Fort Dupont Park is one of the largest parks in Washington, DC, and is named for the Civil War earthworks of Fort Dupont, one of the "Fort Circle Parks" or old Washington, DC, Civil War defenses.
The park offers ranger-led tours and special events. The website offers visitor information and a brief history of the park. In order to contact the website via email, use the "contact us" link located on the left side of the webpage.
The Fort Stanwix National Monument presents the fort's Revolutionary War history and its impact on the history of New York settlement. Collections consist of more than 476,000 artifacts. Three trails circle the fort. One follows the Oneida Carrying Place, while the other two interpret the siege of 1777. During the seige, Colonel Peter Gansevoort maintained control of Stanwix despite the concentrated British, Loyalist, German, Canadian, and Native American troops which surrounded the structure, earning it the nickname of "the fort that never surrendered." This victory is one of several which eventually led to political alliances with The Netherlands and France. The fort is located on traditional Oneida lands. The Oneida Carrying Place is an over land route between Wood Creek and the Mohawk River.
The monument offers an orientation talk, three trails, exhibits, guided curriculum-based educational programs, self-guided fort tours, audio-visual displays, weapons demonstrations, guided tours, living history programs, an activity for three through six year olds, Junior Ranger activities, and an area for building model forts. Reservations are required for all guided programs. The website offers lesson plans, a 1777 campaign Revolutionary War map, a word match, a crossword puzzle, a word search, and suggested reading lists for students and teachers.
A panel of scholars responds to the second part of the PBS miniseries Slavery and the Making of America, which focuses on the Northeast, and includes the story of Mum Bett, who sued for her freedom in Massachusetts and whose victory led to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783.
Historian Dorris Fanelli discusses the site of the first presidential "White House" in Philadelphia and the discovery that George Washington brought many of his slaves to work there. This discovery led to a new kind of public history and the creation of a commemorative site near the Liberty Bell Center.
Author Mark Kurlansky reviews the history of New York City, using the perspective of the wildlife that once lived in the area as a framing device—particularly that of the eastern oyster.
The lecture audio is available separately for download.
The 1803 Swetland Homestead contains rooms furnished in period styles ranging from those of the early 1800s to the 1860s. The wide range of stylistic interpretation showcases the changes in domestic life and Wyoming, PA's industrialization, which occurred during this window of time.
The site offers period rooms. Tours are available to groups, including school groups, with advance notice.
The William Whitley House was one of the first brick houses built west of the Appalachian Mountains. Built in 1794, the house was frequented by many famous early Kentuckians, including George Rogers Clark and Daniel Boone. In addition, the house was the site of the first circular racetrack built in Kentucky. Now, the house has been restored to its condition in the 18th century, and features a gift shop in addition to the historical attractions.
The site offers visitor information, limited historical information, a photo gallery with seven photographs, and an events calendar.
The Historical Society of Washington, DC, is dedicated to preserving the unique historical and cultural heritage of Washington, DC. The society owns and operates a local history museum, which is located in Washington's famous Carnegie Library, which was once the primary library in the DC public library system.
The society offers exhibits, guided tours of the museum, educational programs, and special events. The website offers educational resources including lesson plans and documents, visitor information, and a brief history of the society.
We work with a Teaching American History Grant called Becoming Historians. It's working with elementary school kids, and one of the units of study in the New York City curriculum for 5th grade is this idea of westward expansion, and we came up with this—we realized that we had a bit of a stumbling block because when you're talking westward expansion, it's a pretty traditional model and teachers are doing Oregon Trail. And our kids who live in New York City have no conceptual knowledge of what a plain is or a mountain or a mountain pass. They have very little understanding, even, of what happens upriver. So while we were getting ready to do this work around westward expansion and what's out there, we wanted to help the kids make pictures in their minds to really have good empathy and historical imagination of what's going on. We realized we needed to do some foundational work on mapping.
So I contacted an elementary-school/middle-school teacher at Bank Street College of Education, Sam Brian, who's done a lot of work on geography teaching and young children. And he does this terrain model map and it's a generic model with mountains and valleys and you flood it and you can see how islands are formed from mountains that are connected to the land, but then they become submerged. So the kids can see all this stuff actually happening.
So they're getting that kind of general vocabulary, but then they're also getting specific vocabulary about mountains and peaks and passes and ranges and river valleys and estuaries and all that other kind of language that our children need.
So we had Sam work with us on the terrain models, and then the idea is you go from the terrain model to a map that the children draw, a two-dimensional map the children draw, of the terrain model.
