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History Now Essay

Race and the Good War: An Oral History Interview with Calvin D. Cosby, World War II Veteran

Cecelia Hartsell

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Calvin D. Cosby was born in 1918, in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was my hometown as well. I first knew Calvin Cosby as the husband of my beloved second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ima Bradford Cosby. Mr. and Mrs. Cosby and their daughter...

Appears in:

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

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

The First Saddest Day of My Life: A Vietnam War Story

Sharon D. Raynor

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

What I know about the Vietnam War, I learned as a child from my father, Louis Raynor. At thirteen years old, I discovered an old, tattered, leather-bound diary in my parents’ chest of drawers. When I opened it, I immediately...

Appears in:

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

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Ralph W. Kirkham: A Christian Soldier in the US-Mexican War

Amy S. Greenberg

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

North of Mexico’s border, most Americans know the 1846 conflict that established that boundary (if they know it at all) as the training ground for Civil War heroes. Generals Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and...

Appears in:

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

History Now Essay

The William Shepp Diaries: Combat and Danger in World War I

Michael S. Neiberg

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"Disappointments," wrote Private William Shepp, "are common in the army." At the time, Shepp, an aspiring teacher from a small community in West Virginia, was pondering the seemingly unrewarding and unending work that he and the men...

Appears in:

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

Essay

Abraham Lincoln and the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment

Allen C. Guelzo

Government and Civics

"Those who knew Mr. Lincoln best," wrote Illinois Congressman Isaac Arnold, "knew that he looked, confidently, to the ultimate extinction of slavery" and used "every means which his prudent and scrupulous mind recognized as right and...

Essay

"I begin to see it": Lincoln the War President

James M. McPherson

Government and Civics

In the spring of 1864, three years into the Civil War, it seemed that the Union was finally in a position to defeat the Confederacy, taking advantage of the significant losses the Confederacy had suffered in 1863. For three years,...

History Now Essay

Alexander Hamilton, The Man Who Made America Prosperous

Richard Brookhiser

Economics

When George Washington, newly elected president, picked the members of his administration in 1789 he tapped thirty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton to be the first treasury secretary. Hamilton had been a colonel on Washington’s staff...

Appears in:

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

Understanding the Burr-Hamilton Duel

Joanne B. Freeman

Without a doubt, the duel between former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr is the most famous duel in American history. On July 11, 1804, the two political rivals met on a dueling ground in...

Appears in:

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

Making a Film about Alexander Hamilton

Muffie Meyer

A few years ago, my colleagues and I made a documentary, Alexander Hamilton , for the Public Television series American Experience . When it was completed, we did a lot of screenings, interviews, and Q&As for all kinds of...

Appears in:

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

Alexander Hamilton on the $10 Bill: How He Got There and Why It Matters

Brian Phillips Murphy

Economics

2015 was a big year for Alexander Hamilton. Nearly two hundred eleven years after the nation’s first treasury secretary was shot and killed in a duel with then-Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr, an Off Broadway play...

Appears in:

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

History Now Essay

"The Authentic Voice of Today": Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton

Elizabeth L. Wollman

Art

"The show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday." The comment above could easily have been written about Hamilton , but it was written long before Hamilton...

Appears in:

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016

Essay

Hamilton

Ron Chernow

This excerpt from Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton provides a brief sketch of the Founding Father and his legacy. Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding fathers, at once thinker and doer, sparkling theoretician and...

History Now Essay

"Nature’s Nation": The Hudson River School and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1876

Linda Ferber

Art

8

Introduction The late nineteenth-century critic who first referred to a "Hudson River School" intended the nickname to be dismissive, describing artists whose style was old fashioned and whose American subjects were provincial. The...

Appears in:

45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016

History Now Essay

"The Strange Spell That Dwells in Dead Men’s Eyes": The Civil War, by Brady

Harold Holzer

Art

"[T]he dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams." So admitted the New York Times just a month after it had reported the grisly slaughter of 3,650 Union and Confederate troops at the Battle of Antietam. On a...

Appears in:

45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016

History Now Essay

Why Are They There?: The Confederate Statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection

Bess Beatty

Art

December finally brought the tumultuous year of 1857 to a close. The ongoing crisis in "bleeding" Kansas and the pro-southern Dred Scott decision handed down by the Supreme Court earlier in the year had further fractured political...

Appears in:

45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016

History Now Essay

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Maya Lin

Art

Reprinted by permission of Maya Lin from her book Boundaries (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). It’s taken me years to be able to discuss the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial , partly because I needed to move past it and...

Appears in:

45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016

History Now Essay

"Ditched, Stalled and Stranded": Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression

Carol Quirke

Art

During the Great Depression, a top commercial portraitist took to San Francisco’s streets to experiment with representing the social devastation surrounding her. Her photos showed men sleeping on sidewalks and in parks like bundles of...

Appears in:

45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016

History Now Essay

African American Women in World War II

Maureen Honey

African American women made meaningful gains in the labor force and US armed forces as a result of the wartime labor shortage during the Second World War, but these advances were sharply circumscribed by racial segregation, which was...

Appears in:

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

Glory on D-Day: African American Heroism on the Beaches of Normandy

Linda Hervieux

Waverly Woodson squinted into the distance. From the deck of the ship, he could see little. A thick blanket of cloud hung overhead, and the heavy air pressed in from all sides. Drenched fatigues clung to Woodson’s weary limbs. For...

Appears in:

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

Harlem’s Rattlers: African American Regiment of the New York National Guard in World War I

Jeffrey Sammons

Jeffrey Sammons is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1988) and the co-author, with John H. Morrow, Jr., of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War:...

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

African Americans in the Revolutionary War

Michael Lee Lanning

From the first shots of the American Revolutionary War until the ultimate victory at Yorktown, black men significantly contributed to securing independence for the United States from Great Britain. On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks,...

Appears in:

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

On My Way to War in Iraq

Maurice Decaul

The 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were followed by the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole , then of course September 11, 2001. Within two years I was on my way to Iraq. I had met my recruiter six years earlier by...

Appears in:

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Fighting against the Odds: Black Soldiers in the Second World War

John H. Morrow, Jr.

John H. Morrow, Jr. , is Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He taught for seventeen years at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where, in 1971, he became the first African American faculty member in the...

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

Fighting for Democracy in World War I—Overseas and Over Here

Maurice Jackson

Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (2009), and the co-editor of...

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

Creating Opportunity: My Fight for Social Justice and Advice for Young Women Today

Harriet Karr-McDonald

Government and Civics

I never expected to be a leader. It’s hard to imagine now, but I grew up during a time when there were few opportunities for women in the workplace, other than being a man’s secretary. Unlike most of my peers, I was extremely...

Appears in:

47 | American Women in Leadership Winter 2017