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Featured Essays

Some writers ignore a mountain of evidence that is contrary to their theories about the telephone's development.

Congress forbade living persons from appearing on paper currency in 1866, after an unpopular Treasury Department official put himself on the five-cent note.

The extravaganza celebrating the nation’s first century was the greatest cultural event of America’s Gilded Age.

At the nation’s pivotal moment — the Civil War — two seventeenth-century vessels kept sailing through the American mind: the Mayflower and the slaver White Lion. Their wakes still cut our waters.

America 250!

John Dickinson: Forgotten Founder | Fall 2025, Vol 70, No 4

By Jane E. Calvert

Dickinson played a pivotal role in our Nation’s founding, from the Stamp Act to ratifying the Constitution, but his contributions are largely forgotten by history.

dickinson farmer

Why Is the American Revolution So Important? | Spring 2024, Vol 69, No 2

By Jack D. Warren

Our nation is free because, 250 years ago, brave men and women fought a war to establish the independence of the United States and created a system of government to protect the freedom of its citizens.

congress

The Revolution Could Have Started Here | Summer 2024, Vol 69, No 3

By Bob Thompson

At a curious stone tower in Somerville, Massachusetts, panic in 1774 could have sparked a war seven months before Lexington and Concord entered the history books.

boston map

How One Man Launched a Revolution | Spring 2018 , Vol 63, No 1

By Christine Gibson

Thomas Paine's Common Sense helped Americans "decide upon the propriety of separation,” as George Washington said.

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The Shots Heard Round the World | Spring 2025, Vol 70, No 2

By John Ferling

What began as a civil war within the British Empire continued until it became a wider conflict affecting peoples and countries across Europe and North America.

shots heard round the world

Classic Essays from the Archives

Two Intimate Enemies | September 2000, Summer 2025, Vol 51, No 5

By Joseph J. Ellis

When John Adams was elected president, and Thomas Jefferson as vice president, each came to see the other as a traitor. Out of their enmity grew our modern political system.

jefferson adams

Herbert Hoover Describes the Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson | June 1958, Vol 9, No 4

By Herbert Hoover

The great tragedy of the twenty-eighth President as witnessed by his loyal lieutenant, the thirty-first.

woodrow wilson

The Conversion of Harry Truman | November 1991, Vol 42, No 7

By William E. Leuchtenburg

A child of the South's "Lost Cause," Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national government for the first time since Reconstruction. In so doing, he changed the nation forever.

truman civil rights

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