By 1861, there were 250,000 free people of color living in the American South. They were signs of contradiction amidst a slave society built upon the concept of white supremacy in a racial hierarchy.

In early December, 1777, Joseph Plumb Martin and his comrades in the Continental Army sat down to feast upon a - Our Hero: Rhode Island Quaker ironworker turned Major General and logistician - Thanksg

In 1609 a free man of African and European ancestry, Juan Rodriguez, left the Dutch ship Jonge Tobias anchored off Manhattan Island with eighty hatchets and some knives to set himself up in trading

Hello, when Samuel Townsend died in 1856 near Huntsville, Alabama, he was the eras equivalent of a multimillionaire. He had thousands of acres of cotton-land, and hundreds of enslaved people who plan

You might as well admit it; youve always wondered how you would do in a vicious struggle for power. Those thoughts might be prompted by an over-long project planning meeting for a new software produc

Some 5,000 years ago nomadic peoples of central Asia settled on the Iranian plateau. Their descendants would be the nucleus of an extraordinary empire that reached north to the lands of their ancestor

This is the second and final part of my conversation with Olivier Zunz about his new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, The Man Who Understood Democracy, just published by Princeton University Press.

In 1835 a young French author on the verge of publishing his first book wrote the best thing that can happen to me is if no one read my book, and I have not yet lost hope that this happiness will be

For most of human history, the wealthy of any given society have been those who owned land. Therefore to change concepts of property ownership has been to change concepts of society itself. - In her n

RichardCohenbeginshisnewbookMakingHistory:TheStorytellers Who Shaped the Pastwithtwoparticularlyappropriate epigrams. First, from thehistorianE.H.Carr:Beforeyoustudyhistory,study