107 items
Several years ago when I was researching a very different subject at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, I happened across several archival documents related to FDR’s first inaugural address. As a...
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American Indians and the Transcontinental Railroad
"Across the Continent" is among the most familiar lithographs of Currier and Ives. It features a locomotive chugging from the foreground toward a far western horizon. To the left of the tracks are the standard images of the coming of...
The Origins of the Transcontinental Railroad
The completion in 1869 of the first transcontinental railroad—the Pacific Railway, as the combination of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific was called—created two of the most iconic symbols in American history. The first is a...
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919
On September 19, 1918, 21-year-old Army private Roscoe Vaughan reported to sick call at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, feeling achy and feverish. He was promptly hospitalized along with eighty-two other soldiers that day. Influenza had...
The Role of China in US History
Today, our homes are filled with countless products "Made in China." Long before the American Revolution, thanks to British trade with China, many colonists were able to purchase Chinese furniture, wallpapers, silks, and porcelains....
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America and the China Trade
On a quarter-mile strip of land in the bustling city of Canton (Guangzhou), China, trade was conducted between merchants from China and the eastern seaboard of America, beginning in 1784 and lasting until the mid-nineteenth century....
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Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
In October 1950, the newly established People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War on the North Korean side against the United States and other United Nations troops. Many Chinese American citizens expressed deep concern at this...
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Postwar Taiwan and the USA
Taiwan has been a showcase of liberalization under American encouragement, but also the primary irritant in US-China relations. A large island with a population of twenty-three million located about 100 to 150 miles off the coast of...
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"The Chinese Question"—Unresolved and Ongoing for Americans
In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the nation’s first race-based immigration law that was not effectively repealed until 1965–1968. The act exempted Chinese merchants, diplomats, scholars, and...
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The Diary of Ella Jane Osborn, World War I US Army Nurse
The unpublished diary of Ella Jane Osborn (1881–1966) in the Gilder Lehrman Collection opens an extraordinary window into the daily experiences of one American woman stationed in a US Army hospital in a dangerous and contested battle...
"Dear Miss Cole": World War I Letters of American Servicemen
"Received your package," Pvt. George Van Pelt of Company I, 165th Infantry wrote in May 1918 from the frontlines in France to Annie E. Cole, a grammar school teacher and principal on Staten Island, New York, and to her students. "I...
Race and the Good War: An Oral History Interview with Calvin D. Cosby, World War II Veteran
Calvin D. Cosby was born in 1918, in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was my hometown as well. I first knew Calvin Cosby as the husband of my beloved second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ima Bradford Cosby. Mr. and Mrs. Cosby and their daughter...
The First Saddest Day of My Life: A Vietnam War Story
What I know about the Vietnam War, I learned as a child from my father, Louis Raynor. At thirteen years old, I discovered an old, tattered, leather-bound diary in my parents’ chest of drawers. When I opened it, I immediately...
Ralph W. Kirkham: A Christian Soldier in the US-Mexican War
North of Mexico’s border, most Americans know the 1846 conflict that established that boundary (if they know it at all) as the training ground for Civil War heroes. Generals Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and...
The William Shepp Diaries: Combat and Danger in World War I
"Disappointments," wrote Private William Shepp, "are common in the army." At the time, Shepp, an aspiring teacher from a small community in West Virginia, was pondering the seemingly unrewarding and unending work that he and the men...
Nancy Ward, Cherokee Beloved Woman
In 1755 a Cherokee woman named Nanye’hi accompanied a war party, which included her husband Kingfisher. At Taliwa in what today is north Georgia, the Cherokees engaged the enemy Creek Indians in battle. Nanye’hi crouched behind a log...
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Sitting Bull: Last of the Great Chiefs
Sitting Bull was the last of the great Indian chiefs to surrender his free way of life and settle on a government reservation. He belonged to the Hunkpapa tribe of the Lakota Sioux. The Lakotas numbered seven tribes, loosely...
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Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) and the National Council of American Indians: Leading the Way for Indigenous Self-Representation
Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1876, the same year as the Battle of Greasy Grass (known more commonly in US history as the Battle of Little Big Horn), Gertrude Simmons Bonnin grew up amidst a US-national culture of systemic...
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"Show Them What an Indian Can Do": The Example of Jim Thorpe
Although the twentieth century produced many great athletes, there is no one who stood out more than Jim Thorpe. That is not just my opinion. When Jim Thorpe won two gold medals at the 1912 Olympic Games, the king of Sweden said to...
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Indigenous Americans in World War II: The Navajo Code Talkers
In the summer of 1983, my son and I visited my father, Benson Tohe. He and other Navajo Code Talkers had recently been honored in Washington, DC, with a parade and given a medal for their service in World War II. That was the first...
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Inventing American Diplomacy
In 1783, the expatriate artist Benjamin West began what became his most memorable painting, "The Peacemakers." West intended to produce a group portrait of the diplomats whose negotiations resulted in the Treaty of Paris of 1783, but...
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Native American Discoveries of Europe
Native Americans discovered Europe at the same time Europeans discovered America. As far as we know, no birch bark canoes caught the gulf stream to Glasgow, and no Native American conquistadores planted flags at Florence, but just as...
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Teaching American History to Muslim Exchange Students
Everyone knows that the election of 2004 marked a pivotal turning point for the American people. That point was brought home forcefully by the experience of teaching American history that summer to a group of twenty-one young Muslim...
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Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy
Henry Kissinger is one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the Cold War. He participated as a soldier, scholar, and statesman in many of the most significant policy debates of the period. He acted as an intellectual,...
