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 sweeping through the nation by calling on Americans to “swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.” Alluding to the words of the Declaration itself, Lincoln intoned, “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of...

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 individuals did, felt, and experienced like few historical records can. This is the case with the letters written by Henry and Lucy Knox during the Revolutionary War. Henry Knox is well known to historians. A Boston bookseller, he joined American forces following Lexington and Concord. After transporting fifty-nine captured British cannon from Fort...

"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 appreciate your kindness very much and glad to know that the boys and girls of P. S. #5 have not forgotten me. Those wristlets are fine, just the thing I needed." The woman behind these letters and gifts to the soldiers, Annie E. Cole, was one of eight children born to Jacob W. and Mary Cole. After attending public schools on Staten Island and taking...

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 rags spit out by the economy. Dorothea Lange described watching from her studio windows the unemployed "drifting" past, and wanting to do something. Her "Man Beside Wheelbarrow" (1934) displays one such victim. The worker is bent up against a blank cinderblock expanse. We see only his workingman’s cap; he cannot face the light. Lange later told an...

With his tongue halfway in his cheek, Ambrose Bierce defined history as "an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." Well, we’ve come a long way in a hundred years. These days, historical narratives routinely include the experiences and values of "ordinary" folk. They use popular culture to describe and analyze culture, society, and politics. So, "Roll over Beethoven/Tell Tchaikovsky the news": rock ’n’ roll merits inclusion in the American history curriculum. During the 1950s — when...

To read the text and hear the poem click here. Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S. Eliot demonstrate how the individual talent grew out of a tradition that created, nurtured, and contextualized its ideas. In 1919, the same year in which Eliot published his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Langston Hughes published two poems in the January issue of his Cleveland high school’s literary journal. One of these poems was...

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 for members of the most radical branch of the English Reformation. Like most seventeenth-century English immigrants to America, Bradstreet regarded herself as English, or at best as "New English." For Bradstreet, writing poetry was a way to serve God and the community, not to further a career. The problem was that she was a woman, and women were not...

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 term long ago lost its negative meaning and is now accepted as shorthand for a group of artists active in New York City from the early years of the nineteenth century. Together with like-minded poets and writers, they forged a self-consciously "American" landscape vision and literary voice. Both vision and voice were grounded in the exploration of...

George Washington’s fame rests not upon his words but upon his deeds. Therefore, his First Inaugural Address is sometimes overlooked. This is unfortunate because the words he delivered on Thursday, April 30, 1789, not only launched the new Constitution but also established important and lasting precedents that later presidents have honored and followed. General George Washington began the month of April 1789 in a pessimistic mood, however. Although he knew he would soon become the first President of the United States, the Revolutionary War hero dreaded the job. On the morning...

Dawn brought "mother of pearl" skies to Galveston, Texas, that Saturday morning of September 8, 1900. The city of 38,000, perched on an island just off the mainland, had an elevation of no more than nine feet. With no sea wall to protect it from approaching storms, the city was extremely vulnerable. Weather reports suggested that a tropical disturbance over Cuba could be headed northwest through the Gulf of Mexico. An abundance of sea water already filled the streets, alleys, and yards. Historically, the city had often experienced inundations from the Gulf of Mexico and from...