116 items
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
Reconstruction and the Battle for Woman Suffrage
The origins of the American women’s suffrage movement are commonly dated from the public protest meeting held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. At that historic meeting, the right of women to join with men in the privileges and...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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....
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
Ordinary Americans and the Constitution
The Constitution is so honored today, at home and abroad, that it may seem irreverent to suggest that for a great many ordinary Americans, it was not what they wished as a capstone of their revolutionary experience. This is not to say...
Appears in:
The Jungle and the Progressive Era
The publication of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result. At the time he began working on the...
Appears in:
The US Banking System: Origin, Development, and Regulation
Banks are among the oldest businesses in American history—the Bank of New York, for example, was founded in 1784, and as the recently renamed Bank of New York Mellon it had its 225th anniversary in 2009. The banking system is one of...
Appears in:
Cahokia: A Pre-Columbian American City
Almost a thousand years ago, American Indians built a city along the Mississippi River in the middle of North America. Located opposite modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, this city is called Cahokia by archaeologists, and it was as large...
Appears in:
Amateurism and Jim Thorpe at the Fifth Olympiad
Thorpe’s deception and subsequent confession deals amateur sport in America the hardest blow it has ever had to take and disarranges the scheme of amateur athletics the world over. New York Times , January 28, 1913 The early years of...
New Orleans and the History of Jazz
New Orleans is a city built in a location that was by any measure a mistake. North American settlers needed a way to import and export goods via the Mississippi River, so a city was created atop swamps. By virtue of its location and...
Appears in:
Women and the Great Depression
In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt’s It’s Up to the Women exhorted American women to help pull the country through its current economic crisis, the gravest it had ever faced: "The women know that life must go on and that the needs of life must...
Appears in:
Showing results 26 - 50