than that she would write a lavish poem of praise fourteen years later to Washington, the Virginia plantation owner turned general. Wheatley had proved herself a prodigy, rapidly mastering English and learning Latin,...

In the United States, voting is a constitutionally protected right and an essential symbol of meaningful political participation in our nation’s electoral processes of governing. The right to vote and to have one’s vote count toward one’s political interests are essential aspects of citizen engagement in participatory democracy. Voting is the key to citizens participating in “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” As such, voting acts as the guardian of the exercise of nearly every right we have in American society. Without the right to vote, or to vote in a...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. [1] Upon casual reading, this phrase should sound familiar. Yet unlike what appeared in our nation’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments offered a significant addition, declaring all women and men to be equal. While few might question that today, nearly 175 years ago, gender equality was considered extremely radical. The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments was written for an equally radical event. In July 1848 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, some 300...

When the Boston abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson looked back on the years before the Civil War, he wrote, "there prevailed then a phrase, ‘the Sisterhood of Reforms.’" He had in mind "a variety of social and psychological theories of which one was expected to accept all, if any." Of that sisterhood, anti-slavery stands out as the best-remembered and most hotly debated, even though it was not the largest in terms of membership or the most enduring. (That honor goes to the temperance movement.) Abolitionism continues to fascinate because of its place in the sectional...

One verse of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the unofficial anthem of the Northern cause, summarized the Civil War’s idealized meaning: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. That the war to preserve the Union had become a godly crusade to end slavery—one in which soldiers would "die to make men free"—seemed logical and even providential by 1865. Yet it was an outcome that few in either the North or South would have...

Abraham Lincoln was, for most of his political career, a highly partisan Whig. As long as the Whig Party existed, he never supported the candidate of another party. Until the late 1850s, his chief political heroes were Whigs, above all Henry Clay, whom he said he "loved and revered as a teacher and leader." Even after the Whigs disintegrated, Lincoln bragged that he "had stood by the party as long as it had a being." [1] Yet we care about Lincoln not because he was a Whig but because he became a Republican—which marks him as a particular kind of Whig. Unlike the more...

“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 his presidency—arguably the most iconic utterance of the entire Civil War—by implicitly pronouncing the Declaration of Independence America’s preeminent founding document. The line that opened the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, as Lincoln reminded his listeners, came eighty-seven years after the Declaration. Engaged in a “great civil war”...

James Monroe’s two terms in office as president of the United States (1817–1825) are often called the "Era of Good Feelings." The country appeared to have entered a period of strength, unity of purpose, and one-party government with the end of the War of 1812 and the decay and eventual disappearance of Federalism in the wake of Alexander Hamilton’s death. Thomas Jefferson, living his final years in retirement at Monticello, might well have taken satisfaction in 1824 at the total dominance of Republicanism, or the Democratic-Republican Party, in American political life. Every...