6 April
Stafford, Robert (fl. 1837-1866)
Autograph letter signed
Title: to Ma
GLC02618.089
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Subscribe for access to the vast offerings of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s website. Your subscription will allow you to read the latest work of leading historians, join a growing community of history enthusiasts, view available images in the Gilder Lehrman Collection, and help support history education in classrooms nationwide.The Gilder Lehrman Institute’s website features
History Now, a chronological and thematic approach to our shared national history, from Exploration to the New Millennium
Original essays by renowned historians offering a range of views on American history
More than 300
This sixteen-month calendar (September 2012–December 2013) featuring historical facts, color illustrations, and photographs, commemorates major Civil War events that took place in 1863.
Timelines are a useful tool for teachers of every grade level. These visual chronologies help students put events into perspective and better undertand how historical moments fit together. This timeline chronicles major events in immigration and migration from 1607 to 2003.
Poster Caption: This pictorial history of African American people in America was designed as a poster for the Negro Exhibition Building at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, Nashville, 1897. Each scene captures a moment or figure in African American history from the introduction of the first slaves in Jamestown in 1619 and the death of Crispus (here, Christopher) Attucks in the Revolutionary era, to the lives of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and all the ordinary black people chronicled at lower right. (Goes Litho. Co., Chicago, Ill., 1897)
These posters are 22" x 30", full color
Poster Caption: Despite inaccuracies in scale and detail, this 1733 map shows the sweep of British colonial possessions in the New World set amidst their French and Spanish counterparts. (Map of the British Empire, by Henry Popple, published in London, 1733)
These posters are 22" x 30", full color, and printed on a semi-gloss ivory stock. Each one features a caption that places the image in historical context.
Poster Caption: As tensions heightened following the Boston Massacre of March 1770, Paul Revere published this engraving that recalls the military occupation of Boston by the British army and navy in 1768. Protests against British taxes and policies boiled up in the late 1760s and early 1770s until war broke out in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord. (Print by Paul Revere, Boston, Mass., 1770)
These posters are 22" x 30", full color, and printed on a semi-gloss ivory stock. Each one features a caption that places the image in historical context.
Poster Caption: In 1871, a partnership of ordinary citizens and railroad executives persuaded government officials to withhold a large portion of Wyoming Territory from a public land auction, in recognition of its importance as an example of the grandeur and diversity of America’s natural resources. An Act of Congress in 1872, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, made Yellowstone the first national park in the world. Since then, the United States has designated nearly 400 national parks, sites, and monuments to preserve the nation’s natural, historical, and cultural heritage. (Photograph of
Poster Caption: This World War I recruiting poster invokes the memory of Abraham Lincoln and the bravery of black troops to inspire African Americans to sign up. Ultimately, some 350,000 African Americans enlisted and served in World War I, although in segregated units. (Charles Gustrine, Chicago, Ill., 1918)
These posters are 22" x 30", full color, and printed on a semi-gloss white stock. Each one features a caption that places the image in historical context.
Poster Caption: In September 1957, after school integration was federally mandated, nine courageous black teenagers in Little Rock, Arkansas, were the first African American students to enroll at Central High School. Elizabeth Eckford (pictured here) and her fellow students were screamed at and harassed, and the National Guard was called on to escort the students and quell rioting. Of the nine students, three went on to graduate from Central High, while six completed their education elsewhere. (Photograph, September 6, 1957)
These posters are 22" x 30", full color, and printed on a semi-gloss
Poster Caption: In the summer of 1963, nine years after the US Supreme Court overthrew the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education (Brown v. Board of Education), parents of African American children joined with the NAACP to protest unfair educational practices in St. Louis, Missouri. They demanded, in particular, an increase in the number of minority teachers, the redrawing of school district boundaries, and an end to intact busing, which brought black students to white schools but kept them in segregated classes running on a different time schedule from the white students’
The constitutional legacy of the Dred Scott case has been long lasting. What started as a “freedom suit” filed by Dred Scott and his wife in the St. Louis Circuit Court in 1846 erupted into a US Supreme Court case that ended in 1857. Read about the case details and political consequences surrounding one of the most infamous court decisions of our time. This booklet also includes a timeline of important dates.
Historians on the Record: Slavery and Abolition (DVD) includes eight lectures by leading American history scholars on various topics surrounding slavery and its subsequent abolition. Speakers include James Oliver Horton, Lois E. Horton, David Blight, Ira Berlin, Philip Morgan, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David Brion Davis, Catherine Clinton, and David Reynolds.
Poster Caption: This World War II poster seeks to stir American support for the war by systematically exposing the untruth of Nazi propaganda. (Office of War Information, Washington, DC, 1942)
These posters are 22" x 30", full color, and printed on a semi-gloss ivory stock. Each one features a caption that places the image in historical context.
Use this item to purchase a registration for the Understanding Lincoln online course. Please do not purchase this item unless specifically instructed by GLI staff to do so.
