329 items
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....
"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...
Cadet Nurse Corps, 1943
The Cadet Nurse Corps, established by the Nurse Training Act of 1943, recruited women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five to be trained as nurses. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt insisted the act be amended to prevent racial...
The end of the Vietnam War: conscience, resistance, and reconciliation, 1973
Vietnam was "America’s longest war." While US operations tended to be very limited between 1945 and 1964, escalation in the early months of 1965 eventually led to the deployment of more than 2.5 million military personnel to South...
The Cold War in the classroom, 1952
As the Cold War pervaded domestic as well as international spheres, Duck and Cover , an educational film produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration and Archer Productions Inc., showed children how to react in case of a...
Robert F. Kennedy on Vietnam, 1967
On May 15, 1967, CBS broadcast Town Meeting of the World , a program in which Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York and Governor Ronald Reagan of California answered questions posed by the moderator, Charles Collingwood; students from...
President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, 1961
Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
National Security, Isolationism, and the Coming of World War II
Unit Overview The two decades following the end of "The Great War" witnessed significant changes in American economic, social, and cultural life. The affluence and optimism of the 1920s were tempered by memories of the war and an...
The Gettysburg Address: Identifying Text, Context, and Subtext
Objective This lesson is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These resources were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
My Brother Sam Is Dead
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
Civilian describes pillaging near Gettysburg, 1863
On July 5, 1863, Dr. William H. Boyle wrote to a fellow member of the local Columbus Lodge of the International Organization of Odd Fellows, Isaac McCauley, describing the devastation the Confederates had caused in Chambersburg,...
Civil War condolence letter for General Paul Semmes, 1863
By 1863, thousands of Northern and Southern women had volunteered in hospitals to help care for sick and wounded soldiers. In cities and towns near battlefields, wounded soldiers were often placed in private homes and other buildings...
The Boston Massacre (Grades 4–6)
View the engraving The Bloody Massacre in King Street in the Gilder Lehrman Collection by clicking here . Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units...
The French and Indian War
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
The Mexican-American War: Arguments for and against Going to War
Click here to download this three-lesson unit.
Remember the Maine, 1898
On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana’s harbor in Cuba, killing nearly two-thirds of her crew. The tragedy occurred after years of escalating tensions between the United States and Spain, and the “yellow...
The Battle of Gettysburg through Union and Confederate Eyes
Click here to download this two-lesson unit.
A plea to defend the Alamo, 1836
A decade of conflict between the Mexican government and US settlers in Texas culminated in 1836 with the siege of the Alamo and the Texas Declaration of Independence. On February 23, 1836, Lieutenant Colonel William Travis, Jim Bowie,...
A report from Spanish California, 1776
Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, military commander of Alta California, wrote this letter from Mission San Gabriel. Rivera y Moncada was instrumental in the development of missions in California and was in a sometimes-contentious...
Receipt for land purchased from the Six Nations, 1769
This document records that the representatives of the Six Nations, who signed using totems to designate individuals and tribes, received $10,000 as payment from the Penns for land the tribes had ceded in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in...
Conscientious objectors: Madison pardons Quakers, 1816
In 1816, seven Quakers in Baltimore, Maryland, petitioned President James Madison for pardons after refusing to serve in the militia or pay the exemption fee. Secretary of State James Monroe requested additional information on the men...
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...
A political cartoon of Grant and Lee, 1864
During the first three years of the Civil War, a series of Union generals led the Army of the Potomac against Confederate General Robert E. Lee with little success. In March 1864, Abraham Lincoln appointed General Ulysses S. Grant...
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...
Politics and the Texas Revolution, 1836
Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico was an uphill battle from the very beginning. Texians were outnumbered and outmatched by the much more powerful Mexican military, and the province was plagued by quarrels within its own...
Poem on a Civil War death: "Only a Private Killed," 1861
Approximately 3.5 million men served in the Union and Confederate military during the Civil War. Recent scholarship indicates that at least 750,000 men died. Lewis Mitchell of the 1st Minnesota Volunteers was one of those men. On...
