The United States of America was forged in the meeting halls and on the battlefields of the American Revolution, which established our republican form of government and committed the new country to ideals of liberty, equality, natural and civil rights, and responsible citizenship. Over eight long years, the Revolutionary War was fought across large swaths […]
Revolutionary Beginnings: War and Remembrance in the First Year of America’s Fight for Independence The War for American Independence began on April 19, 1775 — 250 years ago this spring — with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. These initial engagements gave way to the Patriots’ Siege of Boston, a nearly year-long […]
On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, the marquis de Lafayette embarked on a tour of the United States, returning for a final time to the country he helped establish and whose republican form of government he saw as a model for the rest of the world. In August 1824, Lafayette […]
Diplomacy and entertaining have always gone hand in hand in the nation’s capital. Anderson House, the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati, has played a historic role in that story during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—but one that has largely gone untold. Since its opening in 1905, the mansion has been the site of […]
The French artist and engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825) made vital contributions to the early formation of the American nation and American identity. As a foreign volunteer during the Revolutionary War and, later, as a citizen of the new nation, L’Enfant created imagery, architecture and city landscapes that memorialized America’s republican principles of liberty and civic […]