274 items
Guided Readings: Toward Revolution
Reading 1 For fire and water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies in North America. Nothing can exceed the jealousy and emulation which they possess in regard to each other. . . . In short . . . were they left to...
The First Age of Reform
"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...
Japanese internment, 1942
Responding to fears of Japanese spies within the United States, President Roosevelt signed an order authorizing the forced relocation and confinement of more than 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans living in the West....
Historical Context: "Birth of a Nation"
In 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, D. W. Griffith released his epic film Birth of a Nation . The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946. Based...
Statistics: Agriculture in America
Farm Production Year Number of Farms* Bales of Cotton* Bushels of Corn* Bushels of Wheat* Price Index 1860=100 1860 2 3.8 839 173 100 1870 2.7 4.4 760 254 140 1880 4 6.6 1,706 502 100 1890 4.6 8.7 2,125 449 90 1900 5.7 10.1 2,662 599...
Lincoln
No one seemed less well-cast for the role of reformer, in an age of reform, than Abraham Lincoln. To begin with, he was a stranger, emotionally and intellectually, to evangelical Christianity, the great engine of reform in the...
The Rise of Industrial America, 1877-1900
When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age , they gave the late nineteenth century its popular name. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner...
Inside the Vault: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
On the November 4, 2021, Inside the Vault , our curators are joined by Dr. Barbara Perry, the Gerald L. Baliles Professor and director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and Gilder Lehrman Master...
The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective
No American document has had a greater global impact than the Declaration of Independence. It has been fundamental to American history longer than any other text because it was the first to use the name "the United States of America":...
President Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, 1865
Just 701 words long, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address took only six or seven minutes to deliver, yet contains many of the most memorable phrases in American political oratory. The speech contained neither gloating nor rejoicing....
The History of Federal, State, and Tribal Powers, 1788–2020
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Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940
Yale University historian Jonathan Holloway discusses his 2013 work, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940, with James Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Professor...
Study Aid: Great Society Legislation
President Lyndon Johnson announced his Great Society program during his State of the Union address in 1964. He outlined a series of domestic programs that he promised would eliminate poverty and inequality in the United States. By the...
Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan
Essential Question To what degree was Abraham Lincoln successful in achieving his goals? Background The Civil War was perhaps the most momentous event that the United States endured in its history. Author and historian Shelby Foote...
Revolutionary Propaganda: Persuasion and Colonial Support
Background Many students misconstrue the American Revolution as a period of unanimous support for independence from Great Britain. However, colonists generally considered themselves loyal British citizens, asserting rightful...
Historical Context: The Confederacy Begins to Collapse
By early 1863, the Civil War had begun to cause severe hardship on the southern home front. Not only was most of the fighting taking place in the South, but also as the Union blockade grew more effective and the South's railroad...
Hubert Humphrey’s Speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention
Unit Introduction As the United States moved into the post-WWII world, it faced struggles over diversity and race relations. Soldiers returning from Europe recognized the disparities between races in the United States and, by the late...
Guided Readings: African Americans after Slavery
Reading 1 All freedmen . . . over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or...
Proclamation of 1763, 1763
At the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, France surrendered Canada and much of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys—two-thirds of eastern North America—to England. The Proclamation of 1763 “preserved to the said Indians” the lands west...
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Joseph J. Ellis, Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, discusses his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, explains the emergence of the men who led the Revolutionary War and created...
“Defence of Fort McHenry” or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” 1814
In September 1814, Francis Scott Key, an attorney and DC insider, watched the American flag rise over Baltimore, Maryland’s Fort McHenry from a British ship in the harbor. Key had been negotiating the release of an American captive...
Admiration and Ambivalence: Frederick Douglass and John Brown
John Brown did not make it easy for people to love him—until he died on the gallows. Frederick Douglass, from his first meeting with Brown in 1847, through a testy but important relationship in the late 1850s, had long viewed the...
