The Great American History Blog

In the 1960s, Berry Gordy (founder of Motown Records) stressed the creation of music that was, “simple, direct and emotional” with cross ov...

What do Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, the Vietnam War, the KKK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gay & Lesbians have in common? They...

The first cocktail known to history was described in an American periodical of 1816. The first British cocktail bar was opened in Lond...

Hercules Hercules, a slave at the Mount Vernon plantation , who had been George Washington’s long time cook was summoned to Phila...

History while it purports to tell the truth is, in fact, just an interpretive story of chronological events, a made up story that we have a...

Unemployment During the Great Depression Average rate of unemployment in 1929: 3.2% in 1930: 8.9% in 1931: 16.3% in 1932: 24.1% in 1...

"It is impossible for the United States to preserve itself as a republic or as a democracy when 600 families own more of this nation...

By 1870, the Chinese were the largest ethnic component of the foreign-born workforce in California, constituted some nine percent of t...

The development of slavery in Virginia set the pattern for the development of slavery throughout the South and laid the foundations for the...

In 1909 the USS Minnesota called at Guantanamo, Cuba. The skipper took the ship’s junior medical officer, Lt. Johnson, on a tour of S...

The Martini is said to have originated in San Francisco just after the gold rush. It was invented by bartender Professor Jerry Thomas at...

On March 9, 1828, an earthquake, centered in southwestern Virginia, attracted the attention of President John Quincy Adams as it rattled wi...

The recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not the first time that America has faced an environmental catastrophe of historic proport...

Link to: Nuclear War 1962 (Alternate History) In 1962 the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper describing the impact of a nu...

General Pliyev, the Soviet commander in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had twelve Luna Missiles in his arsenal. Each Luna had...

In the early 1960s both the size of nuclear stockpiles and available delivery systems, made decision makers think in terms of a “winnabl...

Link to: CIVIL WAR CIVILIAN LIFE: MANASSAS,VIRGINIA   The Lewis family of “Portici” found themselves at the center of the First Battle ...

Link to: Who Were the Slaves of the Founding Fathers? In April, 1781 the British warship H.M.S. Savage anchored off George Washing...

Most people think that the English were the first Europeans to explore what is now Virginia, founding Jamestown in 1607. There is evid...

                                                                         What are the explanations for werewolves? Hypertrichosis is...