Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

1,254 items

History Now Essay

The Korean War

Allan R. Millett

World History

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

The Korean War was three different conflicts from the perspective of the disparate groups who fought in it. For North and South Korea, the conflict was a civil war, a struggle with no possible compromise between two competing visions...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

Collection Item

Autograph letter signed

19 June 1879

Brown, John Jr., 1821-1895

to Alexander Milton Ross

Brown Jr. writes from Put-in-Bay Island located on South Bass Island (Lake Erie), Ohio. He mentions he will personally be traveling to Kansas and possibly Colorado to examine the land for the purpose of "settlement by Colored people of limited means...

GLC03007.56.11

History Now Essay

The New York African Burial Ground

Edna Greene Medford

The unearthing of the “Negroes Burying Ground” in New York City in 1991 challenged the narrow, popular perception of slavery as an antebellum, southern-based, agrarian institution. It revealed to the public what historians had long...

Appears in:

62 | The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds Spring 2022

History Now Essay

Benjamin Franklin, Spain, and the Independence of the United States

Thomas E. Chávez

On November 29, 1775, more than six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Congress’s Secret Committee of Correspondence gave instructions to Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee to travel to Paris to...

Appears in:

68 | The Role of Spain in the American Revolution Fall 2023

History Now Essay

The Making of the President: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

Harold Holzer

Government and Civics

Perhaps the most surprising thing to modern Americans about the 1860 presidential campaign—the historic election that sent Abraham Lincoln to the White House—is how little actual campaigning the presidential candidates that year did....

Appears in:

33 | Electing a President Fall 2012