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In May 1765, Patrick Henry, who would become one of the American Revolution's greatest ideological leaders, delivered a speech to the Virginia House of Burgesses denouncing the new British Stamp Act
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On February 6, 1778, the government of France recognized the United States of America and signed a treaty of alliance with the young republic against Great Britain. The roots of this alliance extended back to the French and Indian War (1754–1763).
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The 1783 Treaty of Paris formally ended the American Revolutionary War.
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Washington assumed the office of president on April 30, 1789, acutely aware that everything he did established a precedent (for example, that the president has the power to select and nominate executive officers and the power to remove them). He hoped to
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The institution of slavery in the United States changed dramatically with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Plantations in the South had relied on slave labor throughout the 18th century to grow tobacco, rice, and sugarcane, as well as cotton.
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On April 30, 1803, one of the greatest real estate deals in history took place. The United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France. The territory included 828,000 square miles, for which the United States paid $15 million—less than three cent
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By the 1820s, investment companies were also connecting lakes and rivers with a series of manmade canals that expanded the country's navigable waterways.
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George Catlin was a self-taught portrait painter from Philadelphia. Following an encounter with a delegation of Indians passing through Philadelphia on their way to Washington, D.C., in the late 1820s, Catlin decided to journey to the American West.
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In December 1833, more than 60 abolitionists met in Philadelphia and founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Devoted to immediate and uncompensated emancipation for African-American slaves, the members of the society drafted the following manifesto to
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African American army cook working over an open fire at City Point, Virginia, during the siege of Petersburg in the Civil War.
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. In 1841, Catlin published a two-volume collection entitled Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians. This publication included not only his portraits, but also the written record of his experiences in the Ame
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In the spring of 1846 the United States and Mexico entered into an armed conflict that would last two years, ending in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the treaty, Mexico was forced to cede over half of its territory, approximately half a million squar
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The Mexican-American War can be considered a midpoint, technologically and organizationally speaking, between the traditional, restricted hostilities of the early republic and the total, industrialized conflict of the Civil War. While some new technologie
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Typical stage of the Concord type used by express companies on the Overland Trails, ca. 1869. Soldiers keep a lookout from the top, as stagecoach robberies were common.
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As the above picture reveals, white soldiers were not the only participants in the American Civil War. Although it is true that racist attitudes kept African Americans from enlisting to fight in the early years of the conflict, both the Union Army and the
