These newspaper articles illustrate the impact on American society of Spanish Influenza (H1N1), which first appeared in the United States in March 1918.[1] There were periodic, minor outbreaks for six months, but in September a highly fatal second wave of influenza broke out across the country and lasted through January 1919. Within days of being exposed, patients became gravely ill and many died. Influenza is usually only dangerous for the very young and the elderly. During this outbreak the disease was deadly for people aged twenty to forty as well. According to the Centers for Disease…

At the outbreak of World War I, Ella Jane Osborn was a surgical nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. In January 1918, she volunteered to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces as a member of the Red Cross’s nursing service in Europe. Initially, nurses were to work only in hospitals far from the front lines. However, the need to have medical treatment available near the fighting changed these plans, and Osborn was assigned to Evacuation Hospital Number 1 at Sebastopol Barracks in France, just seven miles from the front. Sick and wounded soldiers were sent from the front lines…

During World War I, approximately 370,000 black men in the US military served in segregated regiments and were often relegated to support duties such as digging trenches, transporting supplies, cleaning latrines, and burying the dead. One notable exception is the “Harlem Hellfighters,” organized in 1916 as the 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard. Their nickname came from the 200 Harlem residents who comprised the core of the regiment, and the German view of them as “Hellfighters.” On April 6, 1917, the same day that the United States declared war on Germany, the 15th New York…

When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, it needed funds to support the war effort. The Civil War had demonstrated that simply printing more currency would lead to inflation and economic trouble. During World War I, the Secretary of the Treasury and head of the Federal Reserve, William G. McAdoo, did not want to risk devaluing the new US paper currency, which had only been in existence since 1914. Therefore, McAdoo decided to gather one-third of the money needed through taxes and the rest through fundraising. On April 28, 1917, only twenty-two days after the US entered the…

When World War I ended in 1918 more than 4.6 million men returned to the United States from war. The American people and the US government were unprepared to reintegrate and care for the men who returned with physical injuries and psychological damage that would affect many of the veterans for the rest of their lives. According to the Library of Congress, 224,000 soldiers returned home with a permanent physical or mental disability. Of the injured, 4,400 were amputees. Almost 100,000 soldiers had been removed from combat due to psychological injuries and 40,000 of them were subsequently…

Emma Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (present-day Lithuania). In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, becoming a well-known author and lecturer promoting anarchism, workers’ rights, birth control, and other political and social movements. Anarchists believed that people could naturally govern themselves without systematic controls. They openly rejected US involvement in World War I, and their anti-government activities concerned many in authority.During World War I, Goldman actively protested the war and encouraged men not to register for the…

In 1839, seventeen-year-old Hiram Ulysses Grant received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. It changed the course of his life—and his name. Grant always disliked his first name and was commonly known by his middle name. He wanted to swap his first and middle names when he entered the Academy. However, Congressman Thomas Hamer had submitted Grant’s application to West Point under the name “Ulysses S. Grant.” Hamer knew the boy as Ulysses and, at a loss for his middle name, chose “S” because Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson. On September 22, 1839, shortly…

More than 11,000 American Indians served with the American forces during World War I. Nearly 5,000 Native men enlisted and approximately 6,500 were drafted—despite the fact that almost half of American Indians were not citizens and therefore not eligible for conscription. In all, approximately 25 percent of Native men served in the military.[1] They often volunteered to serve in dangerous roles, including as snipers and scouts. Unlike African American soldiers, Native Americans were not restricted to segregated regiments. Joe High Elk, an American Indian soldier during the war, wrote about his…

This engraving depicts a White Union soldier reading the Emancipation Proclamation to an enslaved family. It was published in 1864 by Lucius Stebbins, based on a painting by Henry W. Herrick. According to Stebbins, the scene “represents the only way in which the glorious news could reach the . . . slaves, viz.: through the faithful soldier.”[1] On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln used his wartime powers to issue the Emancipation Proclamation,[2] which declared that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State . . . in rebellion against the United States, shall be…

On April 7, 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced the breaking of diplomatic ties with Iran as a result of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981. The US had first become actively involved in Iran in 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow the country’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who implemented legislation to wrest control of Iran’s oil fields from Great Britain. The US supported the return of Iran’s monarch, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, a brutal dictator who strove to modernize Iran while ruthlessly suppressing his opponents. In 1978, religious leaders, lower- and middle-class Iranians…

