In December 1773, the Cape Cod Tea Crisis revealed that the people of “radical” Massachusetts were far from united in their support for the American Revolution. An observation that leads us to wonder: How many Americans supported the Patriot cause...
Did you know that George Washington’s favorite drink was whiskey? Actually, it wasn’t. Washington preferred Madeira, a fortified Portuguese wine from the island of Madeira. Why the false start to today’s exploration of history? Gregory Dowd, a...
We live in an age of information. The internet provides us with 24/7 access to all types of information—news, how-to articles, sports scores, entertainment news, and congressional votes. But what do we do with all of this knowledge? How do we sift...
Historians research the past through historical sources. But what are the materials that tell historians about past peoples, places, and events? Today, James Horn, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation...
Most early Americans practiced chattel slavery: the practice of treating slaves as property that people could buy, sell, trade, and use as they would draught animals or real estate. But, did you know that some early Americans practiced a different...
Located 600 miles from Philadelphia and over 700 miles from Québec City, early Detroit could have been a backwater, a frontier post that Europeans established to protect colonial settlements from Native American attacks. Yet Detroit emerged as a...