Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

90,989 items

History Now Essay

The Catcher in the Rye: The Voice of Alienation

Timothy Aubry

Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

One of the most widely taught novels in the United States, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) opens with the sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield’s disillusioned departure from what may be the last in a series of schools that...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

Essay

The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective

David Armitage

Government and Civics, World History

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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":...

History Now Essay

Edison’s Laboratory

Paul Israel

Economics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Thomas Edison’s death in October 1931 seemed to mark the passing of an era. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Waldemar Kaempffert, the editor of a two-volume Popular History of Invention , expressed the common view that Edison...

Appears in:

10 | Nineteenth Century Technology Winter 2006

History Now Essay

Women and the Home Front: New Civil War Scholarship

Catherine Clinton

Art, Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In the 1960s the image of Scarlett O’Hara standing before a Technicolor-drenched panorama from Gone With the Wind (1939) was still firmly planted within the imagination of the American public as a symbol of women on the Civil War home...

Appears in:

26 | New Interpretations of the Civil War Winter 2010

Essay

The Age of Jackson

Ted Widmer

The Age of Jackson has never been easy to define. Broader than his presidency (1829–1837), and narrower than his life (1767–1845), it roughly describes the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the nineteenth century. While some...

History Now Essay

Jamestown and the Founding of English America

James Horn

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Shortly before Christmas 1606, three small ships left London’s Blackwall docks to establish a settlement on Chesapeake Bay, in North America. The largest of the ships, the heavily armed, 120-ton merchantman Susan Constant , carried...

Appears in:

12 | The Age Of Exploration Summer 2007

History Now Essay

The Invention of the Fourth of July

David Waldstreicher

Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, as it has come to be known, is perhaps the most and the least American of holidays. It is the most American because it marks the beginning of the nation, because it rapidly became an occasion...

Appears in:

4 | American National Holidays Summer 2005

History Now Essay

The Impact of Horse Culture

Elliott West

Economics, Geography

For all the calamities that came in the long run, European contact at first offered American Indian peoples many opportunities and advantages. Old World technologies provided a range of trade goods that brought vast improvements to...

Appears in:

28 | American Indians Summer 2011

History Now Essay

Allies for Emancipation? Black Abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln

Manisha Sinha

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Abraham Lincoln was not an original advocate of abolition. In fact we know that his journey to what he called "the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century" was a relatively slow, though...

Appears in:

18 | Abraham Lincoln in His Time and Ours Winter 2008

History Now Essay

The Supreme Court Then and Now

A. E. Dick Howard

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The framers of the United States Constitution made clear that the document was to be regarded as fundamental law. Article VI states that the Constitution and those laws "which shall be made in pursuance thereof" (as well as treaties)...

Appears in:

15 | The Supreme Court Spring 2008

Site Search

90,989 items

The Catcher in the Rye: The Voice of Alienation

The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective

Edison’s Laboratory

Women and the Home Front: New Civil War Scholarship

The Age of Jackson

Jamestown and the Founding of English America

The Invention of the Fourth of July

The Impact of Horse Culture

Allies for Emancipation? Black Abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln

The Supreme Court Then and Now

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