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On a quarter-mile strip of land in the bustling city of Canton (Guangzhou), China, trade was conducted between merchants from China and the eastern seaboard of America, beginning in 1784 and lasting until the mid-nineteenth century....

History Now Essay

America and the China Trade

William R. Sargent

Art, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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In October 1950, the newly established People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War on the North Korean side against the United States and other United Nations troops. Many Chinese American citizens expressed deep concern at this...

History Now Essay

Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years

Charlotte Brooks

Economics, Government and Civics

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Taiwan has been a showcase of liberalization under American encouragement, but also the primary irritant in US-China relations. A large island with a population of twenty-three million located about 100 to 150 miles off the coast of...

History Now Essay

Postwar Taiwan and the USA

Denny Roy

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the nation’s first race-based immigration law that was not effectively repealed until 1965–1968. The act exempted Chinese merchants, diplomats, scholars, and...

History Now Essay

"The Chinese Question"—Unresolved and Ongoing for Americans

John Kuo Wei Tchen

Government and Civics

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If there was one quality Abraham Lincoln believed essential both to individual success and to social advancement, it was industriousness. A child of the impoverished frontier who went on to take proud advantage of what historian Gabor...

Essay

"In the end you are sure to succeed": Lincoln on Perseverance

Harold Holzer

History Now Essay

"Dear Girl, how much I love you": The Revolutionary War Letters of Henry and Lucy Knox

Phillip Hamilton

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Letters between soldiers and spouses are often powerful and moving documents. Given the intensity, danger, and uncertainty of armed conflict as well as the significant changes wrought by most wars, such correspondence reveals what...

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43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015

History Now Essay

The Diary of Ella Jane Osborn, World War I US Army Nurse

Susan F. Saidenberg

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The unpublished diary of Ella Jane Osborn (1881–1966) in the Gilder Lehrman Collection opens an extraordinary window into the daily experiences of one American woman stationed in a US Army hospital in a dangerous and contested battle...

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43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015

History Now Essay

"Dear Miss Cole": World War I Letters of American Servicemen

Phillip Papas

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"Received your package," Pvt. George Van Pelt of Company I, 165th Infantry wrote in May 1918 from the frontlines in France to Annie E. Cole, a grammar school teacher and principal on Staten Island, New York, and to her students. "I...

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43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015

History Now Essay

Race and the Good War: An Oral History Interview with Calvin D. Cosby, World War II Veteran

Cecelia Hartsell

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Calvin D. Cosby was born in 1918, in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was my hometown as well. I first knew Calvin Cosby as the husband of my beloved second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ima Bradford Cosby. Mr. and Mrs. Cosby and their daughter...

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43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

The First Saddest Day of My Life: A Vietnam War Story

Sharon D. Raynor

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

What I know about the Vietnam War, I learned as a child from my father, Louis Raynor. At thirteen years old, I discovered an old, tattered, leather-bound diary in my parents’ chest of drawers. When I opened it, I immediately...

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43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Ralph W. Kirkham: A Christian Soldier in the US-Mexican War

Amy S. Greenberg

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

North of Mexico’s border, most Americans know the 1846 conflict that established that boundary (if they know it at all) as the training ground for Civil War heroes. Generals Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and...

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43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015

History Now Essay

The William Shepp Diaries: Combat and Danger in World War I

Michael S. Neiberg

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"Disappointments," wrote Private William Shepp, "are common in the army." At the time, Shepp, an aspiring teacher from a small community in West Virginia, was pondering the seemingly unrewarding and unending work that he and the men...

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43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015

Essay

Abraham Lincoln and the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment

Allen C. Guelzo

Government and Civics

"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...

Essay

"I begin to see it": Lincoln the War President

James M. McPherson

Government and Civics

In the spring of 1864, three years into the Civil War, it seemed that the Union was finally in a position to defeat the Confederacy, taking advantage of the significant losses the Confederacy had suffered in 1863. For three years,...

History Now Essay

Alexander Hamilton, The Man Who Made America Prosperous

Richard Brookhiser

Economics

When George Washington, newly elected president, picked the members of his administration in 1789 he tapped thirty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton to be the first treasury secretary. Hamilton had been a colonel on Washington’s staff...

