Skip to main content

Featured Articles

Recent rehabilitation of this important site at the Gettysburg battlefield provides a much improved experience for visitors.

A Chinatown cook's fight to re-enter the U.S. in 1895 went up to the Supreme Court, which upheld his claim to birthright citizenship and guaranteed it for all through the 14th Amendment. 

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.

Some delegates at the Constitutional Convention wanted a strong executive, while others feared the American president might become a king.

In the Age of Discovery, maps held closely guarded secrets for the kings, adventurers, and merchants who first acquired them.

Classic Essays from Our Archives

“The Miraculous Care Of Providence” | February/March 1982, Vol 33, No 2

By James Thomas Flexner

George Washington’s Narrow Escapes

washington princeton

1619: The Year That Shaped America  | Winter 2019, Vol 64, No 1

By James Horn

Four hundred years ago this year, two momentous events happened in Britain’s fledgling colony in Virginia: the New World’s first democratic assembly convened, and an English privateer brought kidnapped Africans to sell as slaves. Such were the conflicted origins of modern America.

jamestown

The Treasure From The Carpentry Shop | December 1979, Vol 31, No 1

By David McCullough

THE EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINAL DRAWINGS OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

bridge drawing

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

Did Castro Okay the Kennedy Assassination? | Winter 2009, Vol 58, No 6

By Gus Russo

Incriminating new evidence has come to light in KGB files and the authors' interviews of former Cuban intelligence officers which indicates that Fidel Castro probably knew in advance of Oswald's intent to kill JFK.

jfk

Growing Up Colored | Summer 2012, Summer 2025, Vol 62, No 2

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The noted writer and educator tells of his boyhood in the West Virginia town of Piedmont, where African Americans were second-class citizens, but family pride ran deep.

Henry Louis Gates and family

    Today in History

  • First Nixon-Kennedy debate

    Chicago hosts the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

  • Battle of the Meuse-Argonne begins

    The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the final Allied offensive of World War I, begins in the Argonne Forest in northern France. It would become the bloodiest battle in American history.

    More »

  • George Gershwin born

    American composer and pianist George Gershwin is born as Jacob Gershowitz in Brooklyn, New York.

SUPPORT THIS WEBSITE BY BUYING A NEW EBOOK!