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Announcing the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Finalists

The Lincoln Prize has been awarded annually since 1990 to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War era. Prize winners have included Doris Kearns Goodwin (2006), Eric Foner (2011), and David Blight (2002...

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Announcing the 2021 Lincoln Prize Finalists

Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History have announced the finalists for the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. They are • Alice Baumgartner , South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to...

News

K-8 Educators Offered Unique NEH Summer Institute Program on The Making of America

The Making of America: Colonial Era to Reconstruction is a virtual, weeklong 2021 NEH Summer Institute that offers K–8 educators the opportunity to explore the people, ideas, and events that made America into a cultural, social, and...

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Book Breaks in February Explore Slavery, Desegregation, and Self-Determination

Since the summer of 2020, Gilder Lehrman Book Breaks has featured the most exciting history scholars in America discussing their books live with host William Roka followed by a Q&A with home audiences. This February, the books...

Video: Read Along

"Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968"

This historical fiction picture book presents the story of nine-year-old Lorraine Jackson, who in 1968 witnessed the Memphis sanitation strike—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final stand for justice before his assassination—when her...

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Free Workshop Series & Symposium in Partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations

In partnership with World101 from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), we are pleased to offer four free digital professional development sessions and a symposium in spring 2021. On MARCH 6 the first workshop on American...

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Register Now for Spring History School

Building on the success of our summer and fall Gilder Lehrman History School , we are pleased to offer free courses this spring for elementary, middle, and high school students. History School provides engaging live interactive...

Video: Inside The Vault

Inside the Vault: The Lives and Works of Phillis Wheatley and Elizabeth Keckley

Literature

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

On the February 4, 2021 session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection , our curators talk with English Language Arts educator Jeanette Providence and Hamilton cast member Krystal Mackie about the lives...

Collection Item

Autograph letter signed

Letters to cousin

n.d.

Unknown

GLC03135.13.082

History Now Essay

Yellow Fever 1793

Richard Brookhiser

Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

Late in August 1793 Philadelphia was struck by a strange and virulent disease. Patients developed aches, chills, and fever, vomited black bile, and turned yellow. Some recovered, but many died. The yellow fever, as it was called, had...

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58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters Fall 2020

History Now Essay

The Influenza of 1918 and the Coronavirus of 2020: Some Parallels and Differences

John M. Barry

Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

Sometime prior to late January 1918, a virus jumped species from birds to humans, probably after passing through another mammal. It spawned a lethal pandemic. Sometime prior to late December 2019, a virus jumped species from bats to...

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58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters Fall 2020

History Now Essay

Invisible Threats and the Politics of Disaster: Three Mile Island and Covid-19

Natasha Zaretsky

Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

An invisible, potentially deadly threat. Elected officials saying one thing, and public health experts saying another. A citizenry hungry for information and guidance. A cultural divide between those who are afraid of the threat and...

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58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters Fall 2020

History Now Issue

Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters

#58 Fall 2020

History Now Essay

History in the Making: COVIDCalls and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Scott Gabriel Knowles and Bucky Stanton

Disasters are now a permanent feature of American life—no longer confined to predictable seasons or geographies—in the era of hyperglobalization and its related climate change, a disaster in one part of the world affects all of us....

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58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters Fall 2020

News

Get to Know Sergio de Alba, 2020 National History Teacher of the Year

Sergio de Alba, a teacher at R. M. Miano Elementary School in Los Baños, California, was named the 2020 National History Teacher of the Year and will be honored in a recorded ceremony on October 7, 2020. Register here for A Tribute to...

History Now Essay

Excerpt from Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, "Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793" (1794), with an introduction by James G. Basker

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen

Paragraphs

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58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters Fall 2020

History Now Essay

The Importance of Studying Disasters: Ideas and Advice for the Classroom

Liz Skilton

I was sitting in Algebra when I heard the news that an incident had occurred in New York City. My history teacher, Mr. Turner, appeared suddenly at the door—interrupting the Pythagorean theorem lesson—to say that something was...

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58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters Fall 2020

History Now Essay

From the Editor

Carol Berkin

A disaster often reveals as much about the society wrestling with it as it does about its origins and its physical effects. If scientists focus on the source of the danger—a virus, bacteria, climatic shifts, or disease-carrying...

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58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters Fall 2020

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Black Volunteers in the Nation’s First Epidemic, 1793

The new republic was only four years old, its capital recently established in Philadelphia, when the country suffered its first catastrophic epidemic. Yellow fever broke out in August 1793 and ravaged the city for three months, only...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

The Map Proves It, ca. 1919

Government and Civics

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

Supporters of women’s rights used maps such as the one shown here to demonstrate where women were allowed to vote, when they won that right, and which elections they could vote in. The source of this map is unknown. Originally printed...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

An appeal for suffrage support, 1871

Government and Civics

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

The National Woman Suffrage and Educational Committee was formed in the spring of 1871. The Washington DC-based committee pledged to act as the “centre of all action upon Congress and the country.” The group was also dedicated to the...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Voting restrictions for African Americans, 1944

Government and Civics

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

In 1944 a group of southern editors and writers documented cases of voter suppression in southern states. They took this step because, in the presidential election of 1944, only 28 percent of potential voters in the South participated...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper: Sedition charges, 1815

Government and Civics

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

Even though the Sedition Act of 1798 had expired in 1801, individuals could still be charged with sedition. On January 20, 1815, Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper, publishers of the Massachusetts newspaper The Yankee , printed an article...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

The Sedition Act, 1798

Government and Civics

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

On August 14, 1798, the Columbian Centinel , a Boston newspaper aligned with the Federalist Party, printed this copy of the Sedition Act. It was the last in a series of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the...

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John C. McManus Wins the Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize

Winner of the Seventh Annual Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History Announced Award Program Available Online Thursday, November 5, 2020 New York, NY, September 30, 2020 – The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announced...

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