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Westward Expansion
In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California.
William Cody established his reputation during a celebrated clash with Yellow Hair.
Editor’s Note: Steve Wiegard is the author of ten books, mostly on American history, and he was the longtime senior writer at the San Francisco Chronicle and San Diego Evening Tribune.
From ancestral homes of George Washington to World War II runways, there are many sites in the U.K. where you can encounter American's past.
With five major exploring expeditions west of the Mississippi, John C. Frémont redefined the country — with the help of his wife’s promotional skills.
Editor's Note: Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR's Morning Edition, has recently published
The untrained soldiers who fought at the Alamo believed freedom and the struggle for a better life were worth dying for.
The Alamo
Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as president.
David McCullough’s latest book tells the story of a small group of Revolutionary War veterans and pioneers who set out on an extraordinary 800-mile journey through the wilderness to establish the first settlement in the Ohio Territory.
Completed 150 years ago this month, the railroad's construction was one of the great dramas in American history, and led to a notorious scandal.
While the Civil War raged on battlefields in the East, two armies fought a very different kind of war in the West. The men working for two corporations that were said to be the wealthiest in America struggled to see who could finish a greater part of the transcontinental railroad before the two
President James K. Polk expanded U.S. territory by a third by war-making and shrewd negotiating.
IN FEBRUARY 28, 1848, President James K. Polk received a visit from Ambrose Sevier of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bearing bad news.
Members of the Maryland Forces guard the memories of the dramatic history at Fort Frederick, the best-preserved fort from the former English colonies in America.
As I drove through the Maryland woods to
A 62-year-long quest for statehood ended on January 6, 1912.
On January 6, 1912, New Mexico became a state, followed 39 days later by Arizona. A 62-year-long quest for statehood—the longest in U.S. history—had finally ended.
A Great Lakes Indian rebellion against the British changed the balance forever between Indians and colonists.
The dead woman was one of the lowly Indian slaves known as Panis. Near Detroit in August 1762, she had helped another Pani to murder their master, a British trader.
Two centuries after his death, explorer Meriwether Lewis finally gets a funeral and well-deserved honors.
Two hundreds years ago, Meriwether Lewis, the leader of one of America’s most important expeditions, met an ignoble end at an obscure inn near Hohenwald, Tennessee. Two years earlier, the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s triumphant return to St.
They created towns and became the center of Western life, enabling wheat, cattle, and minerals to flow out of the West.
Half a century after engines touched pilot to pilot at Promontory, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railroad, the imprint of the Iron Road was nearly everywhere in the American West. Some enthusiastic real-estate promoters and railway officials even claimed that the railroads invented the West—or at least the national image of the West.
A junior Army officer, acting on secret orders from the president, bluffed a far stronger Mexican force into conceding North America's westernmost province to the United States.
Frémont was wi
Although it ran only briefly 150 years ago, the Pony Express still defines our understanding of the Old West.
Shortly before last Christmas, a prominent New York auction house put up for bid a collection of 63 postmarked envelopes and stamps that the daring riders of the Pony Express had carried 150 years ago. Experts estimated that the rare collection, owned by Thurston Twigg-Smith, an 88-year-old philanthropist and former publisher of the Honolulu Advertiser, might net $2.5 million. It drew $4 million.
Fate brought Custer and Sitting Bull together one bloody June evening at the Little Bighorn—and marked the end of the Wild West.
250 years ago, Major Robert Rogers and his rangers launched a daring wilderness raid against an enemy village, but paid a steep price.
A dozen miles north of the British fort of Crown Point on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, amid the buttonbush, bulrush, and cattail wetlands that crowded Otter Creek’s delta, Major Robert Rogers glassed down the lake for the lateen sails of a patrolling enemy French sloop or schooner. Pulled into hiding within the marsh lay 17 whaleboats, each bearing eight oars and provisions for a month. It was Saturday, September 15, 1759, in the midst of the French and Indian War, the titanic struggle between the French and British empires for dominion over North America.
Tempers flare and violence reigns in the pre–Civil War battleground of Kansas.
On January 25, 1859, a small wagon expedition of three whites and 13 blacks stole away from Lawrence, Kansas, on the first leg of a journey that would take the African Americans to the free state of Iowa, far from Kansas and the ever-present threat of kidnapping by slave traders.
Florence, near present-day Omaha, August 1856
Where two lines raced to drive the last spike In the transcontinental track
From its first boom during America’s biggest gold rush to its current gamble on gambling, Deadwood, South Dakota, has managed to keep itself very much alive.
Long before it became a state, Hawaii enchanted Americans with a vision of tropical ease, languid music, and a steady throb of sensuality. That life disappeared on December 7, 1941, but vivid traces of it remain.
Americans have always envisioned a west. When they won independence from England in 1783, the west lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains, a west celebrated in the adventures of Daniel Boone. Then, people began to thread through the Cumberland Gap to make new homes there.
The explorers who set out 200 years ago were in danger for three years. Their legacy was in danger for decade after decade, and it was Meriwether Lewis who almost killed it.
Seeking the soul of America’s first superhighway
In the Aleutian Islands, you can explore a landscape of violent beauty, discover the traces of an all-but-forgotten war, and (just possibly) catch a $100,000 fish.
In the spring of 1990, I traveled up the Columbia River aboard a small vessel named Sea Lion on a trip which the cruise company called “In the Wake of Lewis and Clark.” Along the way, probably in a local museum, I noticed a sign bearing