When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775, America was fighting a war on two fronts: one for independence from the British, and a second for survival against smallpox. Because Washington knew the ravages of the disease firsthand, he understood that the ...read more
President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant didn’t meet often in person. But their mutual respect and trust grew deep over the final year of the Civil War as they together steered America and its armies through the most convulsive period in the nation’s history. In his ...read more
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, the United States was entering the fourth year of the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in the nation’s history. The stock market had fallen a staggering 75 percent from 1929 levels, and one in every four ...read more
Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, would never forget the moment his boots hit the sand during Operation Overlord—the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944. Shortly after the landings, Ike toured the beaches, which were littered with broken, ...read more
1. Washington had only a grade-school education. The first president’s formal schooling ended when he was 11 years old, after his father died. That event cut young George off from the opportunity to be educated abroad in England, a privilege that had been afforded to his older ...read more
How important was George Washington’s network of spies to winning the American Revolution? It’s hard to imagine that the fate of the American cause would rest so heavily in the hands of a tailor, an enslaved double agent—or a judge’s wife who sent surreptitious signals on her ...read more
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, is an outsized figure in American politics. He became president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, and the brash and independent Roosevelt quickly remade the presidency in his own image. More than a ...read more
On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that as of January 1, 1863, all enslaved people in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” ...read more
Despite the horrors of slavery, it was no easy decision to flee. Escaping often involved leaving behind family and heading into the complete unknown, where harsh weather and lack of food might await. Then there was the constant threat of capture. So-called slave catchers and ...read more
There was a time when traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant riding for months in a horse-drawn wagon or stagecoach, or sailing southward to Panama and then crossing the Isthmus to board another ship for a journey up the other coast. But that all changed on May 10, ...read more
The six-month encampment of General George Washington’s Continental Army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-1778 was a major turning point in the American Revolutionary War. While conditions were notoriously cold and harsh and provisions were in short supply, it was at the ...read more
Since the late 1930s, conventional wisdom has held that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” helped bring about the end of the Great Depression. The series of social and government spending programs did get millions of Americans back to work on hundreds of public ...read more
Frederick Douglass sits in the pantheon of Black history figures: Born into slavery, he made a daring escape north, wrote best-selling autobiographies and went on to become one of the nation’s most powerful voices against human bondage. He stands as the most influential civil and ...read more
1. The dam’s name was a source of controversy. Surveyors originally recommended the dam be constructed at Boulder Canyon, leading the initiative to be called the Boulder Canyon Dam Project. Even when Black Canyon later was deemed a better location for the new structure, it ...read more
1. His family came to America to escape religious persecution. In 1713, Daniel Boone’s father, a weaver and blacksmith, journeyed from his hometown of Bradninch, England, to the colony of Pennsylvania, established by William Penn in 1681 as a haven for religious tolerance. Like ...read more
Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s guns fell silent, the racial legacies of slavery and Reconstruction continued to reverberate loudly throughout Alabama in 1965. Even the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 months earlier had done little in some parts of the ...read more
1. Tecumseh lost three close family members to frontier violence. Born in 1768 in present-day Ohio, Tecumseh lived during an era of near-constant conflict between his Shawnee tribe and white frontiersmen. At age 6, Lord Dunmore’s War broke out after a series of violent incidents, ...read more
1. He was of French extraction. Paul Revere’s father, Apollos Rivoire, was a French Huguenot who immigrated to Boston at age 13 and Anglicized his family name before marrying a local girl named Deborah Hitchbourn. Born around 1734 and one of 11 or 12 children, Paul never learned ...read more
1. The “tea partiers” were not protesting a tax hike, but a corporate tax break. The protestors who caffeinated Boston Harbor were railing against the Tea Act, which the British government enacted in the spring of 1773. Rather than inflicting new levies, however, the legislation ...read more
1. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on July 4, 1776. On July 1, 1776, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, and on the following day 12 of the 13 colonies voted in favor of Richard Henry Lee’s motion for independence. The delegates then spent the next ...read more
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered remarks, which later became known as the Gettysburg Address, at the official dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, on the site of one of the bloodiest and most decisive battles of ...read more
After a yellow fever epidemic swept through Memphis, Tennessee in 1878, the newly created National Board of Health sent engineer and Civil War veteran George A. Waring Jr. to design and implement a better sewage drainage system for the city. His success there made Waring’s ...read more
Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a peace activist and a leader of the settlement house movement in America. As one of the most distinguished of the first generation of college-educated women, she rejected marriage and motherhood in favor of a lifetime commitment to the poor and ...read more
At the Second Continental Congress during the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia was charged with drafting a formal statement justifying the 13 North American colonies’ break with Great Britain. A member of a committee of five that also included John Adams of ...read more
