63 items
To read the text and hear the poem click here. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the...
"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900
Dawn brought "mother of pearl" skies to Galveston, Texas, that Saturday morning of September 8, 1900. The city of 38,000, perched on an island just off the mainland, had an elevation of no more than nine feet. With no sea wall to...
The Role of China in US History
Today, our homes are filled with countless products "Made in China." Long before the American Revolution, thanks to British trade with China, many colonists were able to purchase Chinese furniture, wallpapers, silks, and porcelains....
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"The Chinese Question"—Unresolved and Ongoing for Americans
In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the nation’s first race-based immigration law that was not effectively repealed until 1965–1968. The act exempted Chinese merchants, diplomats, scholars, and...
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The Diary of Ella Jane Osborn, World War I US Army Nurse
The unpublished diary of Ella Jane Osborn (1881–1966) in the Gilder Lehrman Collection opens an extraordinary window into the daily experiences of one American woman stationed in a US Army hospital in a dangerous and contested battle...
"Dear Miss Cole": World War I Letters of American Servicemen
"Received your package," Pvt. George Van Pelt of Company I, 165th Infantry wrote in May 1918 from the frontlines in France to Annie E. Cole, a grammar school teacher and principal on Staten Island, New York, and to her students. "I...
The William Shepp Diaries: Combat and Danger in World War I
"Disappointments," wrote Private William Shepp, "are common in the army." At the time, Shepp, an aspiring teacher from a small community in West Virginia, was pondering the seemingly unrewarding and unending work that he and the men...
Harlem’s Rattlers: African American Regiment of the New York National Guard in World War I
Jeffrey Sammons is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1988) and the co-author, with John H. Morrow, Jr., of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War:...
Fighting for Democracy in World War I—Overseas and Over Here
Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (2009), and the co-editor of...
Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Thousands of Women Were Elected to Political Office before 1920
In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the well-known leader of the woman’s rights movement, declared her intention to run for Congress, from Brooklyn, New York. Stanton was probably the first woman to campaign for a federal office. It...
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Hometown Societies in the New World: Jewish Landsmanshaftn and Americanization
Jacob Sholts, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire, wandered dejectedly through the streets of New York in 1904. Sholts, who had fled Russia to avoid military service during the Russo-Japanese War, could not keep a job. He felt...
The Jewish Health Professionals of Cincinnati
In studies of the significance of the Cincinnati Jewish community within the wider context of American Jewish history, the development of the Reform movement, and Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise’s oversight in establishing the iconic Plum...
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