The Great American History Blog

A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia By Charles V. Mauro As the Civil War raged, Confederate Brigadier General J.E.B. Stuart entrusted...

August 24, 1814: Washington in Flames By Carole Herrick August 24, 1814: Washington in Flames is an account of the British invasion...

Devil's Island At the top of the prison system pyramid in the U.S. are the so called Super-Maximum prisons. Super Maximum priso...

Your Brother in Arms: A Union Soldier's Odyssey by Robert C. Plumb  George P. McClelland, a member of the 155th Pennsylvania I...

These fictional memoirs are based on the true story of a southern belle who defied convention to become a front line soldier and spy for...

Robert Hanssen  Excerpted from: The Hidden History of Northern Virginia Not surprisingly, the Washington D.C. area was a hotbed ...

Civil War historian Don Hakenson gives insights into Virginia's greatest Civil War generals. Time Travel 21 - Your portal to the ...

The Pirate Jose Gaspar Perhaps the greatest of Florida's pirates was Jose Gaspar. The memory of Jose Gaspar, or "Gaspa...

The first pirate to operate in the waters of New England was one Dixey Bull. In June, 1632, he was peacefully trading in Penobscot Bay ...

In the middle of the 19th century, medical writers attempted to establish ways to identify male homosexuality, which was considered a signi...

Few visitors to Hawaii realize that they may be only a few feet from a hidden royal treasure. On May 8, 1819, the doleful sound of the grea...

The Braddock Massacre In 1755 war raged across the American frontier. The English colonies were locked in a death grip with the Fren...

Horace Greeley Laws concerning divorce varied widely among the states throughout much of American history. In New England, where th...

Victoria Woodhull "High priestess of Free Love" In the state of New York, the Oneida Community, founded in 1848, desc...

Link to:  Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America By the 1870s, couples in all classes were choosing to limit and plan family ...

This book raises the question of the relationship of rock and roll to American values. Does it represent the zenith or the nadir of Americ...

Lee’s central argument is that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 set America on the path to becoming a “gate keeping” nation. The Chinese ...

Queen Victoria reigned over the British Empire, the largest and most diverse empire the world has ever known, from 1837-1901, and gave her...

Ngai argues that immigration policy is fundamentally about citizenship, who is allowed to become a citizen and who is excluded from citiz...

Antin’s book is a book of personal reminiscence rather than theory, and as such, we must de-construct the work to appreciate what it meant...