157 items
Reading 1 Why are we in South Vietnam? We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Vietnam. . . . We have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam...
Study Aid: Major Slave Rebellions
New York City, 1712 Like many later revolts, this one occurred during a period of social dissension among White colonists following Leisler’s Rebellion. The rebels espoused traditional African religions. Stono Rebellion, 1739 The...
Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery
TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The...
Democracy in Early America: Servitude and the Treatment of Native Americans and Africans prior to 1740
Essential Questions How did European explorers and colonists who came to the New World for "Gold, Glory and/or God" justify their treatment of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured servants? To what extent were there...
Japanese Internment Camps of WWII
Overview Since Japanese people began migrating to America in the mid-nineteenth century, there has been resentment and tension between Americans and Asian immigrants. In California at the turn of the century laws were passed making it...
Farewell to Manzanar: Japanese Internment Camps During World War II
Background In 1886, after the arrival of Commodore Perry, the Japanese government lifted its ban on emigration and allowed its citizens to move to other countries. In the years after that, however, the United States made it more...
Theodore Roosevelt: A Bully Reformer
Introduction Theodore Roosevelt was the twenty-sixth president of the United States. His presidency would become the symbol of strong leadership, reform, and a square deal for Americans in the new century. When Roosevelt was...
The 1919 Black Sox Scandal
Introduction Baseball became an increasingly integral part of the American landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Growth of the sport occurred in conjunction with the...
Bruised Egos, Battles, and Boycott: The 1980 Moscow Olympics
Background Politics and sports have intermingled since the inception of the Olympic Games in Greece, but not until the 1980 Olympics did people fear that politics might destroy the Olympic movement and spirit. The Union of Soviet...
Transatlantic Trade, A Symbiotic Relationship
Background Crates full of rice slip and slide across the floorboards as the ship rocks back and forth. The ship looks insignificant in the vastness of the ocean. Air scented with tobacco wafts through the cracks in the ceiling of the...
The Conquest of Mexico: Past and Present Views
Introduction The conquest of Tenochtitlan by Hernán Cortez in 1519 is one of the most well-known examples of encounters between Europeans and Americans prior to 1600. Some primary sources that document the event still exist, though...
The Cold War Across Time (1945–1990): A Jigsaw with Expert Groups
Objective To discover the impact the Cold War had on multiple aspects of life, both in the United States and around the world, by exploring changes over time. Overview of Jigsaw Process Expert Groups will create four timelines...
A Lesson on Détente
Materials "Memorandums of Conversation," National Security Archive, George Washington University Notes and Excerpts from Nixon’s Meeting with Mao, February 1972 , National Security Archive, George Washington University "Nixon and...
How to Analyze Primary Source Documents / F.D.R. & The Great Depression
Essential Question How effective was President Franklin Roosevelt in communicating with the American public during this time of crisis? Objectives Understand the importance of thinking critically about historical events. Be able to...
The Folly of Empire
Overview Students will be introduced to a book written by John B. Judis entitled, The Folly of Empire: What George Bush Could Learn From Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson . This book compares recent foreign policy to the foreign...
The Folly of Empire (Condensed Version)
O verview Students will be introduced to a book written by John B. Judis entitled, The Folly of Empire: What George Bush Could Learn From Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. This book compares recent foreign policy to the foreign...
Letter from Christopher Columbus on Returning from His First Voyage to the Americas, 1493
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The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
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...
The Treaty of Tordesillas: Resolving "a Certain Controversy" over Land in the Americas
Background Imperial rivalries have often been resolved through war; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas is an important example of a rivalry that was resolved without hostilities through the demarcation of areas of influence by the...
Early European Imperial Colonization of the New World
Introduction By the early to mid-seventeenth century, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands were all competing for colonies and trade around the world. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, explorers, conquerors, missionaries...
The Cold War: Discussing the Speech of President Kennedy in 1963
Introduction The Cold War is the term for the rivalry between the two blocs of contending states that emerged following the Second World War. It was a series of confrontations played out on the world stage between the non-Communist...
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...
American Music Goes to War
Entertainment is always a national asset. Invaluable in time of peace, it is indispensable in wartime. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943 Background Music during World War II had an unprecedented impact on America, both on the home front...
President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, 1961
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National Security, Isolationism, and the Coming of World War II
Unit Overview The two decades following the end of "The Great War" witnessed significant changes in American economic, social, and cultural life. The affluence and optimism of the 1920s were tempered by memories of the war and an...
The Boston Massacre (Grades 4–6)
View the engraving The Bloody Massacre in King Street in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here . Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units...
The French and Indian War
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
The Monroe Doctrine
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...
Inside the Vault: Pearl Harbor
Originally broadcast on December 3, 2020, this session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection explores Gilder Lehrman Collection materials relating to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7,...
The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America
Kevin Phillips is the author of eight books, a journalist and a national elections commentator for CBS News during l988, 1992 and 96 presidential elections In the Cousins’ Wars, Phillips poses the question, how did Anglo-America ...
The Arab-Israeli Conflict and the Cold War
Aaron David Miller, Vice President for New Initiatives, The Wilson Center, argues that in the Arab-Israeli conflict national interest, moral interest, and the capacity of America to make a difference are closely aligned. Miller...
Morgan: American Financier
Based on extensive research in newly opened archives, Morgan: American Financier , Jean Strouse’s portrait of J. P. Morgan, shows a man who helped transform the United States into an industrial nation, and amassed an extraordinary...
Europeans and the New World, 1400–1530
Brian DeLay, associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses how the backwater of western Europe emerged from the devastation of the fourteenth century to generate the power, wealth, knowledge,...
In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery
David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and former director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of award-winning works that...
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. Freedom from Fear focuses primarily on political and economic developments, recounting how presidents and citizens responded to the two great...
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