History Lessons
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy: Nations United by the Great Law of Peace
How distinct nations built a shared system of government, and how that government has continued through colonial rivalry, revolution, and the westward growth of the United States. Each November, an annual commemoration in Canandaigua, New York, marks the continuing treaty relationship between the Six Nations and the United States under a treaty signed in that…
Read MoreTecumseh and Tenskwatawa: Alliance Against U.S. Expansion
In the early 1800s, two Shawnee brothers, one a religious leader and one a diplomat and war leader, drew people from many nations into a movement to stop the sale of Indigenous land.
Read MoreNoah Webster: The Words That Helped Build a Nation
Born on October 16, 1758, Noah Webster believed a new republic needed shared schoolbooks and a shared written language. His spellers and dictionaries spread widely — but only as far as teachers, printers, and readers carried them.
Read MoreThe Trail of Tears: Cherokee Removal, Survival, and Rebuilding
What happened to the Cherokee people during the forced removal of 1838–39, and how the Cherokee Nation endured, governed, and rebuilt in Indian Territory.
Read MoreChief John Ross: Cherokee Sovereignty and the Long Fight Against Removal
How a Cherokee merchant became one of his nation’s longest-serving leaders, and how the Cherokee Nation used law, diplomacy, and persistence to defend its sovereignty before and after removal.
Read MoreSequoyah and the Cherokee Syllabary: Writing a Nation’s Language
Sequoyah did not invent the Cherokee language. He developed a writing system for it, one that Cherokee people rapidly adopted and made their own. Cherokee people have spoken their language for countless generations, carrying history, law, ceremony, and story from one generation to the next. Today the Cherokee Nation describes its language work as preserving…
Read MoreHarriette J. Cooke: A Professor’s Rank and a Professor’s Pay
In 1871, Cornell College promoted a longtime teacher to professor and, by its own account, paid her the same as the men beside her. Her story raises a question worth asking of any “first”: how do we know?
Read MoreKansas-Nebraska Act: Railroads, Slavery, and the Fight for the West
The 1854 law that organized Kansas and Nebraska repealed the Missouri Compromise, ignited Bleeding Kansas, and reshaped national politics.
Read MoreLaura Ingalls Wilder and the Homestead West
A full-life account of Andrew Jackson — frontier orphan, war hero, and seventh president — covering his military career, his presidency’s major controversies, including Indian removal, and his contested legacy.
Read MoreThe Indian Removal Act and Its Consequences
In 1850, Congress defused a crisis over slavery’s expansion by breaking it into five separate laws. One of those laws — a far more coercive Fugitive Slave Act — did more to divide the country than any of the concessions meant to hold it together.
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