Rebellion in the Early Republic - The Whiskey...

In 1794, anti-government protests grew into an all-out rebellion, and President Washington faced his first major test of federal authority. Some 7,000 armed Westerners marched on Pittsburgh and threatened its residents. Violent resistance to the whiskey tax soon spread from we ...

As a new century dawned on the United States, an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel began planning a bold plot to overthrow slavery in Virginia’s capital. The uprising would change the future of slavery in the South.

In the spring and summer of 1800, the charismatic Gabri ...

The Ku Klux Klan was arguably America’s first organized terrorist movement. It was a paramilitary unit that arose in the South during the early years of Reconstruction. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them lan ...  Show more

In the 1840s, thousands of Americans journeyed west to California to pursue better lives. One group of settlers became infamous: the Donner Party. After taking an unproven shortcut, their wagon train fell dangerously behind schedule. If they couldn’t cross the Sierra Nevada Mo ...

The Demerara Rebellion of 1823 was an uprising of over ten thousand enslaved people in the Crown colony of Demerara-Essequibo (now part of Guyana) on the coast of South America. Having grown tired of their servitude, the enslaved sought to resist in the most direct way they co ...

Everybody knows Washington as the strapping, powerful general and then president who helped to overthrow the British and forge America, but how did he get there? He was born into a respectable Virginian planter family, had an ordinary education and, with the exception of his tort ...  Show more