Posts Tagged ‘westward expansion’
In which I finally finish reading The Three-Cornered War
My last blog post was pulled from the History in the Margins archives: a piece on the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, an early event in the wars between the United States government and the Plains Indian nations that ended at the Battle of Wounded Knee. In the course of reviewing the piece before I…
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From The Archives: Lincoln’s Greatest Case–Sort of
One of the recurring themes this fall as we worked our way along the Great River Road, crossing the Mississippi back and forth between Iowa and Wisconsin was, in fact, the question of crossing the river. We think of “bridge-building” as a metaphor for bringing communities together, but the construction of real-life bridges was often…
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Road Trip Through History: America’s First Interstate
George Washington was a road builder long before he was a nation-builder. As a young officer under the ill-fated General Braddock, he helped construct a military road from western Maryland to Pennsylvania.* As president of the new United States, he dreamed of a trans-Appalachian road that would unify the new nation and aid westward expansion.…
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