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 Ticonderoga to…

"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 education…

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 interviewer…

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 rock ’n’ roll was born…

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 in the free verse…

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 supposed to…

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 American scenery…

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 of April 1, he…

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 Galveston Bay. In…

Few sights or sounds conjure up the passion and purposefulness of the Southern Civil Rights Movement as powerfully as the freedom songs that provided a stirring musical accompaniment to the campaign for racial justice and equality in the region during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Whether sung at mass meetings, on marches and sit-ins, or en route to some of the Jim Crow South’s most forbidding jails, or whether performed on stage or record by one of the musical ensembles formed by civil rights activists, these songs conveyed the moral urgency of the freedom struggle, while expressing and…

Although the twentieth century produced many great athletes, there is no one who stood out more than Jim Thorpe. That is not just my opinion. When Jim Thorpe won two gold medals at the 1912 Olympic Games, the king of Sweden said to him, “Sir, I believe you are the greatest athlete in the world.” (To which Jim responded, “Thanks, King.”) And, more than eight decades later, an ABC Sports poll named Jim as the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. There were plenty of reasons for those writers to choose Jim Thorpe for that honor, even though it was more than half a century after his…

"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’s composer, lyricist, book-writer, and current star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, was even born. It’s from 1968, and it appeared in the New York Times review by theater critic Clive Barnes of Broadway’s first hit rock musical, Hair. Like Hamilton, Hair was one of the most commercially and critically successful, aesthetically influential Broadway musicals to open in a very…

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) prediction was offered as a way to contrast the "poor power" of even the most stirring words with the still more awe-inspiring actions of 90,000 "brave men, living and dead" who had given the North a badly needed victory. Even if future generations forgot his stirring presidential address, the President was certain that they would always cherish the struggles of…

In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the nation’s first race-based immigration law that was not effectively repealed until 1965–1968. The act exempted Chinese merchants, diplomats, scholars, and students, but prohibited Chinese already living in the US from gaining citizenship. The law claimed one’s race as being all-determining, indeed more significant than one’s nationality. It ruled a British citizen of Chinese origin, for example, as de facto excluded on the basis of racial classification. The act was followed by the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act, extending…

To read the text and hear the poem click here. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the…

The American Progressive movement was not simply a response to the domestic conditions produced by industrialization and urbanization. Instead, it was part of a global response to these developments during an era of unregulated capitalism that accelerated the movement of people, ideas, goods, and money. The significance can be assessed, in part, by the fact that direct foreign investment—the globalization of capital—constituted a higher percentage of all investments in the 1890s than in the 1990s. Born out of a period of great wealth and growing inequality, the Progressive era heralded a…

Quandra Prettyman, senior associate in the English and Africana Studies departments at Barnard College, was one of the first Black faculty members at the college. She taught the first courses in African American literature there in the 1970s and is the editor of Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction (1975). An accomplished poet, she has been published in I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans (1970) and The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century (1973), both edited by Arnold Adoff. In a letter written on March 2, 1880…

"[T]he dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams." So admitted the New York Times just a month after it had reported the grisly slaughter of 3,650 Union and Confederate troops at the Battle of Antietam. On a single afternoon of hideous carnage there, more soldiers had died than at any other place, or on any other day, in American history. Yet as vividly as battlefield correspondents described the carnage, home-front readers still seemed unable to visualize the magnitude of the tragedy—or the depth of individual human sacrifice it entailed. Words seemed insufficient.…

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 on a federal building and unearthed the “Negro Burial Ground”—two centuries after the cemetery had closed. In the process, GSA desecrated some of the 419 ancestral remains they exhumed (a backhoe damaged twenty bodies). Though the US government requires federally funded projects to conduct archaeological/historical property surveys and include descendant…

The black freedom struggle, commonly referred to as the civil rights movement, is undoubtedly one of the greatest social movements in the history of the world. After more than two centuries of bondage followed by another century of rigid segregation and discrimination, African Americans and their white allies finally succeeded in forcing all three branches of the United States government to recognize the basic humanity of black people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was perhaps the movement’s crowning achievement. Coming ten years after the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board…

Senator Patrick McCarran (D−NV) was seething after Congress renewed the 1948 Displaced Persons Act in 1950. Incensed, McCarran wrote to his daughter: “I met the enemy and he took me on the DP bill. It’s tough to beat a million or more dollars and it’s something worthwhile to give the rotten gang a good fight anyway, and they know they have been to a fight for its not over yet.”[1] Guided by a mix of anti-Communism, nativism, and antisemitism, McCarran believed that any changes to the country’s immigration system placed the United States at risk “from a flood of undesirables” and blamed passage…

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 South. Anti-slavery Northern black women felt the sting of oppression personally. Like the slaves, they too were victims of color prejudice; some had been born in Northern bondage; others had family members still enslaved; and many interacted daily with self-emancipated people who constantly feared being returned south.Anti-slavery women such as Sojourner Truth and…

