Was the early United States a “Christian nation?” Did most of its citizenry accept God and the Bible as the moral authority that bound them together as one nation? Scholars have taken a binary stance on these questions. Some argue that early America...
La Presidente? The Presidentess? The First Lady of the Land? The Second Article of the United States Constitution defines the Executive Branch of the government, the powers it has, and the role of the chief executive, the President of the United...
Hamilton the Musical hit Broadway in August 2015 and since that time people all around the world have been learning about a man named Alexander Hamilton. Or, at least they’ve been learning about the musical’s character Alexander Hamilton. But who...
What kind of character should Americans have? Is it possible to create a shared sense of national character and identity that all Americans can subscribe to? Americans grappled with many questions about what it meant to be an American and a citizen...
Our present-day American culture is obsessed with sports. To cite just two pieces of evidence of this, on average, more than 67,000 fans attend each National Football League game and more than 30,000 fans attend each Major League Baseball game. This...
The Confederation period is one of the most neglected aspects of United States History. And yet, it’s a very important period. Between 1781 and 1789, the Confederation Congress established by the Articles of Confederation had to deal with war...
Did you know that maps have social lives? Maps facilitate a lot of different social and political relationships between people and nations. And they did a lot of this work for Americans throughout the early American past. Martin Brückner, a...
What did it mean to be a person and to also be a commodity in early America? Daina Ramey Berry, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin and author of The Price For Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from...
George Washington was an accomplished man. He served as a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, first President of the United States, and on top of all that he was also a savvy...
The American Revolution inspired revolutions in France, the Caribbean, and Latin and South America between the late 18th and mid-19th centuries. Naturally, Spanish and Portuguese American revolutionaries turned to the United States for assistance...