The Great American History Blog

Mount Vernon has always been a place of pilgrimage because of the tomb of George Washington, America’s secular saint.   Prior to the out...

We don’t generally think of Martha Washington as a vivacious fashionista. She has come down to us after two hundred plus years as a frum...

Adultery:   Adultery was a serious offense. The Puritans defined adultery as sex between a married woman and any man other than her hu...

If Germany Won World War II       Historians have been able to piece together an outline of Nazi war aims.     Hitler wanted t...

O ffices of the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Treasurer of the Confederate Government....

Legends of Pirate Gold                The best known woman pirate was Anne Bonny, considered one of the most famous pirates of the...

The values of nineteenth century America were largely white Anglo-Saxon values that stressed Protestant self-reliance and Victorian respe...

Alexandria 1861-1865      The book begins with a look at pre-Civil War Alexandria, the city where Robert E. Lee received orders to...

Andrew Johnson      The practice of embalming only came into its own at the time of the American Civil War.   Thomas Holmes was a...

 Martha Washington Sexual relations between masters and slave women were common during the eighteenth century and later.  Famed S...

     Viewers of the political thriller House of Cards will probably not be surprised to learn that political intrigue is as old as the R...

George Washington had a life-long interest in exotic animals, at one time or another in his lifetime commenting on seeing a “Lyoness”, a “...

     Do ghosts from the American Civil War still walk amongst us, or are reported spectral visions and unearthly things that go bump in ...

"Know, whoever you may be who may chance to set foot in this land, that it contains more gold and silver than there is iron is Biscay...

General Gordon The Seychelles are a group of islands and islets in the Indian Ocean . Praslin Island , the second largest of the g...

Rippon Lodge      Richard Blackburn (1705-1757), although little noted in national history, stands out as a kind of “representativ...

Civil War Locomotive       Since the dawn of history, military strategy had been dominated by logistics.  According to an old s...