Very few women settled in early Virginia, so in 1619 the Virginia Company shipped over a group of ninety voimg women as wives for its settlers. To obtain a bride the would-be husbands had to pay the Company “120 pounds weight of best tobacco leaf.” The price must have seemed reason­able, for within a very […]

The Treaty of Paris had recognized the United States as an independent nation. But it was not one nation as it is today. In 1783 most Americans felt more loyalty to their own state than to the new United States. They saw themselves first as Virginians or New Yorkers rather than as Americans. The patriotic […]

Gettysburg in Pennsylvania is remembered for two things. The first is the battle that was fought there in July 1863. The second is the Gettysburg address, a speech that Abraham Lincoln made there a few months later. On November 19, 1863, Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to dedicate part of the battlefield as a national war […]

In 1908 Israel Zangwill wrote a play, The Melting Pot. The hero, a refugee from persecution in Czarist Russia, escapes to the United States. In the final scene he speaks with enthusiasm about the mixture of peoples in his new homeland: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe […]

In the spring of 1932 thousands of unemployed ex-servicemen poured into Washington, the nation’s capital. They wanted the government to give them some bonus payments that it owed them from the war years. The newspapers called them the “bonus army.” The men of the bonus army were determined to stay in Washington until the President […]