On October 4, 1857, Frederick Douglass penned a letter to Hugh Auld, his former owner, hoping to begin a correspondence. “My heart tells me that you are too noble to treat with indifference the request I am about to make,” he begins.

On June 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act, marking an achievement in federal regulation of the food industry.

The Gilder Lehrman Collection has a multitude of personal letters and writings by prominent politicians, which often reveal a lighter side to their austere public personas.

In the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, on October 21, 1861, the 1st Minnesota Volunteers had just one casualty: a man named Lewis Mitchell. Mitchell was “only a private,” one of the approximately 750,000 casualties in the Civil War.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we’ll be highlighting some of the intriguing, eloquent, and historically significant poems in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. These poems shed a personal light on momentous events in American history, from the American Revolution to World War I.

The first Battle of Fredericksburg, fought December 11–15, 1862, has the distinction of being the largest Civil War battle, with a staggering total of 173,000 combatants. On December 11, Union troops came under heavy fire as they built bridges across the Rappahannock River. They crossed into the town of Fredericksburg the next day and clashed with Confederate troops, making this the first urban battle of the war. On December 13, 1862, Union troops led by General Ambrose Burnside faced off against General Robert E.