Teaching with Documents is a self-paced course with instructional videos and lesson plans for teachers of grades 5-12. Each video focuses on a different way to use primary sources to improve student content knowledge and core literacy skills. Teaching with Documents demonstrates the same tested, Common Core-aligned approach used in Gilder Lehrman’s Teaching Literacy through History™ professional development program.
Teaching with Documents includes
Five demonstration videos, each covering a different literacy strategy
Five classroom-ready teaching units, one for each demonstration video
An
Born a slave, Romeo Smith of Windham, Maine, entered the Continental Army with the promise of freedom in exchange for military service. He served in the 7th Massachusetts for three years and was supposedly manumitted. Yet in January 1784, the threat of being reclaimed as a slave surfaced and Romeo sought the assistance of General Henry Knox. The document featured here is Knox’s retained draft certifying Smith’s freedom.
"This is to certify that the bearer hereof Romeo Smith is a free man, and has served three years in the Army of the United States of America. Any person [struck: going a]
Vivandieres, sometimes known as cantinieres, were women who followed the army to provide support for the troops. Ideally, a vivandiere would have been a young woman—the daughter of an officer or wife of a non-commissioned officer—who wore a uniform and braved battles to provide care for wounded soldiers on the battlefield.
The history of vivandieres can be traced to the French Zouave regiments in the Crimean War. By 1859, many local militia regiments in the United States had adopted the name "Zouave," wore colorful uniforms, and adopted the practice of having a "daughter of the regiment" in
George Tillotson from Greene, New York, enlisted with the 89th New York Infantry in November of 1861. This ambrotype (photograph made on glass) and a series of letters from the summer of 1862 remind us that soldiers and their families faced hardships on the home front as well as on the battlefield. George had been in the army for five months and was stationed at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, when his wife, Libby, sent him the photograph featured here. The photograph was damaged in the mail and began a heartbreaking series of correspondence.
April 19, 1862 – "Your letter of the 6th inst
One hundred years ago this weekend, the RMS Titanic sank, claiming the lives over 1,500 passengers and crew. In this account, Dr. Washington Dodge recounts his tale of survival. Written on board the RMS Carpathia during the three-day journey back to New York, this eyewitness account is one of the earliest and most compelling accounts of the disaster. Dodge’s handwriting and sentence phrasing offer a glimpse into his state of mind as he penned his testimony.
Excerpt:
When boat 13 was lowered to A deck to be loaded I went to this deck – After 8 or 10 women had been placed aboard, no [struck:
In 1836, Abraham Lincoln found himself in a tenuous situation. He was engaged to a woman he barely knew and didn’t want to marry. Mrs. Elizabeth Abell had been pushing for a romance between Lincoln and her sister, Mary Owens, whom Lincoln had met briefly in 1833. When Elizabeth went home to visit her family in Kentucky three years later, she said she would bring Mary back to Illinois if Lincoln would agree to marry her. Lincoln jokingly agreed. He realized the consequences of his rash statement when Mary came to New Salem and considered herself engaged. Lincoln immediately regretted his
What would be a better Mother’s Day present than learning that your child would be returning home from war? In 1919, thirty-year-old Lawrence Hopkins of the 305th Engineers was at the Forwarding Camp in Le Mans, France, awaiting orders to return home. On Wednesday, May 7, he wrote his mother in Ashtabula, Ohio, an early Mother’s Day letter in hopes he would be at sea by Sunday. With great excitement he announced the possibility of being home by Decoration Day (Memorial Day):
Forwarding Camp, Le Mans, FranceMay 7, 1919
Dear Mother:
It is my fond hope that this will be my last letter written
When the Civil War broke out, David McNeely Stauffer (1845–1913) was only sixteen years old. While attending Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania from September 1861 through June 1863, he served brief, emergency enlistments when the state of Pennsylvania was threatened by Robert E. Lee’s forces. He joined the 2nd Pennsylvania Emergency Regiment in September 1862 and served until winter. In June 1863, he joined in the defense of Gettysburg with the
Independent Battery of Pennsylvania. When Stauffer’s enlistment expired in January 1864, he briefly joined the Engineering Corps of the
On July 10, 1863, Confederate General Paul J. Semmes died from wounds he received at the Battle of Gettysburg eight days earlier. A set of materials in the Gilder Lehrman Collection paint a vivid image of a soldier and his family facing death.
On June 1, 1863, when Emily Semmes wrote her husband to update him on news of thier children and enclosing flowers like the ones she had carried in her bridal bouquet. Paul received the letter ten days in Culpepper City, Virginia and was particularly touched by the flowers. Two years of service far from home took its toll on the Georgian who wrote "When
Between the pages of his math exercise book John Barstow jotted down a patriotic tune called "The Amaricans Challing" on January 2, 1777. Carefully written in a youth’s unsteady hand, the text appears to be a transcript of a popular camp song from the Revolutionary era. How this declaration of patriotism found its way into Barstow’s math lessons is unknown. The book is filled with conversion tables for weights and measures, time and money tables, and multiplication and division tables in addition to mathematical problems. One can imagine a young child learning the song from a father or older
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