They look at maps of the actual physical world and they trace river routes and they figure out where the Continental Divide is, because you have rivers draining into one ocean or the other, and so there must be something high up in between that's causing the water to flow downhill. So: "Aha! Those must be mountains." So then you draw in the mountains and then you label all the places. So there's a lot of really rich background work that takes place.
And from that point we went into maps of the Oregon Trail, historic maps from 1843 that we found on the Library of Congress website. And so the kids are doing critical map reading because now they have the knowledge to say, “Oh, it's a pass. It's a butte. It's a bluff.” They're reading those labels on the map and it means something to them because they've seen pictures of it and a three-dimensional model of it. Because it's hard for us in the city to take our kids to places that represent these things.
So then we looked at the Oregon Trail maps and talked about those maps and used the NARA forms to analyze the map: Who is the author? What was the purpose? What was happening at the time? And then we took diaries of peoples' westward journeys and traced those journeys along the maps so the kids could start making the connection between, "Oh, on June first, July second, we passed Independence Rock." And on, "We went through Devil's Gate." And all those places are labeled on the maps, so the kids are then tracing the progression of the individual who wrote the diary along the map and trying to get in their head what it's all about.
Terri: We had a plan for the content, but it was kind of vague. And then coming out of conversations with teachers and making observations in classrooms and figuring out what resources we could pull together, we—like, my original idea for westward expansion was not to do the Oregon Trail, it was to crack it open and do stuff about black pioneers and Exodusters and stuff, but all the teachers are doing this Oregon Trail thing. So I decided to, like, put my desires aside, and then focus on the Oregon Trail thing to think about: How can we make this a more rich experience? How can we enhance what they're already doing in the classroom, so that they're not, like, tossing the baby out with the bathwater? To start with something totally new, or just going to my workshop and learning about the Exodusters and then filing it away and continuing on with their Oregon Trail stuff.
I mean, that's what—the resources in their classroom are largely Oregon Trail, which is why it's taught. So we use that to retool it and then we brought in this idea of mapping and that came from talking with teachers about what their kids needed and me trying to think about what resources I knew were in the city and how could we make this more engaging, more interesting.
We're really working on mapping the curriculum to see how it spirals up, so that you're introducing this idea of a grid maybe in 3rd or 4th grade, and then in 5th grade you're starting to introduce the ideas of latitude and longitude. When you're looking at the Oregon Trail maps, the grid becomes not "A, B, C, 1, 2, 3," it's "degrees north and south" that the kids are actually using to orient themselves on the map.
So it's a way of, you know—they understand the idea of grid, and then they go into the more complicated thing of latitude and longitude. And then we're trying to think about—break it apart. What's on the maps, the historic maps that they're actually using, and then how do we scaffold that so that it aligns with the history curriculum and the geography curriculum so that the kids are not doing the geography unit and then it's, like, done with that, knock that one off the list, let's go to history now.
'Cause Sam's been doing this work since the early mid-90s, I think, and he says that that's the one thing that he's consistently struggling with teachers to get them to do is to make that transition between the work that you do with the terrain models and the imaginary land maps, and then taking it back into social studies and having the teachers actually use it and have the kids apply the information and the ideas that they've gotten from the first part of the work. And so that's really what we're trying to make a little bit more obvious and to make it more articulate.
Michele: To give the teachers the knowledge, the actual content knowledge, to reinforce that because it's not just their field. You know, you have to really study up on it and know what you're teaching and know it in depth so that you actually understand yourself what you're teaching the kids and not be afraid to go a little bit further. We know how to do this very well in the language arts, because that's what New York City has been really focusing on, and understandably. But now it's time to put that focus into history, into geography, and to integrate it.
Terri: The Wildlife Conservation Society has a very cool project happening using historic maps to determine what New York City, Manhattan in particular, looked like in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed up for the first time.
So Sam came and did the same work with the 4th-grade teachers. Instead of focusing on interior landforms, they focused on coastal landforms. So they thought about peninsulas and coves and bays and the river systems, so that that's all very immediately transferred to New York City and New York State geography, and it leads the kids very nicely into 5th grade. And then they did—they looked at historic maps of early colonial New Amsterdam and New York.
Michele: Kids are working in partnerships, we put transparencies over the flat version and then we actually go over where the rivers were, where the bluffs were, where the canyons are, where the coast is, so that they get a three-dimensional view on this flat map of what it was like before the skyscrapers, and also where our school is, where their houses are in relation to this. And then we look at it next to Manhattan now. Like: what’s happening now, what happened then.
Terri: Right. And since you did it on transparency, you can take this—
Michele: Right.