The transformation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, into a seemingly foreordained historical narrative began almost as soon as the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. I was teaching an 8 a.m. class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that morning, so the first I heard of what had happened came from a colleague who greeted me at the door of the lecture hall with the simple words, "We’re at war." Like hundreds of millions of others in the United States and around the world, I spent the rest of the day glued to a television screen, internalizing the images…

Thanksgiving stands as one of the most American of holidays, an autumnal ritual fixed in the imagination as honoring the piety and perseverance of the nation’s earliest arrivals during colonial days. But what were the origins of this quintessentially American tradition? And how and when did the observance become an official part of our national identity and holiday calendar? Harvest festivals have been recorded from ancient to modern times, from the Greeks honoring the goddess Demeter with a nine-day festival to the Jewish celebration of the Feast of the Tabernacles. And from ancient to modern…

The history of the Civil Rights Movement is the story of numerous grassroots campaigns loosely coordinated and assisted by a small number of national organizations. Every local struggle had its own actors, issues, and nuances, and all of them contributed to the broader struggle against Jim Crow. No battle exemplifies the interaction of the local and national better than the campaign for equal rights in the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.During the late 1940s and early 1950s, civil rights activists in Washington waged a battle against racial discrimination in the city that had always been…

A New York Times headline in January 2009 captured the essence of Barack Obama’s inauguration for many Americans: "A Civil Rights Victory Party on the Mall." An estimated 1.8 million people gathered to celebrate. Many heroes of the black freedom struggle enjoyed places of honor. The inaugural committee set aside seats for a few hundred surviving Tuskegee Airmen, members of a celebrated all-black unit during World War II. The dignitaries on the platform included ninety-six-year-old Dorothy Height, who began her career as a civil rights activist in Harlem during the Great Depression and who…

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 rightly so: these kinds of exclusions and contradictions would haunt the United States for decades to come. But we might also wish to remind ourselves of the seeds of inclusiveness that were evident in the collection of men who formed the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration. By the standards of the day, they were a surprisingly diverse group. As the…

The American West is home to the majority of America’s Indian Nations, and, within the past generation, many of these groups have achieved unprecedented political and economic gains. Numerous reservation communities now manage diversified economies. These economic gains—best exemplified by the gambling casinos—and the political gains that have accompanied them have emerged from within Indian country itself, yet they are best understood in the context of, and as a response to, historic federal Indian policies. This new era of Indian autonomy, in short, is linked to the past. Sovereignty and…

To most Americans the Great Plains are the Great Flyover, or maybe the Great Drivethrough. Viewed from a window seat the plains seem nearly devoid of interest, something to get across enroute to someplace far worthier to explore or live in. Yet anyone who has spent time on the plains knows better. Walk around in western Nebraska or the Texas panhandle and you will find a geography that is mixed and surprising and sometimes disorienting. Most people consider plains history much like the land—flat, featureless, and undeserving of more than a glance between sips of a soda. But spend some time in…

In the late fall of 1983, the US Congress passed a bill declaring the third Monday of January each year as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on November 2, 1983, fifteen years after King’s assassination. Passage of this bill had not been easy, as some conservatives and southern members of Congress had issued strong objections to it. During the debate in the Senate, Senator Jesse Helms, Republican from North Carolina, delivered a speech declaring that although there was no evidence that King was a member of the Communist Party, some suspected that he…

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. For Wheatley, who arrived in Boston on a slave ship at the age of seven or eight in 1761, nothing might have seemed more improbable than that she would write a lavish poem of praise fourteen years later to Washington, the Virginia plantation owner turned general. Wheatley had proved herself a prodigy, rapidly mastering English and learning Latin, history, and…

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 one’s political interests are essential aspects of citizen engagement in participatory democracy. Voting is the key to citizens participating in “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” As such, voting acts as the guardian of the exercise of nearly every right we have in American society. Without the right to vote, or to vote in a manner that…

“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 Declaration of Sentiments offered a significant addition, declaring all women and men to be equal. While few might question that today, nearly 175 years ago, gender equality was considered extremely radical. The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments was written for an equally radical event. In July 1848 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, some 300 men and women…

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 theories of which one was expected to accept all, if any." Of that sisterhood, anti-slavery stands out as the best-remembered and most hotly debated, even though it was not the largest in terms of membership or the most enduring. (That honor goes to the temperance movement.) Abolitionism continues to fascinate because of its place in the sectional conflict leading to…

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 transfigures you and me:As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,While God is marching on. That the war to preserve the Union had become a godly crusade to end slavery—one in which soldiers would "die to make men free"—seemed logical and even providential by 1865. Yet it was an outcome that few in either the North or South would have predicted at the…

