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How do you write the history of someone for whom no image exists? Who surfaces intermittently in scraps of words found across hundreds of pages of archival documents? Whose singularity is so often glossed and aggregated as “Indian”?...
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Nancy Ward, Cherokee Beloved Woman
In 1755 a Cherokee woman named Nanye’hi accompanied a war party, which included her husband Kingfisher. At Taliwa in what today is north Georgia, the Cherokees engaged the enemy Creek Indians in battle. Nanye’hi crouched behind a log...
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Ely S. Parker (Donehogawa): Civil War Hero, Ethnologist, Political Leader
After 1800, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, like most Native American tribes, faced a long struggle against destruction of their land bases, cultures, and livelihoods. These struggles also spawned revival movements, one of...
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Sitting Bull: Last of the Great Chiefs
Sitting Bull was the last of the great Indian chiefs to surrender his free way of life and settle on a government reservation. He belonged to the Hunkpapa tribe of the Lakota Sioux. The Lakotas numbered seven tribes, loosely...
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Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) and the National Council of American Indians: Leading the Way for Indigenous Self-Representation
Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1876, the same year as the Battle of Greasy Grass (known more commonly in US history as the Battle of Little Big Horn), Gertrude Simmons Bonnin grew up amidst a US-national culture of systemic...
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"Show Them What an Indian Can Do": The Example of Jim Thorpe
Although the twentieth century produced many great athletes, there is no one who stood out more than Jim Thorpe. That is not just my opinion. When Jim Thorpe won two gold medals at the 1912 Olympic Games, the king of Sweden said to...
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From the Editor
To most Americans, the names of Squanto, Sacagawea, Geronimo, and Sitting Bull are relatively familiar—although how they are described usually depends on their relationship to the White culture of their day. Their individual histories...
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Inside the Vault: Primary Sources about Enslaved People
While conducting research for the film Twelve Years a Slave , director Steve McQueen and his team came to the Gilder Lehrman Collection to view original primary sources. In this session, Antuan Raimone from Hamilton and Corey...
Indigenous Americans in World War II: The Navajo Code Talkers
In the summer of 1983, my son and I visited my father, Benson Tohe. He and other Navajo Code Talkers had recently been honored in Washington, DC, with a parade and given a medal for their service in World War II. That was the first...
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Submit Your Hamilton Education Program Online Videos for Spring 2021!
The Gilder Lehrman Institute is pleased to announce that the national competition and lottery are now open for spring 2021 submissions for the Hamilton Education Program Online. EduHam Online is an easily adaptable, fully online...
Who Will Tell Your Story? Get Creative with EduHam
Have you seen other students’ performance pieces from the Hamilton Education Program and wondered, “How do I do that?” In this class, we will look at primary source documents on the Hamilton Education Program website and find their...
Celebrate Black History Month with Inside the Vault
This February Inside the Vault , the online program that highlights unique primary sources from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, celebrates Black History Month with explorations of major Black writers and orators of the eighteenth and...
Announcing the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Finalists
The Lincoln Prize has been awarded annually since 1990 to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War era. Prize winners have included Doris Kearns Goodwin (2006), Eric Foner (2011), and David Blight (2002...
Announcing the 2021 Lincoln Prize Finalists
Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History have announced the finalists for the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. They are • Alice Baumgartner , South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to...
K-8 Educators Offered Unique NEH Summer Institute Program on The Making of America
The Making of America: Colonial Era to Reconstruction is a virtual, weeklong 2021 NEH Summer Institute that offers K–8 educators the opportunity to explore the people, ideas, and events that made America into a cultural, social, and...
Book Breaks in February Explore Slavery, Desegregation, and Self-Determination
Since the summer of 2020, Gilder Lehrman Book Breaks has featured the most exciting history scholars in America discussing their books live with host William Roka followed by a Q&A with home audiences. This February, the books...
"Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968"
This historical fiction picture book presents the story of nine-year-old Lorraine Jackson, who in 1968 witnessed the Memphis sanitation strike—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final stand for justice before his assassination—when her...
Free Workshop Series & Symposium in Partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations
In partnership with World101 from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), we are pleased to offer four free digital professional development sessions and a symposium in spring 2021. On MARCH 6 the first workshop on American...
Register Now for Spring History School
Building on the success of our summer and fall Gilder Lehrman History School , we are pleased to offer free courses this spring for elementary, middle, and high school students. History School provides engaging live interactive...
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...
Yellow Fever 1793
Late in August 1793 Philadelphia was struck by a strange and virulent disease. Patients developed aches, chills, and fever, vomited black bile, and turned yellow. Some recovered, but many died. The yellow fever, as it was called, had...