Terri: And lay it on top, and you can see how the shape of Manhattan has changed over time. 'Cause you can see that all the hills that were down on the Lower East Side are flattened and the marshes are filled in and the coastline has changed and the rivers are paved over, and you can see all that stuff on the map.
Michele: Along with the mapping, the idea of taking them on trips that reinforce what they're learning two-dimensionally.
Terri:: There's a living museum along the Hudson River called Philipsburg Manor, and it interprets colonial New York history from an enslaved person's perspective. So we thought of, like, taking the train up along the Hudson. You get to see the width of the Hudson. You see the Palisades on the New Jersey side. You can see that there are hills on the New York side, so that there's stuff you can see to, like, "Oh, right. That's a river. And there's a really long bridge going over that river. A couple of them."
Michelle: And also even when we got there, there are, like, sort of culverts where you see that the—go underneath the sidewalks. I mean, you can actually tell that there was water under there, you know? And when you look at these huge expanses of land, except for Central Park, we don't really have huge expanses of land. So—
Terri: Right. And all our rivers are—all of the rivers that are on these British headquarter maps are all gone.
Michele: I think that when you do tie together these 3D models and you actually have them make their own maps and you have them take the trips and then tie in the history that goes with it, it gives a much better experience than just trying to read a standard text, which really is what people failed with. And because of this previous failure, I think teachers shied away. And now we're really giving alternatives to text, which are much better.
The Boston Tea Party is well documented, but are there other instances of similar raids?
The Boston Tea Party was one of many of confrontations from Charleston, South Carolina, to York, Maine, in 1773 and 1774 to prevent shipments of East India tea from entering the Colonies.
Since 1767, boycotts and non-importation agreements in opposition to the Townshend Revenue Acts had promoted political networks and personal connections across the colonies. Perhaps most importantly, regardless of their success or failure, these early resistance actions created a growing sense of common cause among colonists that began to trump local insularity and economic, social, and geographic differences.
The British underestimated extent of colonial political mobilization and the adamancy of colonial commitment to "no taxation without representation," even though colonial opposition had influenced Parliament's repeal of the Townshend Acts in 1770 (with the exception of the tax on tea). In 1773, Britain then imposed the Tea Act, in an attempt to bail out the financially-ailing British East India Tea Company. The Act allowed the company to sell directly to America, thereby bypassing competitors, circumventing British taxation, and generating sufficient corporate income to avoid bankruptcy. The Act actually lowered the price of tea in America; colonists, however, perceived it as another scheme to circumscribe what they had come to define as their rights.
Colonists acted swiftly toward nullification, generating newspapers and broadsides urging colonists once again to refuse to buy imported goods. A strongly-worded article in the Pennsylvania Packet stated,". . . revenue acts are opposite to the very idea and spirit of liberty . . . whenever Tea is swallowed, and pretty well digested, we shall have new duties imposed on other articles of commerce."
In 1773, colonists consumed an estimated 1,200,000 pounds of tea annually, much of it smuggled from Holland. It was perhaps reasonable that the East India Company believed colonial resistance to buying their tea would dissolve if they could get tea to land and offer it for sale. They engaged ships scheduled to arrive simultaneously in November 1773 in Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and made arrangements to find American brokers for their cargo—generally merchants whose personal loyalties lay with the Crown.
All these pre-arrangements made for a poorly-kept secret: American political activists were well apprised beforehand when and where the tea ships were going to try to make port and unload their cargo and news of activities at each port was immediately sent to the others so that all their actions could be coordinated.
Nowhere in the American Colonies was the East India Company able to sell its tea. Outside of Boston, colonists, merely by persuasion or by bullying the shippers and consignees, were able to prevent the landing of the tea into port—or at least its sale. In Boston too, more than a month before the Tea Party, a body of men gathered in the street outside the store of tea merchant Richard Clarke, demanded that the proprietor vow not to receive any tea shipments. One merchant wrote that the crowd, "not receiving such an answer as they demanded, they began an attack upon the store and those within, breaking down doors, flinging about mud, &c., for about an hour, when they began to disperse, and a number of gentlemen, friends of those agents coming to their assistance, they left the store and went upon change, but met with no further insult, tho' there is much threatening."
In Lexington, the inhabitants met and resolved not to use tea of any sort, no matter where it had come from, and to show their sincerity, "they brought together every ounce contained in the town, and committed it to one common bonfire." Boston, perhaps, was unique among the other major American ports insofar as its Colonial Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, was relatively eager to demonstrate to the "troublemakers," with whom he had already had a series of confrontations, that he was the supreme authority in the affairs of the Colony of Massachusetts. This certainly contributed to why events played out in Boston as they did. (Visit this Ask a Historian response for details of events in the Boston Harbor.)
