91 items
In this letter written in July 1912, during his campaign for a thrid term as president, Theodore Roosevelt informs the state and county chairmen of the Progressive Party of his plan to support women’s suffrage. The document shows the...
The Monroe Doctrine, 1823
President James Monroe’s 1823 annual message to Congress included a warning to European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. This portion of the address is known as the Monroe Doctrine. The United States...
Official photograph from the "Golden Spike" Ceremony, 1869
This iconic photograph records the celebration marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad lines at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad,...
The Stamp Act, 1765
On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the “Stamp Act” to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the Seven Years’ War. The act required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various...
The New York Conspiracy of 1741
In New York City in 1741 an economic decline exacerbated conflict between enslaved men and women engaged in commercial activity and working-class White colonists who felt their jobs were threatened. This tension boiled over in the...
Slave revolt in the West Indies, 1733
The prevalence of slavery in pre-Revolutionary America made actual and threatened uprisings of enslaved people of intense interest throughout the British colonies in North America. The West Indies, or Caribbean islands, where slavery...
"Food Will Win the War," 1917
When most people think of wartime food rationing, they often think of World War II. However, civilians were encouraged to do their part for the war effort during World War I as well. This colorful poster by artist Charles E. Chambers...
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inauguration, 1933
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, the nation was reeling from the Great Depression and was dissatisfied with the previous administration’s reluctance to fight it. Roosevelt declared that...
George Washington’s First Inaugural Address, 1789
After officially enacting the newly ratified US Constitution in September 1788, the Confederation Congress scheduled the first inauguration for March 1789. However, bad weather delayed many congressmen from arriving in the national...
The Supreme Court upholds national prohibition, 1920
After more than a century of activism, the temperance movement achieved its signal victory with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919. The amendment abolished "the manufacture, sale, or...
Lowell Mill Girls and the factory system, 1840
Lowell, Massachusetts, named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, was founded in the early 1820s as a planned town for the manufacture of textiles. It introduced a new system of integrated manufacturing to the United States and...
"Bleeding Kansas" and the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise, which stated that slavery would not be allowed north of latitude 36°30′. Instead, settlers would use the principle of popular sovereignty and vote to determine...
The Whiskey Rebellion, 1794
In 1791, the federal government imposed a tax on distilled spirits to pay off the nation’s debts from the American Revolution. The tax, which was payable only in cash, was particularly hard on small frontier farmers, who bartered and...
"Reelect Roosevelt—Friend of Labor," 1936
This Democratic Party campaign poster from 1936 outlines some of the agencies and regulations Franklin Roosevelt put in place to try to solve the most urgent problems of the Great Depression. While it reminds laborers of how they have...
The Haymarket Affair, 1886
The Haymarket Affair is considered a watershed moment for American labor history, at a time when fears about the loyalties and activities of immigrants, anarchists, and laborers became linked in the minds of many Americans. On May 3,...
Slave auction catalog from Louisiana, 1855
On March 13 and 14, 1855, the firm of J. A. Beard & May placed on the auction block 178 enslaved men, women, and children at the Banks Arcade in New Orleans, Louisiana. They were part of the estate of William M. Lambeth, who had...
Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, 1936
On August 14, 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke at length on the state of international affairs in an address delivered at Chautauqua, New York. Roosevelt’s speech focused on maintaining peace in the face of increasing...
Literacy and the immigration of "undesirables," 1903
During the Progressive era, tens of millions of immigrants came to the United States from Europe to fulfill their American dream. During this period most came from southern and eastern Europe, particularly from Italy, Russia, and the...
Preventing labor discrimination during World War II, 1942
In early 1942, as men of working age enlisted in the military and war production accelerated, US industries experienced a labor shortage. President Roosevelt established the War Manpower Commission "to assure the most effective...
William Cullen Bryant opposes the protective tariff, 1876
During the Civil War, the United States needed to raise funds urgently. It did so by raising the tariff, which taxed goods imported from other countries. In the days before the national income tax, the United States depended on the...
William H. Taft recalls dispute with Theodore Roosevelt, 1922
President Theodore Roosevelt mentored and groomed William Howard Taft to be his successor in the White House. However, once Taft was elected in 1908, he based his administration on a more business-centric and limited-government form...
Nominating an African American for vice president, 1880
Born a slave in 1841, Blanche Kelso Bruce was the first African American to be elected to a full term in the US Senate. During his term as a senator from Mississippi (1875–1881), he advocated the rights of African Americans and other...
Racism in the North: Frederick Douglass on "a vulgar and senseless prejudice," 1870
In 1870 Thomas Burnett Pugh, an ardent abolitionist prior to the Civil War, invited Frederick Douglass to participate in the "Star Course" lecture series he had organized at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. However, Douglass ...
Energy conservation during WWII, 1943
World War II had a profound impact on life in the United States although no battles took place on the American mainland. Americans were asked to ration, recycle, and conserve materials that were essential to the war effort. This...
