212 items
Edward J. Renehan Jr. examines Theodore Roosevelt’s view of war and how this affected his children, based on his book The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War.
...
War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars
Andrew Carroll, founder of the Legacy Project, recounts his search for letters from America’s wars and reads excerpts from several.
Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America
Lafayette College historian Donald Miller discusses his new book, Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, in an interview with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
...
Historians Now: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
David McCullough discusses his new book The Wright Brothers.
The Roaring Twenties
The 1920s heralded a dramatic break between America’s past and future. Before World War I the country remained culturally and psychologically rooted in the nineteenth century, but in the 1920s America seemed to break its wistful...
The Progressive Era to the New Era, 1900-1929
We should not accept social life as it has "trickled down to us," the young journalist Walter Lippmann wrote soon after the twentieth century began. "We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, . . . educate...
World War I
War swept across Europe in the summer of 1914, igniting a global struggle that would eventually take nine million lives. World War I pitted the Allies (initially composed of Britain, France, Belgium, Serbia, and Russia, and eventually...
A perspective on the San Francisco earthquake, 1906
At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a great earthquake broke loose, with an epicenter near San Francisco. Violent shocks punctuated the shaking, which lasted some 45 to 60 seconds. The earthquake was felt from southern Oregon to south of...
Eyewitness account of the sinking of the Titanic, 1912
Shortly before midnight on April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg roughly 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Two and a half hours later, at 2:20 a.m., the ship sank with approximately 1500 people still on board. This...
Anti-corporate cartoons, ca. 1900
These cartoons illustrate the growing hostility toward the practices of the big businesses that fueled the industrial development of the United States. In "The Protectors of Our Industries" (1883), railroad magnates Jay Gould and...
Disfranchisement of African American voters in Virginia, 1901
In February 1901, the Virginia General Assembly authorized a constitutional convention to draft election reforms. The convention, supported vehemently by Democrats, aimed to disfranchise African Americans without violating the...
Lynching in America, ca. 1926
The number of violent acts against African Americans accelerated during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began compiling lynching statistics in 1912,...
Birth of a Nation, 1915
This "Advice Sheet" flyer was distributed with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to theaters when the film was released in 1915. Significantly, the distributors are adamant that "NEGROES MUST NOT BE ADMITTED . . . under any...
Frederick Douglass on the disfranchisement of Black voters, 1888
Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved man and premier champion of civil rights for African Americans and women, was the nineteenth century’s most famous Black leader. In this letter, written in December 1888, he protests the...
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 1911
On March 25, 1911, a devastating fire started at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Workers had been locked in the factory to discourage theft and prevent labor organization, and they were unable to escape when the fire...
Prescription for alcohol during Prohibition, 1923
At midnight, January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol took effect. The Eighteenth Amendment banned the manufacture and sale (but not the possession, consumption,...
Women's suffrage poster, 1915
Opponents to women’s suffrage argued that voting would be detrimental to women’s character and to their families. This broadside, published around 1915 refutes those accusations. It declares that if a woman is responsible for taking...
Susan B. Anthony on suffrage and equal rights, 1901
Writing at the age of eighty, having just retired from a long public life as an advocate for abolition and women’s rights, Susan B. Anthony trenchantly summarized the gains that had been made in women’s rights. Her energetic tone...
Theodore Roosevelt on the sinking of the Lusitania, 1915
On May 7, 1915, the British passenger ship Lusitania , sailing from New York to Liverpool, was torpedoed by a German U-boat. The Lusitania sank, killing 1,195 people on board, including 123 Americans. The incident created sharp...
Recruiting posters for African American soldiers, 1918
These two World War I recruiting posters aim to encourage African Americans to enlist. In the first poster, “Colored Man Is No Slacker,” a black soldier takes his leave against a background of African American patriotism, self...
Treaty of Versailles and President Wilson, 1919 and 1921
The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, was drafted at the Paris Peace Conference in the spring of 1919 and shaped by the Big Four powers—Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. This souvenir copy of the Paris...
Sacco and Vanzetti, 1921
On May 31, 1921, Nicola Sacco, a 32-year-old shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a 29-year-old fish peddler, went on trial for murder in Boston. More than a year earlier, on April 15, 1920, a paymaster and a payroll guard had been...
Herbert Hoover's Inaugural Address, 1929
In November 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover was elected president over the Democratic nominee Al Smith. Hoover had served in the Harding and Coolidge administrations and won the nomination after Coolidge declined to run for a third...
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: Post-World War I Labor Tensions
The years following the end of World War I were a period of deep social tensions, aggrevated by high wartime inflation. Food prices more than doubled between 1915 and 1920; clothing costs more than tripled. A steel strike that began...
Historical Context: The Post-World War I Red Scare
The end of World War I was accompanied by a panic over political radicalism. Fear of bombs, Communism, and labor unrest produced a “Red Scare.” In Hammond, Indiana, a jury took two minutes to acquit the killer of an immigrant who had...
Historical Context: The Global Effect of World War I
A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the twentieth century ranked the onset of World War I eighth. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was in one way or...
Reporting on the Spanish Influenza, 1918
These newspaper articles illustrate the impact on American society of Spanish Influenza (H1N1), which first appeared in the United States in March 1918. [1] There were periodic, minor outbreaks for six months, but in September a...
Diary of World War I nurse Ella Osborn, 1918–1919
At the outbreak of World War I, Ella Jane Osborn was a surgical nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. In January 1918, she volunteered to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces as a member of the Red Cross’s nursing...
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....
Selling World War I: "Buy Liberty Bonds!" 1917-1919
When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, it needed funds to support the war effort. The Civil War had demonstrated that simply printing more currency would lead to inflation and economic trouble. During World War...
Rules for discharging disabled veterans, 1919
When World War I ended in 1918 more than 4.6 million men returned to the United States from war. The American people and the US government were unprepared to reintegrate and care for the men who returned with physical injuries and...
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,...
American Indians' service in World War I, 1920
More than 11,000 American Indians served with the American forces during World War I. Nearly 5,000 Native men enlisted and approximately 6,500 were drafted—despite the fact that almost half of American Indians were not citizens and...
John Barry - "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History"
John Barry is an author, historian, and adjunct faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Order The Great Influenza at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every...
Khalil Gibran Muhammad - "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America"
Order The Condemnation of Blackness at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
...
James Shapiro - "Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future"
Order Shakespeare in a Divided America at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
...
Martha Jones - "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All"
Order Vanguard at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Elaine Weiss - "The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote"
Order The Woman's Hour at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Richard Brookhiser - "Give Me Liberty: A History of America's Exceptional Idea"
Order Give Me Liberty at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Harold Holzer - "The Presidents Vs. The Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media—from the Founding Fathers to Fake News"
Order The Presidents Vs. The Press at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
...
Amanda Bellows - "American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination"
Order American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
...
Brandon Byrd - "The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti"
Order The Black Republic at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Ilisa Barbas and Molly Rogers - "To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes"
Order To Make Their Own Way in the World at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
...
Mia Bay - "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance"
Order Traveling Black at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Richard Haass - "The World: A Brief Introduction"
Order The World at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Showing results 101 - 150