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Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective
Of the ten to sixteen million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, more than one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in...
Historical Context: "Birth of a Nation"
In 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, D. W. Griffith released his epic film Birth of a Nation . The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946. Based...
Historical Context: Black Soldiers in the Civil War
By early 1863, voluntary enlistments in the Union army had fallen so sharply that the federal government instituted an unpopular military draft and decided to enroll Black as well as White troops. Indeed, it seems likely that it was...
Historical Context: Go West ... and Grow Up with the Country
In 1854 Horace Greeley, a New York newspaper editor, gave Josiah B. Grinnell a famous piece of advice. "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," said Greeley. Grinnell took Greeley's advice, moved west, and later founded...
Historical Context: Immigration Policy in World War II
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suspended naturalization proceedings for Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants, required them to register, restricted their mobility, and prohibited them from owning...
Historical Context: Mexican Americans and the Great Depression
In February 1930 in San Antonio, Texas, 5000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans gathered at the city’s railroad station to depart the United States for settlement in Mexico. In August, a special train carried another 2000 to central...
Historical Context: Movies and Migration
Many of our most memorable images of the past come from movies. Films set in the past provide a vivid record of history: of the "look," the clothing, the atmosphere, and the mood of past eras. Nevertheless, movies remain a...
Historical Context: The Confederacy Begins to Collapse
By early 1863, the Civil War had begun to cause severe hardship on the southern home front. Not only was most of the fighting taking place in the South, but also as the Union blockade grew more effective and the South's railroad...
Historical Context: The Constitution and Slavery
On the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the US Constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, said that the Constitution was "defective from the start." He pointed out that the framers...
Historical Context: The Economics of Slavery
Like other slave societies, the South did not produce urban centers on a scale equal with those in the North. Virginia's largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850. That same year, Wilmington, North Carolina's...
Historical Context: The First National Census
Early in August 1790, David Howe, an assistant federal marshal, began the difficult task of counting all the people who lived in Hancock County, Maine. One of 650 federal census takers, charged with making "a...perfect enumeration.....
Historical Context: The Human Meaning of Migration
For more than two centuries novelists and autobiographers have explored the human meaning of migration. In hundreds of stories, novels, and autobiographies, these writers have examined what it means to be uprooted, voluntarily or...
Study Aid: The Language of Cultural Mixture and Persistence
The study of migration encourages us to think about the process of cultural adjustment and adaptation that takes place after migrants move from one environment to another. In the early twentieth century, Americans commonly thought of...
Historical Context: Why Do People Migrate?
In trying to understand why people migrate, some scholars emphasize individual decision-making, while others stress broader structural forces. Many early scholars of migration emphasized the importance of "push" and "pull" factors....
Why Black men fought in World War I, 1919
During World War I, approximately 370,000 black men in the US military served in segregated regiments and were often relegated to support duties such as digging trenches, transporting supplies, cleaning latrines, and burying the dead....
Emma Goldman on the restriction of civil liberties, 1919
Emma Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (present-day Lithuania). In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, becoming a well-known author and lecturer promoting anarchism, workers’ rights,...
Annette Gordon-Reed - "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and a professor of history at Harvard. Order The Hemingses of Monticello at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the...
Peniel Joseph - "The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr."
Peniel Joseph holds the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. Order The Sword and the Shield at the...
Daina Ramey Berry & Leslie Harris - "Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas"
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Khalil Gibran Muhammad - "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America"
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Kellie Carter Jackson - "Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence"
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Martha Jones - "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All"
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Alan Taylor - "Thomas Jefferson's Education"
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Richard J. M. Blackett - "The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery"
Richard J. M. Blackett is Andrew Jackson Professor of History, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University. Order The Captive's Quest for Freedom at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through...
Chris Brown - "Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism"
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Manisha Sinha - "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition"
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Lonnie Bunch - "A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump"
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David Blight - "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom"
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Marcus Nevius - "City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856"
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James Oakes - "The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution"
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Brandon Byrd - "The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti"
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Kabrina Baumgartner - "In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America"
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Ilisa Barbas and Molly Rogers - "To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes"
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Ed Ayers - "The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America"
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Thavolia Glymph - "The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation"
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Sophie White - "Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana"
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Catherine Kerrison - "Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America"
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Mia Bay - "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance"
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Kate Masur - "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction"
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Van Gosse - "The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
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Tamika Nunley - "At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C."
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Jane Hong - "Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion"
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Anna Malaika Tubbs - "The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation"
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Jessica Marie Johnson - "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World"
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Clint Smith - "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America"
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Gordon Chang - "The Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad"
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Julie Winch - "Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War"
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