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The Boston Tea Party was a direct action against a corporate monopoly that led to the birth of the United States. The raiders of the Tea Party pledged silence for 50 years. One of them, George R. T. Hewes, lived that long and got his story published. He tells how the British government tried to […]

“I am Dekanawidah and with the Five Nations’ Confederate Lords I plant the Tree of Great Peace.“x1 So begins the Great Law of Peace, the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of tribes centered south of Lake Ontario that thrived for 600 years up to the formation of the United States. The preamble of […]

31 cargo ships and barges stranded, twelve ships sunk with crew, 253 sailors drowned — that was the the toll of the most disastrous storm ever to hit the Great Lakes. The first November gale of 1913 started on western Lake Superior when warm southwest winds sped up on Thursday the 6th. On Friday morning […]

“Water! Water! Water!” wrote an early surveyor of northwestern Ohio, “tall timber! deep water! Not a blade of grass growing or a bird to be seen50.” The surveyor was traveling in the Great Black Swamp, a forty mile (64 km) swath stretching from the western end of Lake Erie nearly to Fort Wayne – an […]

The citizens of Washington, D.C., planned a celebration for the United States’ 50th anniversary, and invited the living signers of the Declaration of Independence, among whom was its author, Thomas Jefferson. But he was too sick to attend, and sent his regret in a letter41: It adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be […]