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44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

Understanding the Burr-Hamilton Duel

Joanne B. Freeman

Without a doubt, the duel between former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr is the most famous duel in American history. On July 11, 1804, the two political rivals met on a dueling ground in...

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44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

Making a Film about Alexander Hamilton

Muffie Meyer

A few years ago, my colleagues and I made a documentary, Alexander Hamilton , for the Public Television series American Experience . When it was completed, we did a lot of screenings, interviews, and Q&As for all kinds of...

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44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

Alexander Hamilton on the $10 Bill: How He Got There and Why It Matters

Brian Phillips Murphy

Economics

2015 was a big year for Alexander Hamilton. Nearly two hundred eleven years after the nation’s first treasury secretary was shot and killed in a duel with then-Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr, an Off Broadway play...

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44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

"The Authentic Voice of Today": Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton

Elizabeth L. Wollman

Art

"The show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday." The comment above could easily have been written about Hamilton , but it was written long before Hamilton...

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44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

Essay

Hamilton

Ron Chernow

This excerpt from Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton provides a brief sketch of the Founding Father and his legacy. Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding fathers, at once thinker and doer, sparkling theoretician and...

History Now Essay

"Nature’s Nation": The Hudson River School and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1876

Linda Ferber

Art

Introduction The late nineteenth-century critic who first referred to a "Hudson River School" intended the nickname to be dismissive, describing artists whose style was old fashioned and whose American subjects were provincial. The...

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"[T]he dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams." So admitted the New York Times just a month after it had reported the grisly slaughter of 3,650 Union and Confederate troops at the Battle of Antietam. On a...

History Now Essay

"The Strange Spell That Dwells in Dead Men’s Eyes": The Civil War, by Brady

Harold Holzer

Art

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December finally brought the tumultuous year of 1857 to a close. The ongoing crisis in "bleeding" Kansas and the pro-southern Dred Scott decision handed down by the Supreme Court earlier in the year had further fractured political...

History Now Essay

Why Are They There?: The Confederate Statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection

Bess Beatty

Art

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Reprinted by permission of Maya Lin from her book Boundaries (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). It’s taken me years to be able to discuss the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial , partly because I needed to move past it and...

History Now Essay

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Maya Lin

Art

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During the Great Depression, a top commercial portraitist took to San Francisco’s streets to experiment with representing the social devastation surrounding her. Her photos showed men sleeping on sidewalks and in parks like bundles of...

History Now Essay

"Ditched, Stalled and Stranded": Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression

Carol Quirke

Art

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African American women made meaningful gains in the labor force and US armed forces as a result of the wartime labor shortage during the Second World War, but these advances were sharply circumscribed by racial segregation, which was...

History Now Essay

African American Women in World War II

Maureen Honey

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Waverly Woodson squinted into the distance. From the deck of the ship, he could see little. A thick blanket of cloud hung overhead, and the heavy air pressed in from all sides. Drenched fatigues clung to Woodson’s weary limbs. For...

History Now Essay

Glory on D-Day: African American Heroism on the Beaches of Normandy

Linda Hervieux

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Jeffrey Sammons is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1988) and the co-author, with John H. Morrow, Jr., of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War:...

History Now Essay

Harlem’s Rattlers: African American Regiment of the New York National Guard in World War I

Jeffrey Sammons

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

From the first shots of the American Revolutionary War until the ultimate victory at Yorktown, black men significantly contributed to securing independence for the United States from Great Britain. On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks,...

History Now Essay

African Americans in the Revolutionary War

Michael Lee Lanning

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The 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were followed by the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole , then of course September 11, 2001. Within two years I was on my way to Iraq. I had met my recruiter six years earlier by...

History Now Essay

On My Way to War in Iraq

Maurice Decaul

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Fighting against the Odds: Black Soldiers in the Second World War

John H. Morrow, Jr.

John H. Morrow, Jr. , is Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He taught for seventeen years at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where, in 1971, he became the first African American faculty member in the...

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57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (2009), and the co-editor of...

History Now Essay

Fighting for Democracy in World War I—Overseas and Over Here

Maurice Jackson

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020