As we make our brunch reservations, choose the perfect greeting card, and make the rest of our preparations for Mother’s Day this Sunday, let’s not forget the women, the mothers of our nation, who took a stand for women’s rights and blazed the trail for future movements. Men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas [...]

This week in 1775, the battles of Lexington and Concord were fought in Massachusetts.  The Massachusetts militia and Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith’s group of British troops suffered casualties, but it is still unclear which side fired the first shot that began the American Revolution. RG 360, The Papers of the Continental Congress, compiled 1774 – [...]

In 1774, British Parliament implemented the Coercive Acts in response to the destruction of British property by colonists during the Boston Tea Party.  Paul Revere reproduced an engraving from a London newspaper that depicted the relationship between the British government and America, and he circulated it among the colonies.  A copy of this allegorical cartoon [...]

Today’s post is written by Monique Politowski, and is part of her ongoing series on the Federalists. Today is the 238th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.  On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Native Americans and wearing disguises, destroyed British owned tea by throwing it into the water of Griffin’s Wharf in Boston.  Archives II has [...]

Today’s post is written by Monique Politowski, and is part of her ongoing series on the Federalists. It must have been weird for the readers of the New York Independent Journal to see an essay supposedly written by a long since dead Roman.  Hamilton, Jay, and Madison all used the pseudonym “Publius,” intentionally becoming the [...]

Today’s post was written by Monique Politowski, an archives technician who works on the NARA/Ancestry digitization partnership project in Silver Spring, Maryland. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were infamous for their use of the f-word, federalism. While John Jay’s infamy grew from his role in the Treaty of Paris (1783) (National Archives Identifier 299805), we should [...]

Today’s post is written by Monique Politowski, an archives technician who works on the NARA/Ancestry digitization partnership project in Silver Spring, Maryland. Millions of records have been converted to digital form since the partnership between NARA and Ancestry.com began in 2008, and some of the most popular records digitized as a result of this union [...]