When I began work on a history of American counterfeiting between the Revolution and the Civil War, I was faced with some peculiar research problems. With a few rare exceptions, counterfeiting during this period was a crime that was not prosecuted by federal authorities. The problem was instead left to...
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American History
Recovering Memories of a Defining Local Event: A Revolutionary-Era Tea Burning
In the 18th century, it was not unusual for a ship to dock at John Shepherd’s landing in the tiny village of Greenwich, New Jersey. The town, located on the Cohansey River about six miles from Delaware Bay, was an official British customs port. But it was not a very...
Religion and the Rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1922
In 1915, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was born. The second Klan, a memorial to the Reconstruction Klan and its work in the postbellum South, was to act as a restructured fraternity that supported white supremacy, the purity of white womanhood, nationalism and Protestant Christianity. William J...
Rescuing Cast Offs: The Do-It-Yourself Box Furniture of Social Worker Louise Brigham
Today's Do-It-Yourself movement is peopled with crafty types who revel in finding creative ways to reuse things instead of simply throwing the old stuff out and buying new. Evidence of this movement can be found in the popularity of ReadyMade Magazine's MacGyver Challenges; in Ikeahacker's celebration of imaginative consumers who...
Creating the Fourth Branch of Government: The Role of the Press in Pennsylvania's Constitutional Debates
The views expressed in this article are the author's and not necessarily those of the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, or the United States Government. When the meeting of the Pennsylvania State Assembly received the Federal Constitution in September 1787, the idyllic excitement that had emanated from...