Martin Luther King Jr.: His Legacy as Seen Through the Mississippi Summer Freedom Project
Background Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 21, is celebrated by Americans each year to remember and recognize the life and work of the man. Martin Luther King Jr., however, represents far more than the contributions of a single...
Challenging Segregation in Public Education
Background The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, during the congressional Reconstruction era. The amendment’s most significant provision —"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or...
Frederick Douglass on Jim Crow, 1887
Frederick Douglass tirelessly labored to end slavery but true equality remained out of reach. Despite the successful passage of several Constitutional amendments and federal laws after the Civil War, unwritten rules and Jim Crow laws...
Japanese Internment Camps of WWII
Overview Since Japanese people began migrating to America in the mid-nineteenth century, there has been resentment and tension between Americans and Asian immigrants. In California at the turn of the century laws were passed making it...
An "Unconstitutional" Act? The Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus
Background At the beginning of the Civil War, as the number of dead increased daily, a force of opposition to the war efforts began to intensify in the Congress and in the voices of the American people. Abraham Lincoln, in an effort...
Inside the Vault: A Summary View of the Rights of British America
On April 7, 2022, our curators were joined by Professor Andrew Robertson to discuss A Summary View of the Rights of British America . Written in 1774 by Thomas Jefferson, this document laid out the principal point that he would argue...
Historians Now: Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser
Richard Brookhiser discusses his book, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln . Brookhiser traces Lincoln's quest to follow in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers.
Inside the Vault: Mary Katherine Goddard
On March 3, 2022, our curators were joined by Dr. Martha J. King to discuss Mary Katherine Goddard. Goddard was a newspaper publisher and printer, producing one of the first copies of the Declaration of Independence, and served as...
President Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 1861
On March 4, 1861, the day Abraham Lincoln was first sworn into office as President of the United States, the Chicago Tribune printed this special pamphlet of his First Inaugural Address. In the address, the new president appealed to...
Populism and Agrarian Discontent
Today, the Gilded Age evokes thoughts of “robber baron” industrialists, immigrants toiling long hours in factories for little pay, massive strikes that were often put down by force, and political corruption in both big cities and the...
Inside the Vault: British Troops Landing in Boston Harbor
Explore just one of the fascinating items from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History collection!
Inside the Vault: Two Generals: George Washington and Robert E. Lee
Originally broadcast on April 17, 2020, this session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection explores a letter from George Washington about becoming the first President of the United States in 1789 and...
Reason and Emotion in Revolutionary America
New York University historian Nicole Eustace discusses the "tempest of emotion" that swept through the Age of Reason, epitomized by the earliest call for a full break between the American colonies and Great Britain, Thomas Paine’s...
Taxation and Representation: The Imperial Debate between Britain and the Americans
Brown University historian Gordon Wood describes the British and American conceptions of representation during the eighteenth century, widely diverging points of view that were forged by radically different experiences with...
Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920
Glenda Gilmore is Assistant Professor of American History at Yale University. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 records political and social change in North Carolina from the...
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....
A Founding Father on the Missouri Compromise, 1819
In 1819 a courageous group of Northern congressmen and senators opened debate on the most divisive of antebellum political issues—slavery. Since the Quaker petitions of 1790, Congress had been silent on slavery. That silence was...
Abraham Lincoln: A Man for All Seasons
Overview At one time in our country’s history we stood divided as a nation over the issue of slavery. It was Abraham Lincoln’s ideology and sense of purpose that helped to unite our country and set us on a path toward realizing the...
The Progressive Era to the New Era, 1900-1929
We should not accept social life as it has "trickled down to us," the young journalist Walter Lippmann wrote soon after the twentieth century began. "We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, . . . educate...
The Slaughterhouse Cases
The first major post-Civil-War Supreme Court decision, popularly know as the Slaughterhouse Cases, resulted in a pivotal interpretation of the relatively new Fourteenth Amendment. Larry Kramer, Dean at Stanford Law School, discusses...
September 11, 2001
"9/11" has emerged as shorthand for the four coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States that took place on September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists from the Islamist extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four...
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