History Now is the online journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Each issue features original essays by renowned historians on key topics, eras, and themes in American history.
A one-year subscription includes access to the 3 new issues published annually and full access to the back catalogue of History Now , featuring hundreds of essays by leading US history scholars.
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: 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.
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 an online 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
Discover the antislavery writers and reformers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries whose passionate words formed the vanguard of a global movement. Join Gilder Lehrman and James G. Basker of Barnard College in a study of the poetry, fiction, sermons, slave narratives, and songs that helped end American slavery and make human rights an expectation of people throughout the world.
In this video, meet course professor James Basker:
COURSE CONTENT:
Six seminar sessions with Professor James G. Basker
Four pedagogy sessions
A roundtable discussion
Seventeen guest lectures
Primary source
The South has played a central role in American history from the first permanent English colony through the United States of today. Join Gilder Lehrman and Edward L. Ayers of the University of Richmond—to look south for American history.
In this video, meet course professor Edward L. Ayers:
Trace the role of the South in American history across four centuries, exploring the creation of the largest and most powerful slave society of the modern world and the attempt to create a new independent nation to sustain that society charting the ending of slavery for four million people, the social
For a half century, the Cold War shaped the world. From its obvious consequences in Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, to its more subtle impact on American culture and daily life, the Cold War was the dominant reality of everyday life.
This course will examine the origins, strategy, and consequences of the Cold War from a global perspective. We will look closely at the conflict’s impact not only in the United States and Russia, but also in sometimes unexpected nations across Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Participants will read eye-opening primary documents that illustrate the Cold War’s many
A four-year cataclysm that left in its wake more than six hundred thousand dead and two million refugees—and destroyed legal slavery in the United States—the Civil War sparked some of the most heroic and achingly dark moments in American history. Join Gilder Lehrman and Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College in a study of the war’s strategy, tactics, and memory, and consider the legacy of the Civil War 150 years after its end.
In this video, meet course professor Allen Guelzo:
COURSE CONTENT
Seven seminar sessions with Professor Allen C. Guelzo
Four reading discussions with scholar Brian
The emancipation of four million slaves during the Civil War was the single most revolutionary social transformation in American history. This course considers the complex process that took several generations to complete, from the American Revolution to Reconstruction, including the “first emancipation” during the American Revolution, the growth of an antislavery movement committed to ending slavery through federal policies, the implementation of these policies and their aftermath during Reconstruction, and the social history of emancipation. This course considers not only the policymakers
More than 50 years after its tragic end, the presidency of John F. Kennedy continues to be the focus of scholars, educators, biographers, journalists, politicians, advertisers, students, and citizens of the nation and the world. Join Gilder Lehrman and Professor Barbara Perry of the University of Virginia to examine why a mere thousand-day presidency continues to attract such universal attention to this day.
Discover the strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures of the 35th president of the United States. This course examines JFK’s biography, career, rhetoric, and policies, including on
Too often the history of the “American colonies” focuses on the thirteen British provinces that rebelled against the mother country in 1776 and formed what became known as the United States. While such an approach allows us to understand the British roots of our current national identity, it fails to do justice to those regions of North America (many of which eventually became part of the United States) and those people and groups that did not participate in the grand experiment of American independence.
Join the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Professor John Fea in examining North American
The years 1914 to 1945 created the America we know. They established the United States as a world political and economic power, if a sometimes ambivalent one. They also shaped the social and economic patterns that characterized the country for decades afterward, sometimes in surprising and unanticipated ways.
Join Gilder Lehrman and professor Michael Neiberg in examining the role of the two world wars in shaping modern American history, and studying scholarly interpretations of what the years 1914 to 1945 meant both for America's role in the world and for the changes to life inside the United
The Constitution is the founding document of the United States. Yet ever since the process of ratification, the document’s meaning—and questions about who gets to decide its meaning—have spurred pitched political battles, campaigns for elected office and social change, and arguments among ordinary voters from all walks of life. Americans have debated the question of what the Constitution means in courtrooms and legislatures, at lunch counters and on picket lines, outside medical clinics and in schools. Studying the Constitution in the twentieth century means learning about how law, society,
This course provides the opportunity to engage with critical historical questions about the position and role of women in the new American republic and about the struggle to redefine relations of power between the genders. In ways that are not well understood, these matters of women and gender were central, not marginal, to the ongoing transformation of American life in the nineteenth century: to the emerging and highly contested sphere of democratic politics in the aftermath of the Revolution; to the imperial ambitions of the United States on the continent and abroad; to the struggle over
This course examines African American history from emancipation to the present, focusing on the struggle of African Americans to achieve full citizenship in the aftermath of legal slavery. In particular, it considers the promise and demise of citizenship represented by Reconstruction, the era of breathtaking anti-black violence and terror known as “Redemption,” and the Great Migrations of African Americans from the South to the North.
The course studies the rise of Jim Crow, the roots of black political organizing in the early twentieth century, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It
Through exemplary works of literature, this course examines the writings of African American poets, novelists, and essayists, and considers how their perspectives have shaped history for all Americans. Professor John Stauffer of Harvard University introduces participants to literary works that stretch across American history, including (but not limited to) the writings of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
COURSE CONTENT
Six seminar sessions led by Professor John Stauffer
Three
The American Revolution is arguably the most significant event in U.S. history. Put simply, without the Revolution, the United States as we know it would not exist. And yet, the Revolution is also one of the events in American history most misunderstood by the general public. It is a much more complex, surprising event than most Americans realize. Participants will gain insight into new scholarly approaches to traditional subjects, including American resistance to British rule, the decision for independence, and America’s victory in the Revolutionary War.
In addition, participants will
