450 items
In the United States, voting is a constitutionally protected right and an essential symbol of meaningful political participation in our nation’s electoral processes of governing. The right to vote and to have one’s vote count toward...
The Contentious Election of 1876
The presidential election of 1876 is better known for its controversial aftermath than for the campaign that preceded it. The basic outline of events after Election Day, November 7, 1876, is familiar. The Democratic candidate,...
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The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social History
On June 13, 1866, Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican floor leader in the House of Representatives and the nation’s most prominent Radical Republican, rose to address his Congressional colleagues on the Fourteenth Amendment to the...
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Reconstruction and the Battle for Woman Suffrage
The origins of the American women’s suffrage movement are commonly dated from the public protest meeting held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. At that historic meeting, the right of women to join with men in the privileges and...
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Citizenship in the Reconstruction South
Slaveholders created a system of race, gender, and class inequality in the pre-Civil War South. They justified slavery by arguing that enslaved people could not take care of themselves and needed masters to look after them. White...
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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...
The Seneca Falls Convention: Setting the National Stage for Women’s Suffrage
On July 19–20, 1848, about 300 people met for two hot days and candlelit evenings in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, in the first formal women’s rights convention ever held in the United States. Sixty-eight women ...
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Adams v. Jackson: The Election of 1824
James Monroe’s two terms in office as president of the United States (1817–1825) are often called the "Era of Good Feelings." The country appeared to have entered a period of strength, unity of purpose, and one-party government with...
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Making (White Male) Democracy: Suffrage Expansion in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War
There is perhaps no theme more central to our traditional understanding of American history than the expansion of democracy. And in that long story of democratization we habitually regard as our peculiar contribution to the world,...
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The First Generation: America’s Women Voters, 1776–1807
Most histories of women gaining the right to vote in the United States begin in July of 1848, when hundreds of activists gathered in Seneca Falls to hold the first women’s rights convention and sign the Declaration of Sentiments. The...
The Material Culture of Slave Resistance
Artifacts tell stories. Sometimes the tales are unclear or even contradictory, and sometimes artifacts—not unlike a dishonest diarist—can even lead the unwary historian astray. But the material culture of enslaved Americans, from...
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From the Editor
In this issue of History Now , we continue our mission of ensuring that the stories of Americans of all races and ethnicities appear in our national history. “Hispanic Heroes in American History” introduces readers to the...
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg: Archivist, Institution Builder, and Advocate of Global Black History
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” So begins one of the most well-known essays of the Harlem Renaissance, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” written by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Published in the March...
Frederick Douglass: An Example for the Twenty-First Century
Noelle N. Trent is the Director of Interpretation, Collections, and Education at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at Howard University on “Frederick...
Cold War, Warm Hearth
In the summer of 1959, a young couple married and spent their honeymoon in a fallout shelter. Life magazine featured the "sheltered honeymoon" with a photograph of the duo smiling on their lawn, surrounded by dozens of canned goods...
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From the Editor
Race and national origin, writes History Now contributor Madeline Y. Hsu, “have been the main determinants for legal immigration and citizenship.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the record of discrimination faced by Asians...
The Emancipation Proclamation: Bill of Lading or Ticket to Freedom?
Of all the speeches, letters, and state papers he had written, Abraham Lincoln believed that the greatest of them was his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. With one document of only 713 words, Lincoln declared more than...
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"The Authentic Voice of Today": Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton
"The show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday." The comment above could easily have been written about Hamilton , but it was written long before Hamilton...
The History of US Immigration Laws: What Students Should Know
The history of US immigration laws can be boiled down to a single question: Who gets to be an American and who does not? This question encompasses who can immigrate to the country, who can stay, and who can become naturalized. We...
James Wilson: Scottish Immigrant, Pennsylvania Statesman, Signer of the Declaration, and Framer of the Constitution
James Wilson’s impact on the founding of the United States was significant. One of only six individuals to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he helped create the nation and its enduring institutions....
From the Editor
The Declaration of Independence remains one of the most hallowed documents in our national history and the men who produced it are singularly honored by the unique designation “the Signers.” Yet most of us know little about these...
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...
The Education of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence
We call them “The Signers,” and that’s what they did. They signed the Declaration of Independence. They were fifty-six men, signing in an age that prized beautiful penmanship as a mark of a fine education and the social rank that came...
Pledging Their Fortunes: The Professions of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
Within the historical literature, the professions of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence has not received nearly the same attention paid to the framers of the US Constitution. In his Economic Interpretation of the...
The Religious Diversity of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence was more than a founding political document of an embryonic American nation. It was also a moral summons to united action written and signed by fifty-six men of diverse religious views. The document...
