327 items
War swept across Europe in the summer of 1914, igniting a global struggle that would eventually take nine million lives. World War I pitted the Allies (initially composed of Britain, France, Belgium, Serbia, and Russia, and eventually...
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...
The Western Sanitary Commission reports on suffering in the Mississippi Valley, 1863
In 1863 in the war-torn South, thousands were homeless and starving. Some of those most in need of aid were newly liberated enslaved people. The Western Sanitary Commission was organized on September 5, 1861, by General John C....
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...
FDR on racial discrimination, 1942
On June 25, 1941, almost six months before the United States’ entry into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination by government defense contractors. The...
President Truman’s Farewell Address, 1953
It has none of the catch phrases or warnings of other, more famous presidential inaugural or farewell addresses, no cautions against permanent alliances or military-industrial complexes, no appeals to better angels or declarations...
Robert Kennedy on civil rights, 1963
At the end of 1962, President John F. Kennedy asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to compile a report on the Civil Rights enforcement activities of the Justice Department over the previous year. In this report,...
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...
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