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