What if a king made bad laws; laws so unnatural that a country broke them by declaring its freedom? He threw his arms in the air. Now you are spouting nonsense. Two slaves running away from their...

Do you think I can't write this and get someone - a drunk married to a fool - to swear to it? Do you think I can't set myself up as a historian? As a storyteller? Do you think I can't write a history...

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd...

Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi - War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace,...

At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion.

elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of...

Machiavelli's The Prince and Plutarch's Lives

While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new...

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old. Probably

When Grant made Edward S. Salomon governor of the Washington Territory, it was the first time an American Jew had occupied a gubernatorial post. When Salomon proved corrupt, Grant handled his case...

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the...

In the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier...

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired — but that's not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a...

Emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past...

When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four...

More often than not, it was the hand of the needy and uncertain that extended the olive branch. History had shown the truth of that over and over again.

The Levantine political idea, which grew naturally among the communities of the eastern Mediterranean, was an original way of dealing with diverse tribal, village, and sectarian identities, and it...

Inés Suárez (1507–1580), a Spanish woman born in Plasencia, journeyed to the New World in 1537 and took part in the conquest of Chile and the founding of Santiago. She wielded great political...

Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to...

This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett's Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3,...

Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on...

The rural Vietnamese was not regarded simply as a pawn in a power struggle but as the active element in the thrust. He was the thrust.

The hands of Hitler were filthy, but those of the United States were not clean. Our government had accepted, was still accepting, the subordination of black people in what we claimed was a democratic...

By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the "Associates" controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking...

Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them...

True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps—one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.

After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.

At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde,...

In the late 1300s, decades after the expulsion of the Jews from England, Geoffrey Chaucer, one of England's earliest poets, included Hugh's story in his Canterbury Tales. The cathedral in Lincoln...

It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip's War, with over half the slaves coming from Plymouth Colony alone. By the end of the war, Mount Hope,...