Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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History Now Essay

The WPA: Antidote to the Great Depression?

Nick Taylor

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

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, estimates of the number of jobless workers in the United States ranged from thirteen million to as high as fifteen million—a quarter of the working population. Every...

Appears in:

The Great Depression

Essay

The Early Republic

Joseph J. Ellis

In April of 1789 the ink on the recently ratified Constitution was barely dry when George Washington began the trek from his Mount Vernon plantation to the national capital at New York. The public reverence usually accorded to royalty...

History Now Essay

Patriotism Crosses the Color Line: African Americans in World War II

Clarence Taylor

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Although African Americans have been the victims of racial oppression throughout the history of the United States, they have always supported the nation, especially during wartime. When World War II erupted, over 2.5 million black men...

Appears in:

14 | World War II Winter 2007

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

Essay

The American Revolution, 1763–1783

Pauline Maier

World History

The British colonists of mainland North America had great hopes for the future in 1763, when the Peace of Paris formally ended the Seven Years’ War. Since the late seventeenth century, their lives had been disrupted by a series of...

Essay

The First Age of Reform

Ronald G. Walters

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

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

"In the history of the world," Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour." [1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in mind a remarkable flowering of reform...