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A New Look at the Great Plains
To most Americans the Great Plains are the Great Flyover, or maybe the Great Drivethrough. Viewed from a window seat the plains seem nearly devoid of interest, something to get across enroute to someplace far worthier to explore or...
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The Colonial Virginia Frontier and International Native American Diplomacy
Telling the story of Native Americans and colonial Virginians is a complex challenge clouded by centuries of mythology. The history of early settlement is dominated by the story of a preteen Pocahontas saving the life of a courageous...
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Born Modern: An Overview of the West
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go. At various times places now considered as thoroughly eastern as western Pennsylvania, western...
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The Great Debate: Kennedy, Nixon, and Television in the 1960 Race for the Presidency
Imagine the setting. Since soon after the close of World War II, the United States had been engaged in a heated Cold War with the Communist Soviet Union. Within the previous four years, Soviet tanks and troops had crushed a democratic...
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Unruly Americans in the Revolution
Nearly all of the blockbuster biographies of the Founding Fathers—whether the subject is George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams—portray the vast majority of ordinary Americans as mere bystanders. Although the authors of...
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The United States and China during the Cold War
The Cold War Comes to Asia In the closing years of World War II, American military and diplomatic representatives in China recognized that civil war was likely to erupt between the Nationalist-controlled government headed by Chiang...
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From These Honored Dead: Memorial Day and Veterans Day in American History
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the prop osition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether...
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A New Era of American Indian Autonomy
The American West is home to the majority of America’s Indian Nations, and, within the past generation, many of these groups have achieved unprecedented political and economic gains. Numerous reservation communities now manage...
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Avast! How the US Built a Navy, Sent In the Marines, and Faced Down the Barbary Pirates
In October 1784, an American merchant vessel, the Betsey , was on a trade run from her home port of Boston to Tenerife in the Canary Islands when she was approached by an un-flagged vessel. Suddenly, "sabers grasped between their...
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The Filibuster King: The Strange Career of William Walker, the Most Dangerous International Criminal of the Nineteenth Century
On November 8, 1855, on the central plaza of the Nicaraguan city of Granada, a line of riflemen shot General Ponciano Corral, the senior general of the Conservative government. Curiously, the members of the firing squad hailed from...
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Cold War, Warm Hearth
In the summer of 1959, a young couple married and spent their honeymoon in a fallout shelter. Life magazine featured the "sheltered honeymoon" with a photograph of the duo smiling on their lawn, surrounded by dozens of canned goods...
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The Years of Magical Thinking: Explaining the Salem Witchcraft Crisis
Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from semi-mythical events such as the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and Salem witchcraft....
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Polish Political Exiles and the Legacy of the American Revolution in the Antebellum US
In the second of the Cabinet rap battles in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton wage a fiery debate in 1796 about whether the US should honor its old treaty obligations to a newly...
파도와 메아리: Waves and Echoes of Korean Migration to the United States
According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay...
The Repeal of Asian Exclusion
The United States excluded Chinese people beginning in the late nineteenth century and expanded its ban to all Asians in the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts. In addition to creating a national origins quota system best known for...
The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
The United States harvested a bumper crop of good immigrants in 1955. About 1,000 highly educated Chinese gained citizenship, including acclaimed scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs such as the architect I. M. Pei, the...
"Revered By All": The Declaration of Independence in the Reconstruction Era
Although it was the speech that redefined the conflict and effectively changed the meaning of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address is often misunderstood today when it is not simply ignored, at least in American...
Diego de Gardoqui and the Beginnings of Spanish-American Diplomacy
Born into a prominent Basque family on November 12, 1735, in the province of Vizcaya, Spain, Diego de Gardoqui was a treasured son of Don José Ignacio Gardoqui y Azpegorta and his wife Maria Simona. Groomed to be a banker, he was sent...
The Spanish Siege of Pensacola
In 1779, the king of Spain declared war on Britain. Like his ally the king of France, he decided to fight his British enemies while they were busy trying to defeat the American Revolution. As soon as he declared war, the Mississippi...
The Declaration of Independence: America’s Call to Arms to Spain and France
Early in the throes of the American Revolution in the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson was wrestling with a document to King Carlos III of Spain and King Louis XVI of France that would bring much-needed help to the embattled American...
Spain’s Black Militias in the American Revolution
In 1775, Virginia’s governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation offering liberty to all enslaved Blacks who would join Great Britain’s military forces and defeat the rebellious Americans fighting for their...
Felicitas St. Maxent, Wife of Bernardo de Gálvez: From French New Orleans Belle to Exiled Spanish Dowager Countess
When Marie-Felicité Saint-Maxent La Roche was born in New Orleans on December 27, 1755, her future looked easy to predict: a pampered childhood, an arranged early marriage to the scion of a wealthy family, the motherhood of many...
The Revolutionary Era West, before and after American Independence
In December 1772, a year before angry colonists heaved chests of East India tea into Boston Harbor, the British government seemed on the cusp of creating a new North American colony. Named “Vandalia,” in honor of Queen Charlotte’s...
The Proclamation, Reading, and Immediate Reception of the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence, which the Second Continental Congress adopted on July 4, 1776, is America’s birth certificate, and patriots greeted it with joy similar to that surrounding the birth of a child. The Declaration...
Reconstructing the West and North
In 1865 the Radicals of the Republican Party regarded the Northern victory in the Civil War as a “golden moment” to remake the Republic. The Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, and, so they thought until Andrew Johnson...
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Mexican Farm Labor and the Agricultural Economy of the United States
In July of 1958, a Mexican man in Empalme, Mexico, died outside a recruitment center for Mexican men who wanted to participate in a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program. The program, designed and agreed upon by both the...
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