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Read about the Gettysburg Address or watch the lecture "The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through His Words" by Professor Ronald C. White of the University of California, Los Angeles.

In October of 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. As the founder of the Tuskegee Institute and a respected leader of the African American community , Washington was an important...

A day after appointing a committee to write the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress named another committee to write the Articles of Confederation . The members worked from June 1776 until November 17, 1777,...

What was once the biggest secret in America is being commemorated in public—building the bomb. The National Park Service and the Department of Energy announced last week the establishment of three national historic parks at Manhattan...

In 1909 a young immigrant woman made a speech in Yiddish that galvanzied a meeting of garment workers into what became a massive, and ultimately successful, strike. Twenty thousand workers followed Clara Lemlich into the streets of...

Mark Twain famously said that he had come in with Halley’s Comet in 1835 and expected to go out with it on its return journey. Indeed, Twain did die in 1910 as the comet was making its return pass. In the intervening years Twain...

Read an excerpt from Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863 or learn more about the history of Thanksgiving as a national holiday .

As we approach the end of November, a month filled with elections and gratitude, let’s take a look back at the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted voting rights to African Americans, and explore a print that celebrates its ratification...

On December 1, 1955, after a long day of work as a seamstress, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and took a seat. Parks, a black woman, took a seat in the first row of seats in the rear "colored...

On December 2, 1859, John Brown went to the gallows for his failed raid on the arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown was a polarizing figure. In the image to the left , based on an incident reported in the New York Tribune that...

The Compromise of 1850 included the controversial Fugitive Slave Law that allowed for the seizure of alleged runaway slaves without due process and prohibited any obstruction to their recovery. Escaped slaves living in the North...

With its staff of white and African American teachers, the Calhoun School was not the norm in the Jim Crow South. Read a letter written by Frederick Douglass on Jim Crow practices in education and other professions.

This hand-drawn card comes from Horatio Loomis Wait’s papers in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Wait, from New York and Chicago, served in the US Navy from July 1862 through July 1870. His letters home often included sketches of mid...

As the best-books-of-the-year lists proliferate, it’s time to remind ourselves to nurture young writers. Here at the Gilder Lehrman Institute we have a great way for history teachers to highlight their students’ achievements. It’s the...

Shortly before 8 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack against US armed forces in Hawaii. The Japanese targeted the Army, Navy, and Marine airfields before bombing the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The...

Have you ever wanted to really dive deep into an image from history? Get in close to that little figure in the corner? Read the cartoon captions without a magnifying glass? The Gigapixel tool from StoryMapJS will help you do just that...

Read a transcript of the "Ten Talents" of George Washington letter written by John Adams.

One hundred and fifty years ago today, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment was proclaimed by Secretary of State William Seward. Abraham Lincoln had fought to get the amendment passed by the Senate and the House, but he did...

On December 22, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman sent a message to President Lincoln from Georgia, saying, "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of...

Read about the Facts of the Slave Trade and Slavery and the Material Culture of Slave Resistance .

Read an excerpt of the Orders to March on Trenton and watch a video on Washington’s Crossing .

Read an excerpt of the letter to Davie Jeems .

As the winter holidays draw close and Americans everywhere travel to celebrate with their loved ones, it is important to remember how one should act when having dinner with family. The 1950 Encyclopedia Britannica film A Date with...

The Gilder Lehrman Institute is excited to announce the addition of two new self-paced courses, Emancipation and The Kennedy Presidency , to our Self-Paced Course Series . This series offers graduate-level courses in American history...

View a full-screen version of The Lewis and Clark Exhibition . Learn more about the Louisiana Purchase in Elliott West’s essay " America the Newcomer: Claiming the Louisiana Purchase " and a printed copy of the map Meriwether Lewis...