Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Spain
That’s what the newspapers called him, and he spent an increasingly reckless career trying to edit out the adjective. But even winning a war single-handed didn’t get him what he wanted.
On the night of March 22, 1901, as fierce rains battered his campsite in the wildest reaches of Luzon Island, Frederick Funston pondered what awaited him the next day. In a career that had been full of mortal risks, he was about to take by far the greatest risk of all.
After half a millennium we scarcely feel the presence of Spain in what is now the United States. But it is all around us.
In 1883 Walt Whitman received an it Santa Fe and deliver a poem at a celebration of the city’s founding.
On their weathered stone battlements can
be read the whole history of the three-century
struggle for supremacy in the New World
On the northwest shoulder of South America, looking out over the blue waters of the Caribbean, an ancient citadel stands guard above a Spanish city. Three thousand miles to the north, where the Gulf of St.
On the 150th anniversary of Texan independence, we trace the fierce negotiations that brought the republic into the Union after ten turbulent years
From the moment he entered the White House in March 1829, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee turned a cold and calculating eye on Texas.
The Revolution might have ended much differently for the Americans if it weren’t for their ally, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, who helped them wrestle the Mississippi valley from the British.
Imagine, for a moment, an alternate ending to the American Revolution. The thirteen rebel colonies sign a peace of exhaustion with Great Britain in 1783.
The saga of Kip Wagner, the first modern American to grow rich from ancient Spanish treasure
The stretch of sand that runs along for miles at the margin of Cape Canaveral was irresistibly reminiscent, I thought, of Cape Cod. But then one sandspit is very like another, except for the temperature surrounding it.
In southern California the orange found a home.
For more than thirty years it stood at the corner of Highland Avenue and Del Rosa Avenue in San Bernardino, California, bordered at the rear by a line of eucalyptus trees and behind that by a thirty-acre grove of fat green trees that joined others in a march to the foothills of the San Bernardino
But didn’t Columbus discover America all by himself? And who were the Pinzóns anyway? Good questions—and not one American in ten thousand probably knows the correct answers.
The discoverer of the New World was responsible for the annihilation of the peaceful Arawak Indians
In the snarled disputes in 1790 over the Yazoo land claims (now large parts of Alabama and Mississippi), George Washington and an educated Creek chieftain turned out to be the diplomatic kingpins
Shortly past noon on April 30, 1789, a tall, somber man, dressed in a simple brown suit, was inaugurated as the first President of the United States at Federal Hall in New York City.
In the Spanish Civil War, Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion fought for their principles
After six months of war, a parade or demonstration barely ruffled the surface of downtown Barcelona.
The Elizabethans and America: Part II -- The fate of the Virginia Colony rested on the endurance of adventurers, the financing of London merchants, and the favor of a courtier with his demanding spinster Queen.
“To push back the consciousness of American beginnings, beyond Jamestown, beyond the Pilgrims, to the highwater mark of the Elizabethan Age” -- Part One of a New Series.
With this account of the Great Queen and her captains and their struggle to master a great prize—the New World—we commence a series of articles specially prepared for AMERICAN HERITAGE by A. L.
"The current was too strong, the demagogues too numerous, the fall elections too near"
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