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.)

[ 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.

[ 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 The event prompted me to put onsite a selection of historical documents on Louisiana.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.

[ 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 its government; and yet it 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.

[ 3/12/06: about 300 printed pages
presented in 42 webpages, 32 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.

[ 8/23/07: 6 articles: 67 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 the Civil War; 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.