Events that happened elsewhere, after the Boston Tea Party on December 14, 1773, were also later styled tea parties, linking them to the momentous action in Boston. Like the Boston Tea Party, they were efforts to reject tea shipments and to enforce a boycott of the East India Company's product.
On December 3, 1773, Alexander Curling, the captain of the London, had brought a cargo of tea to port in Charleston, but its consignees had refused delivery. On December 22, a week after the Boston Tea Party, a committee of colonists told Curling to return the tea to England, but the captain balked. The customs collector then had the 257 tea chests seized for non-payment of customs duties, unloaded, and stored in a locked room in the Exchange building (they were sold in 1776, with the proceeds going to finance the Revolutionary cause).
In late June of 1774, Captain Richard Maitland brought tea into Charleston harbor aboard the British ship Magna Carta. When local officials confronted him, he told them he would return the tea to England, but local men boarded the ship after hearing rumors that he intended to sell the tea. Captain Maitland took refuge on board the 100-gun British man-of-war HMS Britannia. That ship landed seven chests of tea in Charleston on November 3, but local officials ordered the merchant consignees to dump it in the Cooper River "as an Oblation to Neptune," and in order to avoid mob violence, they did.
On Christmas Day, 1773, three days after the tea from the London was seized in Charleston, the British ship Polly, laden with 698 cases of tea, sailed up the Delaware River toward Philadelphia and landed at Chester, Pennsylvania. Its captain, Samuel Ayres, was escorted into the city where he was met by a committee of hard men representing a mass meeting of perhaps 8,000 citizens who told him that he had better return the tea to England. They may have offered to pay some of his expenses and may also have drawn his attention to a broadside that promised to tar and feather him if he attempted to unload the tea. The broadside promised the same treatment to any river pilot who tried to bring the ship into Philadelphia and to any consignee who attempted to accept the shipment. The Polly sailed away without putting into port.
On December 10, just before the Boston Tea Party, the brig William, which had been headed to Boston along with the other tea-laden ships, wrecked off Provincetown. The ship's captain, Joseph Loring, off-loaded the 58 chests of its tea cargo before abandoning the ship, and sent it along to Boston for safe keeping, by agreement with the consignee, the son of Boston tea merchant Richard Clarke. Jonathan Clarke, who had rushed to Wellfleet to make the transfer, allowed his cousin there, David Greenough, to have two cases to sell on Cape Cod, a small amount of which he sold to a Colonel Willard Knowles, who also happened to be in charge of the town of Eastham's stock of ammunition. When their neighbors discovered what had happened, both men were brought into disrepute. Action erupted on March 7, 1774, when about 80 people unsuccessfully tried to "wrest the Towns Ammunition out of the Hands of Col. Knowles." Knowles's neighbors eventually forgave him, and Greenough apparently destroyed the rest of the tea from his two cases.
That left 56 chests of the William's cargo that had been sent to Boston. The Sons of Liberty quickly discovered where it was being kept and raided the place, but found only half of it, 28 cases, which they smashed and emptied into the harbor.
On March 7, 1774, as Colonel Knowles confronted his Eastham neighbors, and a day that Colonial Governor Thomas Hutchinson had proclaimed a day of public fasting, a band of men, evidently believing they had located some of the William's tea that remained, entered the Boston shop of tea merchant Davison, Newman, & Company (whose tea had been destroyed in the Boston Tea Party) and took 16 chests of tea down to the harbor, broke them open, and dumped the contents into the water. This has been referred to as the second Boston Tea Party.
Again, on the same day, March 7, 1774, King George III sent a message to the British Parliament, asking it to exact retribution for the destruction of tea in Boston. Parliament obliged him by passing the Boston Port Act, which would close the port to commerce, beginning on June 1.
On April 18, 1774, the Nancy, commanded by Captain Benjamin Lockyer, having been blown far off course by storms, finally anchored at Sandy Hook, "having on board something worse than a Jonah, which, after being long tossed in the tempestuous ocean, it is hoped, like him, will be thrown back upon the place from whence it came," according to the New York Journal. Its cargo consisted of 698 chests of tea. The consignees sent a note to him, saying they would not accept the tea because it would "expose so considerable a property to inevitable destruction." They advised Lockyer that, "for the safety of your cargo, your vessel, and your persons, it will be most prudent for you to return" to England. Members of the New York chapter of the Sons of Liberty took charge of the Nancy at Sandy Hook, and prevented its crew from deserting the ship, and escorted Lockyer into New York City, where he agreed to return to England with the tea and began procuring supplies to do so.