Calling out the militia after Lexington and Concord, 1775
On the night of April 18, 1775, 700 British soldiers began to march toward Concord, Massachusetts, to seize and destroy arms the American patriots had stored there. Warned by Paul Revere and William Dawes, minutemen confronted and...
World War I poems: “In Flanders Fields” and “The Answer,” 1918
Ella Osborn’s 1918 diary provides insight into the experiences of an American nurse serving in France at the end of World War I. In addition to her notes about the men under her care and events in France, Osborn jotted down two...
Civilian defense on the home front, 1942
In the early days of World War II, air raids and other attacks on populated areas in Europe generated fears that similar attacks could happen in the United States. On May 20, 1941, more than six months before the United States entered...
The service of Medal of Honor recipient Dr. Mary Walker, 1864
A graduate of Syracuse Medical College, Mary Walker served as a doctor during the American Civil War and was the only female acting assistant surgeon in the Union Army. In April 1864, Walker was captured by the Confederates in...
The Battle of Horseshoe Bend and the end of the Creek War, 1814
On May 12, 1814, Tennessee settler Isaac Stephens wrote to his uncle Henry Mackey in Virginia about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. In that battle on March 27, 1814, US Army and Tennessee militia troops under General Andrew...
Benedict Arnold’s 1780 treason and the execution of John Andre recalled, 1823
During the American Revolution, the discovery of General Benedict Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point to the British was a deeply shocking revelation. In a memoir written some forty years after the war, William North, an aide-de...
The Brotherton Indians of New Jersey, 1780
During the French and Indian War, the Lenni-Lenape (or Delaware) Indians of New Jersey were among the tribes that signed the Treaty of Easton of 1758. The tribes agreed not to support the French in the colonial conflict and to leave...
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,...
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 soldier on the battle for the Philippines, 1945
Witnessing the brutality of war and atrocities against civilians could overwhelm the most fair-minded of men. Sidney Diamond, an officer in the 82nd Chemical Battalion, wrote loving, humorous, and hopeful letters to his fiancée almost...
Abraham Lincoln's last letter to his wife, 1865
This letter, written as the Union captured the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, demonstrates Lincoln’s active, hands-on commitment as commander in chief of the armed forces as well as his devotion to his family. It reads...
"The President is murdered," 1865
At 10:13 p.m. on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC, President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln, unconscious and bleeding, was rushed...
D-Day correspondence between a soldier and his wife, 1944
On June 6, 1944, as Allied forces numbering approximately 160,000 troops landed along fifty miles of coastline in Normandy, France, Moe Weiner, a native of Brooklyn, was serving in the US Army Quartermaster Corps in England. He did...
The Fort Pillow Massacre, 1864
"Among the stories of the stormy days of the Republic, few will longer be remembered than the heroic defense and almost utter annihilation of the garrison of Fort Pillow." —Mack J. Leaming, April 1893 On April 12, 1864, fifteen...
Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, 1775
In April 1775, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and Virginia’s royal governor, threatened to free slaves and reduce the capital, Williamsburg, to ashes if the colonists rebelled against British authority. In the months that followed,...
The War for Independence
On July 4, 1774, exactly two years before the United States declared independence, a patriotic club in Worcester, Massachusetts, decided that each member should have in the ready two pounds of gunpowder and twelve flints. With the...
Reconstruction
In the twelve years after the Civil War—the era of Reconstruction—there were massive changes in American culture, economy, and politics. These were the years of the "Old West," of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo hunts, of cattle drives,...
The Failure of Compromise
In the spring of 1861, the United States of America split into two hostile countries—the United States and the new Confederate States of America. The two opposing heads of state agreed about what was causing the rupture—the long...
The American Civil War
The Civil War marked a defining moment in United States history. Long simmering sectional tensions reached a critical stage in 1860–1861 when eleven slaveholding states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Political...
The Civil War and Reconstruction in the American West
The histories of the Civil War and of the emerging West were tangled together from their beginnings. Although the war was fought mostly in the East, the events that set it off were born of the expansion of the 1840s, and in turn the...
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