The Great American History Blog

Alternate history is fictional history, in which an author changes some aspect of the past and sees how this change would have impacted ...

     Norbert Ealy, was a talented young man with a gift for words, and should have been one of Del Boca’s most eligible bachelors.  Unfo...

The Spaniards conquered Peru over the course of several decades in an atmosphere of civil war and chaos.  The Incas had just concluded a...

One of the enduring legends of Peru is the lost city of Paititi .  In 1533, fleeing the Spanish conquerors, some forty thousand refugees ...

     On July 21, 1861, at a crucial moment during the First Battle of Manassas, a courier came riding into Confederate lines with a mes...

Custer's Last Stand      Custer's Seventh Cavalry had its secrets.  The thrice married Mrs. Nash joined Custer’s Sev...

Holly Springs, Mississippi From 1865 to 1875 the state of Mississippi underwent “Reconstruction”, a plan to reintegrate the South in...

I Had Rather Die: Rape in the Civil War By Kim Murphy This is a very gritty book that will forever change your view of the Civ...

Two historically priceless documents, the wills of George and Martha Washington are housed in the Fairfax County Courthouse in Fairfax, ...

Isaiah Dorman In his 1984 book, Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn , Evan S. Connell talks at length about I...

How Sherlock Holmes Lived During the Victorian era, it was quite easy to tell a man’s social position by his style of dress.  Clas...

What Sherlock Holmes Drank      The English have always had a fondness for eccentrics.  Prime Minister William Gladstone, who pres...

    Presidential Railway Car in Alexandria, Virginia       In the spring of 1865, a private railroad car was constructed for Pres...

     Several hundred Confederate dead were buried at the new national cemetery at Arlington by the end of the war in April 1865. Some ...

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...