On January 16, 1991, President George H. W. Bush announced the beginning of the military campaign to end an Iraqi occupation of neighboring Kuwait. The address was broadcast live on radio and television. It was the culmination of five months of lobbying by Bush for the United States to pursue a military response rather than economic sanctions against Iraq. Iraq’s army had invaded the small, oil-rich country of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and quickly overwhelmed the Kuwaiti forces. Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, wanted to control Kuwait’s oil supply and regain land that had been a…

In the aftermath of the Civil War, former slaveholders struggled to adjust to the economic conditions resulting from the end of slavery as well as the destruction of plantations and markets and the population loss. Many southern landowners fell into poverty as they faced depreciated land values and mounting debts. In 1867, farmer and preacher A. C. Ramsey of Alabama wrote to his brother-in-law, Dr. J. J. Wardlaw in South Carolina, describing his family’s economic struggle after the Civil War. He forcefully declares that “the war ruined me” and left his children with “nothing but a piece of…

The Revolutionary War divided families. In 1774, eighteen-year-old Lucy Flucker married twenty-four-year-old Henry Knox. Lucy’s parents were powerful, wealthy Tories, and they were not happy with the match. Henry Knox was the son of an Irish immigrant. At the age of nine, he quit school to go to work when his father abandoned the family. Henry was also rumored to be a patriot.Lucy and Henry left Boston in 1775. Henry joined Washington’s army, and Lucy was left on her own for the first time in her life. When the British evacuated Boston after the siege in 1776, many loyalists left with them…

Abraham Lincoln’s death on April 14, 1865, stunned the nation. He was the first US president to be assassinated and the third to die in office. As Americans mourned, they also began to see him as a martyr and the savior of the Union. In eulogies and engravings, Lincoln was compared to George Washington.Printed in 1865, Columbia’s Noblest Sons features imagery that draws parallels between Washington and Lincoln.Columbia is crowning Washington and Lincoln with laurel wreaths, which were traditionally given to people who had won victories.Columbia was considered the female symbol of the United…

In January 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto began developing a plan to attack the American base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. For eleven months, the Japanese continued to refine their plans while at the same time working diplomatically to relieve tensions with the United States. On November 26, 1941, the main body of attack force began moving toward Hawaii.Shortly before 8 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack against US armed forces in Hawaii. Japanese pilots targeted Army, Navy, and Marine airfields, and then naval ships at Pearl Harbor, with the aim of devastating the…

In 1787 and 1788, debates over the ratification of the Constitution took place in towns and villages across the country. To gain support, both Federalists and anti-Federalists held meetings and marches that sometimes became violent. In July 1788, Federalists marched through Albany, New York, and were stopped at Green Street by a group of anti-Federalists. According to this newspaper report, “a general battle took place, with swords, bayonets, clubs, stones, &c. which lasted for some time, both parties fighting with the greatest rage, and determined obstinacy, till at last the antifederalists…

According to the 1900 census, the population of the United States was then 76.3 million. Nearly 14 percent of the population—approximately 10.4 million people—was born outside of the United States. Drawn by America’s labor opportunities, immigrants came predominantly from Canada and Europe, migrating from countries such as Germany, Britain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.The statistics gathered by the 1900 census were published in 1903 in an atlas that converted the census data into maps and charts. This map uses color gradation to indicate the population density of foreign-born…

Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click here for more information about Bob and to read more in this series.Soldiers rarely describe the details of battles in letters. During World War II, the discussion of events was prohibited by the military and censors were quick to remove anything they considered a risk to the safety and security of the troops. In addition, putting frightening details of war into…

Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click here for more information about Bob and to read more in this series.On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died from a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Spring, Georgia. He was sixty-three years old, had been elected to four terms, and served as president for twelve years. For many American servicemen, Roosevelt had been in office for nearly half their…

Lieutenant Robert “Bob” Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific during World War II. Born on December 19, 1921 in New York City, Bob was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Williams College in Massachusetts when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In a 2006 oral history, Bob recalled listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech. “I was a sophomore at Williams College studying in my room with the radio on (there was no TV in those days) and I heard President Roosevelt announce that…

Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click here for more information about Bob and to read more in this series.As part of the effort to secure land close enough to Japan to launch attacks against the mainland, the US Army and Navy began bombing the Bonin Islands of Iwo Jima, Hajajima, and Chichijima, in June 1944. Army and Navy bombers hit Iwo Jima for over eight months, culminating in seventy-four…

Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th US Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click here for more information about Bob and to read more in this series.After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, life changed dramatically for twenty-year-old Robert Stone and his family, as it did for all Americans. Bob finished his sophomore year at Williams College before enlisting in the USAAF Aviation Cadets in July 1942.Due to the number of men waiting to be…

In September 1814, Francis Scott Key, an attorney and DC insider, watched the American flag rise over Baltimore, Maryland’s Fort McHenry from a British ship in the harbor. Key had been negotiating the release of an American captive during the War of 1812 when the British attacked the fort. After twenty-five hours of heavy bombardment, Key was sure that, come dawn, the British flag would be flying over Baltimore. Upon seeing the American flag still aloft, he wrote, on the back of a letter, the first verse of what would eventually become the national anthem of the United States. Once he returned…

On the morning of September 15, 1963, Denise McNair (age 11), Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Cynthia Wesley (age 14), and Carole Robertson (age 14) were killed when nineteen sticks of dynamite exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Fourteen others were injured in the bombing. Just five days after the bombing of the church, the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver wrote a “Report on Birmingham,” making an appeal on behalf of the Inter-Citizens Committee to prospective supporters and documenting the violence that was consuming the city. The Inter-Citizens Committee was formed…

On June 25, 1950, war broke out on the Korean peninsula when the Soviet-backed Communist forces in North Korea invaded the recently founded democratic republic of South Korea. Following a unanimous UN resolution condemning the invasion, President Harry S. Truman committed US troops to the conflict. The United States took the lead in fighting North Korea to combat the spread of Communism. The events in Korea contributed to the escalation of the Cold War, a decades-long rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Active combat ended in a cease-fire in 1953, but no peace treaty has…

While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures from the 1800 census in New York. It offers a breakdown of the free population of each county in the state as well as three-fifths of the number of slaves present. The US Constitution permitted 60 percent, or three-fifths, of slaves to be counted toward the total population of each state in a compromise designed to provide the southern states with greater…

It has none of the catch phrases or warnings of other, more famous presidential inaugural or farewell addresses, no cautions against permanent alliances or military-industrial complexes, no appeals to better angels or declarations about fear. What President Harry Truman’s farewell address of 1953 does have is an abiding sense of optimism that the United States is on the right track and is well positioned to win the Cold War, beliefs that were proven correct nearly forty years after he left office. His support for these beliefs—that the “fatal flaw in [communist] society” is that “theirs is a…

In 1922, Sharpless Dobson Green, a teacher at Senior High School in Trenton, New Jersey, wrote to influential people around the world to get their advice for his students. In his request, he explained his project:There are about 400 young men and young women training for business under my supervision in the Senior High School of this city; will you send me, over your signature, a little message that will be an inspiration to them in their work now and aid them in being better citizens in the business world?[1]He sent one of his requests to Franklin Delano Roosevelt a decade before Roosevelt…

Between battles, marches, and military exercises, Civil War soldiers spent their free time in camp playing music, writing and reading letters, and, for those with the skill, sketching scenes from the day. This unknown soldier’s sketchbook from 1863, “A Few Scenes in the Life of a ‘SOJER’ in the Mass 44th,” recounts the adventures of a soldier named “Gorge,” or “George,” and follows the movements of the 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in New Bern, North Carolina. The cartoons satirize the war, army life, and the the way Northern newspapers reported the war. Newspapers, like letters, were…

The new republic was only four years old, its capital recently established in Philadelphia, when the country suffered its first catastrophic epidemic. Yellow fever broke out in August 1793 and ravaged the city for three months, only subsiding in November. Twenty thousand people fled the city, as many as 5,000 died (ten percent of Philadelphia’s population), and countless thousands of others suffered illness and hardship. No one then knew what caused the disease (a mosquito-borne virus), there was no effective treatment, and the epidemic only ended with the coming of cold weather that…

