Site Search

90,731 items

History Now Essay

When Myth and Meaning Overshadow History: Remembering the Alamo

Linda K. Salvucci

Rare are the students who enter US classrooms without some preconceived notions regarding the Alamo. Thanks to more than a dozen films produced at regular intervals over the last century, to Walt Disney’s television series for baby...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Women and the Progressive Movement

Miriam Cohen

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

At the end of the nineteenth century, American politicians, journalists, professionals, and volunteers mobilized on behalf of reforms meant to deal with a variety of social problems associated with industrialization. Woman activists,...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

Modern Women Persuading Modern Men: The Nineteenth Amendment and the Movement for Woman Suffrage, 1916–1920

Jonathan Soffer

Government and Civics

Today we take women’s suffrage for granted, but many activists of the nineteenth century, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, struggled their whole lives for the vote, and did not live to see it. As a presidential...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

The Zimmermann Telegram and American Entry into World War I

Michael S. Neiberg

World History

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

The fact that the telegram before him bore Arthur Zimmermann’s name made its contents that much harder for Walter Hines Page to believe. Page was the American ambassador to Great Britain and on a cold London morning in late February...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

D-Day or Operation Overlord, June 6, 1944

Antony Beevor

World History

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

As dawn broke on June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion fleet became visible crossing the choppy waters of the English Channel to France. None of those who took part in D-Day, whether soldier, sailor, or airman, would ever forget the sight...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

The Battle for Baltimore

Alan Taylor

Bitter over the American declaration of war in 1812, when the British Empire had faced the emperor Napoleon at the peak of his power, the British sought payback in 1814. The war erupted over American anger at the British for seizing...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

George Washington’s French and Indian War

Theodore J. Crackel

World History

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

By the 1580s the French were ahead of the British in reaching into the interior of North America. They had established trading companies there, and their ships regularly brought furs back to France. Early in the seventeenth century...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

The Vietnam War and the My Lai Massacre

George Herring

The murder of more than 400 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai and My Khe by US soldiers on March 16, 1968, stands as one of the darkest days in the nation’s military history. It left an indelible stain on America’s record in Vietnam, the...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Technology in the Persian Gulf War of 1991

Robert Citino

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

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

In August 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. Five short months later, a powerful coalition led by the United States would launch Operation Desert Storm, one of the most rapid, decisive, and bloodless victories of all time. In just...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

The Korean War

Allan R. Millett

World History

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

The Korean War was three different conflicts from the perspective of the disparate groups who fought in it. For North and South Korea, the conflict was a civil war, a struggle with no possible compromise between two competing visions...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

The Battle of Antietam: A Turning Point in the Civil War

James M. McPherson

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

Four days after the battle of Antietam, which took place near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, Captain Robert Gould Shaw of the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry wrote to his father: "Every battle makes me wish more and...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

No Way Out: Lord Cornwallis, the Siege of Yorktown, and America’s Victory in the War for Independence

James Kirby Martin

Early on the morning of October 17, 1781, Lieutenant General Charles, Lord Cornwallis, found himself hunkered down in a cave near the southern shoreline of the York River. Above him was the disintegrating hamlet of Yorktown, Virginia,...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Sylvester Graham and Antebellum Diet Reform

Cindy Lobel

"Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants." So begins Michael Pollan’s 2009 book, In Defense of Food . Pollan has made a career educating Americans about the dangers of our contemporary, industrialized food supply. His book offers a...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

Education Reform in Antebellum America

Barbara Winslow

Economics, Religion and Philosophy

Education reform is often at the heart of all great reform struggles. [1] By the 1820s Americans were experiencing exhilarating as well as unsettling social and economic changes. In the North, the familiar rural and agrarian life was...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

Transcendentalism and Social Reform

Philip F. Gura

Those Americans who have heard of American Transcendentalism associate it with the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Henry David Thoreau. Asked to name things about the group they remember, most mention Emerson’s ringing...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

The War against Spain in the Philippines in 1898

Richard Meixsel

Before learning of Commodore George Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on the morning of May 1, 1898, few Americans knew anything about the Philippine Islands. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning In the Days of McKinley ...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

Essay

The Discovery of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Ira Berlin

In the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together, creating—among other things—a new economy. At the center of that economy was the plantation, an enterprise dedicated to the production of exotic...

History Now Essay

The Material Culture of Slave Resistance

Douglas R. Egerton

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

Artifacts tell stories. Sometimes the tales are unclear or even contradictory, and sometimes artifacts—not unlike a dishonest diarist—can even lead the unwary historian astray. But the material culture of enslaved Americans, from...

Appears in:

2 | Primary Sources on Slavery Winter 2004

History Now Essay

"People Get Ready": Music and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s

Brian Ward

Government and Civics

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

Few sights or sounds conjure up the passion and purposefulness of the Southern Civil Rights Movement as powerfully as the freedom songs that provided a stirring musical accompaniment to the campaign for racial justice and equality in...

Appears in:

8 | The Civil Rights Movement Summer 2006

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...

History Now Essay

The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s America

Brenda Wineapple

Literature

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne is the strange American author who has never been out of fashion; since his death in 1864, his stories and novels have resisted the tides of taste, canon reformation, and critical vicissitude. Herman Melville had...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

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...

History Now Essay

African Forced Migration to Colonial America

Ira Berlin

African American life in the United States has been framed by migrations, forced and free. A forced migration from Africa—the transatlantic slave trade—carried black people to the Americas. A second forced migration—the internal slave...

Appears in:

3 | Immigration Spring 2005

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources for George Washington and the French and Indian War from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

For additional information on the broader Seven Years’ War, of which the French and Indian campaigns were only a part, use this recent one-volume study: Baugh, Daniel A. The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources on the Civil War and the Battle of Antietam from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

Prof. McPherson is the author of Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), the authoritative study of the battle and its aftermath. You and your students may also want to look at some of...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

Site Search

Stay up to date, and subscribe to our quarterly newsletter.