How the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion Came to Be the ‘Greatest Gathering of Conqueror and Conquered’

Fifty Years After the Civil War Battle, Politicians Preached Patriotic Amnesia, While Veterans Attempted to Find Solace

The old veterans couldn’t wait to come. Roads ran thick with automobiles and horse buggies. Most arrived on the nation’s sprawling rails. A few walked more than 100 miles. An 85-year-old man, fearing his son would prevent him from going, crawled out a window and caught a train.

Altogether, an estimated 50,000 of the blue and gray trekked to the Great Reunion, a grand commemoration at iconic Gettysburg, on that battle’s 50th anniversary: July 1 to 3, 1913.

Why did they go? According to the many politicians and generals who …

by Thomas R. Flagel | February 6, 2020

America’s Hidden History of Conquest and the Meaning of the West

Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick on How Invaders Came to See Themselves as Victims, Then Romanticized the Native Americans They Displaced

Interview by Gregory Rodriguez | November 3, 2019

Patricia Nelson Limerick is a leading scholar of the American West, and the faculty director and chair of the board of the Center of the American West at the University …

How Jamestown Abandoned a Utopian Vision and Embraced Slavery

In 1619, Wealthy Investors Overthrew the Charter That Guaranteed Land for Everyone

by Paul Musselwhite | August 15, 2019

In the summer of 1619, some of England’s first American colonists were carving up land seized from the Powhatan empire along the James River in Virginia. While the first settlers …

In a Raucous Country, Our Sense of Unity Has Often Emerged Through Conflict

A Diverse Nation, Built on Waves of Immigration, Has Found That Getting Along Is Not Always Easy

by Joe Mathews | August 5, 2019

Americans of wildly disparate backgrounds have managed to find common ground over the course of the country’s history. But the process of cohering has been haphazard, raucous, messy and cruel, …

| Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Eliza Hamilton’s Excellent Five-Month Steamboat Ride From New York to Wisconsin

In 1837, the 80-Year-Old Widow of the Late Treasury Secretary Was Delighted by the Beauty of the Nation

by Tilar J. Mazzeo | August 1, 2019

The musical Hamilton introduced theatergoers to Eliza Schuyler, the wife of Alexander Hamilton, and her sisters Angelica and Peggy. But there is much more to Eliza’s American life than …

In Colonial Virginia It Was the Kids Who Mixed the Cultures That Became American

Both the English and the Native Americans Used Children to Learn the Mysterious Ways of Their New Neighbors

by Karen Ordahl Kupperman | July 18, 2019

In 1608, Thomas Savage, age 13, arrived on the first ship from England bringing supplies to the newly founded Jamestown colony. He had been in Virginia just a few …

American history