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There are two log books. This file was dated using the first book covering Acting Master Shankland's time on the USS "Winnebago," while the second book covers his time as a lieutenant on the USS "Guard" from March 1866 to May 1866. The USS...

GLC06368

Essay

The Civil Rights Movement

Taylor Branch

The word "movement" often designates a cultural shift of less import than the American Revolution, Great Depression, and other capitalized dramas in history. To be sure, some popular movements have gained broader recognition in the...

Essay

The Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945

David M. Kennedy

Economics, Government and Civics

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Across the long arc of American history, three moments in particular have disproportionately determined the course of the Republic’s development. Each respectively distilled the experience and defined the historical legacy of a...

Lesson Plan

Eleanor Roosevelt on Democracy and Citizenship

Government and Civics, World History

4, 5

Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...

Guided Readings

Guided Readings: World War I

Economics, Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy, World History

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name, during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought, as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments, as well as upon every...

History Now Essay

Indian Removal

Theda Perdue

Geography, Government and Civics

In 1828 pressure was building among white Americans for the relocation of American Indians from the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. A student at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation, which lay within...

Appears in:

28 | American Indians Summer 2011

History Now Essay

Women and the Early Industrial Revolution in the United States

Thomas Dublin

Economics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The industrial revolution that transformed western Europe and the United States during the course of the nineteenth century had its origins in the introduction of power-driven machinery in the English and Scottish textile industries...

Appears in:

10 | Nineteenth Century Technology Winter 2006

History Now Essay

Constance Baker Motley: A Trailblazer in the Legal Profession

Gary L. Ford, Jr.

Government and Civics

Gary L. Ford Jr. , an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York, is the author of Constance Baker Motley: One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law (2017) and a co...

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Citizenship in the Reconstruction South

Susanna Lee

Economics, Government and Civics

Slaveholders created a system of race, gender, and class inequality in the pre-Civil War South. They justified slavery by arguing that enslaved people could not take care of themselves and needed masters to look after them. White...

Appears in:

55 | Examining Reconstruction Fall 2019

News

Get to Know the 2017 History Teachers of the Year: Casey Swift, Wyoming

In 2017, the Gilder Lehrman Institute recognized 52 State History Teachers of the Year for their tireless and innovative efforts to make history come alive for their students. But who are they, really? We asked these talented teachers...

News

What Our 2020 History Teachers of the Year Are Doing Now

On Wednesday, October 6 at 8 p.m. ET, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., will present the 2021 National History Teacher of the Year Award to Nataliya Braginsky in a special virtual ceremony . The ceremony also features most of this...

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

Essay

The New Deal

Thomas Kessner

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s protean presidency from 1933 to 1945 (the longest term of leadership in this nation’s history) has provoked many debates about the man and his policies. For some he is the brilliant tactician who wrestled...

History Now Essay

Graft and Oil: How Teapot Dome Became the Greatest Political Scandal of Its Time

Robert W. Cherny

Economics, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In the 1920s, Teapot Dome became synonymous with government corruption and the scandals arising out of the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Since then, it has sometimes been used to symbolize the power and influence of...

Appears in:

20 | High Crimes and Misdemeanors Summer 2009

Essay

The Development of the West

Ned Blackhawk

In the summer of 1876, two dramatically different places captured the American nation’s attention. As the summer began, fairgoers in Philadelphia teemed into the Centennial Exhibition held to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary...

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

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

Teaching American History to Muslim Exchange Students

Ted Widmer

Government and Civics

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

Everyone knows that the election of 2004 marked a pivotal turning point for the American people. That point was brought home forcefully by the experience of teaching American history that summer to a group of twenty-one young Muslim...

Appears in:

1 | Elections Fall 2004

History Now Essay

Abolition and Religion

Robert Abzug

Religion and Philosophy

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

One verse of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the unofficial anthem of the Northern cause, summarized the Civil War’s idealized meaning: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that...

Appears in:

5 | Abolition Fall 2005

About page

GLI Now - Winter 2018 Newsletter

Sara Ziemnik: 2017 National History Teacher of the Year On November 8, Sara Ziemnik was honored as the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s 2017 National History Teacher of the Year at a ceremony in New York City. Pulitzer Prize–winning...

Collection Item

Header Record

1858-1900

Wright, Family, fl. 1858-1900

Augustus R. & Miller Wright archive: Confederate turncoat [partially decimalized .01-.12]

This collection comprises personal and military correspondence relating to U.S., and later Confederate, congressman Augustus Wright and his son Miller, both Southerners with Unionist sympathies. Topics include battles (including First Manassas)...

GLC02691

Essay

The Great Depression

David M. Kennedy

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

Herbert Hoover got many things wrong about the great economic calamity that destroyed his presidency and his historical reputation, but he got one fundamental thing right. Much legend to the contrary, the Great Depression was not...

