90,882 items
Alabama Harrow Strickland Pick Elementary School, Auburn Alaska Nicole Sarrazin-Strong Barnette Magnet School, Fairbanks Arizona Angela Mullen Fireside Elementary School, Phoenix Arkansas Steven Helmick Don R. Roberts Elementary...
Dear George Washington Contest Winners 2015
Fifth-Grade Division First Place Melea Jones Thomas Jefferson Classical Academy, Mooresboro, NC Teacher: Ms. Georgia Maimone Second Place Rasia Graves Rineyville Elementary, Rineyville, KY Teacher: Ms. Traci Gillock Third Place...
Age of Revolution Essay Contest Winners 2015
Jordan D. Axe Las Lomas High School, Walnut Creek, California "The American Revolution and Its Correlation to Patterns of European Revolutions" Ayah Elmansy Academy of Information Technology and Engineering, Stamford, Connecticut "The...
2015 - Mary Huffman
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is pleased to announce that Mary Huffman from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, has been named the 2015 National History Teacher of the Year. Started in 2004, the award highlights the...
Civil War Essay Contest Winners 2016
High School Division Click on the title to view a pdf of a winning essay. First Prize Catherine Cai, Garnet Valley High School, Garnet Valley, Pennsylvania "‘Army Disease ’ and America’s Changing Attitudes toward Drug Addiction"...
About the Hamilton Education Program
In October 2015, Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, The Rockefeller Foundation, NYC Department of Education, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute announced an educational partnership that will...
Dear George Washington Contest Winners 2016
Fifth-Grade Division First Place Kaari Little, Cornerstone Christian School, Olympia, WA Second Place Elizabeth Blenden, Trinity Academy, Caldwell, NJ Third Place Cameron Haughton, Trinity Academy, Caldwell, NJ Fourth Place Brevin...
Age of Revolution Essay Contest Winners 2016
Andrew Branson Academy of Information Technology and Engineering, Stamford, Connecticut "The Comprehensive Debate on the Validity of a Standing Army" Natalea Cohen Rocky Mountain High School, Fort Collins, Colorado "The Role of...
2016 State Winners
Alabama Amy Maddox Vestavia Hills High School, Vestavia Hills Alaska Heather Damario West Valley High School, Fairbanks Arizona Sandy Morse Horizon High School, Scottsdale California Brian Rodriguez Alameda Science and Technology...
2016 - Kevin Cline
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is pleased to announce that Kevin Cline from Frankton, Indiana, has been named the 2016 National History Teacher of the Year. Started in 2004, the award highlights the crucial...
Civil War Essay Contest Winners 2017
High School Division Click on the title to view a pdf of a winning essay. First Prize Kaylee Kimbrough , Pennsylvania Homeschoolers AP Online, Kitanning, Pennsylvania (based in Greenville, Texas) "‘I Shall Deal at the Other Shop’:...
Dear George Washington Contest Winners 2017
Fifth-Grade Division First Place Zachary Gwosden, Bullis Charter School, Los Altos, CA Second Place Chris Kim, Notre Dame Academy, Palisades Park, NJ Third Place Lauren Hoffman, Trinity Academy, Caldwell, NJ Fourth Place Dario...
Age of Revolution Essay Contest Winners 2017
Adrian Byrne Sarno Alameda Science and Technology Institute, Alameda, CA "The Invisible Divide: The Role of Class in America" Aya Elwassif Academy of American Studies, Long Island City, NY "From Witch Hunts to Revolutions" Nathaniel...
Press Coverage and Media
Press Coverage New York Times (Founding Era quiz) Google Blog (Hamilton Education Program + Google Exhibitions partnership) Buzzfeed News (Hamilton Education Program + Google Expeditions partnership) San Francisco Chronicle Stanford...
How to Participate in the Hamilton Education Program
Thank you for your interest in the Hamilton Education Program. Middle and high school students in Title I schools are currently eligible to participate in the program. If you are from a school , please register your interest in...
