436 items
In conjunction with our panel, Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy (presented in partnership with the Office of the Governor of Louisiana), the Gilder Lehrman Institute has compiled this list of resources on the Plessy v....
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...
Rise of the Populists and William Jennings Bryan
Historical Background As the United States evolved into an industrial powerhouse in the decades following the Civil War, the growing strength of the railroads and the banks particularly, coupled with the impact of mechanization on...
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...
Frederick Douglass’s tribute to Abraham Lincoln, 1880
Despite initial differences, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln forged a relationship over the course of the Civil War based on a shared vision. Fifteen years after Lincoln’s death, Douglass described him as "one of the noblest...
"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...
Inside the Vault: The Lives and Works of Phillis Wheatley and Elizabeth Keckley
On the February 4, 2021 session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection , our curators talk with English Language Arts educator Jeanette Providence and Hamilton cast member Krystal Mackie about the lives...
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...
Dinner with the nuclear family, 1950
The threat of invasion and subversion in the Cold War era led Americans to seek consensus and conformity, in politics and in culture. The rise of consumer culture in the same period, driven by an economic boom, a population surge, and...
A Ku Klux Klan threat, 1868
This page contains language that may be offensive or inappropriate for some viewers. Reconstruction politics was a catalyst for widespread racism and hatred that freed people experienced throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan, founded...
Historical Context: Why Do People Migrate?
In trying to understand why people migrate, some scholars emphasize individual decision-making, while others stress broader structural forces. Many early scholars of migration emphasized the importance of "push" and "pull" factors....
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...
The Fight over Slavery in the Revolutionary Era
Columbia University professor Christopher Brown, author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006), examines the rise of anti-slavery thought during the Revolutionary era. Focusing on the often contrasting...
What’s That Sound? Teaching the 1960s through Popular Music
There’s Something Happening Here . . . The 1960s was one of the most dramatic and controversial decades in American history. Opinions about its achievements and failures continue to be divided between those who condemn the decade as...
The Politics of Reform
At the turn of the twentieth century there was a resurging impulse toward social and political reform. In some ways it continued tendencies already apparent since the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century, in which...
Nonviolent Direct Action at Southern Lunch Counters
Background On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, walked into a Woolworth’s store and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. This seemingly...
The Gilded Age
When I was a college student in the late 1960s, the most popular US history courses were the ones that covered the Gilded Age. They promised to illuminate the origins of urgent contemporary problems. Their canvas was broad and filled...
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....
The Pony Express: The Fastest Delivery of a Message across America
Background The inauguration of a new service, the Pony Express, on April 3, 1860, promised the fastest communication ever from the Missouri River to California. How long did a Pony Express message take to go from its starting point in...
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...
The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America: An Introduction
Whatever else the Declaration of Independence encompassed—a proclamation of political sovereignty, an indictment against the King of England, an appeal for allies—its assertion that “all men are created equal” shines as the polestar...
Washington Encourages a Prospective Immigrant: The Economic Potential of the States in 1796
During his second presidential term, George Washington enjoyed a lively correspondence with Sir John Sinclair, member of Parliament and leader of Britain’s scientific agriculture movement, on matters of mutual interest to the two...
"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....
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...
Guided Readings: The Farmers' Revolt
Reading 1 For our business interests, we desire to bring producers and consumers, farmers and manufacturers into the most direct and friendly relations possible. Hence we must dispense with a surplus of middlemen, not that we are...
Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery
TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The...
"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...
Immigration and Migration
The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles,...
Eleanor Roosevelt’s four basic rights, 1944
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a lifelong advocate of equal rights, used her position as First Lady to advocate against discrimination in the United States. However, Mrs. Roosevelt’s ideas were not embraced by everyone in the pre-civil...
The New Deal: Legislation & Policies
Historical Background When the stock market crashed in October of 1929, American citizens faced economic challenges unlike anything previously experienced in U.S. history. By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President in 1933...
National Expansion and Reform, 1815–1860
A good way to understand the men and women who created America’s reform tradition and carried it across the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War is to look at the political heritage their parents and grandparents left to them...
John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, 1961
On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth President of the United States. His short, fourteen-minute inaugural address is best remembered for a single line: "My fellow Americans: ask not what your country...
George Wallace on segregation, 1964
In 1958, George Wallace ran against John Patterson in his first gubernatorial race. In that Alabama election, Wallace refused to make race an issue, and he declined the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. This move won Wallace the...
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...
What Does Liberty Look Like?
" We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ." Declaration of...
History Times: A Nation of Immigrants
Coming to the Land of Opportunity Throughout American history, millions of people around the world have left their homelands for a chance to start a new life in this country—and they continue to come here to this day. People who come...
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