Theodore Roosevelt sank into his rocking chair and grabbed a rare nap in the Gilpatrick Hotel on Third Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was exhausted, and he had good reason to be. Over the preceding months, Roosevelt had traveled thousands of miles across the United States as he campaigned for a third presidential term. To one observer, the 53-year-old Roosevelt was campaigning so vigorously that he seemed to be “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy.”1 That boundles

In his Personal Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant related a story from his early army days that perfectly encapsulates the epic grit that allowed him to repeatedly stand tall and overcome so many daunting obstacles throughout his life. In the spring of 1844, a 22-year-old Grant learned that his unit, the Fourth Infantry Regiment, was being moved from Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri, to a new posting along the frontier of Louisiana. Before that could happen, the young brevet

Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington were the two most storied soldiers of their time. Their epic clash at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 was the culmination of decades of warfare between France and Britain as those two great empires competed to become the world’s most dominant power. Although Wellington ultimately won that battle, ensuring that the 19th century would belong to Great Britain, the legacy of the Emperor of the French never faded away. As Wellingto

Weeks after the crushing British defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela, one Redcoat survivor wrote that "the yell of the Indians is as fresh on my ear, and the terrific sounds will haunt me until the hour of my dissolution."1 The sights and sounds from that July 9, 1755 clash between a French and Indian force led by Captain Daniel Beaujeu and General Edward Braddock’s army of British regulars, Indian allies, and American colonial troops produced some of the most terrifying