History of the USA
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History of the USA’
Following a decisive victory in the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln urged his supporters to make sure that liberty’s advantage was not squandered.
The Battle of Gettysburg ended on July 3rd 1863 in victory for the Union against the Confederate South. On November 19th, US President Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the battlefield cemetery. He rightly guessed that the battle had turned the American Civil War; but in thinking that ‘the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here’ he was touchingly mistaken.
Two years into the American Civil War, the Union army responded to a dispiriting defeat at Chancellorsville with a decisive and historic victory at Gettysburg.
The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended on July 3rd 1863 in victory for the Union against the Confederate South. Yet it came hard on the heels of a bruising defeat at the hands of General Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville, and the great issues that hung upon the American Civil War were, for a few days, very much in the balance.
In 1775, London’s high-handed exploitation of her colonies for tax revenue began to look like a very expensive mistake.
The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) saw thirteen British colonies in North America win independence as the United States of America. For too long, they had sweated in a wretched trade zone created to fill London’s Treasury with gold and line the pockets of her cronies, and it was time for it to stop.
A hen-pecked, ne’er-do-well farmer from New York took off into the Catskill Mountains, and fell in with some very odd company.
The story of Rip van Winkle was written in 1818 by Washington Irving, an American who was visiting England at the time. It tells of an obliging but ne’er-do-well farmer of Dutch descent living in colonial America, who falls asleep in the mountains one evening and consequently misses a rather important event.
Prussia’s invasion of Silesia in 1740 plunged Europe into turmoil, and a French invasion of England became a very real threat.
The War of the Austrian Succession began as part of the seemingly endless German quest to gobble up the continent’s smaller states. It would not have involved Britain had King George II not been also Elector of Hanover, and if France had not seen it as an opportunity to expand her empire at Britain’s expense.
In the year that Napoleon’s quest for European Empire faltered at Moscow, President Madison of the USA came to his aid.
In 1783, the American War of Independence ended with the creation of a new sovereign nation, the United States of America. Peace was short-lived, however, as zealous statesmen in Washington were itching to see revolution sweep on through Europe’s monarchies and across Britain’s Empire – especially Canada.