259 items
In 1950, fewer than 50,000 Americans out of a total US population of 150 million were members of the Communist Party. Yet in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American fears of internal communist subversion reached a nearly hysterical...
The United States and the Caribbean, 1877–1920
Between 1877 and 1920, the United States’ relationship with the Caribbean region underwent a profound change, which was closely tied to the transformation of the United States to an industrial and imperial power. Although the Civil...
Prohibition and Its Effects
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in January 1919 and enacted in January 1920, outlawed the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors." This amendment was the culmination of decades of effort...
To Understand a Scandal: Watergate beyond Nixon
In the early hours of June 17, 1972, police officers arrested five men suspected of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate office building. This building would lend its...
The Discovery of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
In the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together, creating—among other things—a new economy. At the center of that economy was the plantation, an enterprise dedicated to the production of exotic...
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...
Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to Freedom
Frederick Douglass was one of the first fugitive slaves to speak out publicly against slavery. On the morning of August 12, 1841, he stood up at an anti-slavery meeting on Nantucket Island. With great power and eloquence, he described...
"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War
In the spring of 1871, Frederick Douglass was worried. Six years after Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Grant was now President of the United States, the Union of northern and southern states was...
Douglass and Lincoln: A Convergence
In 1880, Osborn Oldroyd invited Frederick Douglass to write something for a collection of tributes to Abraham Lincoln, published two years later as The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles . Douglass was uncharacteristically brief, but...
"Half slave, half free": Lincoln and the "House Divided"
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all proclaim, "a house divided against itself can not stand." [1] Living in a Bible-reading country, most nineteenth-century Americans knew that metaphor by heart—words that also made good common...
"To give all a chance": Lincoln, Abolition, and Economic Freedom
To read carefully the Lincoln economic parable of the ant (reprinted here) suggests a lost truth about our sixteenth president: during most of Abraham Lincoln’s political career he focused not on anti-slavery but on economic policy....
"That glorious consummation": Lincoln on the Abolition of Slavery
"That man who thinks Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln," wrote Abraham Lincoln’s long-time law partner, William Henry Herndon. "He...
Lincoln and Emancipation: Black Enfranchisement in 1863 Louisiana
As the president of a fractured nation, Abraham Lincoln faced no issue more perplexing than that of restoring the rebel states to the Union. Reconstruction during wartime was, he judged, "the greatest question ever presented to...
Abraham Lincoln and the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment
"Those who knew Mr. Lincoln best," wrote Illinois Congressman Isaac Arnold, "knew that he looked, confidently, to the ultimate extinction of slavery" and used "every means which his prudent and scrupulous mind recognized as right and...
A Civil War soldier’s satirical take on the news, 1863
Between battles, marches, and military exercises, Civil War soldiers spent their free time in camp playing music, writing and reading letters, and, for those with the skill, sketching scenes from the day. This unknown soldier’s...
Black Volunteers in the Nation’s First Epidemic, 1793
The new republic was only four years old, its capital recently established in Philadelphia, when the country suffered its first catastrophic epidemic. Yellow fever broke out in August 1793 and ravaged the city for three months, only...
The Map Proves It, ca. 1919
Supporters of women’s rights used maps such as the one shown here to demonstrate where women were allowed to vote, when they won that right, and which elections they could vote in. The source of this map is unknown. Originally printed...
Voting restrictions for African Americans, 1944
In 1944 a group of southern editors and writers documented cases of voter suppression in southern states. They took this step because, in the presidential election of 1944, only 28 percent of potential voters in the South participated...
Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper: Sedition charges, 1815
Even though the Sedition Act of 1798 had expired in 1801, individuals could still be charged with sedition. On January 20, 1815, Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper, publishers of the Massachusetts newspaper The Yankee , printed an article...
The Sedition Act, 1798
On August 14, 1798, the Columbian Centinel , a Boston newspaper aligned with the Federalist Party, printed this copy of the Sedition Act. It was the last in a series of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the...
"Your Late Lamented Husband": A Letter from Frederick Douglass to Mary Todd Lincoln
On March 4, 1865, Frederick Douglass attended President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration. Standing in the crowd, Douglass heard Lincoln declare slavery the "cause" and emancipation the "result" of the Civil War. Over the crisp...
Imperial Rivalries
When Christopher Columbus made his plans to sail westward across the Atlantic, he first set off across Europe to find sponsors. His brother Bartholomew went to the court of the English King Henry VII (who turned him down, much to the...
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...
Showing results 126 - 150