Supporters of women’s rights used maps such as the one shown here to demonstrate where women were allowed to vote, when they won that right, and which elections they could vote in. The source of this map is unknown. Originally printed around 1914, it was altered over a period of five years to reflect the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in various states through mid 1919. Each state is marked in patterns representing the status of women’s suffrage. White represents full suffrage. Stripes represent partial suffrage. Dots represent presidential, partial county, and state suffrage. Black…

The National Woman Suffrage and Educational Committee was formed in the spring of 1871. The Washington DC-based committee pledged to act as the “centre of all action upon Congress and the country.” The group was also dedicated to the education of women on subjects affecting the United States’ welfare so that “women may become intelligent and thoughtful on such subjects, and the intelligent educators of the next generation of citizens.” This pamphlet, An Appeal to the Woman of the United States, written in 1871, urges women to demand equal rights for themselves and gives reasons why women…

In 1944 a group of southern editors and writers documented cases of voter suppression in southern states. They took this step because, in the presidential election of 1944, only 28 percent of potential voters in the South participated, as opposed to 62 percent in the rest of the country. Their findings, compiled in Voting Restrictions in the 13 Southern States, drew attention to the methods used to deprive African Americans of the vote. The pamphlet explains poll times, compensation, voting requirements, absentee voting, voter turnout from previous elections, and the expected voter turnout of…

Even though the Sedition Act of 1798 had expired in 1801, individuals could still be charged with sedition. On January 20, 1815, Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper, publishers of the Massachusetts newspaper The Yankee, printed an article criticizing the governor and state legislature for failing to follow through on threats to secede from the United States during the War of 1812. Within days they were arrested for sedition and brought before the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The War of 1812 between England and the United States was unpopular in New England. The…

On August 14, 1798, the Columbian Centinel, a Boston newspaper aligned with the Federalist Party, printed this copy of the Sedition Act. It was the last in a series of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in July. These acts were written to silence Democratic-Republicans’ criticism of Federalist policies during the Quasi-War with France. The Sedition Act, which was the only one in the series that applied to citizens of the United States, made it illegal to “write, print, utter or publish . . . any…

In February 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt stunned the country by challenging President William Howard Taft for the Republican nomination. The move was not only a rejection of his friend Taft, it also violated an unwritten rule of American politics. Roosevelt had already had two terms in office, and no president had ever had a third. Roosevelt insisted that he was running out of duty, not personal ambition. As president, he had charted a politically progressive course, but under Taft, his chosen successor, the country had been becoming more conservative. In 1912 primary elections…

In this letter written in July 1912, during his campaign for a thrid term as president, Theodore Roosevelt informs the state and county chairmen of the Progressive Party of his plan to support women’s suffrage. The document shows the many edits Roosevelt made as he refined his message. Roosevelt wrote this letter supporting women’s suffrage in 1912, but he had fought for equality for women much earlier in his life. As a senior at Harvard University in 1880, he had written about marriage equality and urged women not to change their last name upon marriage. As a New York State Assembly member in…

Frederick Douglass tirelessly labored to end slavery but true equality remained out of reach. Despite the successful passage of several Constitutional amendments and federal laws after the Civil War, unwritten rules and Jim Crow laws continued to curtail the rights and freedoms of African Americans. Douglass concisely summarized the reality of Jim Crow in an 1887 letter that claimed the South’s "wrongs are not much now written in laws which all may see – but the hidden practices of people who have not yet, abandoned the idea of Mastery and dominion over their fellow man." Racism, violence, and…

In the late nineteenth century, Democrats and Republicans fought over whether the gold standard ought to be retained or if the United States should switch to a free silver system. In 1890, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was passed, increasing the amount of silver purchased by the government. In 1893, Democratic President Grover Cleveland successfully pushed for the act’s repeal. Cleveland’s anti-silver measures split the Democratic Party, however, as many Democrats were silver supporters. By the election year of 1896, the Democratic Party had been taken over by silverites. In July 1897…

On March 25, 1911, a devastating fire started at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Workers had been locked in the factory to discourage theft and prevent labor organization, and they were unable to escape when the fire began. The fire killed 146 people, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the eighth- and ninth-floor workrooms. Most of the victims were immigrant women from eastern Europe. The worst industrial tragedy in the United States to that date led to an outcry over the factory’s conditions and to factory labor safety reforms. This sheet music features a song about…

