Empire: World History

In 1850, 13-year-old Olive Oatman and her family set off on the perilous journey by foot from Missouri to Arizona. Olive and her little sister were captured by a group of Native Americans and then sol...

Fort Laramie was once a stockade where European fur traders and Native Americans lived together peacefully. But by the 1850s it became a stop-over along the busy trail of emigrants moving westwards se...

Despite having fought alongside them, President Andrew Jackson hated Native Nations. In the early 1800s, he sought to deceive Cherokee tribes into giving up their lands. How did Jackson overturn the p...

North America was never virgin territory. For thousands of years it has been home to established nations of Indigenous people who founded ancient cities like Cahokia. When European settlers arrived on...

The British have surrendered, they’ll be leaving soon. Now the Americans have a new and arguably harder task than before. They have to meld those 13 states, each with their own sense of independence a...

The Declaration of Independence establishes the ideals on which this break away nation founds itself on. But it’s full of contradictions. It complains of white colonists being enslaved by King George ...

The infamous Boston Tea Party sees colonists dressed as Native Americans dump British tea in the surrounding waters. Calls of “the British are coming!” rally untrained militias to stand together again...

From sugar to paper, a series of taxes in the 1760s spark outrage amongst American colonists that snowball into a revolution. Was it inevitable that thirteen of Britain's 26 colonies in the Atlantic w...

We're all about the Benjamins. Franklin is unquestionably the most well-rounded of the Founding Fathers. Not only did he help draft the Declaration of Independence and help America define itself, but ...

Often given less attention than the other Founding Fathers, John Adams is no less significant. Not only did he go on to be the second US President, but he was an accomplished diplomat and had a strong...