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Collection Landing Page

Visit The Collection

Visit the Collection Field Trips A field trip to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History gives students the unique opportunity to learn history from real documents, up close with no display cases! This exciting experience...

Collection Landing Page

Visit the Collection

Collection Programs Inside the Vault Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection is a zoom presentation of documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Join our curators and learn the fascinating stories behind...

Collection Landing Page

Spotlight on Primary Sources

Spotlights on Primary Sources Each of the Spotlights from our Collection provides explanatory text, a transcript, and an image of the featured document. Questions for classroom discussion are available to K–12 teachers. Below are some...

Essay

The Civil Rights Movement

Taylor Branch

The word "movement" often designates a cultural shift of less import than the American Revolution, Great Depression, and other capitalized dramas in history. To be sure, some popular movements have gained broader recognition in the...

History Now Essay

Perils of the Ocean in the Early Modern Era

Robert C. Ritchie

Geography, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

A traveler considering an ocean voyage around 1600 had much to contemplate. Voyage by voyage, explorers and colonists alike needed knowledge about the seas and lands in the Atlantic world. Unfortunately, information was never shared...

Appears in:

25 | Three Worlds Meet Fall 2010

History Now Essay

Women of the West

Virginia Scharff

Geography, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...

Appears in:

9 | The American West Fall 2006

Essay

The New Nation, 1783–1815

Alan Taylor

Government and Civics

The leaders of the American Revolution made three great gambles. First, they sought independence from the powerful British Empire, becoming the first colonies in the Americas to revolt and seek independence from their mother empire....

History Now Essay

FDR and Hitler: A Study in Contrasts

David M. Kennedy

Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The Great Depression and World War II were events in world history, but they touched different countries in sometimes dramatically different ways. To paraphrase Tolstoy, many peoples suffered, but every unhappy people was unhappy in...

Appears in:

14 | World War II Winter 2007

History Now Essay

The Marshall and Taney Courts: Continuities and Changes

R. B. Bernstein

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Though the first holders of the job thought it more a burden than a position of honor or power, the office of chief justice of the United States has a pivotal role in the American constitutional system, thanks mainly to John Marshall ...

Appears in:

15 | The Supreme Court Spring 2008

History Now Essay

Indian Removal

Theda Perdue

Geography, Government and Civics

In 1828 pressure was building among white Americans for the relocation of American Indians from the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. A student at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation, which lay within...

Appears in:

28 | American Indians Summer 2011

Essay

The Human Toll of the Great Depression

Steven Mintz

Economics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

After more than half a century, images of the Great Depression remain firmly etched in the American psyche—breadlines, soup kitchens, tin-can shanties and tar paper shacks known as "Hoovervilles," penniless men and women selling...

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

Andrew Jackson’s Shifting Legacy

Daniel Feller

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Of all presidential reputations, Andrew Jackson’s is perhaps the most difficult to summarize or explain. Most Americans recognize his name, though most probably know him (in the words of a famous song) as the general who "fought the...

Appears in:

22 | Andrew Jackson and His World Winter 2009

History Now Essay

The Civil Rights Movement: Major Events and Legacies

James T. Patterson

Art, Government and Civics, Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

From the earliest years of European settlement in North America, whites enslaved and oppressed black people. Although the Civil War finally brought about the abolition of slavery, a harsh system of white supremacy persisted thereafter...

Appears in:

8 | The Civil Rights Movement Summer 2006

History Now Essay

The World War II Home Front

Allan M. Winkler

Economics, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

World War II had a profound impact on the United States. Although no battles occurred on the American mainland, the war affected all phases of American life. It required unprecedented efforts to coordinate strategy and tactics with...

Appears in:

14 | World War II Winter 2007

Essay

The Thirteen Colonies

Francis J. Bremer

Government and Civics

The thirteen colonies that joined together to become the United States of America were but a part of the first British Empire. They were the product of a broad and dramatic expansion of England that began with the establishment of ...

History Now Essay

Ordinary Americans and the Constitution

Gary B. Nash

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The Constitution is so honored today, at home and abroad, that it may seem irreverent to suggest that for a great many ordinary Americans, it was not what they wished as a capstone of their revolutionary experience. This is not to say...

Appears in:

13 | The Constitution Fall 2007

History Now Essay

Women and Wagoners: Camp Followers in the American War for Independence

Holly A. Mayer

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

An old tune called "The Girl I Left Behind Me" tells of a lovelorn soldier yearning to return home to his waiting fair maid. Although there is a good chance that this song was fifed during the Revolutionary War, the earliest...

Appears in:

21 | The American Revolution Fall 2009

Essay

Early Settlements

James Horn

"I marvel not a little," Richard Hakluyt the younger wrote in 1582, "that since the first discovery of America (which is now full fourscore and ten years) after so great conquest and plantings of the Spaniards and Portuguese there,...

History Now Essay

England on the Eve of Colonization

Paul E. J. Hammer

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

When James VI of Scotland and his entourage began his journey south to take up the crown of England in April of 1603, it looked as if the ancient enmity between the two realms had finally been swept away. With England’s aristocratic...

Appears in:

25 | Three Worlds Meet Fall 2010

History Now Essay

The Jungle and the Progressive Era

Robert W. Cherny

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The publication of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result. At the time he began working on the...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

Essay

The Road to War

Chandra M. Manning

Economics, Government and Civics

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

‘A house divided against itself can not stand’ I believe this government can not endure permanently, half slave, and half free . . . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it...

History Now Essay

John Brown: Villain or Hero?

Steven Mintz

Economics, Literature, Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12

In 1856, three years before his celebrated raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown, with four of his sons and three others, dragged five unarmed men and boys from their homes along Kansas’s Pottawatomie Creek and hacked and dismembered...

Appears in:

5 | Abolition Fall 2005

History Now Essay

The US Banking System: Origin, Development, and Regulation

Richard Sylla

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Banks are among the oldest businesses in American history—the Bank of New York, for example, was founded in 1784, and as the recently renamed Bank of New York Mellon it had its 225th anniversary in 2009. The banking system is one of...

Appears in:

24 | Shaping the American Economy Summer 2010

History Now Essay

Cahokia: A Pre-Columbian American City

Timothy R. Pauketat

Almost a thousand years ago, American Indians built a city along the Mississippi River in the middle of North America. Located opposite modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, this city is called Cahokia by archaeologists, and it was as large...

Appears in:

28 | American Indians Summer 2011

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