America: Our Defining Hours

How important was George Washington’s network of spies to winning the American Revolution? It’s hard to imagine that the fate of the American cause would rest so heavily in the hands of a tailor, an enslaved double agent—or a judge’s wife who sent surreptitious signals on her ...read more

On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that as of January 1, 1863, all enslaved people in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” ...read more

There was a time when traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant riding for months in a horse-drawn wagon or stagecoach, or sailing southward to Panama and then crossing the Isthmus to board another ship for a journey up the other coast. But that all changed on May 10, ...read more

The six-month encampment of General George Washington’s Continental Army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-1778 was a major turning point in the American Revolutionary War. While conditions were notoriously cold and harsh and provisions were in short supply, it was at the ...read more

Since the late 1930s, conventional wisdom has held that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” helped bring about the end of the Great Depression. The series of social and government spending programs did get millions of Americans back to work on hundreds of public ...read more

The causes of the Great Depression were numerous, and after the stock market crash of 1929, a number of complex factors helped to create the conditions necessary for the longest and deepest economic downturn in modern history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to take ...read more

Frederick Douglass sits in the pantheon of Black history figures: Born into slavery, he made a daring escape north, wrote best-selling autobiographies and went on to become one of the nation’s most powerful voices against human bondage. He stands as the most influential civil and ...read more

1. The dam’s name was a source of controversy. Surveyors originally recommended the dam be constructed at Boulder Canyon, leading the initiative to be called the Boulder Canyon Dam Project. Even when Black Canyon later was deemed a better location for the new structure, it ...read more

1. His family came to America to escape religious persecution. In 1713, Daniel Boone’s father, a weaver and blacksmith, journeyed from his hometown of Bradninch, England, to the colony of Pennsylvania, established by William Penn in 1681 as a haven for religious tolerance. Like ...read more

Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s guns fell silent, the racial legacies of slavery and Reconstruction continued to reverberate loudly throughout Alabama in 1965. On March 7, 1965, when then-25-year-old activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus ...read more

1. Tecumseh lost three close family members to frontier violence. Born in 1768 in present-day Ohio, Tecumseh lived during an era of near-constant conflict between his Shawnee tribe and white frontiersmen. At age 6, Lord Dunmore’s War broke out after a series of violent incidents, ...read more

Paul Revere is best known as the Boston silversmith immortalized in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem describing the Patriot's midnight ride to warn about a British attack. But that 1775 ride (which wasn't exactly as Longfellow described) is only one chapter in Revere's role in ...read more

1. The 'tea partiers' were not protesting a tax hike, but a corporate tax break. The protestors who caffeinated Boston Harbor were railing against the Tea Act, which the British government enacted in the spring of 1773. Rather than inflicting new levies, however, the legislation ...read more

1. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on July 4, 1776. On July 1, 1776, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, and on the following day 12 of the 13 colonies voted in favor of Richard Henry Lee’s motion for independence. The delegates then spent the next ...read more

1. Twenty-three sets of brothers died aboard USS Arizona. There were 37 confirmed pairs or trios of brothers assigned to USS Arizona on December 7, 1941. Of these 77 men, 62 were killed, and 23 sets of brothers died. Only one full set of brothers, Kenneth and Russell Warriner, ...read more

After a yellow fever epidemic swept through Memphis, Tennessee in 1878, the newly created National Board of Health sent engineer and Civil War veteran George A. Waring Jr. to design and implement a better sewage drainage system for the city. His success there made Waring’s ...read more

Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a peace activist and a leader of the settlement house movement in America. As one of the most distinguished of the first generation of college-educated women, she rejected marriage and motherhood in favor of a lifetime commitment to the poor and ...read more