657 items
Materials US Constitution , Our Documents Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson . New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001. Essential Question Why did the Founders find it necessary to provide...
A proclamation on the suspension of habeas corpus, 1862
The doctrine of habeas corpus is the right of any person under arrest to appear in person before the court, to ensure that they have not been falsely accused. The US Constitution specifically protects this right in Article I, Section...
George Washington would have supported the New Deal, 1934
During his first term, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to deflect opposition to the New Deal. Speaking at Gettysburg on Memorial Day, 1934, Roosevelt invoked the memory of George Washington by comparing his federal agenda with...
The Spanish Armada, 1588
The rivalry between Spain and England grew throughout the late sixteenth century. In the 1570s and 1580s, Sir Francis Drake led English attacks on Spanish vessels and raided Spanish settlements in the Americas. In 1588, Spain’s King...
The Folly of Empire
Overview Students will be introduced to a book written by John B. Judis entitled, The Folly of Empire: What George Bush Could Learn From Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson . This book compares recent foreign policy to the foreign...
The Folly of Empire (Condensed Version)
O verview Students will be introduced to a book written by John B. Judis entitled, The Folly of Empire: What George Bush Could Learn From Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. This book compares recent foreign policy to the foreign...
Letter from Christopher Columbus on Returning from His First Voyage to the Americas, 1493
Click here to download this five-lesson unit.
Our Victorious Fleets in Cuban Waters, 1898
In 1898, the US Navy was small—especially compared to the navies of the European powers. The Navy had shrunk in the years after the Civil War, from more than 600 vessels at that conflict’s close to just forty-eight ready but aging...
Confirming governors for territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, 1901
President Theodore Roosevelt wrote this letter to William H. Hunt, the governor of Porto Rico (as Puerto Rico was known at the time), just twelve days after he assumed the presidency following President William McKinley’s...
The Grange Movement, 1875
The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was founded in 1867 to advance methods of agriculture, as well as to promote the social and economic needs of farmers in the United States. The financial crisis of 1873, along with falling crop...
Building Mount Rushmore, 1926
This September 1926 report by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum to the Harney Peak Memorial Association anticipates the construction of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Borglum’s report offers a look...
Creating the Air Force, 1924
In this July 1924 letter to aviation pioneer and publisher Lester D. Gardner, Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell prophesied the coming tide of Japanese militarism. Concerned about Japan’s growing military power in the skies,...
J. Edgar Hoover on campus unrest, 1970
In September 1970, J. Edgar Hoover composed an open letter to American students detailing his view on civil unrest at the nation’s colleges and universities and warning against the elements he believed responsible. Hoover opened with...
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
Andrew Jackson's Message to Congress Concerning the Indian Removal Act of 1830
View a copy of Jackson’s Message to Congress in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here . For additional resources click here . Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based...
Washington's Farewell Address
View a copy of Washington’s Farewell Address in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here . For a resource regarding the possibility of Washington staying on for a third term click here . Click here to download this five-lesson...
The Declaration of Independence
View the Declaration in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here and here . For additional primary resources click here and here . Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based...
Students’ Constitutional Rights in Public School
Essential Question When may the rights of students in school be restricted? Materials Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, 1969 , Boston College New Jersey v. T.L.O., 1985 , Legal Information Institute, Cornell University...
Ronald Reagan on Reducing the Size of Government
Essential Questions How can the powers of government be divided to best run our nation in this modern era? What role should the federal government play in shaping our economy? Document Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union Message,...
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Domestic Leadership
Essential Questions What constitutes great presidential leadership? How did Eisenhower demonstrate great leadership through his support of the Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956) and his warning about the growth of the Military-Industrial...
The Treaty of Tordesillas: Resolving "a Certain Controversy" over Land in the Americas
Background Imperial rivalries have often been resolved through war; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas is an important example of a rivalry that was resolved without hostilities through the demarcation of areas of influence by the...
Early European Imperial Colonization of the New World
Introduction By the early to mid-seventeenth century, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands were all competing for colonies and trade around the world. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, explorers, conquerors, missionaries...
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address
View this item in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were written to enable students to understand, summarize...
