On October 25, 1760, King George II died and the British crown passed to his young grandson. The first George, the son of the Elector of Hanover and Sophia the granddaughter of Jam...
AN AGE OF CRITICISM Attacks on Abuses in American Life The crisis precipitated by the Progressive uprising was not a sudden and unexpected one. It had been long in preparation. The...
Colonial life, crowded as it was with hard and unremitting toil, left scant leisure for the cultivation of the arts and sciences. There was little money in private purses or public...
The New England Federalists, at the Hartford convention, prophesied that in time the West would dominate the East. "At the adoption of the Constitution," they said, "a certain bala...
James Madison, the father of the federal Constitution, after he had watched for many days the battle royal in the national convention of 1787, exclaimed that the contest was not be...
"The welfare, the happiness, the energy, and the spirit of the men and women who do the daily work in our mines and factories, on our railroads, in our offices and ports of trade,...
THE PROMISE AND THE DIFFICULTIES OF AMERICA The rise of a young republic composed of thirteen states, each governed by officials popularly elected under constitutions drafted by "t...
The tide of migration that set in toward the shores of North America during the early years of the seventeenth century was but one phase in the restless and eternal movement of man...
RESISTANCE AND RETALIATION The Continental Congress When the news of the "intolerable acts" reached America, every one knew what strong medicine Parliament was prepared to administ...
The Personality and Early Career of Roosevelt On September 14, 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office, the presidency passed to a new generation and a leader of a ne...
REPUBLICAN PRINCIPLES AND POLICIES Opposition to Strong Central Government Cherishing especially the agricultural interest, as Jefferson said, the Republicans were in the beginning...
For thirty years after the Civil War the leading political parties, although they engaged in heated presidential campaigns, were not sharply and clearly opposed on many matters of...
It is one of the well-known facts of history that a people loosely united by domestic ties of a political and economic nature, even a people torn by domestic strife, may be welded...
"The irrepressible conflict is about to be visited upon us through the Black Republican nominee and his fanatical, diabolical Republican party," ran an appeal to the voters of Sout...
It has now become a fashion, sanctioned by wide usage and by eminent historians, to speak of America, triumphant over Spain and possessed of new colonies, as entering the twentieth...
The New Economic Age The spirit of criticism and the measures of reform designed to meet it, which characterized the opening years of the twentieth century, were merely the signs o...
At the close of the Civil War, Kansas and Texas were sentinel states on the middle border. Beyond the Rockies, California, Oregon, and Nevada stood guard, the last of them having b...
THE MEN AND MEASURES OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT Friends of the Constitution in Power In the first Congress that assembled after the adoption of the Constitution, there were eleven Senat...
Women in Public Affairs The social legislation enacted in response to the spirit of reform vitally affected women in the home and in industry and was promoted by their organization...
"We shall not send an emigrant beyond the Mississippi in a hundred years," exclaimed Livingston, the principal author of the Louisiana purchase. When he made this astounding declar...
The nationalism of Hamilton was undemocratic. The democracy of Jefferson was, in the beginning, provincial. The historic mission of uniting nationalism and democracy was in the cou...
If a single phrase be chosen to characterize American life during the generation that followed the age of Douglas and Lincoln, it must be "business enterprise"--the tremendous, irr...
The outcome of the Civil War in the South was nothing short of a revolution. The ruling class, the law, and the government of the old order had been subverted. To political chaos w...
If Jefferson could have lived to see the Stars and Stripes planted on the Pacific Coast, the broad empire of Texas added to the planting states, and the valley of the Willamette wa...