159 items
In many ways, the Gettysburg Address reflects the culmination of Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong admiration for the principles of the Declaration of Independence. As a young man in 1838, Lincoln responded to the wave of mob violence...
"Courage to Face the Unknown": The World War II Service and Legacy of Celina Baez Sotomayor
During the 1940s hundreds of thousands of American women left their hometowns to serve in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), a US Army unit created in World War II to enable women to serve in noncombat positions and “free a man to fight.” ...
"Dear Girl, how much I love you": The Revolutionary War Letters of Henry and Lucy Knox
Letters between soldiers and spouses are often powerful and moving documents. Given the intensity, danger, and uncertainty of armed conflict as well as the significant changes wrought by most wars, such correspondence reveals what...
"Dear Miss Cole": World War I Letters of American Servicemen
"Received your package," Pvt. George Van Pelt of Company I, 165th Infantry wrote in May 1918 from the frontlines in France to Annie E. Cole, a grammar school teacher and principal on Staten Island, New York, and to her students. "I...
"Ditched, Stalled and Stranded": Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression
During the Great Depression, a top commercial portraitist took to San Francisco’s streets to experiment with representing the social devastation surrounding her. Her photos showed men sleeping on sidewalks and in parks like bundles of...
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"If Ever Two Were One": Anne Bradstreet’s "To My Dear and Loving Husband"
Anne Bradstreet is famous for being the first American poet. But she did not think of herself as either "first" or "American." She did not even think of herself as a poet. We would call her a Puritan, a term adopted by their enemies...
"The Brave Men, Living and Dead": Common Soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg
Midway through his remarks at the Gettysburg National Soldiers’ Cemetery on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln confided that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." This remarkable (and remarkably off-target)...
"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City
In October 2021, the African Burial Ground National Monument commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the New York City slave cemetery’s rediscovery by the General Services Administration (GSA). In 1991, the GSA started construction...
“Rachel Weeping for Her Children”: Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery
During the period leading up to the Civil War, black women all over the North comprised a stalwart but now largely forgotten abolitionist army. In myriad ways, these race-conscious women worked to bring immediate emancipation to the...
A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad
We are often focused today on the fact that the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not include women, African Americans, or Indigenous people, and how far this deviated from the spirit of “all men are created equal.” And...
A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington
One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington....
A Second Declaration of Independence: The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. [1] Upon casual reading, this phrase should sound familiar. Yet unlike what appeared in our nation’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, the 1848...
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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Abolition and Religion
One verse of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the unofficial anthem of the Northern cause, summarized the Civil War’s idealized meaning: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that...
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Adella Hunt Logan: Suffragist and Educator
My new book, Princess of the Hither Isles , traces the life of my paternal grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan, who’s intrigued me for as long as I can remember. During my childhood, she felt like a major presence in my life. Not only was...
Advice (Not Taken) for the French Revolution from America
"I come as a friend to offer my help to this very interesting republic," wrote the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette from aboard the Victoire as it sailed from France across the ocean to the rebellious British colonies in the...
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African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment
Sharon Harley is Associate Professor and former Chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited the pioneer anthology The Afro-American...
African American Women in World War II
African American women made meaningful gains in the labor force and US armed forces as a result of the wartime labor shortage during the Second World War, but these advances were sharply circumscribed by racial segregation, which was...
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African Americans in the Revolutionary War
From the first shots of the American Revolutionary War until the ultimate victory at Yorktown, black men significantly contributed to securing independence for the United States from Great Britain. On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks,...
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Alice Paul, Suffrage Militant
Alice Stokes Paul (1885−1977) was one of the leading feminists of the early twentieth century, a person who brought the women’s suffrage movement into the national spotlight. Passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment or the Nineteenth...
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An Arduous Path: The Passage and Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment
As we mark the centennial of women’s constitutional right to vote, we should remember that the Nineteenth Amendment, like the suffrage movement itself, was forced to navigate an arduous path. Even at the endgame, even at the dawn of...
Andrew Jackson and the Constitution
In 1860, biographer James Parton concluded that Andrew Jackson was "a most law-defying, law obeying citizen." Such a statement is obviously contradictory. Yet it accurately captures the essence of the famous, or infamous, Jackson....
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Angelina and Sarah Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters
Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah Grimke were legends in their own lifetimes. Together these South Carolina sisters made history: daring to speak before "promiscuous" or mixed crowds of men and women, publishing some of the most...
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Antonia Pantoja, a Nuyorican Builder of Institutions
Antonia Pantoja was a fierce community organizer and builder of influential institutions. Throughout her life she created organizations that enhanced the lives of Puerto Ricans and other minoritized communities. She was a dreamer with...
Benjamin Franklin, Spain, and the Independence of the United States
On November 29, 1775, more than six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Congress’s Secret Committee of Correspondence gave instructions to Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee to travel to Paris to...
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