160 items
The new republic was only four years old, its capital recently established in Philadelphia, when the country suffered its first catastrophic epidemic. Yellow fever broke out in August 1793 and ravaged the city for three months, only...
John Adams on the abolition of slavery, 1801
On January 24, 1801, President John Adams responded to two abolitionists who had sent him an anti-slavery pamphlet by Quaker reformer Warner Mifflin (1745–1798). In the letter, Adams expresses his views on slavery, the dangers posed...
The First Inaugural Address of George Washington
Unit Objectives This lesson on the First Inaugural Address of George Washington is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s series of Common Core–based units. These units were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and...
Study Aid: Checks and Balances
Checks and Balances Executive Branch carries out the laws can veto laws can call special sessions of Congress controls enforcement of laws nominates judges can pardon people convicted of federal crimes commander in chief develops...
The horrors of slavery, 1805
Originally circulated in 1805 to educate the public about the treatment of slaves, this broadside, entitled "Injured Humanity," continues to inform twenty-first-century audiences of the true horrors of slavery. As evidenced by this...
Revolutionary in America
The image is so clear in our minds, seen first in elementary school and reinforced countless times since: a few dozen gentlemen with powdered wigs and period suits (coats, waistcoats, and knee-length breeches) gathered in a large...
Daina Ramey Berry & Leslie Harris - "Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas"
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Marcus Nevius - "City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856"
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Clint Smith - "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America"
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Slavery and the Constitution
Historian James Oliver Horton briefly examines the protections for slavery embedded in the US Constitution.
Making a Covenant with Death: Slavery in the Constitutional Structure
Materials US Constitution , Our Documents Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson . New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001. Essential Question Why did the Founders find it necessary to provide...
Slavery in the New York State census, 1800
While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures...
Articles of Confederation
Essential Question How could our Founding Fathers best meet the governing needs of the various factions after the Revolutionary War? Materials Articles of Confederation (PDF). Source: Transcript of the Articles of Confederation , 100...
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...
Alan Taylor - "Thomas Jefferson's Education"
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Manisha Sinha - "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition"
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Catherine Kerrison - "Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America"
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Tamika Nunley - "At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C."
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Jessica Marie Johnson - "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World"
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Brenda Stevenson - "What Is Slavery?"
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Our Constitution: The Bill of Rights (Grades 4–6)
View the Constitution in our collection by clicking here and here . For a resource on the variations between a draft and the final version of the Constitution click here . For additional resources click here . Unit Objective This...
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