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9. Recommended Reading
The Gilder Lehrman Institute recommends the books listed here, which represent the very best in recent scholarship on the origins, impact, and legacy of the Declaration of Independence. Visit the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Maier, Pauline....
10. Images of the Founding Era
Explore a gallery of images and broadsides related to the Declaration of Independence and Revolutionary Era.
13. What's New
“The Declaration at 250” is a multi-year project. These pages will be updated with new resources periodically. Check back here to find out what the Gilder Lehman Insitute of American History has planned. Coming Soon April 2022: A new publication, Black Historians on the Record, with essays related to democracy and liberty across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Highlights include “Race and the American Constitution: A Struggle toward National Ideals” by James Oliver Horton “African Americans and the Making of Liberia” by Claude A. Clegg “Avoiding the Trap of...
Guided Readings: Religion and Social Reform: Abolitionism
Reading 1 Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” . . . I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. . . . I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. . . . Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the...
Guided Readings: American Foreign Policy in the 1970s
Reading 1 Why are we in South Vietnam? We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Vietnam. . . . We have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence. And I intend to keep our promise. . . . We are also there to strengthen world order. Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of...
Infographic: North-South Comparisons before the Civil War
View this infographic as a downloadable PDF.
Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy: Recommended Resources
In conjunction with our panel, Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy (presented in partnership with the Office of the Governor of Louisiana), the Gilder Lehrman Institute has compiled this list of resources on the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the history of discrimination, and the fight for civil rights in the United States. You can watch a recording of this program (originally held on March 16, 2022) below: For some of these links, you may need to be a subscriber on our site. To log in or start the subscription process, please click here. If you are a K–12 educator who has...
Abraham Lincoln Highlights
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, founded in 1994 promotes the knowledge and understanding of American history through educational programs and resources. Drawing on the 80,000 documents in the Gilder Lehrman Collection and an extensive network of eminent historians, the Institute provides teachers, students, and the general public with direct access to unique primary source materials. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the HISTORY® Channel invite you to watch Abraham Lincoln, then explore Lincoln’s world through primary sources. The items below...
Presidential Election Results, 1789–2020
Introduction The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, who are representatives typically chosen by the candidate’s political party, though some state laws differ. Each state’s number of electors is based on its congressional delegation (one for each member in the House of Representatives and one for each member in the Senate). Currently, a total of 270 electoral votes is required to win the presidency. Before the 1804 election the first runner-up became vice president, as spelled out in the US Constitution. As a result of the Election of 1800, the method of electing the...
Infographic: Life in Colonial America: Climate, Commerce, and Culture
Click here to learn more about the New England Colonies.Click here to learn more about the Middle Colonies.Click here to learn more about the Southern Colonies.
Cultural Encounters: Teaching Exploration and Encounter to Students
Some 40,000 years from now, give or take a few millennia, someone, somewhere in the universe may find and listen to the Golden Record, NASA’s attempt to describe Earth and its peoples to anyone out there who might be interested. There are actually two copies of the Golden Record, each on its own spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which were launched out into the cosmos in 1977, one year after the Bicentennial of the United States and almost five centuries after the first sustained encounters between the peoples of the Americas and the peoples of Europe. It is interesting that...
Questions for Discussion: The Roots of the Revolution
Was colonial America a democratic society?Were the colonists justified in resisting British policies after the French and Indian War (1754–1763)?Were the origins of the American Revolution primarily economic or ideological?Were the colonists’ responses to the Stamp Act (1765) justified?How did the Stamp Act Congress pave the road for American independence?Is violence a sound strategy to bring about significant political and social change? (Case studies to help examine this question could include: the Stamp Act riots [1765], the Boston Massacre [1770], the Boston Tea Party [1773],...
Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective
Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, over one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in what is now the United States. Yet by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South. For a long time it was widely assumed that southern slavery was harsher and crueler than slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic church insisted that slaves had a right to marry, to seek relief from a cruel master, and to purchase their...
Historical Context: Birth of a Nation
In 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, D.W. Griffith released his epic film Birth of a Nation. The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946. Based on a novel by a Baptist preacher named Thomas Dixon, the film painted Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, as a time when vengeful former enslaved people, opportunistic White scalawags, and corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers plundered and oppressed the former Confederacy until respectable White southerners rose up and restored order. A ...
