Revolutionary Beginnings: War and Remembrance in the First Year of America’s Fight for Independence The War for American Independence began on April 19, 1775 — 250 years ago this spring — with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. These initial engagements gave way to the Patriots’ Siege of Boston, a nearly year-long […]
On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, the marquis de Lafayette embarked on a tour of the United States, returning for a final time to the country he helped establish and whose republican form of government he saw as a model for the rest of the world. In August 1824, Lafayette […]
Diplomacy and entertaining have always gone hand in hand in the nation’s capital. Anderson House, the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati, has played a historic role in that story during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—but one that has largely gone untold. Since its opening in 1905, the mansion has been the site of […]
The French artist and engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825) made vital contributions to the early formation of the American nation and American identity. As a foreign volunteer during the Revolutionary War and, later, as a citizen of the new nation, L’Enfant created imagery, architecture and city landscapes that memorialized America’s republican principles of liberty and civic […]
American military doctors who joined the cause for independence faced formidable odds. Of the 1,400 medical practitioners who served in the Continental Army, only about ten percent had formal medical degrees. The majority of the rest had learned their practice through an apprenticeship with an established physician. Most were young men at the beginning of […]