Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

90,983 items

History Now Essay

The Origins of the Transcontinental Railroad

Richard White

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

The completion in 1869 of the first transcontinental railroad—the Pacific Railway, as the combination of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific was called—created two of the most iconic symbols in American history. The first is a...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

History Now Essay

Financing the Transcontinental Railroad

Maury Klein

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics

The first transcontinental railroad, built between 1864 and 1869, was the greatest construction project of its era. It involved building a line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, across a vast, largely unmapped territory...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

History Now Essay

Home Adrift: Women and Domesticated Rail Travel

Amy G. Richter

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

In the summer of 1869 Godey’s Lady’s Book published an editorial marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The author praised the new "wonder of the world" and then clarified that "this great work was begun, carried on...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

History Now Essay

Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad

Glenn Willumson

Art, Geography, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

On a brisk May afternoon, in the high desert of Utah, the shrill tap of the telegraph key simultaneously announced the completion of North America’s first transcontinental railroad to cities across the United States. Immediately...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

Essay

Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to Freedom

Steven Mintz

Government and Civics

Frederick Douglass was one of the first fugitive slaves to speak out publicly against slavery. On the morning of August 12, 1841, he stood up at an anti-slavery meeting on Nantucket Island. With great power and eloquence, he described...

History Now Essay

A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington

James G. Basker

Government and Civics, Literature

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

One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington....

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014

Essay

"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War

David W. Blight

In the spring of 1871, Frederick Douglass was worried. Six years after Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Grant was now President of the United States, the Union of northern and southern states was...

Essay

Douglass and Lincoln: A Convergence

James Oakes

In 1880, Osborn Oldroyd invited Frederick Douglass to write something for a collection of tributes to Abraham Lincoln, published two years later as The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles . Douglass was uncharacteristically brief, but...

History Now Essay

"I, Too": Langston Hughes’s Afro-Whitmanian Affirmation

Steven Tracy

Literature

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

To read the text and hear the poem click here. Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S....

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014

History Now Essay

"The New Colossus": Emma Lazarus and the Immigrant Experience

Julie Des Jardins

Literature

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...

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014

Essay

"Half slave, half free": Lincoln and the "House Divided"

Gabor S. Boritt

Government and Civics

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all proclaim, "a house divided against itself can not stand." [1] Living in a Bible-reading country, most nineteenth-century Americans knew that metaphor by heart—words that also made good common...

Essay

"To give all a chance": Lincoln, Abolition, and Economic Freedom

Lewis E. Lehrman

Government and Civics

To read carefully the Lincoln economic parable of the ant (reprinted here) suggests a lost truth about our sixteenth president: during most of Abraham Lincoln’s political career he focused not on anti-slavery but on economic policy....

Essay

"That glorious consummation": Lincoln on the Abolition of Slavery

Allen C. Guelzo

Government and Civics

"That man who thinks Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln," wrote Abraham Lincoln’s long-time law partner, William Henry Herndon. "He...

History Now Essay

Disasters and the Politics of Memory

Kevin Rozario

Government and Civics

The controversy that erupted around the opening of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum on May 21, 2014, reminds us that much is at stake in the way disasters are remembered. Costing some $700 million to build, with an annual...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900

Elizabeth Hayes Turner

Geography, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

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...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919

Carol Byerly

Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

On September 19, 1918, 21-year-old Army private Roscoe Vaughan reported to sick call at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, feeling achy and feverish. He was promptly hospitalized along with eighty-two other soldiers that day. Influenza had...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

Everyone’s Backyard: The Love Canal Chemical Disaster

Amy M. Hay

Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

It all started quietly. There were no alerts, no sirens, no evacuation plans, no reports from Jim Cantore on the Weather Channel. Most people living in the LaSalle neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, first heard about problems in...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood

John M. Barry

Geography, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

In the latter part of August 1926, the sky darkened over much of the central United States and a heavy and persistent rain began to fall. Rain pelted first Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma, then edged eastward into Iowa...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

Essay

The Sanctity of the Law: Lincoln’s Legal Career

Steven Mintz

Before he became president, Abraham Lincoln supported himself and his family as an attorney. For nearly a quarter of a century, he was a country lawyer, who frequently traveled for up to six months a year through Illinois’s 8th...

Essay

Lincoln and Emancipation: Black Enfranchisement in 1863 Louisiana

Richard J. Carwardine

Government and Civics

As the president of a fractured nation, Abraham Lincoln faced no issue more perplexing than that of restoring the rebel states to the Union. Reconstruction during wartime was, he judged, "the greatest question ever presented to...

History Now Essay

Revolutionary Philadelphia

Ray Raphael

Geography, Government and Civics

The image is so clear in our minds, seen first in elementary school and reinforced countless times since: a few dozen gentlemen with powdered wigs and period suits (coats, waistcoats, and knee-length breeches) gathered in a large...

Appears in:

11 | American Cities Spring 2007

History Now Essay

The Passage of the Civil Rights Act

Clay Risen

Government and Civics

When the Civil Rights Act passed fifty years ago, it was immediately hailed as one of the most important pieces of legislation of the twentieth century. Not only did it ban discrimination in hotels, restaurants, public parks, schools,...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

History Now Essay

Civil Rights Leadership and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

Clarence Taylor

Government and Civics

The most important social protest movement of the twentieth century was the civil rights movement, which provided countless numbers of people the opportunity to become involved in the struggle for racial equality. The civil rights...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Dispatches from the Front: The Civil Rights Act and the Pursuit of Greater Freedom in a Small Southern City

Charles W. McKinney

Government and Civics

The civil rights protests that enveloped the nation in the summer of 1964 occurred against the backdrop of the slow, uncertain progress of the legislation that would eventually become known as the Civil Rights Act. As activists across...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Charles L. Zelden

As is the case with most historical events, the key to teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) is context. The CRA by itself is simply a piece of congressional legislation—structurally complicated and textually byzantine. Still,...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

Site Search

90,983 items

The Origins of the Transcontinental Railroad

Financing the Transcontinental Railroad

Home Adrift: Women and Domesticated Rail Travel

Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad

Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to Freedom

A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington

"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War

Douglass and Lincoln: A Convergence

"I, Too": Langston Hughes’s Afro-Whitmanian Affirmation

"The New Colossus": Emma Lazarus and the Immigrant Experience

"Half slave, half free": Lincoln and the "House Divided"

"To give all a chance": Lincoln, Abolition, and Economic Freedom

"That glorious consummation": Lincoln on the Abolition of Slavery

Disasters and the Politics of Memory

"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919

Everyone’s Backyard: The Love Canal Chemical Disaster

The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood

The Sanctity of the Law: Lincoln’s Legal Career

Lincoln and Emancipation: Black Enfranchisement in 1863 Louisiana

Revolutionary Philadelphia

The Passage of the Civil Rights Act

Civil Rights Leadership and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

Dispatches from the Front: The Civil Rights Act and the Pursuit of Greater Freedom in a Small Southern City

Teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964

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