Category Modern History

The Underground Railroad was not underground and not a railroad. It was a loose, illegal, mostly Black network that helped between 30,000 and 100,000 enslaved Americans escape to free states and Canada between the 1830s and 1865. Its best-documented record — William Still's 649 first-person interviews from Philadelphia — was hidden in an attic until after the war. This is what the actual paper trail says.

On July 17, 1794, six hundred armed western Pennsylvania farmers burned the home of the federal whiskey-tax inspector at Bower Hill. Three months later, George Washington personally led thirteen thousand militiamen toward the rebellion — the only time a sitting US president has commanded troops in the field. The rebellion dispersed. The tax was repealed eight years later. Here is what happened, and what was actually settled.

In September 1780, the hero of Saratoga tried to sell West Point to the British. The plot collapsed because three militiamen stopped a stranger on the Tarrytown road and searched his boots. Arnold escaped to a British warship; Major André was hanged. Until the spring of 1779, Arnold had been one of the most effective field commanders in the Continental Army. This is what actually happened.

On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams asked her husband to "Remember the Ladies" in the new code of laws. He laughed. Yet from the Edenton Tea Party to Mercy Otis Warren's anonymous case for the Bill of Rights, women argued the founding generation into protections that still define American life.

By 1775, two armies were offering enslaved Americans freedom in exchange for service — one British, one American. From Lord Dunmore's Proclamation to the 1st Rhode Island Regiment to James Lafayette's spy work at Yorktown, the story of Black Americans in the Revolution is the story of a calculation no Founding Father ever had to make.