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An old tune called "The Girl I Left Behind Me" tells of a lovelorn soldier yearning to return home to his waiting fair maid. Although there is a good chance that this song was fifed during the Revolutionary War, the earliest...
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New Orleans and the History of Jazz
New Orleans is a city built in a location that was by any measure a mistake. North American settlers needed a way to import and export goods via the Mississippi River, so a city was created atop swamps. By virtue of its location and...
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Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, State Rights, and Black Rights: Another Look at Lincoln and Race
Stephen Douglas was the first in a long line of observers frustrated by the inconsistent things Abraham Lincoln had to say about racial equality. In their fifth debate, at Galesburg, Illinois, on October 7, 1858, Douglas complained...
The Importance of Muhammad Ali
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., as Muhammad Ali was once known, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942—a time when blacks were the servant class in Louisville. They held jobs such as tending the backstretch at Churchill...
The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source
The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation of an African American literary tradition, as well as unique glimpses into the souls of slaves themselves. The roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published in...
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Motor City: The Story of Detroit
"You can see here, as it is impossible to do in a more varied and complex city, the whole structure of an industrial society." So wrote essayist Edmund Wilson, reporting on a visit to the Motor City in the 1930s. As the capital of...
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Why Sports History Is American History
In the classroom, examples from sports can explain key events in American history and help explore how people in American society have grappled with racial, ethnic, and regional differences in our very diverse nation. Whether it is...
Abolition and Antebellum Reform
When the Boston abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson looked back on the years before the Civil War, he wrote, "there prevailed then a phrase, ‘the Sisterhood of Reforms.’" He had in mind "a variety of social and psychological...
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When the Past Speaks to the Present: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History and a professor of history at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which received the Pulitzer...
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