More households are now homes to pets than ever before, which is perhaps not surprising, given the wide-ranging benefits that keeping a pet can bring to our daily lives. Scientific studies have revealed that pets can aid our mental well-being for example, lower our blood pressure and even help children to read. While the increasingly wide range of pets being kept today means that there is literally a pet for everyone, the aim of this guide is

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In 1839, two years after graduating from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau and his older brother, John, took a boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John's sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion during his stay at Walden Pond. Modern readers have come to see Thoreau's story of the river journey as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, depicting the early...

Moore, librarian of the New York Historical Society, discusses the role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War -- the wrangling over whether to allow black troops to be armed and to fight, especially in the southern states -- and the formation of black units from both northern and southern colonies.