Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

291 items

News

Morgan DeMartis and Cassidy Hooker Move into New Roles at the Gilder Lehrman Insitute

Looking to the Future from the Front Lines of GLI: What’s on the Horizon for Cassidy Hooker and Morgan DeMartis Upon entering the Gilder Lehrman office, visitors are welcomed by Cassidy Hooker and Morgan DeMartis. They have made the...

News

Talking of Souls and Scholarship with the Co-Winners of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize

The following appeared first on Medium.com on February 26, 2019, published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Tiya Miles are the co-winners of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for 2018. The Douglass Prize was...

History Now Essay

Why We the People? Citizens as Agents of Constitutional Change

Linda R. Monk

Government and Civics

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"We the People?" asked Patrick Henry at the Virginia convention to ratify the new Constitution in 1788. "Who authorized them to speak the language of ‘We the People,’ instead of ‘We the States’?" [1] Looking back, we can be grateful...

Appears in:

13 | The Constitution Fall 2007

Video: Inside The Vault

Inside the Vault: Lincoln’s Refusal to Pardon Nathaniel Gordon

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

“It becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that, relinquishing all expectation of pardon by Human Authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the Common God and Father of all men.” —Abraham Lincoln, February 4, 1862...

History Now Essay

From the Editor

Carol Berkin

The Declaration of Independence was written to explain the just causes for the Americans’ break with their mother country. In it, Thomas Jefferson carefully listed the American grievances against the king, creating a catalogue of...

Appears in:

63 | The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America Summer 2022

Essay

Lincoln

Allen C. Guelzo

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

No one seemed less well-cast for the role of reformer, in an age of reform, than Abraham Lincoln. To begin with, he was a stranger, emotionally and intellectually, to evangelical Christianity, the great engine of reform in the...

History Now Essay

Self-Evident Truths: Black Americans and the Declaration of Independence

Leigh Fought

In 1776, as the ink on the Declaration of Independence dried, the Rev. Lemuel Haynes pointed out that Black Americans like himself lived under “much greater oppression than that which Englishmen seem so much to spurn at. I mean an...

Appears in:

67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era Summer 2023

News

Announcing the Winners of the 2018–2019 Civil War Student Essay Contest

The Gilder Lehrman Institute received a record 873 submissions for the 2018–2019 Civil War Student Essay Contest. Judges Kevin Cline (2016 National History Teacher of the Year and Indiana History Teacher of the Year (HTOY)), Kevin Dua...

News

David Blight Awarded the 2019 Lincoln Prize for <em>Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom</em>

Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History have announced that David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster), is the recipient of the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln...

History Now Essay

The Seneca Falls Convention: Setting the National Stage for Women’s Suffrage

Judith Wellman

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

On July 19–20, 1848, about 300 people met for two hot days and candlelit evenings in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, in the first formal women’s rights convention ever held in the United States. Sixty-eight women ...

Appears in:

7 | Women's Suffrage Spring 2006