169 items
"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...
Fighting for Democracy in World War I—Overseas and Over Here
Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (2009), and the co-editor of...
From the Editor
To celebrate the launch of Gilder Lehrman’s new website, we at History Now thought it appropriate to provide readers with a special, expanded issue. We chose for our topic one of the central themes in our national history: the causes...
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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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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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American Jewish Origins, 1654-1820
A year after his inauguration as president, George Washington visited the Newport, Rhode Island Jewish Congregation, Jeshuat Israel, in 1790. He went in response to a letter he had received from the leaders of that synagogue as well...
Exiles by the Streams of Babylon: Newport Jews in the Colonial Era
Newport, Rhode Island, wears its colonial past like a badge of honor. Visitors to its historic district encounter numerous plaques, markers, and monuments as they wend the town’s narrow and cobblestoned streets. As contemporary...
Hometown Societies in the New World: Jewish Landsmanshaftn and Americanization
Jacob Sholts, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire, wandered dejectedly through the streets of New York in 1904. Sholts, who had fled Russia to avoid military service during the Russo-Japanese War, could not keep a job. He felt...
The Jewish Imprint on American Musical Theater
Long celebrated as one of the most quintessentially American of entertainment genres, Broadway musicals delight audiences with glitz, glitter, and polish; send them home with at least a glimmer of hope; and celebrate America’s promise...
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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Coming to America: Ellis Island and New York City
New York City is a kind of archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the American mainland. There are some forty islands in the city beyond Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long...
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Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity
Strictly speaking, all American novels (with the exception of those written by Native Americans) are in one way or another immigrant fiction. But we usually think of immigrant fiction more narrowly as the encounter of the foreign-born...
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San Francisco and the Great Earthquake of 1906
At the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco still reigned as the major seaport on the Pacific coast. The city traced its origins to 1776, when a Spanish expedition planted a mission and a military post at the end of the...
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Why Immigration Matters
It is difficult today to recapture the iconoclasm signaled by Oscar Handlin’s opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted more than fifty years ago: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I...
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Getting Ready to Lead a World Economy: Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century America
When Jefferson won the presidency in 1801, his victory had an economic impact as great as the political one. The establishment of the new government under the Constitution twelve years earlier had laid the foundation for an integrated...
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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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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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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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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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Lincoln’s Interpretation of the Civil War
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for the second time. The setting itself reflected how much had changed in the past four years. When Lincoln delivered his First Inaugural Address, the new Capitol dome, which...
Transcontinental Railroads: Compressing Time and Space
Many of our modern clichés about the impact of technology, particularly about the consequences of the Internet and telecommunications, first appeared as clichés about nineteenth-century railroads, particularly the transcontinental...
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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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The New Deal, Then and Now
Well before Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the New Deal was emerging as an instructive model for those trying to understand, and address, what is now known as the "worst financial crisis since the 1930s." But is the New Deal in fact...
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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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Teaching the Revolution
For most Americans, young and old, the history of the American Revolution can be summed up something like this: In 1776, all the colonists rose up in unison to rebel against a tyrannical king and the horrible burden of unfair taxes...
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Our National Cemetery and Its Honored Dead: The African American History of Arlington
Adapted by permission of Ric Murphy from his book, Section 27 and Freedman’s Village in Arlington National Cemetery: The African American History of America’s Most Hallowed Ground (McFarland & Company, 2020), co-authored with...
Pledging Their Fortunes: The Professions of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
Within the historical literature, the professions of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence has not received nearly the same attention paid to the framers of the US Constitution. In his Economic Interpretation of the...
James Wilson: Scottish Immigrant, Pennsylvania Statesman, Signer of the Declaration, and Framer of the Constitution
James Wilson’s impact on the founding of the United States was significant. One of only six individuals to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he helped create the nation and its enduring institutions....
A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad
We are often focused today on the fact that the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not include women, African Americans, or Indigenous people, and how far this deviated from the spirit of “all men are created equal.” And...
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...
El enemigo de mi enemigo es mi amigo: Bernardo de Gálvez and the Battle That Saved the United States at Its Birth
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” goes the old adage, which is particularly apt when describing the relationship between Spain and the nascent United States during the War of American Independence. By 1775 when the war began,...
Voices of Democracy: Jovita Idár, the Idár Family, and the Struggle against Juan Crow
In August 2023, the US Mint will release the Jovita Idár quarter, “the ninth coin in the American Women Quarters Program” authorized by Public Law 116–330. On its website, the Mint states that Idár’s “ideas and practices were ahead of...
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg: Archivist, Institution Builder, and Advocate of Global Black History
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” So begins one of the most well-known essays of the Harlem Renaissance, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” written by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Published in the March...
"All Should Have an Equal Chance": Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence
In many ways, the Gettysburg Address reflects the culmination of Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong admiration for the principles of the Declaration of Independence. As a young man in 1838, Lincoln responded to the wave of mob violence...
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