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) and the National Council of American Indians: Leading the Way for Indigenous Self-Representation
Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1876, the same year as the Battle of Greasy Grass (known more commonly in US history as the Battle of Little Big Horn), Gertrude Simmons Bonnin grew up amidst a US-national culture of systemic...
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The League of the Iroquois
No Native people affected the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history more than the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of present-day upstate New York. Historians have been attempting to explain how and why ever since,...
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African American Religious Leadership and the Civil Rights Movement
Clarence Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Modern African American History, Religion, and Civil Rights at Baruch College, The City University of New York. His books include The Black Churches of Brooklyn (1994), Knocking at Our Own Door...
Different Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement
In 1984 Jimmy Carter reflected on growing up in the segregated South. He recalled that as a young child, he, like many white children, had had an African American child as his closest friend. The two children spent all their play time...
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"Nature’s Nation": The Hudson River School and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1876
Introduction The late nineteenth-century critic who first referred to a "Hudson River School" intended the nickname to be dismissive, describing artists whose style was old fashioned and whose American subjects were provincial. The...
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From The Editor
As school children, my generation thrilled to the stories of European explorers who set out in small wooden ships to cross uncharted seas. These men represented the curiosity, imagination, and desire for new experiences, exotic goods...
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From The Editor
When delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, many of them feared that the quarrels between the states, the sudden rash of internal rebellions, the continuing presence of enemies on our national...
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From The Editor
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the global conflict known as World War II. The impact of this war was felt by civilians as well as soldiers, as the nation transformed itself...
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From the Editor
The Declaration of Independence was written to explain the just causes for the Americans’ break with their mother country. In it, Thomas Jefferson carefully listed the American grievances against the king, creating a catalogue of...
The Escape of Black Women during the American Revolution
In 1961, Morgan State University historian Dr. Benjamin Quarles published the now classic study The Negro in the American Revolution , which became the definitive account of the role African Americans played in the War for...
Polish Political Exiles and the Legacy of the American Revolution in the Antebellum US
In the second of the Cabinet rap battles in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton wage a fiery debate in 1796 about whether the US should honor its old treaty obligations to a newly...
The Square Deal: Theodore Roosevelt and the Themes of Progressive Reform
Progressivism arrived at a moment of crisis for the United States. As the nineteenth century came to a close, just decades after the Civil War, many feared the nation faced another explosive and violent conflict, this time between the...
Lockean Liberalism and the American Revolution
The town of Boston took an important step toward rebellion on November 20, 1772, by adopting a declaration of "the Rights of the Colonists" drafted by Sam Adams, the firebrand of the Revolution. Adams summarized these "Natural rights"...
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The Impact of Title IX
One of the great achievements of the women’s movement was the enactment of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The law states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be...
The Battle of the Sexes
It’s hard to explain, if you weren’t there at the time, why the "Battle of the Sexes"—the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs—was so important. The most enduring image from the event was the picture of Billie...
Memorializing the Gravesites of Twentieth-Century African Americans
Excerpts reprinted by permission of Karla F. C. Holloway from her book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Duke University Press, 2003). I wandered for an hour trying to find Harriet Tubman (1913). I didn’t mind the time. I...
Winning the Vote: A History of Voting Rights
Voting Rights on the Eve of the Revolution The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a "stake in society." Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed...
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From the Editor
Personal visits to cemeteries and burial grounds evoke both emotions and memories. But these final resting places are also windows into our national history. The heroes buried at Arlington tell us the story of our nation’s wars while...
"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...
Our National Cemetery and Its Honored Dead: The African American History of Arlington
Adapted by permission of Ric Murphy from his book, Section 27 and Freedman’s Village in Arlington National Cemetery: The African American History of America’s Most Hallowed Ground (McFarland & Company, 2020), co-authored with...
African American Burial Sites in New England from Colonial Times through the Early Twentieth Century
For most of New England’s history, African Americans have been present. Their history here begins as far back as at least 1629, when enslaved Africans were brought to Massachusetts, African Americans subsequently making significant...
The New York African Burial Ground
The unearthing of the “Negroes Burying Ground” in New York City in 1991 challenged the narrow, popular perception of slavery as an antebellum, southern-based, agrarian institution. It revealed to the public what historians had long...
Early America’s Jewish Settlers
If you had the opportunity to create a new society from scratch, to build its institutions and establish its social structure from the ground up, how would you go about doing it? This is one of the most fruitful ways for teachers and...
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Race and the Good War: An Oral History Interview with Calvin D. Cosby, World War II Veteran
Calvin D. Cosby was born in 1918, in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was my hometown as well. I first knew Calvin Cosby as the husband of my beloved second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ima Bradford Cosby. Mr. and Mrs. Cosby and their daughter...
Fighting against the Odds: Black Soldiers in the Second World War
John H. Morrow, Jr. , is Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He taught for seventeen years at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where, in 1971, he became the first African American faculty member in the...
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