Search | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

460 items

History Now Essay

Perils of the Ocean in the Early Modern Era

Robert C. Ritchie

Geography, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

A traveler considering an ocean voyage around 1600 had much to contemplate. Voyage by voyage, explorers and colonists alike needed knowledge about the seas and lands in the Atlantic world. Unfortunately, information was never shared...

Appears in:

25 | Three Worlds Meet Fall 2010

History Now Essay

Women of the West

Virginia Scharff

Geography, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...

Appears in:

9 | The American West Fall 2006

History Now Essay

FDR and Hitler: A Study in Contrasts

David M. Kennedy

Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The Great Depression and World War II were events in world history, but they touched different countries in sometimes dramatically different ways. To paraphrase Tolstoy, many peoples suffered, but every unhappy people was unhappy in...

Appears in:

14 | World War II Winter 2007

History Now Essay

The Marshall and Taney Courts: Continuities and Changes

R. B. Bernstein

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Though the first holders of the job thought it more a burden than a position of honor or power, the office of chief justice of the United States has a pivotal role in the American constitutional system, thanks mainly to John Marshall ...

Appears in:

15 | The Supreme Court Spring 2008

History Now Essay

Indian Removal

Theda Perdue

Geography, Government and Civics

In 1828 pressure was building among white Americans for the relocation of American Indians from the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. A student at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation, which lay within...

Appears in:

28 | American Indians Summer 2011