History Now Essay

The Great Depression: An Overview

David M. Kennedy

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Appears in:

The Great Depression

Essay

African Americans and Emancipation

Manisha Sinha

Historians increasingly understand emancipation was not a singular event that simply involved the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Instead, emancipation is better understood as...

History Now Essay

Betty Ford: A New Kind of First Lady

Gil Troy

Americans never elected Gerald R. Ford president or even vice president—Richard Nixon appointed him after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973. Today, Ford’s brief presidency is often forgotten. Yet during Ford’s two...

Appears in:

35 | America’s First Ladies Spring 2013

History Now Essay

Why Immigration Matters

Thomas Kessner

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

It is difficult today to recapture the iconoclasm signaled by Oscar Handlin’s opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted more than fifty years ago: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I...

Appears in:

3 | Immigration Spring 2005

Essay

World War I

Jennifer D. Keene

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

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

War swept across Europe in the summer of 1914, igniting a global struggle that would eventually take nine million lives. World War I pitted the Allies (initially composed of Britain, France, Belgium, Serbia, and Russia, and eventually...

History Now Essay

The League of Women Voters: A Century of Voter Engagement

Barbara Winslow

The League of Women Voters (LWV) was founded in 1920 by American suffragists, just months before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the constitutional right to vote after more than seventy years of struggle. Over...

Appears in:

56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond Spring 2020

History Now Essay

Adella Hunt Logan: Suffragist and Educator

Adele Logan Alexander

My new book, Princess of the Hither Isles , traces the life of my paternal grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan, who’s intrigued me for as long as I can remember. During my childhood, she felt like a major presence in my life. Not only was...

Appears in:

54 | African American Women in Leadership Summer 2019

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

The Escape of Black Women during the American Revolution

Karen Cook Bell

In 1961, Morgan State University historian Dr. Benjamin Quarles published the now classic study The Negro in the American Revolution , which became the definitive account of the role African Americans played in the War for...

Appears in:

63 | The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America Summer 2022

History Now Essay

Memorializing the Gravesites of Twentieth-Century African Americans

Karla F. C. Holloway

Excerpts reprinted by permission of Karla F. C. Holloway from her book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Duke University Press, 2003). I wandered for an hour trying to find Harriet Tubman (1913). I didn’t mind the time. I...

Appears in:

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

Lesson Plan

The Big Bang! The Birth of Rock and Roll

Art, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

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

Overview In the early 1950s, a new form of music exploded onto the scene, exciting a growing teenage audience while startling many others who preferred the music of Bing Crosby and Patti Page. Popularized by disc jockey Alan Freed in...

History Now Essay

Allies for Emancipation? Black Abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln

Manisha Sinha

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Abraham Lincoln was not an original advocate of abolition. In fact we know that his journey to what he called "the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century" was a relatively slow, though...

Appears in:

18 | Abraham Lincoln in His Time and Ours Winter 2008

History Now Essay

First Ladies’ Contributions to Political Issues and the National Welfare

Betty Boyd Caroli

Government and Civics

The US Constitution assigns no duties or responsibilities to the president’s spouse. Every woman had to define for herself the role she wanted to play. From the blank slate that Martha Washington encountered in 1789, the job gradually...

Appears in:

35 | America’s First Ladies Spring 2013

History Now Essay

FDR’s First Inaugural Address

Davis W. Houck

Economics, Government and Civics

Several years ago when I was researching a very different subject at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, I happened across several archival documents related to FDR’s first inaugural address. As a...

Appears in:

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013

Essay

Populism and Agrarian Discontent

Michael Kazin

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Today, the Gilded Age evokes thoughts of “robber baron” industrialists, immigrants toiling long hours in factories for little pay, massive strikes that were often put down by force, and political corruption in both big cities and the...

Essay

Postwar Politics and the Cold War

Jeremi Suri

The late summer of 1945 marked the height of American power. The country that had suffered from dust bowls, economic depression, and a devastating attack on its Pacific naval fleet in the last decade-and-a-half emerged as the dominant...

History Now Essay

Lockean Liberalism and the American Revolution

Isaac Kramnick

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The town of Boston took an important step toward rebellion on November 20, 1772, by adopting a declaration of "the Rights of the Colonists" drafted by Sam Adams, the firebrand of the Revolution. Adams summarized these "Natural rights"...

Appears in:

21 | The American Revolution Fall 2009

About page

GLI Now - Fall 2017 Newsletter

2017 Teacher Seminars: Wrap-up and Highlights The Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Teacher Seminars , which have been held each summer since 1996, are the most popular professional development opportunity offered by our organization. Held...

Collection Item

Autograph letter signed

3 August 1791

Knox, William, 1756-1795

to Henry Knox

References his letters of 27 June and 19 July that he sent to Henry. Has not received any letters from Henry since the one marked 6 April. States he has not met with any success in selling Henry's lands, not even a single serious offer. Says his...

GLC02437.05099

About page