On April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House. He spoke not of recent  victories, or those to come, but to the shape of the peace that would follow. Now that th

At the end of the 19th century, Amsterdam was home to nearly seventy diamond factories, in which were 7,500 steam-powered polishing mills. The workers who cut and polished the diamonds, brought there

It is perhaps the greatest scandal and sea-story of the first half of 19th Century America that nearly everyone has forgotten. It led to a court martial, endless headlines, a fistfight in a meeting of

In late November, 1864, David R. Snelling visited his uncle, who then lived in Baldwin County near Milledgeville, Georgia. As a boy, he had worked in his uncles fields alongside those his uncle ensla

My guest today is Dr. Ben Jones, Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society and the South Dakota State Historian. - Ben Jones served for 23 years in the United States Air Force, attaining

For over a generation the history of the American West has been described by scholars as one of violence, including genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and settler colonialism. While it replaced an older hist

In 1780, captured American naval officer Joshua Barney escaped from prison in Plymouth, made his way to London, and with the help of some English sympathizers to the American Revolution was able to ta

In 1776 a massive British fleet of more than 400 ships carrying tens of thousands of soldiers arrived outside New York Harbor. Many of these soldiers were German, hired from their princes by the Briti

The history of the ancient Near East can seem like staring down a deep, deep well of time, so deep that it gives one vertigo. It stretches back to 3,500 BC: that is, Ill do the math for you, 5,522 ye

At her 80th birthday party Agatha Christie described a conversation she had once overheard about herself. She had been on a train, and there listened to two ladies talking about her, copies of her lat