People with only a slight interest in history will enjoy these fascinating, short and easy to understand stories. Serious history buffs will like these lesser-known episodes, not the stories weve heard a million times. For example: try to find anyone who knows about the attempted slave insurrection in Fairfax County, Virginia. With Mary Lincolns spending habits, who knew that Abraham Lincoln actually saved an enormous percentage of his presidential salary? A slave honored in Virginia with a monument; the history of Lee Highway which opened with great fanfare in 1923 as a 3,000 mile road from Washington, DC to San Diego; a story about the Little River Turnpike, the second oldest turnpike in America, built partly by slaves and captured Hessian soldiers. Youll read about two Civil War ships that collided in the Potomac River. Victims included wounded soldiers' wives and one soldiers six-year-old son. Youll read a great account of the massive Civil War corruption. Youll learn about the disastrous condition of the treasury (sound familiar?) during the Revolutionary War. The government tried everything, including a lottery to get the country afloat in a sea of red ink. But the most fascinating story may be about the Revolutionary War soldier who faked his own desertion to defect to the enemy with the highly secretive mission of going behind enemy lines to capture and return for trial the worst traitor in American history: Benedict Arnold. Bet you never heard of this story. There are many other stories in this eclectic, heavily-researched manuscript. Theres a story about the Christmas Truce in World War One, about long-forgotten holidays in Virginia, about the retrocession which sent an area of Washington back to Virginia in 1846, and about the impeachment of a Supreme Court justice (it happened only once). And more!

The name Joseph Addison was once synonymous with the finest of English prose. Eminent writers from Voltaire to Lord Macaulay to John Steinbeck considered him a consummate master to be studied and emulated. According to Benjamin Franklin, Addison’s writings "contributed more to the improvement of the minds of the British nation, and polishing their manner, than those of any other English pen whatever." While his influence lives on in the sound and style of English today, the fame of this literary role model has faded from popular awareness. The Addisonian spirit, which ushered in an exceptional era of domestic peace in Britain and provided inspiration for the French and American Revolutions, coded many of the constitutional, political, and social agreements we continue to live with today. This book, the first comprehensive monograph of Addison in half a century, considers Addison’s contribution through an in-depth exploration of his writings, political work, social life, and theatrical stagings.

History has shown us that the power of political speech can be put to both positive and manipulative ends - while rhetoric is a powerful tool for those who seek to persuade others to adopt their views, it can also be employed to foment factionalism and undermine the very basis of a democratic society. In this unique study, Marc Hanvelt shows how eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume confronted questions about the negative moral and political effects of rhetoric, and how he differentiated between manipulative and non-manipulative political speech. Drawing on Hume's philosophical, historical, and popular writings, The Politics of Eloquence presents an understanding of rhetoric that can be properly ascribed to this important thinker, an understanding hitherto overlooked in the scholarly literature. Offering an original approach to thinking about political rhetoric – an essential element of democratic politics – Hanvelt makes important contributions to both Hume scholarship and to broader areas in political theory and philosophy.