As part of the Era of Theodore Roosevelt, a Gilder Lehrman online course, Professor Bruce Schulman of Boston University visited the Gilder Lehrman Collection to view stereo-cards of Theodore Roosevelt. In the video below, Professor Schulman explains the origins of Roosevelt’s famous appreciation for and desire to conserve America’s natural resources and the ways in which he helped redefine the role of the president as a “steward of citizens’ general welfare” by establishing the first national park system.

On October 4, 1857, Frederick Douglass penned a letter to Hugh Auld, his former owner, hoping to begin a correspondence. “My heart tells me that you are too noble to treat with indifference the request I am about to make,” he begins.

On June 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act, marking an achievement in federal regulation of the food industry.

The Gilder Lehrman Collection has a multitude of personal letters and writings by prominent politicians, which often reveal a lighter side to their austere public personas.

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.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we’ll be highlighting some of the intriguing, eloquent, and historically significant poems in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. These poems shed a personal light on momentous events in American history, from the American Revolution to World War I.