This special issue looks at the dramatic and momentous events that occurred 250 years ago this month.
“Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end,” said one minuteman after the fight.
Previously unknown, a map drawn by Lord Percy, the British commander at Lexington, sheds new light on the perilous retreat to Boston 250 years ago this month.
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.
Overshadowed in memory by Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts town of Menotomy saw the most violent and deadly fighting on April 19, 1775.
"Americans are united by their history and by a faith in progress, justice, and freedom," writes President Kennedy
While the American Revolution was still being fought, Mum Bett declared that the new nation’s principle of liberty must extend to her, too. It took 80 years and a far-more-terrible war to confirm the rights that she had demanded.
Even though he had no military training, Lincoln quickly rose to become one of America’s most talented commanders.
We can take pride in our nation, not as we pretend to a commission from God and a sacred destiny, but as we struggle to fulfill our deepest values in an inscrutable world.
The Cuban Missile Crisis as seen from the Kremlin
Abraham Lincoln learned much of what made him a great president — honesty, sincerity, toughness, and humility — from his early reading and from studying the lives of Washington and Franklin.