George Washington

Americans have long nurtured mixed feelings about age and aged leaders. Yet during the country’s founding, a young America admired venerable old sages.

How should a republic honor its leaders?

Americans disparaged the British as arsonists. But the rebels fought with fire too.

Long before monuments to enslavers were removed, lawmakers decided to relocate a scandalous, half-naked depiction of George Washington in a toga.

Treaties with Britain, the Confederated tribes, and Spain revealed that America was still dependent on the greater geopolitics of the Atlantic World.

Stories of 1776 and Santa Claus.

Why we should resist hero-worshipping Ukraine’s president.

A single reference in the historical record has spawned an array of adaptations, most of which overstate the anonymous figure's role in the Culper Spy Ring.

West Ford’s descendants want to prove his parentage—and save the freedmen’s village he founded.

History books remember Yorktown as a "victory for the right of self-determination." But the battle guaranteed slavery for nearly another century.

This armed uprising in 1794, over taxation by the fledgling new government, threatened to destroy the new union within six years of the Constitution’s ratification.

What role should the federal government play in building our infrastructure?

Which personality of the American Revolution or the founding era is remembered for the wrong reasons, and why?

Vaccines against smallpox during the Revolutionary War are one example of how mandates have protected the health of Americans for more than two centuries.

On Akhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us,” a new history of America’s constitutional conversation.

Actions are more persuasive than words, and manipulating morale often dictates how commanders deploy their troops. Witness the American War of Independence.

Those who claim that vaccine resistance is an expression of liberty are historically illiterate.

Bill Bleyer dives into the secret Culper Spy Ring during the American Revolution while disproving many of the urban myths surrounding the characters involved.

A Virginia congressman has filed a bill to make the swamp a National Heritage Site.

From Alexander Hamilton to Richard Nixon and more: meddling, fixing, rigging, fraud, and violence.