Site Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

90,294 items

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

History Now Essay

Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Thousands of Women Were Elected to Political Office before 1920

Wendy E. Chmielewski

Government and Civics

In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the well-known leader of the woman’s rights movement, declared her intention to run for Congress, from Brooklyn, New York. Stanton was probably the first woman to campaign for a federal office. It...

Appears in:

47 | American Women in Leadership Winter 2017

History Now Essay

How Women Legislate

Sue Thomas

An enduring question about women in politics is whether they operate differently from men. If so, do these differences affect government policies and procedures, especially those that flow from local, state, and national legislatures?...

Appears in:

47 | American Women in Leadership Winter 2017

History Now Essay

Women and the United States Supreme Court

Julie Silverbrook

Government and Civics

If you ask most people about the history of women and the United States Supreme Court, they are likely to point to the historic nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female justice, in 1981. That is a watershed moment in our...

Appears in:

47 | American Women in Leadership Winter 2017

History Now Essay

Women’s Leadership in the American Revolution

Rosemarie Zagarri

What did it mean for women to exercise "leadership" in the American Revolution? Before that conflict, the question itself would probably have baffled most American women and men. Living within a staunchly patriarchal society, they...

Appears in:

47 | American Women in Leadership Winter 2017

History Now Essay

Clarksdale: Myth, Music, and Mercy in the Mississippi Delta

Shelley Ritter

While the term the blues means many different things to many different people, it’s undeniable that everyone gets them at one point or another. As the late vocalist Johnny Taylor sang, "People got money, still got problems/ Go to the...

Appears in:

48 | Jazz, the Blues, and American Identity Summer 2017

History Now Essay

Robert Johnson and the Rise of the Blues

Elijah Wald

In November of 1936, a young man named Robert Johnson traveled from Mississippi to San Antonio, Texas, for his first recording session with the American Record Corporation. He was twenty-five years old and had already hoboed and...

Appears in:

48 | Jazz, the Blues, and American Identity Summer 2017

History Now Essay

Songs of a Different South: The Allman Brothers’ Blues-Rock Legacy

Kerry Candaele

In March 1971, the Allman Brothers Band—Duane Allman (guitar), Gregg Allman (vocals, organ), Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johnson (drums), Butch Trucks (drums), Dickey Betts (guitar), and Berry Oakley (bass)—took the stage at the Fillmore...

Appears in:

48 | Jazz, the Blues, and American Identity Summer 2017

History Now Essay

Charles Mingus and the Third Stream

Krin Gabbard

Among the many jazz movements in which Charles Mingus (1922–1979) participated, the most likely and the most unlikely was Third Stream Music. [1] Gunther Schuller (1925–2015) coined the term, describing Third Stream as "the fusion and...

Appears in:

48 | Jazz, the Blues, and American Identity Summer 2017

History Now Essay

From the Editor

Carol Berkin

History Now welcomes you back to the classroom for another exciting semester engaging the American past. We begin this school year with an issue on early American religion that highlights one of the critical characteristics of our...

Appears in:

29 | Religion in the Colonial World Fall 2011

History Now Essay

From the Editor

Carol Berkin

To celebrate the launch of Gilder Lehrman’s new website, we at History Now thought it appropriate to provide readers with a special, expanded issue. We chose for our topic one of the central themes in our national history: the causes...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012