663 items
The Civil War was the bloodiest in the nation’s history, with 618,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perishing in the war. Among the nearly 8,000 men mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 were twelve commanding...
A bond for the manumission of a slave, 1757
In 1757, New York tavern keeper Eve Scurlock freed five slaves in her will, citing their fidelity, service, and good behavior. Among them was a woman named Ann, to whom Scurlock also willed money, clothing, and household items. Though...
The Province of Massachusetts Bay requests aid from Queen Anne, 1708
Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713) was the second of four great wars for empire fought among France and England and their Indian allies. This struggle broke out when the French raided English settlements on the New England frontier....
President Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 1861
On March 4, 1861, the day Abraham Lincoln was first sworn into office as President of the United States, the Chicago Tribune printed this special pamphlet of his First Inaugural Address. In the address, the new president appealed to...
The "House Divided" Speech, ca. 1857–1858
By 1850, the extension of slavery into the new territories won through the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 provided a testing ground for competing visions of America. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and the Kansas...
The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863
The Emancipation Proclamation was shaped by both pragmatic considerations and Lincoln’s deeply held, lifelong hatred of slavery. It was timed, after the Union victory at Antietam, to strike a military blow against the South’s economic...
President Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, 1865
Just 701 words long, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address took only six or seven minutes to deliver, yet contains many of the most memorable phrases in American political oratory. The speech contained neither gloating nor rejoicing....
Best friends divided by the Civil War, 1861
On April 12, 1861, Confederate officials informed Major Robert Anderson, US commander at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, that they would allow one hour for him to surrender his forces. When he refused, Confederates...
Olaudah Equiano, 1789
Within ten years of the first North American settlements, Europeans began transporting captured Africans to the colonies as enslaved laborers. Imagine the thoughts and fears of an eleven-year-old boy who was kidnapped from his village...
A View of Savannah, Georgia, 1734
The colony of Georgia was founded in 1732 by James Oglethorpe, a British Member of Parliament. Oglethorpe planned Savannah as a place where the poor could come to make a better life. An attempt to produce a "classless society," this...
Indian Wars: The Battle of Washita, 1868
The Battle of Washita on November 27, 1868, pitted US Army troops commanded by General George Custer against the Southern Cheyenne. An excerpt from Custer’s report on a return to the battlefield ten days later is presented here. The...
William T. Sherman on the western railroads, 1878
After Ulysses S. Grant’s election as president, William Tecumseh Sherman, known for leading the "March to the Sea" in the closing months of the Civil War, was appointed commanding general of the United States Army. Headquartered in St...
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, 1775
By April 1775, reconciliation between England and the thirteen colonies had failed. Two months earlier, Parliament had declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion, and on April 14 General Thomas Gage received secret orders...
An African American protests the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850
This 1850 letter written by Henry Weeden is a statement against slavery by a free African American. Weeden was one of Boston’s leading abolitionists. In the 1840s, he had been an activist for the integration of Boston’s schools. [1]...
George Wallace on segregation, 1964
In 1958, George Wallace ran against John Patterson in his first gubernatorial race. In that Alabama election, Wallace refused to make race an issue, and he declined the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. This move won Wallace the...
George Washington discusses Shays’ Rebellion and the upcoming Constitutional Convention, 1787
On January 25, 1787, Daniel Shays and his insurrectionists confronted a Massachusetts state militia force outside the Springfield armory. Shays’ Rebellion had begun in the summer of 1786, when Shays, a former Continental Army captain,...
Enslaved Children of New Orleans, 1863
Photographs of emancipated children were sold to raise money for the education of freed slaves in New Orleans. The children featured in this photograph drew attention to the fact that slavery was not solely a matter of color. If a...
The Fifteenth Amendment, 1870
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments gave constitutional status to emancipation’s promise. The Fifteenth Amendment provided suffrage for black men, declaring that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote...
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...
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...
Discovering a mass grave in Iraq, 2003
Mark Rickert wrote this email while serving as a journalist with the 372nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment in Iraq. On this day, he and his group were investigating rumors of a mass grave. The letter is written to his grandfather,...
Christmas in Kuwait, 1990
Cpl. Brett G. Coughlin arrived with Delta Company in Saudi Arabia at the port of Al Jubail on September 13, 1990. For the next three months the company trained in the northern desert of Saudi Arabia. By Christmas, its headquarters...
Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address, 2009
The inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2009 was a historic moment not only because Obama was the first African American ever sworn into executive office but also because he entered the presidency at a...
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: 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: 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 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...
Historical Context: American Slavery and Abolition through Hollywood
Throughout the twentieth century, many influential Hollywood films, such as Birth of a Nation , Gone with the Wind , Glory , and Amistad , have helped shape the way Americans have thought about slavery and its legacy. Birth of a...
Guided Readings: Origins of the Cold War and Soviet-American Confrontation
Reading 1 From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague,...
Guided Readings: The Korean War
Reading 1 In Korea the Government forces, which were armed to prevent border raids and to preserve internal security, were attacked by invading forces from North Korea. . . . The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that...
Guided Readings: Anti-Communism at Home
Reading 1 Sec. 2: (a) It shall be unlawful for any person— (1) to knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United...
Guided Readings: Religion and Social Reform: Abolitionism
Reading 1 Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” . . . I shall strenuously contend...
Guided Readings: World War I
Reading 1 The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name, during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought, as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments, as well as upon every...
Guided Readings: Slavery
Reading 1: The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the...most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.....Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is...
Guided Readings: Sectional Conflict
Reading 1 I do not . . . hesitate to avow before this House and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the...
Guided Readings: Secession and the Civil War
Reading 1 The leaders and oracles of the most powerful party in the United States have denounced us as tyrants and unprincipled heathens through the whole civilized world. They have preached it from their pulpits. They have declared...
Guided Readings: African Americans after Slavery
Reading 1 All freedmen . . . over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or...
Guided Readings: Indian Policy
Reading 1 One [infantry] battalion...left Fort Lyon [Colorado] on the night of the 28th of November, 1864; about daybreak on the morning of the 29th of November we came in sight of the camp of friendly [Cheyenne and Arapaho] Indians.....
Guided Readings: Toward Revolution
Reading 1 For fire and water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies in North America. Nothing can exceed the jealousy and emulation which they possess in regard to each other. . . . In short . . . were they left to...
Guided Readings: Impact of the Revolution on Women and African Americans
Reading 1 I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If...
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