Political History: Did you mean...?

John Hancock (1737-1793) was a merchant, politician, and Founding Father of the United States, who helped lead the Patriot movement during the American Revolution (1765-1789). He served as president of the Second Continental Congress from...

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman and political thinker. His most famous work is Reflections on the Revolution in France a critique of the social and political turmoil in that country in the final decade of the 18th century...

The Petticoat affair, also called the Eaton affair, was a political scandal that rocked Washington, D.C., from 1829 to 1831, during the early years of Andrew Jackson's presidency. Revolving around the rumored sexual promiscuity of Peggy Eaton...

The social contract is an idea in philosophy that at some real or hypothetical point in the past, humans left the state of nature to join together and form societies by mutually agreeing which rights they would enjoy and how they would be...

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an Anglo-American Enlightenment thinker whose radical ideas were taken up by revolutionaries in both the American Revolution (1765-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799). A Founding Father through his influence...

Although Thanksgiving celebrations dated back to the first European settlements in America, it was not until the 1860s that Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be a national holiday.

The Secret History of the Mongols is a chronicle written in the 13th century CE (with some later additions) and is the most important and oldest medieval Mongolian text. The book covers the origins of the Mongol people, the rise to power...

In this collection, we look at the lives, works, and ideas of the following 12 key philosophers of the Enlightenment: Thomas Hobbes René Descartes John Locke Montesquieu David Hume Jean-Jacques Rousseau Denis Diderot Adam...

The best way to learn ancient history is not by memorizing dates and facts but, rather, through critical thinking and analysis. When studying ancient history, the key is to make inferences, using empathy and evaluation to alter one's perspective...

Halloween, the secret history about the holiday’s pagan roots, and the truth about the strange political and social taboos that we have wrapped the holiday up in are discussed with “indie goddess,” Prof. Wendy Fonarow. We look at how costumes...