American & Military History

[ 11/14/05: essentially complete
(2421 print pages; 64 photos, 155 maps) — presented in 169 webpages ]

Gen. Robert E. Lee (USMA, 1829) is an outstanding example of the American character at its best, and remains in many ways the quintessential American historical figure: the first item on this site was a complete transcription of the 2400‑page 4‑volume life of him, R. E. Lee, by Douglas S. Freeman, still today viewed as definitive, that won the author the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

(Only the index remains to complete. When I finish that, I expect to shift gears and continue the site with Sherman's letters.)

[ 175 + xii print pages, 1 photo, presented in 9 webpages ]

Place of honor also to whom honor is due: George Rogers Clark's Memoir is one of the best books on my site, a fascinating record of the American Revolutionary War campaign that gave us the Northwest Territory without which our history would have taken a vastly different and less happy turn. A key primary source written by the victorious commander himself, it not only gives an interesting picture of conditions on the western frontier at the time of the birth of the Republic, but also of a special forces operation on a shoestring budget with minimal support; and most of all, a good look inside the mind of the campaign's military chief, who succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations, and did so by relying on the intrinsic advantages in being an American. This is all of such topical interest in our own time that I hope it's required reading for the professional American Soldier, and any who would lead them.

[ 80 typescript pages, 1 engraving, presented in 6 webpages ]

A far lesser figure in our history, William Hyde (1818‑1874) was nonetheless a participant in one of the great pioneer sagas that made this country what we are. His Private Journal records his early days in upstate New York and his conversion to Mormonism, his trek across the continent as a sergeant in the Mormon Battalion of the U. S. Army (which takes up half the work), his missionary endeavors in Australia, and the end of his life, spent building the State of Utah. An interesting account of one of the world's great military marches, it also throws some light on the uneasy and shifting accommodation between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the United States government.

[ 315 printed pages
presented in 20 webpages, with 24 photos ]

One of the earliest real wars fought on the soil of the United States was also the bloodiest of our history in terms of the casualty rate; and very similar in a number of respects to the Twin Towers War we are now fighting. King Philip's War by George Ellis and John Morris is a serviceable account of it.

John Easton's Relation of the Indian War is one of the most important contemporaneous source documents for the history of King Philip's War.

[ 8/12/06: over 3900 printed pages
presented in 144 webpages, 58 photos, 10 maps, 110 engravings ]

In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, causing several breaks in the levees that defend the city against high waters and a consequent flood disaster unprecedented in any large American city. The event prompted me to put onsite a selection of historical documents on Louisiana. Much of it is about New Orleans — including two entire books on the history of the city — but the site also includes a complete transcription of Gayarré's four-volume History of Louisiana; and other material.

[ 12/17/07: 538 printed pages
presented in 106 webpages, 88 photos, 3 maps, 3 engravings ]

Since I live in Chicago, I'm developing a small site on the History of Illinois. The first installments: Illinois in 1818, a very good book by Solon J. Buck on the state's pioneer history, its land and its economy, its pathway to statehood; and — by no means as good a book, but sketching a richly anecdotal picture of the 19c here — John Drury's Old Illinois Houses.

[ 617 printed pages
presented in 20 webpages ]

Modern Americans tend to forget that not all the colonies were English! The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, by John Fiske, is a very readable yet nicely comprehensive account of its subject.

[ 303 printed pages
presented in 11 webpages; unillustrated ]

Herbert E. Bolton's The Spanish Borderlands presents the history of Spanish exploration and colonization of the territories within the present boundaries of United States, which are viewed as defensive border marches protecting Mexico, the far more important possession from Spain's standpoint.

[ 366 printed pages
presented in 26 webpages; 2 maps ]

Related background to American history: Edward Gaylord Bourne's Spain in America recounts the Spanish voyages of exploration (as well as some of the others) and the early colonization of America; and lays out the Spanish colonial system, that at one time or another governed about half the present United States.

