Site Search

90,731 items

History Now Essay

Dolley Madison: First Lady and Queen

Catherine Allgor

Government and Civics

Whatever else you can say about Dolley Payne Todd Madison (1768–1849), she was famous. She was so well known and well regarded in her lifetime that, at her death in 1849, both houses of Congress adjourned, along with the Supreme Court...

Appears in:

35 | America’s First Ladies Spring 2013

History Now Essay

Martha Washington Creates the Role of First Lady

Patricia Brady

Government and Civics

During nearly forty-one years of marriage, Martha and George Washington lived together in harmony and mutual enjoyment. Never did he play the overbearing patriarch nor she the querulous nag. Theirs was a peaceful domestic partnership,...

Appears in:

35 | America’s First Ladies Spring 2013

History Now Essay

Betty Ford: A New Kind of First Lady

Gil Troy

Americans never elected Gerald R. Ford president or even vice president—Richard Nixon appointed him after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973. Today, Ford’s brief presidency is often forgotten. Yet during Ford’s two...

Appears in:

35 | America’s First Ladies Spring 2013

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources on Title IX from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

Books and Printed Materials Carpenter, Linda Jean, and R. Vivian Acosta. Title IX. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2005. [A book designed to help sports professionals understand the law and its implications.] Hogshead-Makar, Nancy, and...

Appears in:

23 | Turning Points in American Sports Spring 2010

History Now Essay

"No Event Could Have Filled Me with Greater Anxieties": George Washington and the First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789

Phillip Hamilton

Government and Civics

George Washington’s fame rests not upon his words but upon his deeds. Therefore, his First Inaugural Address is sometimes overlooked. This is unfortunate because the words he delivered on Thursday, April 30, 1789, not only launched...

Appears in:

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013

History Now Essay

A More Perfect Union? Barack Obama and the Politics of Unity

Thomas J. Sugrue

Government and Civics

A New York Times headline in January 2009 captured the essence of Barack Obama’s inauguration for many Americans: "A Civil Rights Victory Party on the Mall." An estimated 1.8 million people gathered to celebrate. Many heroes of the...

Appears in:

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013

History Now Essay

FDR’s First Inaugural Address

Davis W. Houck

Economics, Government and Civics

Several years ago when I was researching a very different subject at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, I happened across several archival documents related to FDR’s first inaugural address. As a...

Appears in:

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013

History Now Essay

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

Lewis E. Lehrman

Government and Civics

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address was a peerless work of political theology, evoked in the native tongue he had mastered in the same diligent way he had mastered the rebellion. In 703 words, he summarized the moral dilemma of...

Appears in:

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013

History Now Essay

John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address

Michael Nelson

Government and Civics

On January 20, 1961, as on most presidential inauguration days, the nation was governed by one president until noon and by another afterward. The contrast between outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his incoming successor,...

Appears in:

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013

History Now Essay

Sharing a Civil War Photo with a Million People

Garry E. Adelman

Art

A tree falls on a shed and all but destroys it. A passing student notices that from a certain angle the portion of the shed still standing looks just like a man on horseback. It is uncanny; a talented artist could hardly do better....

Appears in:

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013

History Now Essay

"The Brave Men, Living and Dead": Common Soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg

Robert Bonner

Midway through his remarks at the Gettysburg National Soldiers’ Cemetery on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln confided that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." This remarkable (and remarkably off-target)...

Appears in:

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013

History Now Essay

Field Relief Work at Gettysburg

Jane E. Schultz

On Independence Day in 1863, a Saturday, it was raining in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as burial details and medical officers took account of the recent battle. Some 50,000 men had fallen in three days, 8,000 of them killed outright and...

Appears in:

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013

History Now Essay

How the Town Shaped the Battle: Gettysburg 1863

Allen C. Guelzo

Geography

We think we know who the important players at the Battle of Gettysburg were: Robert E. Lee, or George G. Meade, or the Union Army of the Potomac, or the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. But there is one major player from whom,...

Appears in:

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013

History Now Essay

Lincoln’s "Flat Failure": The Gettysburg Myth Revisited

Harold Holzer

A century and a half ago, Abraham Lincoln brought forth at Gettysburg a speech universally remembered as one of the greatest ever written, a gem not only of American political oratory, but of American literature. Tributes have been...

Appears in:

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013

History Now Essay

The Relevance of Gettysburg

D. Scott Hartwig

Joshua Chamberlain, who earned a Medal of Honor for his leadership and the courageous stand of his regiment, the 20th Maine, on Little Round Top on July 2, 1863, during the Battle of Gettysburg, reflected after the war that, ...

Appears in:

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013

History Now Essay

American Indians and the Transcontinental Railroad

Elliott West

Geography

"Across the Continent" is among the most familiar lithographs of Currier and Ives. It features a locomotive chugging from the foreground toward a far western horizon. To the left of the tracks are the standard images of the coming of...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

History Now Essay

The Origins of the Transcontinental Railroad

Richard White

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

The completion in 1869 of the first transcontinental railroad—the Pacific Railway, as the combination of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific was called—created two of the most iconic symbols in American history. The first is a...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

History Now Essay

Financing the Transcontinental Railroad

Maury Klein

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics

The first transcontinental railroad, built between 1864 and 1869, was the greatest construction project of its era. It involved building a line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, across a vast, largely unmapped territory...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

History Now Essay

Home Adrift: Women and Domesticated Rail Travel

Amy G. Richter

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

In the summer of 1869 Godey’s Lady’s Book published an editorial marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The author praised the new "wonder of the world" and then clarified that "this great work was begun, carried on...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

History Now Essay

Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad

Glenn Willumson

Art, Geography, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

On a brisk May afternoon, in the high desert of Utah, the shrill tap of the telegraph key simultaneously announced the completion of North America’s first transcontinental railroad to cities across the United States. Immediately...

Appears in:

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad Winter 2014

Essay

Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to Freedom

Steven Mintz

Government and Civics

Frederick Douglass was one of the first fugitive slaves to speak out publicly against slavery. On the morning of August 12, 1841, he stood up at an anti-slavery meeting on Nantucket Island. With great power and eloquence, he described...

History Now Essay

A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington

James G. Basker

Government and Civics, Literature

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

One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington....

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014

Essay

"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War

David W. Blight

In the spring of 1871, Frederick Douglass was worried. Six years after Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Grant was now President of the United States, the Union of northern and southern states was...

Essay

Douglass and Lincoln: A Convergence

James Oakes

In 1880, Osborn Oldroyd invited Frederick Douglass to write something for a collection of tributes to Abraham Lincoln, published two years later as The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles . Douglass was uncharacteristically brief, but...

History Now Essay

"I, Too": Langston Hughes’s Afro-Whitmanian Affirmation

Steven Tracy

Literature

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

To read the text and hear the poem click here. Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S....

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014

Site Search

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