Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
William Henry Harrison
While his brother Tecumseh was assembling the greatest Indian confederation the U.S. would ever confront, the “Prophet” launched a fateful preemptive attack in Indiana Territory.
Editor’s Note: One of the most respected historians of the Civil War and Indian conflicts, Peter Cozzens has written 17 books and is now at work on the third volume of a trilogy about the Indian wars in the American West, the Old Northwest (America’s Heartland), and the Old S Read more >>
Buried here, along with hundreds of congressmen and various Indian chiefs, are Mathew Brady, John Philip Sousa, and J. Edgar Hoover
As the truck bearing two coffins rolled out the main cemetery gate onto Potomac Avenue, the spirit of Richard Bland Lee must have sighed, “It’s about time.” In 1980, after 153 years, the brother of LightHorse Harry and uncle of Robert E. Read more >>
A former British ambassador and noted historian explains why "hard-headed self-possessed Americans go so wild with excitement at election times"
“…largely a matter of booming”
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Our forebears were much given to singing. They sang themselves through revolution with “The Liberty Song” and “Yankee Doodle,” and afterward each struggle of the young nation inspired songsters to extol in music and lyric the virtues of freedom. Read more >>
The tragedy of Black Hawk, who became the eponym of a war he tried to avoid
On July 4, 1838, the people of Fort Madison, in the Iowa Territory, invited an old Sauk war chief named Black Hawk to be guest of honor at their Independence Day celebration. Read more >>
The American system of choosing a President has not worked out badly, far as it may be from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a natural aristocracy
Only Tecumseh came close to uniting the warring tribes, but his British allies and his less visionary people failed him
Five successive Benjamin Harrisons created a private empire of tobacco and trade and a great Virginia plantation