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Christopher Columbus: How The Explorer's Legend Grew—and Then Drew Fire
Christopher Columbus has long been exalted as a heroic figure in American history: the first explorer to establish a European presence in the New World. Americans have celebrated his arrival as far back as 1792, the 300th anniversary of his landing. But it would take almost 200 ...read more
The New Deal Program that Sent Women to Summer Camp
During the Great Depression, thousands of unemployed men picked up saws and axes and headed to the woods to serve in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that employed about 3 million men. But men in the CCC weren’t the only ones to take to the great outdoors on ...read more
How Alexander Hamilton's Widow, Eliza, Carried on His Legacy
After Vice President Aaron Burr killed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, Hamilton’s widow, Elizabeth Schuyler “Eliza” Hamilton, had to find a way to go on without her beloved husband. One of the ways she found solace—and honored his memory—was to found two ...read more
Slavery Persisted in New England Until Well Into the 19th Century
Slavery was a dominant feature of the antebellum South, but it was also pervasive in the pre-Civil War North—the New England states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island all have a history of slavery. In the early colonial period, Europeans ...read more
Why Thomas Jefferson's Anti-Slavery Passage Was Removed from the Declaration of Independence
With its soaring rhetoric about all men being “created equal,” the Declaration of Independence gave powerful voice to the values behind the American Revolution. Critics, however, saw a glaring contradiction: Many of the colonists who sought freedom from British tyranny themselves ...read more
How the 'Big Three' Teed Up the Cold War at the 1945 Yalta Conference
By February 1945, it was increasingly clear that not only would Adolf Hitler's Third Reich fail to last a millennium as he had hoped; it wouldn’t even survive the spring. With the end of World War II finally in sight, the “Big Three” Allied leaders—U.S. President Franklin D. ...read more
What Was Alexander Hamilton's Role in Aaron Burr's Presidential Defeat?
As the presidential election of 1800 approached, Americans were more divided than ever before. The incumbent President John Adams faced off against Vice President Thomas Jefferson, the former secretary of state and author of the Declaration of Independence. To Jefferson and his ...read more
11 Anthems of Black Pride and Protest Through American History
For centuries, Black Americans have used music as a powerful tool. In the antebellum South, enslaved people sang spirituals to covertly plan their escape to freedom. Poems were put to music and performed to celebrate the eradication of slavery, and ballads and hip hop have been ...read more
How the WWII Tehran Conference Tested the Unity of the 'Big Three' Allies
For four days in November-December 1943, as World War II raged, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in secret in the Iranian capital of Tehran. Code named Eureka, the Tehran Conference was the first time all three Allied leaders had ever been face to ...read more
How a New Vaccine Was Developed in Record Time in the 1960s
The invention of the modern mumps vaccine is the stuff of medical textbook legend. In 1963, a star researcher at the pharmaceutical company Merck took a swab of his own daughter’s throat to begin cultivating a weakened form of the mumps virus. And just four years later, in record ...read more
Why Isn't Washington, D.C. a State?
Leading up to the American Revolution, one of the colonists’ chief complaints about the British Empire was that it imposed “taxation without representation”—a slogan that Washington, D.C. has since adopted as its unofficial motto. In 2000, D.C. started printing “Taxation Without ...read more
How Literacy Became a Powerful Weapon in the Fight to End Slavery
On August 21, 1831, enslaved Virginian Nat Turner led a bloody revolt, which changed the course of American history. The uprising in Southampton County led to the killing of an estimated 55 white people, resulting in execution of some 55 black people and the beating of hundreds ...read more
The Secret British Campaign to Persuade the US to Enter WWII
In June of 1941, Americans read about an extraordinary British mission into Nazi-occupied France. Newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun and New York Post, detailed how the British parachuted into an airfield with tommy guns and hand grenades, overpowered the guards and ...read more
Why Buffalo Soldiers Served Among the Nation's First Park Rangers
Among the earliest stewards of the nation’s national parks were soldiers from segregated black regiments. Starting in the 1890s, the Buffalo Soldiers, who had earned valor fighting in the Indian Wars and Spanish-American War, added park ranger to their titles and played a ...read more
FDR, Churchill and Stalin: Inside Their Uneasy WWII Alliance
In desperate times, the enemy of your enemy becomes your friend. During World War II, the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union would never have been three-way allies had they not shared a mortal enemy in Adolf Hitler. The Americans were isolationists, the Brits were ...read more