It can be difficult to relate to the men and women of the Civil War era. Despite the extraordinarily different circumstances in which they found themselves, however, we can connect with our forebears in traditions such as the celebration of Christmas.
On May 25, 1843, Sam Houston, Jr. was the first of eight children born to General Sam Houston and Margaret Lea. Sickly when he was born at Washington-on-the Brazos, Texas, he improved so that his father described him as, “a hearty brat, robust and hearty as a Brookshire pig."
Confederate troops were rushed by rail to confront the Union army led by Brigadier General Irwin McDowell at Bull Run. Among those who rode by rail was a brigade under an eccentric professor from Virginia Military Institute. That brigade delivered the battle’s knockout blow and its general, Brigadier General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, would gain his sobriquet “Stonewall”.
As the morning sun burned through the fog along the New Market Road about eight miles southeast of Richmond on the autumn morning of September 29, 1864, it revealed a scene of carnage and human wreckage. Dead infantrymen in coats that were a familiar shade of Union blue covered the slopes before New Market Heights. But most of the faces of the dead and maimed were black.
The author of the children's poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was persistent in arguing that establishing the national November holiday could help heal wounds from the Civil War.
After the failed socialist revolutions of 1848 which encompassed most of the European continent, many German, English, Hungarian, Bavarian, etc. atheistic socialists flocked to the United States having been banned from their homelands for treason. Ironically just about all of them wound up in the North (for a number of factors including an already…
Introduction The Republican Party is the establishment of mainstream conservatism in contemporary American politics. Many of our readers, including myself, have likely had a history of voting for the Republican Party or perhaps even being a registered Republican. Many mainstream American conservatives remember with fondness the “Reagan revolution” that swept Ronald Reagan into office and…
By Ray Hill William Gannaway Brownlow was one of the most controversial figures in Tennessee history. “Parson” Brownlow was highly controversial during his own time and few figures ever relished the political battles he waged more than the man who was a pastor, editor, governor and United States senator. Brownlow was born in…
The Mayflower Compact is the agreement between the 41 male passengers of the ship Mayflower establishing the form of government of the Plymouth Colony (1620-1691 CE), signed on 11 November 1620 CE off the coast of present-day Massachusetts, USA.
The origins of Freemasonry are obscure. The creation of the Craft (as it is also called) occurred over time between the first recorded gentleman joining an Edinburgh stonemasons’ lodge in 1599 and the 1721 publication in London of The Constitutions of the Free-Masons by Scots Presbyterian minister James Anderson.1
