History Guild

Sometimes history can be bizarre and borderline unbelievable, and sometimes fate brings two families together by force. In 1864, at a train station in Jersey City, N.J., the Booth and Lincoln families would have a lesser-known encounter, a year before the infamous events at Ford's Theatre. Robert Todd Lincoln, the first child born to President Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, and the President's only child to survive into adulthood, accidentally fell onto the train tracks at the station, in the path of an oncoming train. For most people, this…

In 1852, President Millard Fillmore assigned Commodore Matthew C. Perry to force the opening of Japanese ports to American trade after more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation. Fillmore authorized Perry to use “gunboat diplomacy” in order to accomplish the task at hand. After nearly 250 years of isolation, the Japanese nation was about to be opened to the world by force. Perry’s fleet arrived at Uraga, near the entrance to Edo Bay, on July 8, 1853. Ignoring Japanese demands to leave, Perry had a white flag and a letter…

During one of the United States darkest hours, our cousins across the sea, the British, looked upon the unfolding drama within their strongest daughters borders, and came away with some VERY interesting conclusions. As Goldwin Smith believed “America was not a ‘foreign nation, alien to our political concerns, but…the great colony of England.” “The essential Englishness of the South, and the mongrelised nature of the North, was manifested, argued pro-Confederates, on America’s battlefields. While Southern ranks were comprised of ‘men who own the soil they are defending’, Northern armies were…