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The Gilder Lehrman Institute is delighted to announce a partnership between the New York City Department of Education and the Broadway musical Hamilton . With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, 20,000 NYC public high school...

On this day in 1842, Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd in her sister’s front parlor in Springfield, Illinois. The wedding came after a two- year courtship and engagement. A mysterious break in the engagement came in 1841, which some...

These days, Thanksgiving is all about the food—from the classic turkey to delicious pumpkin pie, Americans look forward to overindulging on favorite foods that we associate with the harvest bounty of 17th-century Massachusetts. But...

Read about historical campaigns in Elections: History Now 1 (Fall 2004) or Electing a President: History Now 33 (Fall 2012) .

In 1904, the US took over a massive overseas building project—a ship canal in Panama that would connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This wasn’t a new idea. In his first message to Congress as president in 1869, Ulysses S....

Do you want to explore an image down to the smallest detail? StoryMapJS Gigapixel is a great free tool to help you do that. Check out our gigapixel on The War of 1812 in the West . View this tutorial as a printable PDF . If you need...

Set yourself a challenge: Map Lewis and Clark’s journey west with diary entries . . . Take a walk around the haunts of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts. . . . Wherever you want to recreate history, the open-source...

George Tillotson from Greene, New York, enlisted in the 89th New York Infantry in November 1861. Some of his Civil War–era letters are among the 15,000 letters in the Gilder Lehrman Collection written by servicemen . He wrote home on...

Each summer, the Gilder Lehrman Institute offers academically rigorous seminars for K–12 educators and National Park Service interpreters. Held at colleges and historic sites across the US and abroad, the weeklong seminars offer...

Read about the journey for equal rights for women in Women’s Suffrage: History Now 7 (Spring 2006) .

Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore describes how, within a single generation, relations between the settlers and the Wampanoags declined from the fabled First Thanksgiving to a devastating war. Lepore notes: ...

Read a transcript of the Dow Jones News Service ticker tape and read about the power of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in Great Inaugural Addresses: History Now 36 (Summer 2013) .

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...

On Monday, December 14 , Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of Broadway’s hit musical Hamilton, received the George Washington Prize. Miranda became the first playwright to win the literary award in an exciting ceremony that...

Thomas Barwiss Hagstoz Askin Jr. joined the US Navy in March 1938 at the age of 17. His diary, entitled "Memorys and Incidents of My Last 60 (?) Days in the United States Navy," begins on August 14, 1941, when he was stationed on...

The phrase "’Twas the night before Christmas," from Clement Moore’s "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is familiar to most of us, but less familiar is the poem, "The Night after Christmas," written by Dr. Robert Archer. Archer, born in 1794...

As the nation approached the third year of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are...

Today’s school children are familiar with fire drills, earthquake drills, tornado drills, and even tsunami drills. Filing out-doors to athletic fields or hiding under desks from imaginary natural disaster debris is expected, scheduled...

On January 5, 1914, automaker Henry Ford made history by instituting a $5-a-day wage. The move made national news. Five dollars a day constituted double the industry norm—and double the pay of most of Ford’s own employees. At the same...

Did you know that the most popular written work in American history was published before America was an actual nation of its own? On January 10, 1776, six months before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the...

Alexander Hamilton was born on this day, either in 1755 or 1757 (historians debate the year). Explore Hamilton’s life and legacy in this interactive digital exhibit.

The Statue of Liberty has long welcomed newcomers to the United States as a shining beacon of freedom and opportunity in the middle of New York Harbor. Children are taught that the Statue of Liberty was gifted to the United States by...

Either you love ’em or you hate ’em. Everyone has an opinion on sideburns, and few fashion choices provoke quite so much controversy. Yet sideburns have a rich history that can be appreciated by supporters and detractors alike....

Read an excerpt of the letter written by George Wallace and explore the online exhibition Freedom Riders , detailing the struggle for civil rights when Wallace was governor.