Abraham Lincoln was, for most of his political career, a highly partisan Whig. As long as the Whig Party existed, he never supported the candidate of another party. Until the late 1850s, his chief political heroes were Whigs, above all Henry Clay, whom he said he "loved and revered as a teacher and leader." Even after the Whigs disintegrated, Lincoln bragged that he "had stood by the party as long as it had a being."[1] Yet we care about Lincoln not because he was a Whig but because he became a Republican—which marks him as a particular kind of Whig. Unlike the more conservative of the Whigs…

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 the end of the War of 1812 and the decay and eventual disappearance of Federalism in the wake of Alexander Hamilton’s death. Thomas Jefferson, living his final years in retirement at Monticello, might well have taken satisfaction in 1824 at the total dominance of Republicanism, or the Democratic-Republican Party, in American political life. Every major candidate…

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 I named for her, but a compelling 1918 oil portrait of her, by the African American painter William Edouard Scott, hung in the home of an aunt, then that of my parents, then (and still) my own.I later learned that Adella had been born into a rare southern free family of color during the Civil War and died several decades before I was born. I knew she’d had many…

"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 spring of 1777. "The happiness of America is intimately tied to the happiness of all humanity; America will become the respected and secure haven of virtue, honesty, tolerance, equality, and a peaceful freedom."[1] Within six months, he would be honored with the command of a division in the Continental Army. At the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778, Lafayette and…

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 contributions at all levels of society from colonial times down to the present. Their early history, however, was often denied or forgotten altogether by White scholars who were anxious to keep the issues of slavery and racism under wraps, either uncomfortable or unwilling to acknowledge that it was part of the region’s heritage. But now, that history is being…

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: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (1997), Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century (2002), and Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (2011). He is co-editor, with Jonathan Birnbaum, of the prizewinning collection Civil Rights Since…

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 Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), to which they contributed essays about Black women suffragists. Harley recently published “African American Women and the Right to Vote” in Women and Suffrage (2018) and “‘I Don’t Pay Those Borders No Mind At All’: Audley E. Moore (‘Queen Mother’ Moore)—Grassroots Global Traveler and Activist” in Women and Migration: Responses in…

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 legal in all parts of the country, and virulent racism in the dominant culture. President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 8802 in 1941 banned race discrimination in defense industries and civil service jobs. It was rarely enforced, however, and mostly ignored by employers until they were forced to hire nonwhites by exhaustion of the white labor…

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, an escaped slave, was at the center of what became known as the Boston Massacre that fanned the flames of revolution. Once the rebellion began, Prince Estabrook, another African American, was one of the first to fall on Lexington Green in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. Other black men fought to defend nearby Concord Bridge later in the day. At least a dozen black…

African American life in the United States has been framed by migrations, forced and free. A forced migration from Africa—the transatlantic slave trade—carried black people to the Americas. A second forced migration—the internal slave trade—transported them from the Atlantic coast to the interior of the American South. A third migration—this time initiated largely, but not always, by black Americans—carried black people from the rural South to the urban North. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, African American life is again being transformed by another…

2015 was a big year for Alexander Hamilton. Nearly two hundred eleven years after the nation’s first treasury secretary was shot and killed in a duel with then-Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr, an Off Broadway play opened at the Public Theater in New York City’s East Village to rave reviews and sold-out houses. The brainchild of Tony Award–winning playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton had an extended run and remained the toughest ticket to score in town. By the summer, the hip-hop–infused musical was bound for a bigger home on Broadway, having created a boom of interest in all…

When George Washington, newly elected president, picked the members of his administration in 1789 he tapped thirty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton to be the first treasury secretary. Hamilton had been a colonel on Washington’s staff during the Revolution, and had served with him at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Hamilton also had special qualifications for the job: as a teenager on the island of St. Croix he had clerked for Beekman and Cruger, a New York–based merchant house with international business; as a lawyer he had helped charter one of the country’s first banks, the Bank of New…

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 Amendment to the US Constitution was due in large part to Paul’s visionary leadership, courage, determination, brilliant organizational skills, and laser-like focus on planning and execution. A tireless, unrelenting, uncompromising, and uncomplaining feminist fighter, she fervently believed that there could be no gender equality until and unless the nation was…

Abraham Lincoln was not an original advocate of abolition. In fact we know that his journey to what he called "the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century" was a relatively slow, though continuous, one. Emancipation was a complex process that involved the actions of the slaves, the Union Army, Congress, and the President. Historians have argued over the relative roles of the slaves and Lincoln in the coming of emancipation. It is my purpose to shift the terms of this debate by drawing attention to a third group of emancipators—abolitionists, particularly…

Thorpe’s deception and subsequent confession deals amateur sport in America the hardest blow it has ever had to take and disarranges the scheme of amateur athletics the world over. New York Times, January 28, 1913 The early years of the twentieth century were a dynamic, often chaotic time for the emerging phenomenon of sports in America. With the exception of baseball, which had its modern form in place by 1900, rules and organizations were formed and reformed year by year. Basketball was brand new, invented in 1891. Football was strictly a collegiate game dominated by the northeastern Big…