38 items
In its broadest sense, African American history predates the history of the United States, colonial or otherwise; by the time the English colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, Africans and people of African descent had already been...
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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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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...
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...
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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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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...
The William Shepp Diaries: Combat and Danger in World War I
"Disappointments," wrote Private William Shepp, "are common in the army." At the time, Shepp, an aspiring teacher from a small community in West Virginia, was pondering the seemingly unrewarding and unending work that he and the men...
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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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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