The Influenza of 1918 and the Coronavirus of 2020: Some Parallels and Differences
Sometime prior to late January 1918, a virus jumped species from birds to humans, probably after passing through another mammal. It spawned a lethal pandemic. Sometime prior to late December 2019, a virus jumped species from bats to...
Invisible Threats and the Politics of Disaster: Three Mile Island and Covid-19
An invisible, potentially deadly threat. Elected officials saying one thing, and public health experts saying another. A citizenry hungry for information and guidance. A cultural divide between those who are afraid of the threat and...
History in the Making: COVIDCalls and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Disasters are now a permanent feature of American life—no longer confined to predictable seasons or geographies—in the era of hyperglobalization and its related climate change, a disaster in one part of the world affects all of us....
Get to Know Sergio de Alba, 2020 National History Teacher of the Year
Sergio de Alba, a teacher at R. M. Miano Elementary School in Los Baños, California, was named the 2020 National History Teacher of the Year and will be honored in a recorded ceremony on October 7, 2020. Register here for A Tribute to...
Excerpt from Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, "Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793" (1794), with an introduction by James G. Basker
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The Importance of Studying Disasters: Ideas and Advice for the Classroom
I was sitting in Algebra when I heard the news that an incident had occurred in New York City. My history teacher, Mr. Turner, appeared suddenly at the door—interrupting the Pythagorean theorem lesson—to say that something was...
From the Editor
A disaster often reveals as much about the society wrestling with it as it does about its origins and its physical effects. If scientists focus on the source of the danger—a virus, bacteria, climatic shifts, or disease-carrying...
Black Volunteers in the Nation’s First Epidemic, 1793
The new republic was only four years old, its capital recently established in Philadelphia, when the country suffered its first catastrophic epidemic. Yellow fever broke out in August 1793 and ravaged the city for three months, only...
The Map Proves It, ca. 1919
Supporters of women’s rights used maps such as the one shown here to demonstrate where women were allowed to vote, when they won that right, and which elections they could vote in. The source of this map is unknown. Originally printed...
An appeal for suffrage support, 1871
The National Woman Suffrage and Educational Committee was formed in the spring of 1871. The Washington DC-based committee pledged to act as the “centre of all action upon Congress and the country.” The group was also dedicated to the...
Voting restrictions for African Americans, 1944
In 1944 a group of southern editors and writers documented cases of voter suppression in southern states. They took this step because, in the presidential election of 1944, only 28 percent of potential voters in the South participated...
Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper: Sedition charges, 1815
Even though the Sedition Act of 1798 had expired in 1801, individuals could still be charged with sedition. On January 20, 1815, Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper, publishers of the Massachusetts newspaper The Yankee , printed an article...
The Sedition Act, 1798
On August 14, 1798, the Columbian Centinel , a Boston newspaper aligned with the Federalist Party, printed this copy of the Sedition Act. It was the last in a series of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the...
John C. McManus Wins the Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize
Winner of the Seventh Annual Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History Announced Award Program Available Online Thursday, November 5, 2020 New York, NY, September 30, 2020 – The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announced...
Affiliate School Program | Affiliate School History Scholarships
The Gilder Lehrman Institute is pleased to partner with Gettysburg College and Marist College to offer scholarships of $5,000 or more each year for up to four years exclusively for Gilder Lehrman Affiliate School students. Click the...
Colonization & Settlement, 1493–1763
Reference Guides: Colonization & Settlement, 1493–1763 Beginning with a 1493 Latin printing of Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Collection contains more than 4000 colonial-era documents that chronicle...
American Revolution, 1763-1783
American Revolution, 1763-1783 The Gilder Lehrman Collection contains materials written by over 2,000 individuals who fought in and lived through the American Revolution. These firsthand accounts were written by leaders, soldiers, and...
The New Nation, 1784-1800
The New Nation, 1784–1800 These materials address the creation of the US Constitution from the failure of the Articles of Confederation through the controversial election of 1800 in both official records and personal correspondence....
Expansion & Reform, 1800-1860
Expansion & Reform, 1800-1860 The conflict over slavery, the growth of federal power, and the territorial expansion of the United States figure prominently in the Collection. Thousands of letters, documents, broadsides, and...
The Civil War, 1861-1865
The Civil War, 1861-1865 Letters and documents recount the secession crisis and the American Civil War through general orders, orderly books, recruitment broadsides, maps, photographs, newspapers, and the journals, official dispatches...
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