The Great American History Blog

On December 21, 1781, the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Virginia, burned to the ground, killing many wounded soldiers recovering the...

The presidential election of 1824 was one of the most hotly contested elections in the nation’s history. The Federalist Party had dissolv...

As in every army, drunkenness and vice were abundantly present in the Army of Northern Virginia. Still, it was not uncommon to find soldier...

Sam Davis of Smyrna, Tennessee was captured by Union troops in November 1863 as he was attempting to deliver a secret military message. He ...

Father Augustus Tolton is regarded as the first Roman Catholic priest of purely African descent in the United States. Both of Tolton’s p...

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lucy Mina Otey, a sixty year old widow, organized five hundred women of Lynchburg, Virginia into the Ladi...

Abortion, rather than contraception, was the primary form of birth control during the antebellum and Civil War era. In the Civil War era i...

Estimating the total number of runaways is difficult. Some consider the claim of a southern judge in 1855 that the South had lost “upward...

The Chinese immigration “problem” began in California. California, which became a state in 1850, far from major population centers, was con...

In the late summer of 1619 a storm beaten Dutch ship (possibly a pirate ship) appeared in the harbor at Jamestown. The ship had nothing to ...

The opening of vast new oil reserves in Mexico, coupled with the conviction that the existing Mexican government under Victoriano Huerta wa...

In 1904 when Theodore Roosevelt announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring in a message to Congress that: “If a ...

Jacobson contends that the concept of race is a product of politics and culture and is in fact “a modem superstition”. The perception o...

A truly thought provoking book on the nature and purpose of punishment. In the final analysis, Foucault argues that the purpose of punishm...

The work establishes the question, “Is objectivity possible in the writing of history”, as the central proposition of the development of ...

Perhaps a groundbreaking book in its day, Orientalism now seems rather trite in its conclusion that intellectual schemas support the poli...

After World War I the British Empire was at the height of its world wide power. The rivalry between the United States and Great Britain dur...

                                                              Bradford Smith-Hoskins It was not unusual to find British officers vis...

How much have our thought processes changed since the werewolf scares of the Middle Ages? Sometimes one wonders. In August 1972, the O...

At the age of 81, Benjamin Franklin became the president of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negro...