The War of 1812 is an under-known conflict in United States history. It’s not a war that many Americans think about or dwell upon. And it was not a war that the United States can claim it clearly won. Nicholas Guyatt, a Professor of North American...
What was it like to keep a pet in Early America? How did early Americans acquire pets? What kinds of animals did early Americans keep as pets? Ingrid Tague, a Professor of History at the University of Denver and the author of Animal Companions: Pets...
Have you ever had one of those really interesting conversations where the person was so fascinating that you wished the conversation didn’t have to end? Flora Fraser joins us for one of those conversations. We’ll talk about biography, and in doing...
Who do we count as family? If a relative was born in a foreign place and one of their parents was of a different race? Would they count as family? Eighteenth-century Britons asked themselves these questions. As we might suspect, their answers varied...
Biography. Since the earliest days of the United States, and even before the thirteen colonies came together to forge a nation, Americans have been interested in biography. But why? What is it about the lives of others that makes the past so...
Over the course of his long life, Benjamin Franklin traveled to and lived in London on two different occasions. The first time he went as a teenager. The second, as a man and colonial agent. All told he spent nearly 18 years living in the heart of...
What about the British Redcoats? When we discuss the military history of the American War for Independence, we tend to focus on specific battles or details about the men who served in George Washington’s Continental Army. Rarely do we take the...
Historians often portray the American Revolution as an orderly, if violent, event that moved from British colonists’ high-minded ideas about freedom to American independence from Great Britain and the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. But...
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the Second Continental Congress resolve “that these United Colonies are, and of right out to be, free and independent States…” The Second Continental Congress adopted Lee’s motion and on June...
Pirates are alive and well in our popular culture. Thanks to movies like Pirates of the Caribbean and television shows like Black Sails, we see pirates as peg-legged, eye-patch wearing, rum-drinking men. But are these representations accurate? What...