Chapters

The story of John Riley and the San Patricios (The Saint Patrick Battalion) is one of the most poignant in the annals of the Frontier Partisans. Irish immigrants who joined the U.S. Army during the Mexican War faced discrimination and brutal treatment at the hands of a Protestant officer corps that nursed an ancestral distrust [...]

  From the Los Angeles Times this morning: The early American settlers called it “the starving time,” and accounts of the winter of 1609-1610 were so ghastly, and so morbid, that scholars weren’t sure if the stories were true. George Percy, then president of the English settlement of Jamestown in Virginia, wrote that settlers ate [...]

The quest to find the sources of the Nile River consumed mid-19th Century Britain. It ticked off a whole bunch of cultural and psychological boxes for the Victorians: Adventure in far-flung, exotic places; obsession with geography; the delicious thrill of white men descending into a savage world (with certain carnal possibilities to be hinted at [...]

By Ceili Cornelius  Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by my daughter Ceili, based on an assignment from her 8th grade history class, asking students to decide whether Andrew Jackson deserves to be on the $20 bill. Her conclusions and arguments are her own. I happen to agree with most of them; I [...]