Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.
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Her owner planned to take her from California to slave-holding Texas, so Biddy Mason went to court. After a dangerous drama, she won her freedom.
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Eighty minutes before Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops stormed ashore at Kota Bharu in Malaysia and fired the first shots of World War II in Asia.
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Many of our first food-safety laws arose after healthy young volunteers became sick when they tried commercial foods containing toxic additives.
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In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.
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The U.S. government managed to hide the magnitude of what happened in Hiroshima until John Hersey’s story appeared in the New Yorker, driving home the truth about America’s new mega-weapon.
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In the spring of 1945, American bombing raids destroyed much of Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities, killing at least 200,000 people, without forcing a surrender.
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When judging the morality of the use of atomic weapons in World War II, observers typically focus on Japanese deaths, while ignoring the far-larger number of non-Japanese casualties.
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Leaders in Tokyo alone controlled when the war would end, but the regime's political structure was so complex that it crippled rational decision-making.
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Enlisting an army of alter egos, Adams used the Boston press to make the case for American independence and to orchestrate a burgeoning rebellion.
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As he later recounted in his memoirs, Frederick Douglass endured daily beatings and forced labor before taking his chances on the road to freedom.
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Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.
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The horrors of the Civil War led to madness and suicide among many soldiers and veterans, but comparisons to modern diagnoses of PTSD are difficult.
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Paul Douglas was 50 years old when he left a career in politics to join the Marines at the outset of World War II, earning Purple Hearts at Peleliu and Okinawa.
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Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington.
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