This text about the passing of the Connecticut Compromise comes from our book, From Sea to Shining Sea.

This text about the ratification of the 14th Amendment comes from our book, The American Venture.

This text about the signing of the Declaration of Independence comes from our book, From Sea to Shining Sea.

This text about Custer's Last Stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn comes from our book, Lands of Hope and Promise.

This text about the Battle of Bunker Hill comes from our book, From Sea to Shining Sea.

This text comes from our book, The American Venture. By war, the former English colonies of North America had won their independence. But what they had obtained by war, they could lose in peace—if they found no effective means of governing themselves. Revolutions often follow a predictable path in history. First, revolutionaries establish a new government; then follows a period of confusion, which ends in dictatorship. Happily, the American Revolution did not follow this pat

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II. While the British and the Americans fought the Germans in Italy, their air forces had been carrying out bombing raids on Germany itself. But Allied air strikes, though very destructive to both property and human life, did not bring about the results Churchill and Roosevelt had desired. Air raids did not at first seriously hurt Germany’s war production, nor did they break the German spirit. The growing number of civ

This text about the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 comes from our book, Lands of Hope and Promise.

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II. Italia irredenta—“unredeemed Italy”—was the name Italian nationalists gave to those lands where Italians lived but that as yet were not part of Italy. The most important of these territories were Trentino in the Alps, the Italian Tyrol, and Trieste, a port city northeast of Italy—all of which, in the early 1900s, were under Austrian rule. That Austria still held these territories was a source of great annoyance to

This text comes from our book, The American Venture. For over 50 years following Cabot’s last voyage, England ignored the New World. What is called the Reformation was dividing Europe into hostile religious camps, Catholic and Protestant, and England was soon drawn into the fray. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catharine of Aragon (daughter to Fernando and Isabel), King Henry VIII (Henry VII’s son) proclaimed the Church of England independent of the pap

This text comes from our book, From Sea to Shining Sea. Benedict Arnold, a merchant of New Haven, Connecticut, wanted to do great things for the colonial cause and his own reputation. But by the end of the Revolution, he did grave harm to the colonials, and his return to England as a Tory has earned him forever the name of traitor and turncoat. It all began when Arnold, in search of glory, set his sights on the strongest British fort in North America—Fort Ticonderoga, on the

This text comes from our book, The American Venture. Despite the fervor of the “War Hawks” (as those who had pushed for war with Great Britain were called), the American army and navy were not prepared for war. Great Britain’s navy had more than 100 ships; the United States, only five frigates. Great Britain’s army was also much larger than America’s and better trained. In America’s favor, however, Great Britain’s army and navy were both engaged in war with Napoleon in Europe

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II . Like all Europeans, Catholics in the 1840s were divided on how to meet the challenges of their time. The Church in Western Europe was in many ways still in a state of shock because of the French Revolution and its aftermath. It was hard for Catholics, bishops and popes included, to understand fully all that had happened. Thus, when they considered what needed to be done to bring Europe back to the Faith, Catholics

This text comes from our book, The American Venture . The 1950s was a time when European colonies in Africa and Asia were loosening themselves from their European masters to form their own independent states. While in some places this was done peacefully, insurgent violence beset other regions—such as French Indochina in East Asia, where, in 1954, Communist Vietnamese rebels defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Winning its independence, Vietnam was divided into two states

This text comes from our book, Lands of Hope and Promise . It took over 400 vessels to ferry the immense Army of the Potomac, 121,500 strong, from its base near Washington to Fort Monroe. McClellan’s army reached Fort Monroe in mid-March and began its slow advance up the York Peninsula. On April 5, McClellan’s advanced guard reached Yorktown where, some 80 years earlier, Cornwallis had surrendered to Washington. Joe Johnston’s Confederates lay between the Army of the Potomac

This text comes from our book, Lands of Hope and Promise . The American army and navy in the Pacific were making steady advances against the Japanese while German resistance crumbled in Europe. From the island of Saipan, American bombing raids pounded Japanese cities to dust, progressively destroying Japan’s industrial capability to make war, as well as killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians—men, women and children. The U.S. firebombing of Tokyo laid waste to 56 squa

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II . On a summer’s day in August 1819, tens of thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Fields, near Manchester, in Lancashire County, England. They had come, summoned by radical leaders, to hear the reformer Henry Hunt give a speech on the causes he stood for—yearly elections for members of Parliament, universal manhood suffrage, and voting by secret ballot. Great throngs of people had begun to arrive a little befo

In a city in Holland called Leyden lived a colony of Englishmen. These English men and women had come to live in Holland for only one reason: they wanted the freedom to practice their religion without interference from the government or anyone else.

This text comes from our book, The American Venture . Such swift work was thought necessary, especially because, since the election in November, the federal government had done nothing about the depression. For three months, Hoover initiated no new policies, though he tried to get Roosevelt to endorse measures which made the New Deal much more like the old deal that had lost Hoover the election. With government doing nothing, panicky investors withdrew their savings from bank

This text comes from our book, The American Venture . Theodore Roosevelt was a man of strong passions and commitments—to justice, for instance, and American glory and power. Yet, Roosevelt shared with other progressives of his time another passion—the conservation of regions of great natural beauty and utility. At the turn of the century, ranchers and timber companies were looting federal public lands, particularly in the West, of their rich harvest of wood. Roosevelt believe