When the Civil War broke out, Clara Barton wanted more than anything to be a Union soldier, an impossible dream for a thirty-nine-year-old woman, who stood a slender five feet tall. Determined to serve, she became...

The bloody slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, and the savage reprisals that followed, shattered beyond repair the myth of the contented slave and the benign master and intensified the forces of...