american history

News Stories

The Southern Minnesota Sioux Uprising of 1862 and Tragic Fate of Jean LaRue

Nearby in the township of Owatonna, on a farm owned by Edward Gleek, worked a servant named Jean LaRue. LaRue had come from the Bouches-du-Rhone department of southern France and evidently left his home and mother Suzanne in search of a new life on the frontier prairie of southern Minnesota.

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News Stories

The Obits of William Walker, Filibustering President of Nicaragua

Born in 1824, Walker, who graduated summa cum laud at the age of fourteen from the University of Nashville, tried his hand at respectable professions such as medicine and law, but ended up as the embodiment of a mercenary movement to extend the realm of American empire south of the Mexican border.

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President Jackson Confronts France: The Spoliations Showdown, 1834-1836

For years the issue of unpaid indemnity – otherwise known as spoliations – caused consternation among successive U.S. diplomats in Paris as the French government refused to address it.

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