164 items
The industrial revolution that transformed western Europe and the United States during the course of the nineteenth century had its origins in the introduction of power-driven machinery in the English and Scottish textile industries...
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The Indian Removal Act
In the early nineteenth century, as European empires and the fledgling United States jockeyed for position in the West, true power was still in the hands of Native peoples. They far outnumbered whites and controlled resources and...
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The Zimmermann Telegram and American Entry into World War I
The fact that the telegram before him bore Arthur Zimmermann’s name made its contents that much harder for Walter Hines Page to believe. Page was the American ambassador to Great Britain and on a cold London morning in late February...
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D-Day or Operation Overlord, June 6, 1944
As dawn broke on June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion fleet became visible crossing the choppy waters of the English Channel to France. None of those who took part in D-Day, whether soldier, sailor, or airman, would ever forget the sight...
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The Battle for Baltimore
Bitter over the American declaration of war in 1812, when the British Empire had faced the emperor Napoleon at the peak of his power, the British sought payback in 1814. The war erupted over American anger at the British for seizing...
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Technology in the Persian Gulf War of 1991
In August 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. Five short months later, a powerful coalition led by the United States would launch Operation Desert Storm, one of the most rapid, decisive, and bloodless victories of all time. In just...
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The Korean War
The Korean War was three different conflicts from the perspective of the disparate groups who fought in it. For North and South Korea, the conflict was a civil war, a struggle with no possible compromise between two competing visions...
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The Battle of Antietam: A Turning Point in the Civil War
Four days after the battle of Antietam, which took place near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, Captain Robert Gould Shaw of the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry wrote to his father: "Every battle makes me wish more and...
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No Way Out: Lord Cornwallis, the Siege of Yorktown, and America’s Victory in the War for Independence
Early on the morning of October 17, 1781, Lieutenant General Charles, Lord Cornwallis, found himself hunkered down in a cave near the southern shoreline of the York River. Above him was the disintegrating hamlet of Yorktown, Virginia,...
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Education Reform in Antebellum America
Education reform is often at the heart of all great reform struggles. [1] By the 1820s Americans were experiencing exhilarating as well as unsettling social and economic changes. In the North, the familiar rural and agrarian life was...
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Transcendentalism and Social Reform
Those Americans who have heard of American Transcendentalism associate it with the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Henry David Thoreau. Asked to name things about the group they remember, most mention Emerson’s ringing...
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The War against Spain in the Philippines in 1898
Before learning of Commodore George Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on the morning of May 1, 1898, few Americans knew anything about the Philippine Islands. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning In the Days of McKinley ...
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The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s America
Nathaniel Hawthorne is the strange American author who has never been out of fashion; since his death in 1864, his stories and novels have resisted the tides of taste, canon reformation, and critical vicissitude. Herman Melville had...
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The Transnational Nature of the Progressive Era
In teaching the era of progressive reforms, it is hard to resist the temptation to focus on the two progressive presidents. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, figures of enormous power and striking failings, are the sorts of...
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The Contentious Election of 1876
The presidential election of 1876 is better known for its controversial aftermath than for the campaign that preceded it. The basic outline of events after Election Day, November 7, 1876, is familiar. The Democratic candidate,...
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Advice (Not Taken) for the French Revolution from America
"I come as a friend to offer my help to this very interesting republic," wrote the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette from aboard the Victoire as it sailed from France across the ocean to the rebellious British colonies in the...
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The US and Spanish American Revolutions
If one says "American Revolution" in the United States today, it is assumed that what is being referred to is the North American liberation struggles against the British Empire in the late eighteenth century. But the British North...
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The Other Theater: The War for American Independence beyond the Colonies
After the British signed the peace treaty that ended the American War for Independence in 1783, the City of London decided to commission a work of art to commemorate the conflict. The city’s representatives approached John Singleton...
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Two Revolutions in the Atlantic World: Connections between the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution
The late eighteenth century saw two successful anti-colonial revolutions unfold in the Americas. The first was in the United States, culminating in 1783. The second was in Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. That...