The Papal Bull "Inter Caetera," issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, played a central role in the Spanish conquest of the New World. The document supported Spain’s strategy to ensure its exclusive right to the lands discovered by Columbus the previous year. It established a demarcation line one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands and assigned Spain the exclusive right to acquire territorial possessions and to trade in all lands west of that line. All others were forbidden to approach the lands west of the line without special license from the rulers of Spain. This…

The first English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, who arrived in 1607, were eager to find gold and silver. Instead they found sickness and disease. Eventually, these colonists learned how to survive in their new environment, and by the middle of the seventeenth century they discovered that their fortunes lay in growing tobacco. This 1622 letter from Jamestown colonist Sebastian Brandt to Henry Hovener, a Dutch merchant living in London, provides a snapshot of the colony in flux. Brandt, who likely arrived in 1619 in a wave of 1,200 immigrants, writes of his wife’s and brother’s deaths the…

The Dutch colonization of New Netherland (which included parts of present-day New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut) began in the 1620s. From the outset, New Netherland was a multiethnic, multireligious society: about half of the population was Dutch and the remainder included French, Germans, Scandinavians, and small numbers of Jews from Brazil. Settlers were attracted to the colony’s promises of freedom of worship, local self-government, and free land that would remain tax-exempt for ten years. Between 1652 and 1674, the Dutch and English fought three naval wars, battling for…

Like many other explorers, Henry Hudson stumbled upon North America almost by accident. Employed by the Dutch Republic to find a sea passage to the Far East, Hudson and the crew of his ship the Halve Maen landed at what is today New York on September 11, 1609, claiming the region for the Dutch.Efforts to map the region began almost immediately after Henry Hudson landed and culminated with this map, made by Nicholas Visscher and printed in 1682. This map depicts not only the former Dutch holdings of New Amsterdam (which had been taken over by the British), but also New England and New Jersey…

Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch trials of 1692. The myths surrounding what happened in Salem make the true story that much more difficult to uncover. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which forms the basis of many Americans’ knowledge of the trials, takes liberties with the story. Miller transforms Tituba, a young Native American girl, into an African slave who led a group of young women into the…

This map of “la Louisiane” was published by French geographer Guillaume de l’Isle. It is the first detailed map of the Gulf Coast region and the Mississippi River, as well as the first printed map to show Texas (identified as “Mission de los Teijas etablie en 1716”). The map is also the first to identify New Orleans, founded in 1718 (see the inset detail of the mouth of the St. Louis River). De l’Isle obtained most data from French explorers and fur-traders traveling through North America. A close examination of the map reveals the land routes of early explorers in North America. Each route is…

By the beginning of 1770, there were 4,000 British soldiers in Boston, a city with 15,000 inhabitants, and tensions were running high. On the evening of March 5, crowds of day laborers, apprentices, and merchant sailors began to pelt British soldiers with snowballs and rocks. A shot rang out, and then several soldiers fired their weapons. When it was over, five civilians lay dead or dying, including Crispus Attucks, an African American merchant sailor who had escaped from slavery more than twenty years earlier.Produced just three weeks after the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere’s historic…

On Christmas Day in 1776 the American Revolution was on the verge of collapsing. Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American forces had been driven from New York City to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and reduced to a mere three thousand men. Washington knew that a victory was needed to raise the Americans’ morale and turn the tide of war. With winter on its way and thousands of enlistments soon expiring, his time was running out. Washington, seeing an opportunity, decided to attack Trenton, New Jersey, a nearby town guarded by only fifteen hundred Hessians, German…

Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one-fifth of the colonies’ population lived in bondage. Although most enslaved people were in the South, slavery was a legal institution in each of the thirteen colonies. Fourteen percent of the state of New York’s population was enslaved, for example, and New York City had more enslaved people than any other city in the colonies except Charleston, South Carolina…

On May 25, 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention began meeting in a room, no bigger than a large schoolroom, in Philadelphia’s State House. They posted sentries at the doors and windows to keep their "secrets from flying out." They barred the press and public, and took a vow not to reveal to anyone the words spoken there. There were speeches of two, three, and four hours. The convention, which lasted four months, took only a single eleven-day break. First draft of the United States Constitution, with notes by Pierce Butler, August 6, 1787 This copy of the draft of the…