Zócalo Admin, Author at What It Means to Be American

When Americans Feared an Invasion From Their Northern Border

In the Late 19th century, the French Canadians Who Came to Work in Cotton Mills Were Treated as ‘Pawns in a Catholic Plot’

by David Vermette
August 7, 2019

In 1893, Clare de Graffenried, special agent of the United States Department of Labor, published an article in The Forum describing an invasion of America’s northeastern border. For 30 years, Graffenreid observed, hundreds of thousands of French Canadians had been pouring into states like Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, finding work in the region’s burgeoning industries. “Manufacturing New England, Puritan and homogeneous no longer, speaks a French patois,” she wrote.

Furthermore, Graffenreid continued, French Canadian workers huddled in …

Eliza Hamilton’s Excellent Five-Month Steamboat Ride From New York to Wisconsin

In 1837, the 80-Year-Old Widow of the Late Treasury Secretary Was Delighted by the Beauty of the Nation

by Tilar J. Mazzeo
August 1, 2019

The musical Hamilton introduced theatergoers to Eliza Schuyler, the wife of Alexander Hamilton, and her sisters Angelica and Peggy. But there is much more to Eliza’s American life than we can see in the musical. When her distant cousin, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote about life on the Hudson River frontier in The Last of the Mohicans, he might as well as have been describing her girlhood. Later, as part of that generation who fought for, and won, American independence, Eliza …

How Did 19th-Century Ax Murderer Lizzie Borden Become a Household Name?

The Wealthy Yankee’s Brutal Crime Went Unpunished, Infuriating an Increasingly Diverse and Egalitarian Public

by Joseph Conforti
July 22, 2019

The Lizzie Borden murder case abides as one of the most famous in American criminal history. New England’s crime of the Gilded Age, its seeming senselessness captivated the national press. And the horrible identity of the murderer was immortalized by the children’s rhyme passed down across generations.

Lizzie Borden took an ax, / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.

While there is no doubt that Lizzie Borden …

In Colonial Virginia It Was the Kids Who Mixed the Cultures That Became American

Both the English and the Native Americans Used Children to Learn the Mysterious Ways of Their New Neighbors

July 18, 2019

In 1608, Thomas Savage, age 13, arrived on the first ship from England bringing supplies to the newly founded Jamestown colony. He had been in Virginia just a few weeks when he was presented as a gift to Wahunsenaca, the great Powhatan who ruled over most of the people along the rivers leading into the lower Chesapeake Bay area. In return, Powhatan gave the English a young man named Namontack.

Such exchanges of young people were considered normal. As English …

The Once-Enslaved Kentuckian Who Became the ‘Potato King of the World’

After His Emancipation, Junius Groves Walked 500 Miles to Kansas Where He Made a Fortune and Built a Community

by Peter Longo
July 8, 2019

Junius Groves started life as an enslaved person in Kentucky. By the time of his death, he would be celebrated, by those fortunate enough to know his story, as an exemplary builder of community, and as the “Potato King” of Kansas and beyond.

Groves was born in 1859 and emancipated by the Civil War. Around 1880, when he was 19, Groves walked from Kentucky to Kansas City, Kansas, with other former slaves at his side. It was a 500-mile walk that …

Why America’s First Saint Stopped Trying to Convert Her Neighbors to Catholicism

In the Early 19th Century, Elizabeth Seton Concluded That Proselytizing Undermined Social Harmony

by Catherine O’Donnell
July 1, 2019

Elizabeth Seton, for whom hundreds of Catholic parishes and schools are named, was the first native-born American citizen to be made a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Her 1975 canonization was the result of decades of labor by admirers who sought evidence of Seton’s “heroic virtue”—and miracles. Those admirers, who oversaw Seton’s presentation in Rome, also shaped an enduring story about the society in which Seton, who was born in 1774 and died in 1821, lived.

Emphasizing Seton’s courage …

How the Survivor of a 1609 Shipwreck Brought Democracy to America

Stephen Hopkins, Colonist at Both Jamestown and Plymouth, Proposed a Government Based on Consent of the Governed

by Joseph Kelly
June 24, 2019

We don’t like to talk much about Jamestown. Established in 1607, it was the first permanent English settlement in the New World. But it was a shameful start to America.

Even before they landed, the governing councilors were at each other’s throats. John Smith, a former mercenary, was nearly hanged—twice—and narrowly escaped an assassin. Another councilor, George Kendall, was executed by firing squad. John Ratcliffe deposed the colony’s first president, Edward Maria Wingfield, and installed himself as president. Later, …

How Sicilian Merchants in New Orleans Reinvented America’s Diet

In the 1830s, They Brought Lemons, Commercial Dynamism, and a Willingness to Fight Elites

by Justin Nystrom
June 20, 2019

When I started writing a book exploring the crucial contributions that Sicilians had made to New Orleans food culture, I sat down to talk with fabled restaurateur Salvatore “Joe” Segreto. “You’re not going to do one of those “who killa da chief?” histories, are you?,” was the first question he asked me.

Segreto referred to a familiar catcall heard by Italian kids growing up in New Orleans, forged in the bloody aftermath of the assassination of the city’s police Chief …

How the Gilded Age Turned Cowboys Into ‘Adventure Heroes’

Cattle Herding May Have Been Boring and Demeaning, But It Seemed Like an Antidote to Soul-Killing Industrial Jobs

by Tim Lehman
June 10, 2019

It is rare to find cowboys on the silver screen who spend much time performing the humdrum labor—herding cattle—that gave their profession its name. Westerns suggest that cowboys are gun-toting men on horseback, riding tall in the saddle, unencumbered by civilization, and, in Teddy Roosevelt’s words, embodying the “hardy and self-reliant” type who possessed the “manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation.”

But real cowboys—who worked long cattle drives in lonely places like Texas—mostly led lives of numbing tedium, usually …

The Long, Violent 1962 Storm That Inspired the Environmental Movement

100 MPH Winds Killed Millions of Trees in the Pacific Northwest, Changing Its Forests Forever

by John Dodge
June 6, 2019

The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 was the largest, most violent windstorm in the recorded history of the West Coast. Starting on October 12, it swept from Northern California to southern British Columbia over the course of 24 hours, with winds gusting over 100 miles per hour. It killed dozens, injured hundreds more, and damaged or destroyed some 53,000 homes in western Oregon and western Washington.

Fifty years after the storm ripped through the Pacific Northwest, meteorologists still marvel at …

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