[ 11/17/07: 229 printed pages
presented in 11 webpages; unillustrated ]

Washington and His Colleagues is a fairly straightforward account of the two-term presidency of George Washington by Henry Jones Ford: the United States were new then, and so was everything about their government; and yet they had to face Arab piracy, the destabilizing designs of France — and the rights of the several States, which the author, a Hamiltonian, seems to put in the same bag as the other two.

[ 245 printed pages
presented in 15 webpages, with 3 maps ]

Arthur Preston Whitaker's book, The Spanish-American Frontier: 1783‑1795, subtitled The Westward Movement and the Spanish Retreat in the Mississippi Valley, is a clear, readable, detailed exposition of its subject, from the backwoods of Kentucky and the stillborn state of Franklin to Natchez and New Orleans and diplomatic manoeuvres in European capitals.

[ 8/1/08: 286 printed pages
presented in 14 webpages; unillustrated ]

Dwight Lowell Dumond's The Secession Movement, 1860‑1861 details how the North and South pulled apart. It's far more complex than is presented in school texts, which after all are designed as propaganda. Everyone had a share in the blame, with the bulk of it going to intransigent Northern moralism and its accompanying taste for coercion.

[ 8/17/08: 375 printed pages
presented in 39 webpages; 32 photos ]

The Life of Woodrow Wilson written by his Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, provides a clear if eulogistic and rather summary account of the President's life, and a somewhat more compelling insight into his character.

[ 6/16/09: about 300 printed pages
presented in 43 webpages, 34 photos ]

My pages on The History of Kentucky don't yet include a general history of the Commonwealth, but instead, two small but very different aspects of that history treated in great detail: General James Wilkinson (patriot or traitor?); and the history of the coal mining town of Jenkins in the southeast corner of the state.

[ 266 printed pages, 68 photos, 1 drawing, 1 map
presented in 22 webpages ]

The Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror is a lurid piece of rip-off journalism about the 1906 earthquake. It's poorly written, prurient, and disorganized: but it was churned out within a few weeks of the event with a shrewd eye to what the public wanted to read, and contains eyewitness accounts and many photographs. Verdict: worth reading, if only to get an insight into the impact of the quake at the time.

[ 71 printed pages, presented in 8 webpages ]

When some of the citizens of Baltimore, including the editors of an important newspaper and several generals with impeccable Revolutionary War credentials, protested the recently declared War of 1812, others, feeling themselves to be better patriots, went on a murderous rampage: they earned themselves the name of Hanson's Mob, and the Great Baltimore Riot of 1812 became an ever-topical example of how not to face pacifism. Here is the report of it in a contemporaneous pamphlet.

[ 4/14/06: 1 page ]

The first battle of the September 11 War was a tactical draw, but a strategic victory for the United States: although United Flight 93 was crashed into the farmland of Pennsylvania, the amazing resources of American technology and communications served to mobilize our first heroes of the war, who prevented our enemies from doing incalculably worse damage with that plane. A U. S. Government transcript — heavily redacted — is available here, among many other places online.

[ 5/24/09: 31 articles: 445 print pages ]

American History Notes is a growing collection of articles from various journals in U. S. history and related fields. Since copyright law restricts me to rather older material, the history doesn't go much past World War I; which doesn't stop these papers from being interesting.

West Point Fifty Years Ago: Not the 1950's, but 1829. Francis Smith's 1879 after-dinner speech to fellow classmates is of interest not only because it is one of the earliest extant recollections of the Point, but because General Smith had been the commanding officer of the Virginia Military Institute since before the Civil War in which he fought most of those same classmates: the very fact that he gave the speech was a sign that our divided nation was starting to heal, and he talks about it.

The farewell speech of Gen. Douglas MacArthur (USMA, 1903) to the Corps on May 12, 1962. When I first looked into it, I was very surprised to discover that every single transcript available online was marked by gross errors and omissions of entire paragraphs. I retranscribed it from the audio tape of his actual delivery of it on that day; the audio itself is also downloadable from this page.