Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

1,584 items

Essay

September 11, 2001

the National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Government and Civics, World History

K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"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...

Essay

Mary Elizabeth Lease: Populist Reformer

Kelly A. Woestman

Blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic woes is not a new idea in American history. Over a century ago, Mary Elizabeth Lease, the best-known orator of the Populist era, asserted, "Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a...

Essay

Suggested Resources on World War I and the Zimmermann Telegram from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

Professor Neiberg has written extensively on World War I. Of his many books, Fighting the Great War: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006) will be most helpful in teaching the topics discussed in this essay. Although this...

Essay

Entrepreneurs and Bankers: The Evolution of Corporate Empires

Robert W. Cherny

James J. Hill enjoyed being called "the Empire Builder," taking it as a compliment for his work as president of the Great Northern Railway. Hill’s railway company, which ran through the northern Great Plains and Pacific Northwest,...

Essay

Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to Freedom

Steven Mintz

Government and Civics

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...

Essay

"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War

David W. Blight

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...

Essay

Douglass and Lincoln: A Convergence

James Oakes

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...

Essay

"Half slave, half free": Lincoln and the "House Divided"

Gabor S. Boritt

Government and Civics

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...

Essay

"To give all a chance": Lincoln, Abolition, and Economic Freedom

Lewis E. Lehrman

Government and Civics

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....

Essay

"That glorious consummation": Lincoln on the Abolition of Slavery

Allen C. Guelzo

Government and Civics

"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...