History Lessons

The articles below provide access to valuable resources, including articles, videos, and courses that deepen knowledge and civic engagement.

Why the first Monday in September belongs to the machinists, carpenters, and mill workers who organized to claim ...

With the Compromise of 1850, Congress converted a crisis over slavery's expansion into five separate laws. The most ...

He was called the “Great Pacificator” and the “Great Compromiser.” His bargains repeatedly deferred the conflicts — over ...

The Donner-Reed Party's catastrophe was the result of a chain of decisions and conditions, not one cause. Tamsen ...

A lawyer with ambitions in Mexican California proposed a shorter road west before he had traveled it himself ...

Expansionists rallied around a slogan demanding U.S. control to 54°40′, near the southern boundary of Russian America—but the ...

Her 1836 journey and the letters she sent home did not create the Oregon Trail migration by themselves—but ...

How a surveyor’s grief over a family tragedy on the Columbia River led him to blaze a safer ...

For six days in August 1835, a struggling New York newspaper told its readers that a celebrated astronomer ...

How an illiterate Missouri runaway became the most famous frontiersman in America — and how a fuller reckoning ...

How two nights of violence in a Virginia county reshaped the laws of the American South — and ...

How a shrewd Gold Rush businesswoman built a fortune, backed the abolitionist cause, and took racial exclusion in ...