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It was a bold proposition for thirteen poorly organized colonies to go to war against what was then the world’s greatest economic and military power. Without the vast wealth of the British and without a professionally trained military, the colonists faced a daunting task in fighting the Crown for their independence. When George Washington was given command of the Continental Army, he was horrified by the lack of discipline he found. “Uncertainty weighs on me when all around me are asleep. No one knows the predicament we are in,” Washington noted privately. While twenty-first-century Americans may like to think that...

Today’s Democratic Party traces its history to 1828, making it the oldest existing political party in the country. The party has its origins in the First Party System, which consisted of the Federalists and Republicans. By the 1810s, the Republicans had begun calling themselves the Democratic-Republicans. Going into the 1820s, the Democratic-Republicans were the only party in the United States, as the Federalists effectively ceased to exist after about 1815.The presidential election of 1824 was one of the most contentious in American history and led to the formation of the modern Democratic Party. Four candidates from the Democratic-Republican Party ran...

Accounts of warfare are often strictly accounts of the heroism of men, which is understandable, as most stories of wartime heroism tend to take a narrow view and focus only on combat, a role from which women were excluded until relatively recently in history. But women have always served in times of war, including in the American Revolution. Although records of the Revolution typically focus on accounts of battlefield bravery or the patriotic statesmen who wrote the country’s founding documents.  The actions of Revolutionary-era women, though often uncelebrated, were no less heroic. Thousands of women displayed a quiet bravery by...

Long before the Civil War ravaged the United States, the country was already deeply divided over the issue of slavery. The controversy existed from the country’s inception, threaded through the wording of the Constitution, even if it was never explicitly stated. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote much of the Declaration of Independence, owned hundreds of slaves throughout his life, only a handful of whom were freed before his death. There is an obvious and painful paradox in the fact that the man who wrote “all men are created equal” was also a man whose wealth depended on the labor of enslaved humans....

In the aftermath of the French and Indian War, which ended in 1763, thousands of British soldiers were stationed throughout the American colonies. At the time, the colonists saw them as protectors, a defense against potential threats from both the French and Native Americans. However, in the ensuing years, as tensions between the British and their American colonies worsened, the British troops were increasingly seen as an occupying force. In Boston, where nearly one-tenth of the city’s population were British soldiers, relations between Bostonians and the British military were particularly fractious.On a snowy night in March of 1770, a group...