An African American soldier’s pay warrant, 1780
During the American Revolution, Sharp Liberty, an African American soldier, served in the Connecticut Line of the Continental Army. Before the war, he had been enslaved in Wallingford, Connecticut. In 1777, he enlisted in the army,...
Temperance movement cartoon: The Drunkard’s Progress, 1826
Numerous reform movements to improve society sprang up in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. The temperance movement attracted reformers who identified excessive drinking as the principal cause of domestic...
A British view of rebellious Boston, 1774
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, both the British and the colonists used broadsides to influence public opinion. This broadside, “The Bostonian’s Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring & Feathering,” printed in...
Frederick Douglass’s tribute to Abraham Lincoln, 1880
Despite initial differences, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln forged a relationship over the course of the Civil War based on a shared vision. Fifteen years after Lincoln’s death, Douglass described him as "one of the noblest...
A World War II poster: "Starve the Squander Bug," 1943
Before he became world-renowned as Dr. Seuss for his children’s books and illustrations, Theodor Geisel worked for the US government during World War II designing posters such as this one, encouraging patriotism and investment. The...
The women’s rights movement after the Civil War, 1866
The fight for women’s rights that had begun in earnest with the convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, diminished in the 1850s and 1860s as reformers focused on the abolition of slavery and the Civil War, but the movement did...
An appeal for suffrage support, 1871
The National Woman Suffrage and Educational Committee was formed in the spring of 1871. The Washington DC-based committee pledged to act as the “centre of all action upon Congress and the country.” The group was also dedicated to the...
J. Edgar Hoover on campus unrest, 1970
In September 1970, J. Edgar Hoover composed an open letter to American students detailing his view on civil unrest at the nation’s colleges and universities and warning against the elements he believed responsible. Hoover opened with...
Emma Goldman on the restriction of civil liberties, 1919
Emma Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (present-day Lithuania). In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, becoming a well-known author and lecturer promoting anarchism, workers’ rights,...
The struggle for married women’s rights, circa 1880s
In the early nineteenth century, married women in the US were legally subordinate to their husbands. Wives could not own their own property, keep their own wages, or enter into contracts. Beginning in 1839, states slowly began to...
John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, 1961
On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth President of the United States. His short, fourteen-minute inaugural address is best remembered for a single line: "My fellow Americans: ask not what your country...
Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address, 2009
The inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2009 was a historic moment not only because Obama was the first African American ever sworn into executive office but also because he entered the presidency at a...
Phillis Wheatley’s poem on tyranny and slavery, 1772
Born in Africa, Phillis Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery as a child. She was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston in 1761. The Wheatleys soon recognized Phillis’s intelligence and taught her to read and write. She became...
Hamilton’s Report on the Subject of Manufactures, 1791
When George Washington became president in 1789, he appointed Alexander Hamilton as his secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton’s vision for the economic foundation of the United States included three main programs: 1) the federal...
The origins of FDR’s New Deal, 1932
When the nation fell into the Great Depression following the stock market crash of 1929, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was serving as New York’s governor and was responsible for shaping the state’s response to the crisis. The origins of...
Eleanor Roosevelt’s four basic rights, 1944
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a lifelong advocate of equal rights, used her position as First Lady to advocate against discrimination in the United States. However, Mrs. Roosevelt’s ideas were not embraced by everyone in the pre-civil...
Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom, 1846
After he had escaped from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass became a well-known orator and abolitionist. He wrote an autobiography in 1845, but because he was a runaway slave, its publication increased the chances that he would be...
Sir Francis Drake’s attack on St. Augustine, 1586
Five years after leading the first English circumnavigation of the globe in 1577–1580, Sir Francis Drake led a raid against Spanish settlements in the Caribbean including Santiago, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena, as well as St....
A Jamestown settler describes life in Virginia, 1622
The first English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, who arrived in 1607, were eager to find gold and silver. Instead they found sickness and disease. Eventually, these colonists learned how to survive in their new environment, and by...
George Washington on the abolition of slavery, 1786
Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one...
John Quincy Adams and the Amistad case, 1841
On July 1, 1839, fifty-three Africans, recently kidnapped into slavery in Sierra Leone and sold at a Havana slave market, revolted on board the schooner Amistad . They killed the captain and other crew and ordered the two Spaniards...
Sharecropper contract, 1867
Immediately after the Civil War, many former slaves established subsistence farms on land that had been abandoned by fleeing white Southerners. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and a former slaveholder, soon restored this land to...
A perspective on the San Francisco earthquake, 1906
At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a great earthquake broke loose, with an epicenter near San Francisco. Violent shocks punctuated the shaking, which lasted some 45 to 60 seconds. The earthquake was felt from southern Oregon to south of...
Herbert Hoover on the Great Depression and New Deal, 1931–1933
The stock market crashed on Thursday, October 24, 1929, less than eight months into Herbert Hoover’s presidency. Most experts, including Hoover, thought the crash was part of a passing recession. By July 1931, when the President wrote...
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