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U.S. Congressional Serial Set

The Smithsonian Institution and its twenty museums and galleries have been in the news recently. There is controversy. If you would like to know more, we encourage you to do your own research and urge...

Much like Black Friday and spray cheese, the electoral college is a uniquely American invention. Surprisingly, though, unlike Americans' undying love of discount TVs and processed cheese product, the...

Just over 155 years ago, on July 9, 1868, the second of the three Reconstruction Amendments was adopted. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution speaks to citizenship, legislative apportionment, and...

The history of Chinese immigration to the United States, from the Gold Rush to World War II, is uniquely the one instance in which American law has specifically barred an entire national or ethnic...

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the adult education and social movement known as Chautauqua blossomed in the United States. The original Chautauqua was the concept of a Methodist...

Before the American Revolution, postal service, such as it was, was administered by the British. Mail within the colonies was sparse, while the preponderance of mail was between North America and...

Ice is a remarkable substance, solid yet transparent, alternately useful and vexatious in cold climates, marvelous in tropical ones, made of water yet it floats. The arrival of ice in Calcutta, India...

There’s an entry in Readex’s Native American Indians, 1645-1819 , from a book printed in Philadelphia in 1803 in which British topographical engineer Captain Thomas Hutchins described the “Kahokia...

The spirit of Black Hawk is alive and well and living in New Orleans. How does the influence of this Sauk war leader inform Creole identity over 250 years after his birth? The answer involves a rich...

The political question of internal improvements challenged lawmakers in the earlier days of the United States with the majority supporting the federal government taking an active role in the...

The experiences of women in wartime have been less well documented than those of men. Their contributions, their sufferings and heroism merit closer attention. The wealth of digitized primary sources...

1. From private collections to public repositories The first libraries in the United States were largely private, the realm of wealthy and learned men. During the Colonial Era, these men bequeathed...

On April 26, 1986, a safety experiment at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine went terribly awry, unleashing plumes of fire and invisible radioactive particles that rained down on...

Among the United States’ earliest and most fervent supporters of working women’s rights was an Irish immigrant named Mathew Carey, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1784. In that city he established a...

Multiple choice: You’re Matthew Lyon, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1801. On the occasion of your fifty-second birthday, you’re asked what your most enduring legacy will be, that...

In the early days of the American republic, the territorial imperative that would develop into manifest destiny was more of an optimistic thought experiment than an imperial (or divine) mandate to...

At the confluence of the period of racial violence known as Red Summer (1919) and the first Red Scare (1917-1920), Jamaica-born poet and journalist Claude McKay merged black anger with radical...

Fifty years ago the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, a multi-pronged military campaign that underscored South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu’s inability to protect his country’s...

The “Bridge of No Return” doesn’t look like much today: four waist-high blue bollards at the eastern end stand guard over grass growing through the cracked roadway. A weathered sign reads, “Military...

Readex had the opportunity to sit down with Paul Finkelman, a leading authority on American legal history, race relations and religious freedom, to discuss the importance of primary documents in his...

You may have heard of the “Pentagon Papers” from the Vietnam War era. More recently, the “Panama Papers” exposed the use of that country’s legal and financial institutions for tax evasion. But what...

The aims of the Committee of Liberation of the Peoples of Russia are: the overthrow of Stalin’s tyranny, the liberation of the peoples of Russia from the Bolshevik system, and the restitution of those...

In 1967 author and journalist Eugene Lyons published an article in the Washington Evening Star under the headline, “Freedom Came to Russians on this Day 50 Years Ago.” A bit of math would place that...

Consider for a moment the plight of Indonesia’s leaders in 1945: how to establish a national identity in a country spread across more than 13,000 islands, featuring hundreds of languages and ethnic...