The Stories In Our Books
Gen. Joseph Stilwell’s War In Burma
Why did nearly a quarter of a million Americans serve in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II, yet so few people today know what they accomplished? Why did thousands of American infantrymen fight and die in the jungles of northern Burma in one of the most demanding campaigns of the war, only to have their story largely disappear from popular memory?
The Lost War: America’s World War II Battle for Burma
Manifest Destiny Almost Denied
The first two armies formed by the fledgling United States government underestimated the power of Indian resistance in the old Northwest Territory and were defeated in humiliating fashion. The Indian chiefs involved were later defeated—and also honored for their bravery.
Ohio Country Indians and the Defeat of Two American Armies
Why Forrest’s Statues Are Taboo
Some students in the old Confederacy are taught to revere Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest for his bravery, but he was anathema to his superiors and he commanded an attack that resulted in the butchery of Black soldiers.
Penn School Pioneered Reconstruction
In the first major victory for the United States in the Civil War, the capture of coastal South Carolina created education opportunities for enslaved children, while their fathers and brothers fought with new Black regiments. It’s one of the greatest and least remembered stories in the Civil War.
Point Royal Experiment: Prelude to Reconstruction
The Confederacy’s Race to Industrialize
The Confederate states mobilized to manufacture gunpowder, iron, and artillery after secession. The focal point was Selma, Alabama, which was one of the final sites to fall. Freed enslaved people followed U.S. cavalry out of the city, the same route taken by Black civil rights marchers 100 years later.
Selma, Alabama: Iron, Slavery, and Civil Rights
The Lost Colony That Opened America
A vicious ambush by Myles Standish on Massachusetts warriors cemented safety of the Plymouth Plantation and spurred a huge wage of Puritan immigration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Myles Standish and the Lost Colony
Daniel Morgan’s Brilliant Coup
The Revolutionary War battle of Cowpens is well remembered in the Carolinas, but less so elsewhere even though it merits attention for at least two reasons. It reversed British advances in the South, and its strategic brilliance.
Robert E. Lee: ‘We Bullied Them’
That was how Robert E. Lee reportedly characterized America’s war with Mexico, a conflict engineered by President James K. Polk as he sought to expand the United States to the Pacific. Another future Civil War general, Ulysses S. Grant, was even more severe. He called the Mexican-American War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation” and later argued that the Civil War was, in part, America’s punishment for its aggression against Mexico.
Purpose-Built Fleet Stumbles to Stunning Victory
It was a race to rule Lake Erie. Americans and British simultaneously built warships on opposite ends of the lake, knowing the winner could change the war. Pennsylvania militiamen left their farms to guard Perry’s vulnerable shipyard. Then came battle: a demolished flagship, a disputed second-in-command, Perry’s audacious comeback—and the extraordinary capture of an entire British squadron.