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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,...

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...

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

The Social and Intellectual Legacy of the American Revolution

Gary B. Nash

Government and Civics

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

"We can see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice. The mind once enlightened cannot...

Essay

The Open Door Policy and the Boxer War: The US and China

Warren I. Cohen

By 1899, the United States had become a world power. It was not only the world’s greatest industrial nation, but in the war with Spain it had demonstrated a willingness to use its power militarily. It had acquired possessions near and...

Essay

Anti-Communism in the 1950s

Wendy Wall

In 1950, fewer than 50,000 Americans out of a total US population of 150 million were members of the Communist Party. Yet in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American fears of internal communist subversion reached a nearly hysterical...

Essay

The United States and the Caribbean, 1877–1920

Jason Colby

Between 1877 and 1920, the United States’ relationship with the Caribbean region underwent a profound change, which was closely tied to the transformation of the United States to an industrial and imperial power. Although the Civil...

Essay

Prohibition and Its Effects

Lisa Andersen

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

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in January 1919 and enacted in January 1920, outlawed the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors." This amendment was the culmination of decades of effort...

Essay

To Understand a Scandal: Watergate beyond Nixon

David Sarias

Government and Civics

In the early hours of June 17, 1972, police officers arrested five men suspected of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate office building. This building would lend its...

History Now Essay

When Myth and Meaning Overshadow History: Remembering the Alamo

Linda K. Salvucci

Rare are the students who enter US classrooms without some preconceived notions regarding the Alamo. Thanks to more than a dozen films produced at regular intervals over the last century, to Walt Disney’s television series for baby...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Women and the Progressive Movement

Miriam Cohen

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

At the end of the nineteenth century, American politicians, journalists, professionals, and volunteers mobilized on behalf of reforms meant to deal with a variety of social problems associated with industrialization. Woman activists,...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

Modern Women Persuading Modern Men: The Nineteenth Amendment and the Movement for Woman Suffrage, 1916–1920

Jonathan Soffer

Government and Civics

Today we take women’s suffrage for granted, but many activists of the nineteenth century, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, struggled their whole lives for the vote, and did not live to see it. As a presidential...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

The Zimmermann Telegram and American Entry into World War I

Michael S. Neiberg

World History

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

The fact that the telegram before him bore Arthur Zimmermann’s name made its contents that much harder for Walter Hines Page to believe. Page was the American ambassador to Great Britain and on a cold London morning in late February...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

D-Day or Operation Overlord, June 6, 1944

Antony Beevor

World History

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

As dawn broke on June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion fleet became visible crossing the choppy waters of the English Channel to France. None of those who took part in D-Day, whether soldier, sailor, or airman, would ever forget the sight...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

The Battle for Baltimore

Alan Taylor

Bitter over the American declaration of war in 1812, when the British Empire had faced the emperor Napoleon at the peak of his power, the British sought payback in 1814. The war erupted over American anger at the British for seizing...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

George Washington’s French and Indian War

Theodore J. Crackel

World History

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

By the 1580s the French were ahead of the British in reaching into the interior of North America. They had established trading companies there, and their ships regularly brought furs back to France. Early in the seventeenth century...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

The Vietnam War and the My Lai Massacre

George Herring

The murder of more than 400 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai and My Khe by US soldiers on March 16, 1968, stands as one of the darkest days in the nation’s military history. It left an indelible stain on America’s record in Vietnam, the...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Technology in the Persian Gulf War of 1991

Robert Citino

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

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

In August 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. Five short months later, a powerful coalition led by the United States would launch Operation Desert Storm, one of the most rapid, decisive, and bloodless victories of all time. In just...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

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

The Battle of Antietam: A Turning Point in the Civil War

James M. McPherson

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

Four days after the battle of Antietam, which took place near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, Captain Robert Gould Shaw of the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry wrote to his father: "Every battle makes me wish more and...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

No Way Out: Lord Cornwallis, the Siege of Yorktown, and America’s Victory in the War for Independence

James Kirby Martin

Early on the morning of October 17, 1781, Lieutenant General Charles, Lord Cornwallis, found himself hunkered down in a cave near the southern shoreline of the York River. Above him was the disintegrating hamlet of Yorktown, Virginia,...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Sylvester Graham and Antebellum Diet Reform

Cindy Lobel

"Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants." So begins Michael Pollan’s 2009 book, In Defense of Food . Pollan has made a career educating Americans about the dangers of our contemporary, industrialized food supply. His book offers a...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

Education Reform in Antebellum America

Barbara Winslow

Economics, Religion and Philosophy

Education reform is often at the heart of all great reform struggles. [1] By the 1820s Americans were experiencing exhilarating as well as unsettling social and economic changes. In the North, the familiar rural and agrarian life was...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

Transcendentalism and Social Reform

Philip F. Gura

Those Americans who have heard of American Transcendentalism associate it with the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Henry David Thoreau. Asked to name things about the group they remember, most mention Emerson’s ringing...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

The War against Spain in the Philippines in 1898

Richard Meixsel

Before learning of Commodore George Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on the morning of May 1, 1898, few Americans knew anything about the Philippine Islands. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning In the Days of McKinley ...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

Essay

The Discovery of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Ira Berlin

In the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together, creating—among other things—a new economy. At the center of that economy was the plantation, an enterprise dedicated to the production of exotic...

History Now Essay

The Material Culture of Slave Resistance

Douglas R. Egerton

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

Artifacts tell stories. Sometimes the tales are unclear or even contradictory, and sometimes artifacts—not unlike a dishonest diarist—can even lead the unwary historian astray. But the material culture of enslaved Americans, from...