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech
Unit Overview This unit is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Teaching Literacy through History resources, designed to align to the Common Core State Standards. These units were developed to enable students to understand,...
The Cold War: Discussing the Speech of President Kennedy in 1963
Introduction The Cold War is the term for the rivalry between the two blocs of contending states that emerged following the Second World War. It was a series of confrontations played out on the world stage between the non-Communist...
Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States, 1858
Though Lincoln spoke frequently during the 1858 Illinois Senate race against Stephen Douglas—a campaign that propelled Lincoln to the political forefront and helped shape him into a presidential candidate—very few Lincoln manuscripts...
Slavery in the New York State census, 1800
While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures...
Sergeant Francis Fletcher of the 54th Massachusetts on equal pay for Black soldiers, 1864
Francis H. Fletcher, a 22-year-old clerk from Salem, Massachusetts, enlisted as a private in Company A of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment on February 13, 1863. One year after the regiment left Boston with great fanfare,...
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...
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...
Suffragists invoke Lincoln, 1910
In 1910 Washington State voted to approve full woman suffrage, a vote that was influenced by publications and posters such as this one. This poster, declaring that "Lincoln said women should vote," invoked the words of Abraham Lincoln...
American Music Goes to War
Entertainment is always a national asset. Invaluable in time of peace, it is indispensable in wartime. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943 Background Music during World War II had an unprecedented impact on America, both on the home front...
A secret agreement between pirate hunters, 1696
Maritime trade and exploration in the colonial era created an environment ripe for piracy. One of the most famous pirates in history, Captain William Kidd, was commissioned by William III of England in 1695 as a privateer to hunt and...
Alexander Hamilton’s "gloomy" view of the American Revolution, 1780
By October 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton was discouraged by the apparent apathy of the American people and the ineffectuality of their elected representatives, as well as by the recent discovery of...
Thomas Jefferson's opposition to the Federalists, 1810
The Federalist Party evolved from the core of Federalists, like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who wrote and defended the US Constitution in 1787–1788. The political party advocated a strong central government and supported...
Ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, 1866
President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in Confederate states still at war with the Union on January 1, 1863, and as a wartime order, it could be reversed by subsequent presidential proclamation,...
Our Constitution: The Bill of Rights (Grades 7–9)
View the Constitution in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here and here . For a resource on the variations between a draft and the final version of the Constitution of the United State, click here . Unit Objective These...
The Articles of Confederation, 1777
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 1777, when...
Our Constitution: The Bill of Rights (Grades 4–6)
View the Constitution in our collection by clicking here and here . For a resource on the variations between a draft and the final version of the Constitution click here . For additional resources click here . Unit Objective This...
Our Constitution: The Bill of Rights (Grades 10–12)
View the Constitution in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here and here . For a resource on the variations between a draft and the final version of the United States Constitution click here . For additional resources click...
A proposed Thirteenth Amendment to prevent secession, 1861
In the wake of the presidential election of 1860 that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House, the slaveholding states of the American South, led by South Carolina, began withdrawing from the nation. In the midst of this...
Ratification of the US Constitution in New York, 1788
This unique copy of the US Constitution was printed by Claxton and Babcock in Albany, New York, between February 11 and March 21, 1788. Copies of the Constitution were widely distributed following the document’s signing by the members...
Aaron Burr, fugitive and traitor, 1804
On July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr shot former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Nine days later he wrote this cryptic letter (partially in cipher) to his son-in-law, Joseph...
How We Elect a President: The Electoral College (Grades 7–9)
Objective This lesson on the Electoral College is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These resources were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original...
How We Elect a President: The Electoral College (Grades 10–12)
Objective This lesson on the Electoral College is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These resources were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original...
Hamilton’s Report on the Subject of Manufactures, 1791
When George Washington became president in 1789, he appointed Alexander Hamilton as his secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton’s vision for the economic foundation of the United States included three main programs: 1) the federal...
Harry S. Truman responds to McCarthy, 1950
In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged in a speech in West Virginia that more than 200 staff members at the Department of State were known to be members of the Communist Party. During Harry Truman’s press conference on...
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