The Great American History Blog

  In August, 1814, as Washington City still smoldered, seven British warships under the command of Captain James Gordon appeared on the...

Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna has long been vilified in American history for the massacre of the defenders of the Alamo....

“What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” is a mis-quote from 1953 testimony given by Charles E. Wilson at his Congressional...

On July 16, the great Union army, marched out of Washington City to meet the Confederates at Manassas Junction. On July 21, 1861, the two g...

In 1755 war raged across the American frontier. The English colonies were locked in a death grip with the French and their Indian allies. ...

At 10:00 A.M. on August 16, 1812, a white flag appeared over Fort Detroit. Despite the vehement protests of his officers and men, Briga...

George Armstrong Custer was no military novice in 1876 when he rode out to subdue the Sioux. Custer graduated from West Point in 1861, a...

Secretary of War John Armstrong Jr., a self styled military genius, had a theory that militia fought best at the spur of the moment. Early ...

September 15, 1863, was the happy occasion of the wedding of Miss Sallie Ann Corbell of Chuckatuck, Virginia, to Major General George E. ...

On May 12, 1979, the front page of The Washington Post carried an article entitled,“The Mount Vernon Monster.” For nine months, in 1978 an...

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 ...