Historical Context: Black Soldiers in the Civil War
By early 1863, voluntary enlistments in the Union army had fallen so sharply that the federal government instituted an unpopular military draft and decided to enroll black, as well as white, troops. Indeed, it seems likely that it was the availability of large numbers of African American soldiers that allowed President Lincoln to resist demands for a negotiated peace that might have including the retention of slavery in the United States. Altogether, 186,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army and another 29,000 served in the Navy, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all...
Historical Context: Go West ... and Grow Up with the Country
In 1854 Horace Greeley, a New York newspaper editor, gave Josiah B. Grinnell a famous piece of advice. "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," said Greeley. Grinnell took Greeley's advice, moved west, and later founded Grinnell, Iowa.Before 1830 Iowa was Indian land, occupied by the Sauk, Fox, Missouri, Pottowatomi, and other Indian tribes. The defeat of the Sauk and Fox Indians in the Black Hawk War in 1832 opened the first strip of Iowa to settlement. By 1840 Iowa's population of settlers had risen to 40,000.Because no government land office was established in Iowa...
Immigration Policy in World War II
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suspended naturalization proceedings for Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants, required them to register, restricted their mobility, and prohibited them from owning items that might be used for sabotage, such as cameras and shortwave radios. The curfews on Italian immigrants were lifted in October 1942, on Columbus Day.Approximately 600,000 Italian aliens lived in the United States in 1940. About 1,600 Italian citizens were interned, and about 10,000 Italian-Americans were forced to move from their houses in...
Historical Context: Life on the Trail
Each spring, pioneers gathered at Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, to begin a 2,000 mile journey westward. For many families, the great spur for emigration was economic: the financial depression of the late 1830s, accompanied by floods and epidemics in the Mississippi Valley. Said one woman: "We had nothing to lose, and we might gain a fortune." Between 1841 and 1867, more than 350,000 trekked along the overland trails. Most pioneers traveled in family units. At first, pioneers tried to maintain the rigid sexual division of labor that characterized...
Historical Context: Mexican Americans and the Great Depression
In February 1930 in San Antonio, Texas, 5000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans gathered at the city’s railroad station to depart the United States for settlement in Mexico. In August, a special train carried another 2000 to central Mexico. Most Americans are familiar with the forced relocation in 1942 of 112,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to internment camps. Far fewer are aware that during the Great Depression, the Federal Bureau of Immigration (after 1933, the Immigration and Naturalization Service) and local authorities rounded up Mexican immigrants and naturalized...
Historical Context: Movies and Migration
Many of our most memorable images of the past come from movies. Films set in the past provide a vivid record of history: of the "look," the clothing, the atmosphere, and the mood of past eras. Nevertheless, movies remain a controversial source of historical evidence. Because moviemakers are not held to the same standards as historians, historical films often contain inaccuracies and anachronisms. Further, films frequently blur the line between fact and fiction and avoid complex ideas that cannot be presented visually.Of course, no one goes to a movie expecting a history lesson....
Historical Context: Post-World War I Labor Tensions
The years following the end of World War I were a period of deep social tensions, aggrevated by high wartime inflation. Food prices more than doubled between 1915 and 1920; clothing costs more than tripled. A steel strike that began in Chicago in 1919 became much more than a simple dispute between labor and management. The Steel Strike of 1919 became the focal point for profound social anxieties, especially fears of Bolshevism.Organized labor had grown in strength during the course of the war. Many unions won recognition and the 12-hour workday was abolished. An 8-hour days was...
Historical Context: Slavery in a Capitalist World
Why were the South's political leaders so worried about whether slavery would be permitted in the West when geography and climate made it unlikely that slavery would ever prosper in the area? The answer lies in the South's growing awareness of its minority status in the Union, of the elimination of slavery in many other areas of the Western Hemisphere, and of the decline of slavery in the upper South.During the first half of the nineteenth century, slave labor was becoming an exception in the world. During the early years of the 19th century, Spain's newly independent New World...
Historical Context: The Breakdown of the Party System
As late as 1850, the two-party system seemed healthy. Democrats and Whigs drew strength in all parts of the country. Then, in the early 1850s, the two-party system began to disintegrate in response to massive foreign immigration. By 1856 the Whig party had collapsed and been replaced by a new sectional party, the Republicans.Between 1846 and 1855, more than three million foreigners arrived in America. In cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, and St. Louis immigrants actually outnumbered native-born citizens. Opponents of immigration capitalized on working-class fear of...
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