Spotlight on: Primary Source The struggle for married women’s rights, circa 1880s Government and Civics In the early nineteenth century, married women in the US were legally subordinate to their husbands. Wives could not own their own property, keep their own wages, or enter into contracts. Beginning in 1839, states slowly began to...
History Now Essay Women in American Politics in the Twentieth Century Sara Evans Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were outsiders to the formal structures of political life—voting, serving on juries, holding elective office—and they were subject to wide-ranging discrimination that marked them as... Appears in: 7 | Women's Suffrage Spring 2006
History Now Essay The Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830 Marylynn Salmon Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ State law rather than federal law governed women’s rights in the early republic. The authority of state law meant that much depended upon where a woman lived and the particular social circumstances in her region of the country. The... Appears in: 7 | Women's Suffrage Spring 2006
News National Poetry Month, Part 3: Poem on a Civil War Death In the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, on October 21, 1861, the 1st Minnesota Volunteers had just one casualty: a man named Lewis Mitchell. Mitchell was “only a private,” one of the approximately 750,000 casualties in the Civil War....
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
Essay History Times: The Industrial Revolution Gilder Lehrman Institute K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 A Changing Nation The second half of the nineteenth century can be described as a time of innovation, invention, and rapid growth—a period known as the "Industrial Revolution." Many inventions from this period never caught on or have...
Lesson Plan Examining Women’s Roles through Primary Sources and Literature Art, Literature 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Essential Question: How were the ever-changing roles of women in American society chronicled? Background Joseph Heller writes in his book The Feminization of Quest-Romance that "American Literature equates the very essence of what it...
History Now Essay A History of the Thanksgiving Holiday Catherine Clinton Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Thanksgiving stands as one of the most American of holidays, an autumnal ritual fixed in the imagination as honoring the piety and perseverance of the nation’s earliest arrivals during colonial days. But what were the origins of this... Appears in: 4 | American National Holidays Summer 2005
Essay History Times: A Nation of Immigrants Gilder Lehrman Institute Economics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Coming to the Land of Opportunity Throughout American history, millions of people around the world have left their homelands for a chance to start a new life in this country—and they continue to come here to this day. People who come...
Essay History Times: The Colonial Era Gilder Lehrman Institute Economics, Geography, Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy 2, 3, 4, 5 Crossing the Atlantic Ocean Imagine saying goodbye to family, friends, and familiar places to take a dangerous voyage across thousands of miles of ocean in a small wooden ship. Your destination: a strange and often hostile land. Yet,...
Video: Book Breaks Catherine Clinton - "Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War" Order Stepdaughters of History at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
History Now Essay Women and the Music Industry in the 1970s Elizabeth L. Wollman Art The 1970s gets a bad rap. Rarely revered as a glorious—or even particularly memorable—time in contemporary American history, the seventies is more often seen as the sad stepchild to the 1960s, which is celebrated as a decade of peace,... Appears in: 32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012
Video American History and the World Economics NYU Professor of the Humanities Thomas Bender argues that the idea of American exceptionalism has hobbled the study of American history. Bender traces the study of history from the "men of letters" historians of the nineteenth...
History Now Essay With All Due Respect: Understanding Anti-Suffrage Women Susan Goodier Government and Civics Although it may be hard to believe today, not everyone wanted women to have the right to vote. In fact, during the early nineteenth century, very few people thought women capable of political engagement of any kind. As the century... Appears in: 56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond Spring 2020
Program/Event National Book Prizes | Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize The Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize is a $50,000 prize sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The award recognizes the best book on American military history in English distinguished by its scholarship,...
News Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with the Gilder Lehrman Institute National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15–October 15) celebrates the contributions made by Hispanic and Latino Americans to the history and culture of the United States. The Gilder Lehrman Institute offers the following programs...
History Now Essay The First Generation: America’s Women Voters, 1776–1807 Marcela Micucci Most histories of women gaining the right to vote in the United States begin in July of 1848, when hundreds of activists gathered in Seneca Falls to hold the first women’s rights convention and sign the Declaration of Sentiments. The... Appears in: 56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond Spring 2020
News The Education of Women: On This Day, 1735 On May 19, 1735, the New-York Weekly Journal republished an article from England’s The Guardian on the reasons to educate women . Most notably, the author (most likely Joseph Addison) states that women, though they have different...