Five years after leading the first English circumnavigation of the globe in 1577–1580, Sir Francis Drake led a raid against Spanish settlements in the Caribbean including Santiago, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena, as well as St. Augustine (in present-day Florida). This engraving, by Baptista Boazio, was made to accompany a book describing Drake’s 1586 expedition, A Summarie and True Discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage (published in 1588–1589). The illustration depicts the attack of Drake’s fleet of twenty-three ships on St. Augustine, which was captured and...

The prevalence of slavery in pre-Revolutionary America made actual and threatened uprisings of enslaved people of intense interest throughout the British colonies in North America. The West Indies, or Caribbean islands, where slavery predominated, were vitally important to commerce and trade in the colonies, and revolts there were particularly newsworthy. In this issue of the New-York Weekly Journal , dated March 11, 1733[/4],* editor John Peter Zenger printed a sloop captain’s report on a takeover by enslaved people of the Danish island of St. John in November 1733. A group of...

When most people think of wartime food rationing, they often think of World War II. However, civilians were encouraged to do their part for the war effort during World War I as well. This colorful poster by artist Charles E. Chambers was issued by the United States Food Administration to encourage voluntary food conservation. "Food Will Win the War" was the name of the campaign initiated by the newly appointed head of the agency, Herbert Hoover. Food was necessary not only to feed America’s growing Army, but to help relieve famine in Europe, in part to prevent the overthrow of...

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a lifelong advocate of equal rights, used her position as First Lady to advocate against discrimination in the United States. However, Mrs. Roosevelt’s ideas were not embraced by everyone in the pre-civil rights era when segregation and racism were institutionalized in American economics, politics, and society. In this letter from 1944 Mrs. Roosevelt responded to one of her critics, Addie Frizielle, who worried about the desegregation of restrooms and forced social interaction between the races in the government’s movement toward racial equality in...

On May 19, 1735, John Peter Zenger republished this essay in the New-York Weekly Journal. Originally printed in the Guardian , a British periodical, the two-page essay supports the education of women “of Quality or Fortune.” The author, probably Joseph Addison, one of the founders of the Guardian , argued that women should be educated because they had more spare time than men, they had a natural gift for speech, they were responsible for educating their children, and they needed to keep busy. In addition, the article suggests that educated women were seen to be more suitable as...

The Cadet Nurse Corps, established by the Nurse Training Act of 1943, recruited women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five to be trained as nurses. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt insisted the act be amended to prevent racial discrimination. As a result, more than 3,000 minorities served as cadet nurses, including Japanese women recruited from relocation camps. Those accepted into the program received subsidized and expedited education and, in return, agreed to serve under the US Public Health Service for the duration of the war. These student nurses served on the home...

Vietnam was "America’s longest war." While US operations tended to be very limited between 1945 and 1964, escalation in the early months of 1965 eventually led to the deployment of more than 2.5 million military personnel to South Vietnam through 1973. While the literature on the Vietnam War is voluminous, the issue of draft resistance has either been overlooked or misunderstood by historians. Most people in fact do make a distinction between draft evasion and draft resistance. The virtual omission of draft resistance from the historical accounts of the Vietnam War is a...

The Christian History was a revivalist periodical founded by the Boston clergyman Thomas Prince in 1743 to report on the religious revivals sweeping across Europe and the United States. It was the first Christian periodical published in the United States, but lasted only two years. The revivals of that period were ignited by Jonathan Edwards, whose theology sparked renewed enthusiasm and emphasized human depravity, divine omnipotence, and a personal relationship with God. This period is often referred to as the “First Great Awakening,” although the term “Great Awakening” wasn’t...

The best-known work of the poet and novelist Lydia Maria Child may be her poem "Over the River and through the Woods," but she is also remembered for her compelling objections to slavery and her support for underrepresented groups. She was a tireless activist and her prolific and candid writing on non-violence and equality was well ahead of its time. Originally from Massachusetts, Child moved to New York in 1841 to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard . After leaving that post in 1843, she published many of her popular editorials and commentaries in the two-volume Letters...

As the Cold War pervaded domestic as well as international spheres, Duck and Cover , an educational film produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration and Archer Productions Inc., showed children how to react in case of a nuclear attack. The Soviet Union had tested its first nuclear bomb in 1949 and fear of an attack in the United States was high. As a result, Congress created the Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1950 to prepare America for emergencies. Two of the organization’s more visible contributions were public fallout shelters and the Emergency Broadcast...