Massachusetts: Did you mean...?

The US presidential election of 1796 was the first contested presidential election in the history of the United States. John Adams, the candidate of the Federalist Party, won the presidency, defeating his rival, Thomas Jefferson, candidate...

The US presidential election of 1789 was the first presidential election to take place after the ratification of the United States Constitution. Held on 4 February 1789, it resulted in the unanimous election of George Washington (l. 1732-1799...

The Webster-Hayne debate was a series of back-and-forth speeches between Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina in January 1830. What started as a debate over the sale of western lands blossomed...

Slavery in Colonial America, defined as white English settlers enslaving Africans, began in 1640 in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia but had already been embraced as policy prior to that date with the enslavement and deportation of Native...

"Give me liberty or give me death!” is the closing line from a speech made by Patrick Henry to the Second Virginia Convention on 23 March 1775, in which he argued that war with Britain was inevitable and a militia should be raised to defend...

On the eve of the American Revolution (1765-1789), the Thirteen Colonies had a population of roughly 2.1 million people. Around 500,000 of these were African Americans, of whom approximately 450,000 were enslaved. Comprising such a large...

The American invasion of Quebec (September 1775-June 1776) was a military campaign undertaken during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Hoping to induce the Province of Quebec to join the rebellion, the Second Continental Congress...

Portrait of Thomas Hutchinson, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the leadup to the American Revolution. Painting by Edward Truman, 1741. Massachusetts Historical Society.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), or the American War of Independence, was a conflict between Great Britain and its 13 North American colonies, who declared independence as the United States of America. Initially a rebellion within...

John Brown (1800-1859) was a militant abolitionist best known for the part he played in the violence of Bleeding Kansas (1854-1859) and his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia) in October 1859. Brown developed an intense...