“People are complicated” is a truism that holds in the past and the present. Seldom do we find a person where all of their actions and thoughts are black and white. What we see instead is that people are colorful because they aren’t just one thing...
On April 19, 1775, the thirteen colonies found themselves at war with Great Britain. British military forces ranked among the most powerful in the world. By contrast, the colonies had forces of militiamen–civilian volunteers– because the Continental...
Nathaniel Bowditch worked as a navigator, mathematician, astronomer, and business innovator. Over the course of his lifetime, his fellow Americans hailed him as the “American Sir Isaac Newton.” Tamara Thornton, a professor of history at the...
How did the smallest colony and smallest state in the union became the largest American participant in the slave trade? Christy Clark-Pujara, an Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...
When we think of Native Americans, many of us think of inland dwellers. People adept at navigating forests and rivers and the skilled hunters and horsemen who lived and hunted on the American Plains. But did you know that Native Americans were...
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...
In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue as part of the great European quest to find new routes and shortcuts to the spice islands and territories of Asia. Spain and Portugal led this quest during the 15th and 16th centuries and their...