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Historical Background While the dominant narrative of the American Revolution focuses on its political causes, the factor of religion cannot be ignored. Many settlers came to the North American colonies seeking the freedom to practice...
The Great Awakening
Historical Background The most important religious development in colonial America was the introduction of religious revivals known as the Great Awakening. Religious revivals first appeared in England, Scotland, and Germany, and...
The Grange Movement, 1875
The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was founded in 1867 to advance methods of agriculture, as well as to promote the social and economic needs of farmers in the United States. The financial crisis of 1873, along with falling crop...
J. Edgar Hoover on campus unrest, 1970
In September 1970, J. Edgar Hoover composed an open letter to American students detailing his view on civil unrest at the nation’s colleges and universities and warning against the elements he believed responsible. Hoover opened with...
Historical Context: Newsies
In the movies, scrappy urban newsboys hawk papers with screaming headlines, shouting, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" Real late nineteenth and early twentieth century newsboys were very different than the Hollywood image of lovable...
The Haymarket Riot
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
“A City upon a Hill” from John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity,” 1630
Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
The New Deal: Legislation & Policies
Historical Background When the stock market crashed in October of 1929, American citizens faced economic challenges unlike anything previously experienced in U.S. history. By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President in 1933...
Rise of the Populists and William Jennings Bryan
Historical Background As the United States evolved into an industrial powerhouse in the decades following the Civil War, the growing strength of the railroads and the banks particularly, coupled with the impact of mechanization on...
Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority
Essential Questions What impact did "the Moral Majority" have on American culture and politics in the 1980s? What are the differences between primary and secondary sources? Materials Excerpt from Listen America by Jerry Falwell (1980)...
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech
Unit Overview This unit is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Teaching Literacy through History resources, designed to align to the Common Core State Standards. These units were developed to enable students to understand,...
Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States, 1858
Though Lincoln spoke frequently during the 1858 Illinois Senate race against Stephen Douglas—a campaign that propelled Lincoln to the political forefront and helped shape him into a presidential candidate—very few Lincoln manuscripts...
The horrors of slavery, 1805
Originally circulated in 1805 to educate the public about the treatment of slaves, this broadside, entitled "Injured Humanity," continues to inform twenty-first-century audiences of the true horrors of slavery. As evidenced by this...
Slavery in the New York State census, 1800
While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures...
Sergeant Francis Fletcher of the 54th Massachusetts on equal pay for Black soldiers, 1864
Francis H. Fletcher, a 22-year-old clerk from Salem, Massachusetts, enlisted as a private in Company A of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment on February 13, 1863. One year after the regiment left Boston with great fanfare,...
A northerner’s view of southern slavery, 1821
Aurelia Hale of Hartford, Connecticut, offered her impressions of southern life in this letter of June 11, 1821. Hale, then about twenty-two years old, had recently traveled to Washington County, Georgia, to serve as a schoolteacher....
A Ku Klux Klan threat, 1868
This page contains language that may be offensive or inappropriate for some viewers. Reconstruction politics was a catalyst for widespread racism and hatred that freed people experienced throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan, founded...
A Founding Father on the Missouri Compromise, 1819
In 1819 a courageous group of Northern congressmen and senators opened debate on the most divisive of antebellum political issues—slavery. Since the Quaker petitions of 1790, Congress had been silent on slavery. That silence was...
Frederick Douglass on Jim Crow, 1887
Frederick Douglass tirelessly labored to end slavery but true equality remained out of reach. Despite the successful passage of several Constitutional amendments and federal laws after the Civil War, unwritten rules and Jim Crow laws...
Suffragists invoke Lincoln, 1910
In 1910 Washington State voted to approve full woman suffrage, a vote that was influenced by publications and posters such as this one. This poster, declaring that "Lincoln said women should vote," invoked the words of Abraham Lincoln...
Guided Readings: Slavery and Abolition
Sid Lapidus Collection: Liberty and the American Revolution Introduction The campaign to end slavery was a prolonged struggle. In England and in America in the eighteenth century, some authors such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson...
Breaking from Great Britain, 1776
Sid Lapidus Collection: Liberty and the American Revolution By 1776, Thomas Paine had become the most influential writer defending the break from Great Britain. Born in England, Paine arrived in the colonies in 1774, at age 34. His...
The Big Bang! The Birth of Rock and Roll
Overview In the early 1950s, a new form of music exploded onto the scene, exciting a growing teenage audience while startling many others who preferred the music of Bing Crosby and Patti Page. Popularized by disc jockey Alan Freed in...
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