Mark Twain’s article, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, was a scathing indictment of Colonialism. Although he did not mention Rev. William Scott Ament by name in the article, repercussions from it indicted him for atrocities committed in the name of Christianity and generated much of the controversy the article. From 13 September 1900, Ament, and an assistant, Reverend Elwood Gardner Tewksbury accompanied by the U.S. 6th Cavalry, searched the areas adjacent to Beijing for Boxers, collecting indemnities for Christians who had been killed by the Boxers, and ordered the burning of some homes

The single biggest wave of immigration in the period came between 1845 and 1849, when Ireland endured a potato famine. One million people died, and one and a half million left, most for the United States, where they landed in Eastern Seaboard cities, and settled there, having no money to pay their way to travel inland. … They lived in all-Irish neighborhoods, generally in tenements, and worked for abysmal wages. New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, writing in his diary, lamented their foreignness: “Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as

While women labored to reform society behind the scenes, men protested on the streets. The eighteen-teens marked the beginning of a decades-long struggle between labor and business. During the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, factories had closed when the banks failed. In New York, a workingman’s wages fell from 75 cents to 12 cents a day. Those who suffered the most were men too poor to vote; it was, in many ways, the suffering of workingmen during that Panic of 1819 that had led so many men to fight for the right to vote, so that they could have a hand

KINGS ARE BORN; presidents are elected. But how? In Philadelphia in 1787, James Wilson explained, the delegates had been “perplexed with no part of this plan so much as with the mode of choosing the President.” At the convention, Wilson had proposed that the people elect the president directly. But James Madison had pointed out that since “the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States . . . the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.” That is, in a direct election, the North, which had more voters, would have more

THE DIVIDE over slavery, which had nearly prevented the forming of the Union, would eventually split the nation in two. There were other fractures, too, deep and lasting. The divide between Federalists and Anti-Federalists didn’t end with the ratification of the Constitution. Nor did it end with the ratification of the Bill of Rights. On December 15, 1791, ten of the twelve amendments drafted by Madison were approved by the necessary three-quarters of the states; these became the Bill of Rights. They would become the subject of ceaseless contention.

(pg 137)

With the ratification of the Bill of

From These Truths:

The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia acted as a check on the Revolution, a halt to its radicalism; if the Revolution had tilted the balance between government and liberty toward liberty, the Constitution shifted it toward government. But in very many ways the Constitution also realized the promise of the Revolution, and particularly the promise of representation. In devising the new national government, the delegates adamantly rejected a proposal that the state legislators, rather than the people, elect members of Congress. “Under the existing Confederacy, Congress

A common myth is that Henry Ford invented the automobile. This is not true. While he may not have invented the automobile, he did offer a new way of manufacturing a large number of vehicles. This method of production was the moving assembly line.
The most common feature of this assembly line was the conveyer belt. The belts were in use within other industries, including slaughterhouses. Moving the product to the worker seemed like a better use of time and resources. The Ford Motor Company team decided to try to implement the moving assembly line in the automobile manufacturing process.

After

From These Truths, pages 91-108

THE CONTINENTAL Congress neither suffered the disunion and chaos of the Albany Congress nor undertook the deferential pleading of the Stamp Act Congress. Preparing for the worst, this new, more ambitious, and more expansive—continental—Congress urged colonists to muster their militias and stockpile weapons. It also agreed to boycott all British imports and to ban all trade with the West Indies, a severing of ties with the islands.

...

The Declaration that Congress did adopt was a stunning rhetorical feat, an act of extraordinary political courage. It also marked a

Excerpts from These Truths, pages 80-91:

But the [Seven Years] war had left Britain nearly bankrupt. The fighting had nearly doubled Britain's debt, ...  the king’s ministers determined that defending the empire’s new North American borders would require ten thousand troops or more, especially after a confederation of Indians led by an Ottawa chief named Pontiac captured British forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. 

Fearing the cost of suppressing more Indian uprisings, George III issued a proclamation decreeing that no colonists could settle west of the Appalachian Mountains, a line that

This is from Wikipedia:

American Revolutionary War, April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783

• Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775
• The Province of New Hampshire adopts a constitution for an independent State of New Hampshire, January 5, 1776
• The Province of South Carolina adopts a constitution for an independent State of South Carolina on March 15, 1776
• The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations declares its independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain on May 4, 1776
• The Colony of Connecticut declares its independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain on June 18, 1776
• The Colony