600 items
Historical Background American Indians (First Nations in Canada) constructed homes to conform to their needs and environment. Housing for some tribal groups was permanent, while other residences reflected the need to relocate, often...
Matthew F. Delmont - "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad"
Matthew F. Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Order Half American at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided...
Jacqueline Jones - "No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era"
Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin and a past president of the American Historical Association. Order No Right to an Honest Living at the Gilder Lehrman...
Julie Winch - "Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War"
Order Between Slavery and Freedom at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
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Native American Policy
Background: Two conflicting policies have governed this country’s treatment of Native Americans—assimilation and removal. As the United States expanded, it became necessary to issue formal policy statements and make treaties with...
Morgan: American Financier
Based on extensive research in newly opened archives, Morgan: American Financier , Jean Strouse’s portrait of J. P. Morgan, shows a man who helped transform the United States into an industrial nation, and amassed an extraordinary...
The French and Indian War
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
Guided Readings: The Korean War
Reading 1 In Korea the Government forces, which were armed to prevent border raids and to preserve internal security, were attacked by invading forces from North Korea. . . . The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that...
Guided Readings: World War II
Reading 1 It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to...
Robert W. Merry - "Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861"
Robert W. Merry has authored six books, including President McKinley: Architect of the American Century and A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent . Order Decade of...
African American Voting Rights
African American Voting Rights from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo .
American History and the World
NYU Professor of the Humanities Thomas Bender argues that the idea of American exceptionalism has hobbled the study of American history. Bender traces the study of history from the "men of letters" historians of the nineteenth...
Early American Slave Culture
In this lecture, historian Philip D. Morgan compares the Lowcountry and Chesapeake slave cultures and reveals much about the way of life of some of the earliest African Americans. Although South Carolina in the eighteenth century was...
Infographic: Industrialization: American Labor
View this infographic as a downloadable PDF. If you would like to learn more about Industrialization, view " Industrialization: Changing Living Standards " and " Industrialization: The Growth of Industry ."
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Myths of the American Revolution
Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, contrasts the popular memory of the Revolutionary War with its more complicated realities. She argues that although many of us were...
The Origins of the Cold War
The Cold War was more than the product of post-World War II tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union argues John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. Rather, it was the product of...
American Colonization Society membership certificate, 1833
When James Madison signed this membership certificate as president of the American Colonization Society in 1833, the organization’s effort to repatriate America’s free black population to Africa had been underway for over a decade. On...
African American Lives: An Overview
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of African American History at Harvard University, speaks about the development of the African American National Biography,...
Nineteenth-Century Native American Viewpoints
Objective Identify and compare the ideas of major Native American leaders from the nineteenth century. Evaluate the impact of those ideas on the United States and Native Americans. Locate the original and final reservation territory...
"Food Will Win the War," 1917
When most people think of wartime food rationing, they often think of World War II. However, civilians were encouraged to do their part for the war effort during World War I as well. This colorful poster by artist Charles E. Chambers...
Evaluating Lyndon B. Johnson’s Character and Efforts during the Civil Rights Era
Background Information In 1969 Thomas Baker conducted an interview with Roy Wilkins, executive directory of the NAACP, based on Wilkins’s experiences with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. This abridged version of the...
Statistics: Trends in American Farming
Percentage of Labor Force in Agriculture 1860 53% 1870 52% 1880 51% 1890 43% 1900 40% 1910 31% 1920 26% 1930 21% Farming Profession Number of Farms (in thousands) Proportion of Total Population 1940 6,350 23.1% 1950 5,648 15.2% 1960 3...
Preventing labor discrimination during World War II, 1942
In early 1942, as men of working age enlisted in the military and war production accelerated, US industries experienced a labor shortage. President Roosevelt established the War Manpower Commission "to assure the most effective...
The Civil Rights Movement: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X
Click to download this three-lesson unit.
Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War
Thomas G. Andrews, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, discusses his Bancroft Prize–winning book, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, and the interconnection between railroads, coal,...
Historical Context: Post-World War I Labor Tensions
The years following the end of World War I were a period of deep social tensions, aggrevated by high wartime inflation. Food prices more than doubled between 1915 and 1920; clothing costs more than tripled. A steel strike that began...
Roundtable discussion on American Antislavery Writings
On December 2, 2014, four scholars joined Gilder Lehrman president and Barnard College professor James G. Basker for a roundtable discussion on American antislavery writings. The panel included Elizabeth Alexander (Yale), Christopher...
Recruiting posters for African American soldiers, 1918
These two World War I recruiting posters aim to encourage African Americans to enlist. In the first poster, “Colored Man Is No Slacker,” a black soldier takes his leave against a background of African American patriotism, self...
An African American soldier’s pay warrant, 1780
During the American Revolution, Sharp Liberty, an African American soldier, served in the Connecticut Line of the Continental Army. Before the war, he had been enslaved in Wallingford, Connecticut. In 1777, he enlisted in the army,...
Inside the Vault: Robert F. Kennedy's Report on Civil Rights
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,...
Why Black men fought in World War I, 1919
During World War I, approximately 370,000 black men in the US military served in segregated regiments and were often relegated to support duties such as digging trenches, transporting supplies, cleaning latrines, and burying the dead....
The Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945
Across the long arc of American history, three moments in particular have disproportionately determined the course of the Republic’s development. Each respectively distilled the experience and defined the historical legacy of a...
The massacre of American Indian allies, 1818
On April 23, 1818, Captain Obed Wright of the Georgia militia ordered an attack on a Chehaw village, which resulted in the slaughter of several American Indians. In a letter written a week after the attack, Brigadier General Thomas...
Historical Context: The Global Effect of World War I
A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the twentieth century ranked the onset of World War I eighth. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was in one way or...
Historical Context: The Post-World War I Red Scare
The end of World War I was accompanied by a panic over political radicalism. Fear of bombs, Communism, and labor unrest produced a “Red Scare.” In Hammond, Indiana, a jury took two minutes to acquit the killer of an immigrant who had...
A World War II poster: "Starve the Squander Bug," 1943
Before he became world-renowned as Dr. Seuss for his children’s books and illustrations, Theodor Geisel worked for the US government during World War II designing posters such as this one, encouraging patriotism and investment. The...
Statistics: The American Economy during the 1920s
Cars on the Road 1919 6.7 million 1929 23 million Percentage of Households with Radios 1925 19 percent (5,000,000 homes) 1929 35 to 40 percent Sales of Radios 1922 $60 million 1929 $842.6 million Wage Levels and the Price of a Ford...
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