2017 State Winners
Alabama W. Blake Busbin Auburn High School, Auburn Alaska Adam Johnson Romig Middle School, Anchorage Arizona John-David Bowman Westwood High School, Mesa Arkansas Rebecca Luebker Moll Haas Hall Academy, Fayetteville California Carol...
Exhibitions
Exhibitions Museum Exhibitions Items from the Gilder Lehrman Collection are exhibited at prominent museums across the country. See what is currently on display. Learn More Traveling Exhibitions Our Traveling Exhibitions are offered...
Why Documents Matter: An Interactive Digital Edition
Welcome to Why Documents Matter: An Interactive Digital Edition —a selection of primary sources from the Gilder Lehrman Collection curated and annotated for K–12 classrooms (print edition available here ). Scroll through the entire...
Alexander Hamilton: Witness to the Founding Era
This series of online exhibitions explores the importance of Alexander Hamilton to the founding of the United States. Each mini-exhibition features locations where Alexander Hamilton made history and documents written by or about him...
Reference, Rights & Reproductions
ORDER RESEARCH COPIES Research copies are PDFs of items from our Collection. PDFs cost $10 per item and are sent via email after your invoice is paid. 5 PDF copies per calendar year are provided for free to Affiliate School K–12...
The Gilder Lehrman Collection
In 1991, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman embarked on a mission to create one of the most important repositories of historical American documents in the country. Today, the Gilder Lehrman Collection contains more than eighty-five...
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...
The Doctrine of Discovery, 1493
The Papal Bull "Inter Caetera," issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, played a central role in the Spanish conquest of the New World. The document supported Spain’s strategy to ensure its exclusive right to the lands...
A Jamestown settler describes life in Virginia, 1622
The first English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, who arrived in 1607, were eager to find gold and silver. Instead they found sickness and disease. Eventually, these colonists learned how to survive in their new environment, and by...
The surrender of New Netherland, 1664
The Dutch colonization of New Netherland (which included parts of present-day New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut) began in the 1620s. From the outset, New Netherland was a multiethnic, multireligious society: about half...
Late seventeenth-century map of the Northeast, 1682
Like many other explorers, Henry Hudson stumbled upon North America almost by accident. Employed by the Dutch Republic to find a sea passage to the Far East, Hudson and the crew of his ship the Halve Maen landed at what is today New...
Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witch trials, 1693
Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch...
Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi, 1718
This map of “la Louisiane” was published by French geographer Guillaume de l’Isle. It is the first detailed map of the Gulf Coast region and the Mississippi River, as well as the first printed map to show Texas (identified as “Mission...
Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, 1770
By the beginning of 1770, there were 4,000 British soldiers in Boston, a city with 15,000 inhabitants, and tensions were running high. On the evening of March 5, crowds of day laborers, apprentices, and merchant sailors began to pelt...
Henry Knox’s Order of March to Trenton, 1776
On Christmas Day in 1776 the American Revolution was on the verge of collapsing. Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American forces had been driven from New York City to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and reduced...
George Washington on the abolition of slavery, 1786
Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one...
Two versions of the Preamble to the Constitution, 1787
On May 25, 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention began meeting in a room, no bigger than a large schoolroom, in Philadelphia’s State House. They posted sentries at the doors and windows to keep their "secrets...
George Washington’s reluctance to become president, 1789
From 1787 to 1789, as the Constitution was submitted for ratification by the states, most Americans assumed that George Washington would be the first president. In this April 1789 letter to General Henry Knox, his friend from the...
The duel: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, 1804
Alexander Hamilton, former secretary of the treasury, and Aaron Burr, sitting vice president of the United States, had feuded publicly for years. Their long-standing enmity came to a head in the spring of 1804. After an exchange of...
A map of the Louisiana Territory, 1806
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France during Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president more than doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson’s next step was to learn all about this new territory of the United States. He chose...
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