Civics Education
Kit Carson: Frontier Fame, War, and the Navajo Long Walk
Kit Carson spent decades building one of the most celebrated reputations on the American frontier before commanding the 1863–64 campaign that helped compel thousands of Navajo people to surrender and leave their homeland.
Read MoreNat Turner and the Southampton Rebellion of 1831
A Southampton County preacher reads scripture and sky over two nights in August 1831 and sets off the deadliest slave revolt in American history — prompting a major legal crackdown on enslaved and free Black Virginians.
Read MoreMary Ellen Pleasant: Fortune, Freedom, and a Fight for Equal Rights
How Mary Ellen Pleasant built a Gold Rush fortune, backed abolitionist causes, and fought racial exclusion in California’s courts.
Read MoreLuzena Stanley Wilson: Rebuilding a Life in Gold Rush California
How a Missouri farmwife turned a biscuit, a hotel, and a hard-won legal right into a life that survived flood, fire, and abandonment — and kept rebuilding anyway.
Read MoreMissouri Statehood and the Missouri Compromise of 1820
On August 10, 1821, Missouri became the 24th state. Getting there required one of the most consequential — and fragile — political bargains in American history.
Read MoreJames Marshall and John Sutter: The Discovery That Changed America
How a debt-ridden Missouri frontiersman’s desperate gamble opened a 900-mile highway to the American Southwest and helped knit two nations together through commerce.
Read MoreAmerica’s First Income Tax: A Civil War Turning Point
Signed into law on August 5, 1861, America’s first federal income tax was enacted as part of Congress’s effort to finance the Civil War and established an important precedent in American fiscal history.
Read MoreThe Monroe Doctrine: How a Presidential Message Shaped the Western Hemisphere
From merchants and missionaries to gold seekers and pioneer families, one western Missouri town stood at the center of a continental migration that would reshape a nation.
Read MoreIndependence, Missouri: The Jumping-Off Point to the West
From merchants and missionaries to gold seekers and pioneer families, one western Missouri town stood at the center of a continental migration that would reshape a nation.
Read MoreJames K. Polk and the Expansion of the United States
James K. Polk served as the 11th president of the United States from 1845 to 1849.
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