Quilts
On the American frontier, quilt making was both a necessity and an art. The pioneer women who made quilts used their creativity and imagination while assuring that their families would…
Squaredancing
“Do-si-do!” Swing your partner!” “Promenade!” The caller sings out instructions. The fiddler plays a lively tune. Women in swirling skirts and men in bright Western shirts link hands and move…
The Constitutional Convention
On May 25, 1787, representatives of 12 American states met at Philadelphia. Only five years earlier, these states had defeated the British and had become independent. They then banded together…
John James Audubon
In long hair and buckskin clothes, John James Audubon looked like other men on the American frontier in the early 1800s. But Audubon had a unique occupation. His work was…
Barbara Jordan
“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, and it is total,” Congresswoman Barbara Jordan told a national television audience on July 25, 1974. She was not about…
Colonial Punishments
Flirting in public. Shaving on Sunday. Complaining that a minister’s sermon was boring. Today, all of those acts sound harmless. But they were crimes in colonial America, and those who…
1735
By 1735, Britain had established 13 thriving colonies on the eastern coast of North America. But the colonists were chafing under British rule—they wanted more freedom. In August, that desire…
1718
In this year, two settlements were founded that would later become important U.S. cities. The year also saw the death of Blackbeard, a notorious pirate who had terrorized ships off…
The Dutch in America
The Dutch – people from the Netherlands – came to America in two waves. The first wave came at the very beginning of the period of European settlement. These Dutch…
The Founding of St. Augustine
Some Americans believe that the first permanent European settlement in the present-day United States was the English village at Jamestown, Virginia. But 42 years before the founding of Jamestown, the…
Pocahontas
In 1608, Captain John Smith, one of the leaders of the English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, was captured by Indians. According to a book Smith wrote in later years,…
the Founding of Harvard College
Just six years after the Puritans founded Massachusetts Bay Colony, they decided to start a “schoale or colledge” near Boston. When John Harvard, a clergyman dying of tuberculosis, wrote a…
Clara Barton
She was called the “angel of the battlefield” by those who saw her caring for wounded and dying soldiers during the Civil War. Her role there made her a national…
Stonewall Jackson
Stonewall Jackson died two years before the end of the Civil War, but he is remembered as one of the greatest commanders. He was Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man, famous…
Frederick Douglass
In 1841, at an antislavery meeting in Massachusetts, a tall young African-American named Frederick Douglass stood up to speak. He knew about slavery, for he had been born a slave…