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FDR’s First Inaugural Address
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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Sharing a Civil War Photo with a Million People
A tree falls on a shed and all but destroys it. A passing student notices that from a certain angle the portion of the shed still standing looks just like a man on horseback. It is uncanny; a talented artist could hardly do better....
"The Brave Men, Living and Dead": Common Soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg
Midway through his remarks at the Gettysburg National Soldiers’ Cemetery on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln confided that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." This remarkable (and remarkably off-target)...
Field Relief Work at Gettysburg
On Independence Day in 1863, a Saturday, it was raining in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as burial details and medical officers took account of the recent battle. Some 50,000 men had fallen in three days, 8,000 of them killed outright and...
How the Town Shaped the Battle: Gettysburg 1863
We think we know who the important players at the Battle of Gettysburg were: Robert E. Lee, or George G. Meade, or the Union Army of the Potomac, or the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. But there is one major player from whom,...
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...
Financing the Transcontinental Railroad
The first transcontinental railroad, built between 1864 and 1869, was the greatest construction project of its era. It involved building a line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, across a vast, largely unmapped territory...
A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington
One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington....
"I, Too": Langston Hughes’s Afro-Whitmanian Affirmation
To read the text and hear the poem click here. Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S....
"The New Colossus": Emma Lazarus and the Immigrant Experience
To read the text and hear the poem click here. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the...
Disasters and the Politics of Memory
The controversy that erupted around the opening of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum on May 21, 2014, reminds us that much is at stake in the way disasters are remembered. Costing some $700 million to build, with an annual...
"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900
Dawn brought "mother of pearl" skies to Galveston, Texas, that Saturday morning of September 8, 1900. The city of 38,000, perched on an island just off the mainland, had an elevation of no more than nine feet. With no sea wall to...
The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood
In the latter part of August 1926, the sky darkened over much of the central United States and a heavy and persistent rain began to fall. Rain pelted first Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma, then edged eastward into Iowa...
"Dear Girl, how much I love you": The Revolutionary War Letters of Henry and Lucy Knox
Letters between soldiers and spouses are often powerful and moving documents. Given the intensity, danger, and uncertainty of armed conflict as well as the significant changes wrought by most wars, such correspondence reveals what...
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...
Making a Film about Alexander Hamilton
A few years ago, my colleagues and I made a documentary, Alexander Hamilton , for the Public Television series American Experience . When it was completed, we did a lot of screenings, interviews, and Q&As for all kinds of...
Alexander Hamilton on the $10 Bill: How He Got There and Why It Matters
2015 was a big year for Alexander Hamilton. Nearly two hundred eleven years after the nation’s first treasury secretary was shot and killed in a duel with then-Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr, an Off Broadway play...
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Reprinted by permission of Maya Lin from her book Boundaries (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). It’s taken me years to be able to discuss the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial , partly because I needed to move past it and...
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"Ditched, Stalled and Stranded": Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression
During the Great Depression, a top commercial portraitist took to San Francisco’s streets to experiment with representing the social devastation surrounding her. Her photos showed men sleeping on sidewalks and in parks like bundles of...
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African American Women in World War II
African American women made meaningful gains in the labor force and US armed forces as a result of the wartime labor shortage during the Second World War, but these advances were sharply circumscribed by racial segregation, which was...
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Glory on D-Day: African American Heroism on the Beaches of Normandy
Waverly Woodson squinted into the distance. From the deck of the ship, he could see little. A thick blanket of cloud hung overhead, and the heavy air pressed in from all sides. Drenched fatigues clung to Woodson’s weary limbs. For...
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Harlem’s Rattlers: African American Regiment of the New York National Guard in World War I
Jeffrey Sammons is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1988) and the co-author, with John H. Morrow, Jr., of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War:...
African Americans in the Revolutionary War
From the first shots of the American Revolutionary War until the ultimate victory at Yorktown, black men significantly contributed to securing independence for the United States from Great Britain. On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks,...
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On My Way to War in Iraq
The 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were followed by the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole , then of course September 11, 2001. Within two years I was on my way to Iraq. I had met my recruiter six years earlier by...
Fighting against the Odds: Black Soldiers in the Second World War
John H. Morrow, Jr. , is Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He taught for seventeen years at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where, in 1971, he became the first African American faculty member in the...
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