Appears in:

2 | Primary Sources on Slavery Winter 2004

History Now Essay

"People Get Ready": Music and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s

Brian Ward

Government and Civics

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

Few sights or sounds conjure up the passion and purposefulness of the Southern Civil Rights Movement as powerfully as the freedom songs that provided a stirring musical accompaniment to the campaign for racial justice and equality in...

Appears in:

8 | The Civil Rights Movement Summer 2006

Essay

September 11, 2001

the National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Government and Civics, World History

K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"9/11" has emerged as shorthand for the four coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States that took place on September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists from the Islamist extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four...

History Now Essay

The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s America

Brenda Wineapple

Literature

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne is the strange American author who has never been out of fashion; since his death in 1864, his stories and novels have resisted the tides of taste, canon reformation, and critical vicissitude. Herman Melville had...

Appears in:

16 | Books That Changed History Summer 2008

Essay

Mary Elizabeth Lease: Populist Reformer

Kelly A. Woestman

Blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic woes is not a new idea in American history. Over a century ago, Mary Elizabeth Lease, the best-known orator of the Populist era, asserted, "Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a...

History Now Essay

African Forced Migration to Colonial America

Ira Berlin

African American life in the United States has been framed by migrations, forced and free. A forced migration from Africa—the transatlantic slave trade—carried black people to the Americas. A second forced migration—the internal slave...

Appears in:

3 | Immigration Spring 2005

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources for George Washington and the French and Indian War from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

For additional information on the broader Seven Years’ War, of which the French and Indian campaigns were only a part, use this recent one-volume study: Baugh, Daniel A. The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources on the Civil War and the Battle of Antietam from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

Prof. McPherson is the author of Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), the authoritative study of the battle and its aftermath. You and your students may also want to look at some of...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources on Desert Storm from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

There’s an odd pattern to published works about this conflict, whether you call it Desert Shield/Desert Storm or the First Persian Gulf War. A flurry of books appeared within two years of the end of hostilities—indeed, a couple...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources on the American Revolution and Lord Cornwallis from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

Prof. Martin has written extensively on the American Revolution. Of his many books, the one most relevant to the essay you’ve just read is his collaboration with Mark E. Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

Essay

Suggested Resources on World War I and the Zimmermann Telegram from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

Professor Neiberg has written extensively on World War I. Of his many books, Fighting the Great War: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006) will be most helpful in teaching the topics discussed in this essay. Although this...

History Now Essay

Suggested Resources on the War of 1812 from the Archivist

Mary-Jo Kline

Prof. Taylor’s most recent book, the prizewinning The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Knopf, 2010), focuses on the conflict along the US-Canadian border involving...

Appears in:

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars Spring 2012

History Now Essay

The Transnational Nature of the Progressive Era

Daniel T. Rodgers

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In teaching the era of progressive reforms, it is hard to resist the temptation to focus on the two progressive presidents. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, figures of enormous power and striking failings, are the sorts of...

Appears in:

30 | American Reform Movements Winter 2012

History Now Essay

Lincoln and Abolitionism

Douglas L. Wilson

Abraham Lincoln immortalized himself in American history by the role that he played in abolishing the institution of slavery, but he arrived at this distinction only after a long career of opposition to abolitionism. This at first...

Appears in:

6 | Lincoln Winter 2005

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013

History Now Essay

"Fun, Fun Rock ’n’ Roll High School"

Glenn C. Altschuler and Robert O. Summers

Art, Government and Civics

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

With his tongue halfway in his cheek, Ambrose Bierce defined history as "an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." Well, we’ve come a long...

Appears in:

32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

History Now Essay

The Forties and the Music of World War II

Elihu Rose

Art

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

The 1940s were the apotheosis of American popular music. Swing, blues and country were all popular styles but, above all, it was the heyday of the seventeen-piece big band. Names like Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Duke...

Appears in:

32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

History Now Essay

9/11 and Springsteen

Craig Werner

Art, Government and Civics, World History

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

The transformation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, into a seemingly foreordained historical narrative began almost as soon as the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. I was teaching an 8 a.m....

Appears in:

32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

History Now Essay

Globalizing Protest in the 1980s: Musicians Collaborate to Change the World

Douglas R. Egerton and Leigh Fought

Art, Government and Civics, World History

13+

"There something’s happening here," Stephen Stills sang in "For What It’s Worth," a 1966 song about a confrontation between students and police in Los Angeles. And for a time, there was. Radio stations filled the air with protest...

Appears in:

32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

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

History Now Essay

The Sixties and Protest Music

Kerry Candaele

Art, Government and Civics

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

Music has always kept company with American wars. During the Revolutionary War, "Yankee Doodle" and many other songs set to reels and dances were sung to keep spirits alive during dark hours. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Lincoln...

Appears in:

32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

History Now Essay

Pop Music and the Spatialization of Race in the 1990s

Mark Anthony Neal

In September 1990, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air debuted on NBC. The show starred Will Smith, also known as the Fresh Prince, of the rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, portraying a character, "Will Smith," who relocates from a...

Appears in:

32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

Essay

Entrepreneurs and Bankers: The Evolution of Corporate Empires

Robert W. Cherny

James J. Hill enjoyed being called "the Empire Builder," taking it as a compliment for his work as president of the Great Northern Railway. Hill’s railway company, which ran through the northern Great Plains and Pacific Northwest,...

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

History Now Essay

Adams v. Jackson: The Election of 1824

Edward G. Lengel

Government and Civics

James Monroe’s two terms in office as president of the United States (1817–1825) are often called the "Era of Good Feelings." The country appeared to have entered a period of strength, unity of purpose, and one-party government with...

Appears in:

33 | Electing a President Fall 2012

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