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History Now Essay

"The New Colossus": Emma Lazarus and the Immigrant Experience

Julie Des Jardins

Literature

To read the text and hear the poem click here. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the...

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014

Essay

"Half slave, half free": Lincoln and the "House Divided"

Gabor S. Boritt

Government and Civics

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all proclaim, "a house divided against itself can not stand." [1] Living in a Bible-reading country, most nineteenth-century Americans knew that metaphor by heart—words that also made good common...

Essay

"To give all a chance": Lincoln, Abolition, and Economic Freedom

Lewis E. Lehrman

Government and Civics

To read carefully the Lincoln economic parable of the ant (reprinted here) suggests a lost truth about our sixteenth president: during most of Abraham Lincoln’s political career he focused not on anti-slavery but on economic policy....

Essay

"That glorious consummation": Lincoln on the Abolition of Slavery

Allen C. Guelzo

Government and Civics

"That man who thinks Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln," wrote Abraham Lincoln’s long-time law partner, William Henry Herndon. "He...

History Now Essay

Disasters and the Politics of Memory

Kevin Rozario

Government and Civics

The controversy that erupted around the opening of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum on May 21, 2014, reminds us that much is at stake in the way disasters are remembered. Costing some $700 million to build, with an annual...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900

Elizabeth Hayes Turner

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

Dawn brought "mother of pearl" skies to Galveston, Texas, that Saturday morning of September 8, 1900. The city of 38,000, perched on an island just off the mainland, had an elevation of no more than nine feet. With no sea wall to...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919

Carol Byerly

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

On September 19, 1918, 21-year-old Army private Roscoe Vaughan reported to sick call at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, feeling achy and feverish. He was promptly hospitalized along with eighty-two other soldiers that day. Influenza had...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

Everyone’s Backyard: The Love Canal Chemical Disaster

Amy M. Hay

Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

It all started quietly. There were no alerts, no sirens, no evacuation plans, no reports from Jim Cantore on the Weather Channel. Most people living in the LaSalle neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, first heard about problems in...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

History Now Essay

The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood

John M. Barry

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

In the latter part of August 1926, the sky darkened over much of the central United States and a heavy and persistent rain began to fall. Rain pelted first Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma, then edged eastward into Iowa...

Appears in:

40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014

Essay

The Sanctity of the Law: Lincoln’s Legal Career

Steven Mintz

Before he became president, Abraham Lincoln supported himself and his family as an attorney. For nearly a quarter of a century, he was a country lawyer, who frequently traveled for up to six months a year through Illinois’s 8th...

Essay

Lincoln and Emancipation: Black Enfranchisement in 1863 Louisiana

Richard J. Carwardine

Government and Civics

As the president of a fractured nation, Abraham Lincoln faced no issue more perplexing than that of restoring the rebel states to the Union. Reconstruction during wartime was, he judged, "the greatest question ever presented to...

History Now Essay

Revolutionary Philadelphia

Ray Raphael

Geography, Government and Civics

The image is so clear in our minds, seen first in elementary school and reinforced countless times since: a few dozen gentlemen with powdered wigs and period suits (coats, waistcoats, and knee-length breeches) gathered in a large...

Appears in:

11 | American Cities Spring 2007

History Now Essay

The Passage of the Civil Rights Act

Clay Risen

Government and Civics

When the Civil Rights Act passed fifty years ago, it was immediately hailed as one of the most important pieces of legislation of the twentieth century. Not only did it ban discrimination in hotels, restaurants, public parks, schools,...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

History Now Essay

Civil Rights Leadership and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

Clarence Taylor

Government and Civics

The most important social protest movement of the twentieth century was the civil rights movement, which provided countless numbers of people the opportunity to become involved in the struggle for racial equality. The civil rights...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Dispatches from the Front: The Civil Rights Act and the Pursuit of Greater Freedom in a Small Southern City

Charles W. McKinney

Government and Civics

The civil rights protests that enveloped the nation in the summer of 1964 occurred against the backdrop of the slow, uncertain progress of the legislation that would eventually become known as the Civil Rights Act. As activists across...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Charles L. Zelden

As is the case with most historical events, the key to teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) is context. The CRA by itself is simply a piece of congressional legislation—structurally complicated and textually byzantine. Still,...

Appears in:

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality Winter 2015

History Now Essay

The Role of China in US History

Warren I. Cohen

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Today, our homes are filled with countless products "Made in China." Long before the American Revolution, thanks to British trade with China, many colonists were able to purchase Chinese furniture, wallpapers, silks, and porcelains....

Appears in:

42 | The Role of China in US History Spring 2015

History Now Essay

America and the China Trade

William R. Sargent

Art, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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....

Appears in:

42 | The Role of China in US History Spring 2015

History Now Essay

Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years

Charlotte Brooks

Economics, Government and Civics

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...

Appears in:

42 | The Role of China in US History Spring 2015

History Now Essay

Postwar Taiwan and the USA

Denny Roy

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

42 | The Role of China in US History Spring 2015

History Now Essay

"The Chinese Question"—Unresolved and Ongoing for Americans

John Kuo Wei Tchen

Government and Civics

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...

Appears in:

42 | The Role of China in US History Spring 2015

Essay

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

Harold Holzer

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...

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...

Appears in:

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...

Appears in:

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...

Appears in:

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

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