Many Americans felt the U.S. had failed to live up to its ideals on its 200th anniversary. They hoped it might improve by the Declaration’s next big celebration.

Claire Wolnisty is associate professor of United States history at Austin College. She is the author of A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South ...

The lesson of the 1712 Coromantee uprising was that a slave rebellion somewhere was a slave rebellion everywhere. It was the beginning of an age of slave rebellions. In 1731, a West African named ...