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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...

Appears in:

67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era Summer 2023

History Now Essay

"Courage to Face the Unknown": The World War II Service and Legacy of Celina Baez Sotomayor

Elizabeth R. Escobedo

During the 1940s hundreds of thousands of American women left their hometowns to serve in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), a US Army unit created in World War II to enable women to serve in noncombat positions and “free a man to fight.” ...

Appears in:

70 | World War II: Portraits of Service Spring 2024

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

Appears in:

8 | The Civil Rights Movement Summer 2006

History Now Essay

"Prince of Darkness": Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire

Shane White

Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a Black man whose very existence flies in the face of our understanding of the way things were in nineteenth-century New York. He made his fortune as a broker. Although a pioneer, far from being some novice...

Appears in:

72 | Black Entrepreneurship in America Fall 2024

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...

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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

Appears in:

32 | The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

History Now Essay

A History of the Thanksgiving Holiday

Catherine Clinton

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

4 | American National Holidays Summer 2005

History Now Essay

A Local and National Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Postwar Washington, DC

Wendell E. Pritchett

Government and Civics

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

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...

Appears in:

8 | The Civil Rights Movement Summer 2006

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

A More Perfect Union? Barack Obama and the Politics of Unity

Thomas J. Sugrue

Government and Civics

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...

Appears in:

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses Summer 2013

History Now Essay

A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad

James G. Basker and Sofia Melnychuck

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...

Appears in:

64 | New Light on the Declaration and Its Signers Fall 2022

History Now Essay

A New Era of American Indian Autonomy

Ned Blackhawk

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

9 | The American West Fall 2006

History Now Essay

A New Look at the Great Plains

Elliott West

Geography

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

9 | The American West Fall 2006

History Now Essay

A Place in History: Historical Perspective on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

James Oliver Horton

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

4 | American National Holidays Summer 2005

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington

James G. Basker

Government and Civics, Literature

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

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....

Appears in:

39 | American Poets, American History Spring 2014

History Now Essay

A Right Deferred: African American Voter Suppression after Reconstruction

Marsha J. Tyson Darling

Government and Civics

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...

Appears in:

51 | The Evolution of Voting Rights Summer 2018

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

A Second Declaration of Independence: The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments

Sally G. McMillen

“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...

Appears in:

63 | The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America Summer 2022

History Now Essay

Abolition and Antebellum Reform

Ronald G. Walters

Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

5 | Abolition Fall 2005

History Now Essay

Abolition and Religion

Robert Abzug

Religion and Philosophy

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

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...

Appears in:

5 | Abolition Fall 2005

History Now Essay

Abraham Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy

Sean Wilentz

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

18 | Abraham Lincoln in His Time and Ours Winter 2008

History Now Essay

Abraham Lincoln's "Apple of Gold": The Declaration of Independence

Harold Holzer

Government and Civics, Literature

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” [1] So Abraham Lincoln began the most famous speech of...

Appears in:

67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era Summer 2023

History Now Essay

Adams v. Jackson: The Election of 1824

Edward G. Lengel

Government and Civics

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...

Appears in:

33 | Electing a President Fall 2012

History Now Essay

Adella Hunt Logan: Suffragist and Educator

Adele Logan Alexander

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...

Appears in:

54 | African American Women in Leadership Summer 2019

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

Advice (Not Taken) for the French Revolution from America

Susan Dunn

World History

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

"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...

Appears in:

34 | The Revolutionary Age Winter 2012

History Now Essay

African American Burial Sites in New England from Colonial Times through the Early Twentieth Century

Glenn A. Knoblock

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...

Appears in:

62 | The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds Spring 2022

History Now Essay

African American Religious Leadership and the Civil Rights Movement

Clarence Taylor

Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

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...

Appears in:

8 | The Civil Rights Movement Summer 2006

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

History Now Essay

African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment

Sharon Harley

Government and Civics

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...

Appears in:

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography Summer 2020

56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond Spring 2020

History Now Essay

African American Women in World War II

Maureen Honey

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...

Appears in:

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

African Americans in the Revolutionary War

Michael Lee Lanning

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,...

Appears in:

46 | African American Soldiers Fall 2016

History Now Essay

African Forced Migration to Colonial America

Ira Berlin

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...

Appears in:

3 | Immigration Spring 2005

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