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Historical Context: Why Do People Migrate?
In trying to understand why people migrate, some scholars emphasize individual decision-making, while others stress broader structural forces. Many early scholars of migration emphasized the importance of "push" and "pull" factors....
Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy
In conjunction with our panel, Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy (presented in partnership with the Office of the Governor of Louisiana), the Gilder Lehrman Institute has compiled this list of resources on the Plessy v....
The Province of Massachusetts Bay requests aid from Queen Anne, 1708
Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713) was the second of four great wars for empire fought among France and England and their Indian allies. This struggle broke out when the French raided English settlements on the New England frontier....
The Great West Illustrated, 1869
The exploration and settlement of the American West coincided with the development of the medium of photography. Photographic images, reproduced in books and newspapers and available for purchase on their own, helped shape Americans’...
John Winthrop describes life in Boston, 1634
Between 1629 and 1640, 20,000 Puritans left England for America to escape religious persecution. They hoped to establish a church free from worldly corruption founded on voluntary agreement among congregants. This covenant theory...
Sharecropper contract, 1867
Immediately after the Civil War, many former slaves established subsistence farms on land that had been abandoned by fleeing white Southerners. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and a former slaveholder, soon restored this land to...
Immigration and Migration
The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles,...
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...
"Barbed Wire Baseball: How One Man Brought Hope to the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII"
As a boy, Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura dreams of playing professional baseball, but everyone tells him he is too small. Yet he grows up to be a successful player, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! When the Japanese attack Pearl...
Immigration in the Gilded Age: Using Photographs as Primary Sources
Aim / Essential Question How successful were photographs in demonstrating the conditions of immigrants during the Gilded Age? Background The latter portion of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century witnessed the start...
Texas Declaration of Independence, 1836
On March 2, 1836, Texas formally declared its independence from Mexico. The Texas Declaration of Independence was signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos, now commonly referred to as the “birthplace of Texas.” Similar to the United States...
Cultural Encounters: Teaching Exploration and Encounter to Students
Some 40,000 years from now, give or take a few millennia, someone, somewhere in the universe may find and listen to the Golden Record, NASA’s attempt to describe Earth and its peoples to anyone out there who might be interested. There...
Democracy in Early America: Servitude and the Treatment of Native Americans and Africans prior to 1740
Essential Questions How did European explorers and colonists who came to the New World for "Gold, Glory and/or God" justify their treatment of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured servants? To what extent were there...
Guided Readings: Indian Policy
Reading 1 One [infantry] battalion...left Fort Lyon [Colorado] on the night of the 28th of November, 1864; about daybreak on the morning of the 29th of November we came in sight of the camp of friendly [Cheyenne and Arapaho] Indians.....
Nature, Culture, and Native Americans
Daniel Wildcat is a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and Director of the American Indian Studies Program at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. He discusses the importance of distinguishing between...
The Virginia Colony
Objective In presenting to students documents dating from the earliest European contact with the Americas, teachers are faced with problems of accessibility. The language is often daunting, and the relevance for students of American...
The Brotherton Indians of New Jersey, 1780
During the French and Indian War, the Lenni-Lenape (or Delaware) Indians of New Jersey were among the tribes that signed the Treaty of Easton of 1758. The tribes agreed not to support the French in the colonial conflict and to leave...
Andrew Jackson to the Cherokee Tribe, 1835
Elected president in 1828, Andrew Jackson supported the removal of American Indians from their homelands, arguing that the American Indians’ survival depended on separation from whites. In this 1835 circular to the Cherokee people,...
"Grandfather's Journey"
When he was a young man, Allen Say’s grandfather left his home in Japan to explore the world. He began his journey by crossing the Pacific Ocean on a steamship, then wandered the deserts, farmlands, and cities of North America. Allen...
Study Aid: Major Slave Rebellions
New York City, 1712 Like many later revolts, this one occurred during a period of social dissension among White colonists following Leisler’s Rebellion. The rebels espoused traditional African religions. Stono Rebellion, 1739 The...
Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
James F. Brooks, Director of the School of American Research Press, is author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (2002), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Bancroft...
Ilyon Woo - "Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom"
Ilyon Woo is a writer whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal . Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society. Order Master Slave...
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