As the country split in two, President Abraham Lincoln was determined to hold onto the border areas, including his native state of Kentucky. "I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky," he is reported to have said during the early days of the conflict. James A. Garfield, an Ohio schoolteacher turned lawyer turned soldier, helped him keep it. (02/05/2012)

Initial rumors going around Washington about the future of Simon Cameron, Abraham Lincoln's ethically challenged secretary of war, soon turned out to be right on the money. (01/22/2012)

Eighty years ago the Rev. James Cox arrived at the White House to present a petition to President Herbert Hoover seeking $5 billion for public works projects. That number is equal to about $80 billion today, based on changes in the consumer price index. (01/08/2012)

Even with the United States newly at war, much about Christmas 1941 was familiar. "In many ten thousands of homes the lights flick on at dawn," Post-Gazette reporter Frank Matthews wrote on Dec. 25. In those homes, little boys and girls would spy presents around their trees, and shout up the stairways, "Daddy ... he came." (12/25/2011)

Previously sleepy Washington has "the press and bustle of New York," a correspondent for The Daily Pittsburgh Gazette wrote during his wartime visit to the federal capital. "Throngs of wagons block up the street, bearing every kind of burden," the reporter wrote on Dec. 21, 1861. (12/11/2011)