112 items
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...
Revolutionary Propaganda: Persuasion and Colonial Support
Background Many students misconstrue the American Revolution as a period of unanimous support for independence from Great Britain. However, colonists generally considered themselves loyal British citizens, asserting rightful...
Colonists Divided: A Revolution and a Civil War
Background The Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, the Sugar Act, and the Tea Act were just a few of the many policies Great Britain enacted in the British North American colonies in the eighteenth century. To many...
The Boston Massacre
Introduction In this lesson, students will be asked to learn the disputed and agreed-upon facts of the Boston Massacre in small groups and then discuss them and propose a website definition of the Massacre as a class. This lesson...
The Declaration of Independence
View the Declaration in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here and here . For additional primary resources click here and here . Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based...
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...
A report on the reaction to the Stamp Act, 1765
On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the “Stamp Act” to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the Seven Years’ War. It required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various papers,...
The Stamp Act, 1765
On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the “Stamp Act” to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the Seven Years’ War. The act required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various...
"Contagious Liberty": Women in the Revolutionary Age
Background The American Revolution, a byproduct of events both on the North American continent and abroad, unleashed a movement that focused on egalitarianism in ways that had never been seen before. Even John Adams commented on these...
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 Preamble to the US Constitution, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Declaration of Independence
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...
Receipt for land purchased from the Six Nations, 1769
This document records that the representatives of the Six Nations, who signed using totems to designate individuals and tribes, received $10,000 as payment from the Penns for land the tribes had ceded in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in...
Phillis Wheatley’s poem on tyranny and slavery, 1772
Born in Africa, Phillis Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery as a child. She was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston in 1761. The Wheatleys soon recognized Phillis’s intelligence and taught her to read and write. She became...
Calling out the militia after Lexington and Concord, 1775
On the night of April 18, 1775, 700 British soldiers began to march toward Concord, Massachusetts, to seize and destroy arms the American patriots had stored there. Warned by Paul Revere and William Dawes, minutemen confronted and...
A British view of rebellious Boston, 1774
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, both the British and the colonists used broadsides to influence public opinion. This broadside, “The Bostonian’s Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring & Feathering,” printed in...
The War for Independence
On July 4, 1774, exactly two years before the United States declared independence, a patriotic club in Worcester, Massachusetts, decided that each member should have in the ready two pounds of gunpowder and twelve flints. With the...
The Road to Revolution
The Peace of Paris (February 10, 1763) marked a glorious moment in the history of the British Empire. France surrendered Canada, ending more than a century of warfare on the northern frontier. At the time, no one seriously thought...
The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective
No American document has had a greater global impact than the Declaration of Independence. It has been fundamental to American history longer than any other text because it was the first to use the name "the United States of America":...
Inside the Vault: Black Patriots of the American Revolution
Originally broadcast on October 29, 2020, this session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection explores unique documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection that record the service of Black soldiers in the...
Inside the Vault: Founding Era Propaganda
On the May 1, 2020 session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection , Kevin Cline, 2016 Gilder Lehrman National History Teacher of the Year, joined the Institute’s curators to explore Paul Revere’s engraving...
Black Writers of the Founding Era: A Conversation with James Basker
Black Writers of the Founding Era: A Conversation with James Basker Recorded at Roosevelt House, Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, April 17, 2024.
This discussion of the new Library of America anthology Black Writers of the...
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