141 items
In December 1772, a year before angry colonists heaved chests of East India tea into Boston Harbor, the British government seemed on the cusp of creating a new North American colony. Named “Vandalia,” in honor of Queen Charlotte’s...
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...
Lemuel Haynes, Young African American Patriot of the 1770s
In 1776, Lemuel Haynes was a young veteran of the War of Independence who was envisioning his future. He had been an indentured servant from his birth in 1753 to his coming of age in 1774. After being released from indenture, he...
Judith Sargent Murray and the Declaration of Independence
Judith Stevens (as she was then) was just twenty-five years old when a group of men in Philadelphia boldly declared the American colonies’ independence from England. Insisting that all men were created equal, and claiming that all...
Jack Cleveland Montgomery: Peace to War and Back Again
Few combat veterans have seemingly overcome the trauma that comes with their terrifying, horrific experiences. Most, in fact, suffer from the mild to severe effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and undergo flashbacks,...
"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City
In October 2021, the African Burial Ground National Monument commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the New York City slave cemetery’s rediscovery by the General Services Administration (GSA). In 1991, the GSA started construction...
Polish Political Exiles and the Legacy of the American Revolution in the Antebellum US
In the second of the Cabinet rap battles in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton wage a fiery debate in 1796 about whether the US should honor its old treaty obligations to a newly...
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...
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...
Inventing American Diplomacy
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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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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Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity
Strictly speaking, all American novels (with the exception of those written by Native Americans) are in one way or another immigrant fiction. But we usually think of immigrant fiction more narrowly as the encounter of the foreign-born...
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Sisters of Suffrage: British and American Women Fight for the Vote
The dominant narrative of the entire women’s suffrage movement begins and ends with the United States and Britain. Hundreds of thousands of women petitioned, canvassed, lobbied, demonstrated, engaged in mass civil disobedience, went...
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Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy
Henry Kissinger is one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the Cold War. He participated as a soldier, scholar, and statesman in many of the most significant policy debates of the period. He acted as an intellectual,...
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A New Look at the Great Plains
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...
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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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Rethinking Huck
A classic, Mark Twain quipped, is "a book which people praise and don't read." The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the rare classic that is highly praised and widely read. Following World War II, it became required reading in most...
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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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