Meanwhile, on April 22, the ship London (which had been in Charleston in December) arrived, now under the command of a Captain Chambers. Although Chambers protested that he had no tea aboard, the Sons of Liberty had received word from Philadelphia that he was smuggling 18 chests, for his own profit, hidden among the ship's blankets. Chambers was taken into custody and members of the Sons of Liberty searched the ship, discovered the tea chests, broke them open, dumped the tea into the river, and brought the busted chests back to the city, where they were used to ignite bonfires in the streets. Chambers was threatened with his life, but he managed to escape, and made his way to the Nancy. A few days later, the ship sailed back to England with both Lockyer and Chambers aboard.
One night in late January, 1774, Princeton College students from all the colonies broke into the College's storeroom, and then, as described by student Charles Beatty, "gathered all the steward's winter store of tea and having made a fire on the campus we there burned near a dozen pound, tolled the bell, and made many spirited resolves." They also made an effigy of Massachusetts Governor Hutchinson, tied a tea canister around its neck, and burned it in front of Nassau Hall. Students subsequently continued their agitations, including paying nocturnal visits in groups of 40 "drest in white," to local townspeople rumored to be tea drinkers, seizing their stock of tea, and burning it.
On May 23, 1774, the local chapter of the Sons of Liberty, having heard that the Port of Boston was to be closed, and having passed a series of "resolves" against buying, selling, or drinking tea shipped from England, heard that the brig Geddes (which was possibly owned by the local customs inspector, William Geddes, who was also a merchant) had put into port in Chestertown with tea in its cargo. They boarded the brig by force and dumped its tea into the Chester River.
Some of the facts in this instance are a little spare—such as who owned the tea and where it had come from. Nevertheless, the city of Chestertown stages an enthusiastic reenactment of the "Chestertown Tea Party" every Memorial Day weekend.
In the summer of 1774, Thomas Charles Williams, the London representative of an Annapolis merchant firm, tried to smuggle tea across the Atlantic into Annapolis by disguising nearly a ton of it in 17 packages labeled as linen, and loading it among the rest of the cargo on the brig Peggy Stewart. The captain of the brig, Richard Jackson, only discovered the true nature of the "linen" while at sea. A few years before, an Annapolis precedent had been set when its customs officer refused to allow any ships to unload any portion of their cargo until the tax on all of it had been paid. This now alarmed Captain Jackson because most of the rest of the Peggy Stewart's cargo consisted of 53 indentured servants.
The ship reached Annapolis on October 14, 1774, and Williams's business partners decided they wanted nothing to do with his attempt at smuggling. They could not think of risking the lives of the indentured servants by sending the ship back across the Atlantic during the storm season which had just begun. They paid the customs tax due and quickly got the human cargo ashore, leaving the tea onboard. The presence of tea aboard ship had inflamed public opinion in Annapolis. Williams and his business partners were threatened with lynching; their store and their homes, with destruction. To avoid that, the business partners offered to burn the Peggy Stewart, which they owned, along with its cargo, which they did, on the night of October 19. This came to be called the Annapolis Tea Party. The city of Annapolis marks this each year with a ceremony.
On September 15, 1774, the sloop Cynthia sailed into harbor at York, Maine, from Newfoundland with a cargo that included 150 pounds of tea for its owner, local judge and Tory sympathizer, Jonathan Sayward. The local Sons of Liberty noted its arrival and called a town meeting on September 23. Meeting participants voted to seize the tea, which was done against the objections of the ship's captain, Sayward's nephew, James Donnell. The tea was placed in a storeroom, "until further Discovery could be made." That night, "a Number of Pickwacket Indians" (so it was said) broke into the storeroom and made off with the tea. Two days later, however, it was mysteriously returned, so perhaps Sayward was able to drink his tea after all, without having to pay customs duty on it (because it had been stolen). This was later called the York Tea Party.
In the summer of 1774, the captain of the small ship, Greyhound, loaded with East India Company tea, was reluctant to try to unload his shipment in Philadelphia, so just before the Delaware Bay, he put into Cohansey Creek, and anchored at the little hamlet of Greenwich, New Jersey. There he unloaded his cargo, and it was put into the cellar of a Loyalist, Daniel Bowen, who intended to have it eventually carried overland into Philadelphia and to sell it there.
On the night of December 22, 1774, after planning in secret for several months, 40 locals dressed as Indians broke into Bowen's house, carried the cases of tea into a field, dumped the tea in a large pile, and set it all on fire. Those who participated in this tea party were arrested but were not convicted because the jury was in complete sympathy with them.
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