Articles

Although the Battle of Gonzales (2 October 1835) is recognized as the first of the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836, hostilities actually began in 1832 with the Anahuac Disturbances and the Battle of Velasco (25-26 June 1832). The Anahuac Disturbances...

It was supposed to be just another masquerade. As daylight turned to dusk on 28 January 1393, servants rushed through the halls of the Hôtel Saint-Pol in Paris, making the final arrangements for what promised to be an evening of fun and revelry...

It began with a bet in 1859 and would end in a burning in 1860, but, for the 110 African men, women, and children who had been illegally smuggled into the United States aboard the Clotilda, the flames that engulfed it were only the beginning...

Colditz Castle in Saxony, Germany, sits high on a precipitous cliff face that towers above a tributary of the river Mulde. First built in the 11th century, the forbidding castle was variously used as a lunatic asylum, a sanatorium for the...

Sam Watkins was only 21 when his home state of Tennessee seceded from the Union in the spring of 1861. Swept away by the patriotic fervor and thirst for adventure that gripped an entire generation of unfortunate young men, Watkins and most...

The 1789 mutiny on the Bounty is an infamous tale of sailors being lured by the easy charms of the South Seas into casting adrift their commander and living out their days as fugitives from the Royal Navy. 'Captain' Bligh, victim of the mutiny...

"What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?" is Frederick Douglass' masterwork of oration, delivered on 5 July 1852 at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. Also sometimes given as "What, to the Slave, is your Fourth of July?", the...

"Outlawed in my own land for having served her with courage," the Marquis de Lafayette wrote to his wife, Adrienne, "I have been forced to flee into enemy territory from France, which I defended with so much love. To the very last minute...

The New Economic Policy (NEP) of Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), leader of Soviet Russia, was the introduction in 1921 of a limited form of capitalism in light industry and agriculture. Contrary to Marxist economic ideas, the NEP was viewed as...

With thousands of square feet of canvas capturing every breath of the trade winds, a 19th-century tea clipper was the absolute pinnacle of sailing evolution. The Cutty Sark was just such a ship, carrying tea and then wool across the far-flung...