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History Now Essay

"All Should Have an Equal Chance": Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence

Jonathan W. White

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...
Appears in:
67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era Summer 2023
History Now Essay

"Dear Girl, how much I love you": The Revolutionary War Letters of Henry and Lucy Knox

Phillip Hamilton

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...
Appears in:
43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015
History Now Essay

"Dear Miss Cole": World War I Letters of American Servicemen

Phillip Papas

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

"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...
Appears in:
43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam Fall 2015
History Now Essay

"Ditched, Stalled and Stranded": Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression

Carol Quirke

Art

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...
Appears in:
45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016
History Now Essay

"Fun, Fun Rock ’n’ Roll High School"

Glenn C. Altschuler and Robert O. Summers

Art, Government and Civics

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...
Appears in:
32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012
History Now Essay

"I, Too": Langston Hughes’s Afro-Whitmanian Affirmation

Steven Tracy

Literature

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...
Appears in:
39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014
History Now Essay

"If Ever Two Were One": Anne Bradstreet’s "To My Dear and Loving Husband"

Charlotte Gordon

Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...
Appears in:
39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014
History Now Essay

"Nature’s Nation": The Hudson River School and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1876

Linda Ferber

Art

8

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...
Appears in:
45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016
History Now Essay

"No Event Could Have Filled Me with Greater Anxieties": George Washington and the First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789

Phillip Hamilton

Government and Civics

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...
Appears in:
36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013
History Now Essay

"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900

Elizabeth Hayes Turner

Geography, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

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...
Appears in:
40 | Disasters in Modern American History Fall 2014
History Now Essay

"People Get Ready": Music and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s

Brian Ward

Government and Civics

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...
Appears in:
The Civil Rights Movement
History Now Essay

"Revered By All": The Declaration of Independence in the Reconstruction Era

Douglas R. Egerton

Government and Civics

Although it was the speech that redefined the conflict and effectively changed the meaning of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address is often misunderstood today when it is not simply ignored, at least in American schools. In 1970, as a Phoenix eighth grader, I had to memorize it, but it was just words, learned by rote. My history teacher made no effort to decipher its meaning for us, or to explain why these deceptively simple 271 words challenged the nation to practice what it had long preached. So, in my classes, I ask my students what Lincoln, a most...
Appears in:
67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era Summer 2023
History Now Essay

"Show Them What an Indian Can Do": The Example of Jim Thorpe

Joseph Bruchac

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...
Appears in:
59 | American Indians in Leadership Winter 2021
History Now Essay

"The Authentic Voice of Today": Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton

Elizabeth L. Wollman

Art

"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...
Appears in:
44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination Winter 2016
History Now Essay

"The Brave Men, Living and Dead": Common Soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg

Robert Bonner

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...
Appears in:
37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives Fall 2013
History Now Essay

"The Chinese Question"—Unresolved and Ongoing for Americans

John Kuo Wei Tchen

Government and Civics

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...
Appears in:
42 | The Role of China in US History Spring 2015
History Now Essay

"The New Colossus": Emma Lazarus and the Immigrant Experience

Julie Des Jardins

Literature

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 stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your...
Appears in:
39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014
History Now Essay

"The Politics of the Future Are Social Politics": Progressivism in International Perspective

Thomas Bender

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...
Appears in:
17 | Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era Fall 2008
History Now Essay

"The Seed Time of a Great Harvest": Douglass Recalls Fellow Abolitionists

Quandra Prettyman

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...
Appears in:
57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020
History Now Essay

"The Strange Spell That Dwells in Dead Men’s Eyes": The Civil War, by Brady

Harold Holzer

Art

"[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...
Appears in:
45 | American History in Visual Art Summer 2016
History Now Essay

"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City

David Mills

Literature

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...
Appears in:
62 | The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds Spring 2022
History Now Essay

“A Vote-less People Is a Hopeless People”: Lessons from Selma

Robert A. Pratt

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...
Appears in:
51 | The Evolution of Voting Rights Summer 2018
57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020
History Now Essay

“In the Name of America’s Future”: The Fraught Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act

Maddalena Marinari

Government and Civics

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”...
Appears in:
52 | The History of US Immigration Laws Fall 2018
History Now Essay

“Rachel Weeping for Her Children”: Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery

Margaret Washington

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...
Appears in:
5 | Abolition Fall 2005
57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020
History Now Essay

9/11 and Springsteen

Craig Werner

Art, Government and Civics, World History

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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,...
Appears in:
32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

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