202 items
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 Battle of the Sexes
It’s hard to explain, if you weren’t there at the time, why the "Battle of the Sexes"—the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs—was so important. The most enduring image from the event was the picture of Billie...
Women and the Great Depression
In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt’s It’s Up to the Women exhorted American women to help pull the country through its current economic crisis, the gravest it had ever faced: "The women know that life must go on and that the needs of life must...
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Economic Policy through the Lens of History
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be...
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The Indians’ War of Independence
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson clearly described the role of American Indians in the American Revolution. In addition to his other oppressive acts, King George III had "endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of...
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James Madison and the Constitution
James Madison had just turned twenty-five when he took up his first public office as a delegate to the Virginia provincial convention that endorsed American independence and then adopted a new constitution and an accompanying...
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The Square Deal: Theodore Roosevelt and the Themes of Progressive Reform
Progressivism arrived at a moment of crisis for the United States. As the nineteenth century came to a close, just decades after the Civil War, many feared the nation faced another explosive and violent conflict, this time between the...
Technology of the 1800s
In his classic study, Democracy in America (1835–1840), Alexis de Tocqueville titled one of his chapters "Why the Americans are more Addicted to Practical rather than Theoretical Science." He observed that the political and social...
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Conflict and Commerce: The Rise and Fall of New Netherland
In September 1609, when Henry Hudson guided his ship, De Halve Maen , through the narrows dividing present-day Staten and Long Islands, he was not the first European navigator to sail into what we know today as New York Bay. The...
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The Importance of Muhammad Ali
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., as Muhammad Ali was once known, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942—a time when blacks were the servant class in Louisville. They held jobs such as tending the backstretch at Churchill...
Winning the Vote: A History of Voting Rights
Voting Rights on the Eve of the Revolution The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a "stake in society." Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed...
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Indian Slavery in the Americas
The story of European colonialism in the Americas and its victimization of Africans and Indians follows a central paradigm in most textbooks. The African "role" encompasses the transportation, exploitation, and suffering of many...
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The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source
The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation of an African American literary tradition, as well as unique glimpses into the souls of slaves themselves. The roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published in...
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The Origins and Legacy of the Pennsylvania Quakers
Enthusiastic religious conviction among rustic Quakers contributed much to what seems civilized and refined about American culture and society. Although the movement later attracted intellectual and genteel members, Quakerism began as...
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Motor City: The Story of Detroit
"You can see here, as it is impossible to do in a more varied and complex city, the whole structure of an industrial society." So wrote essayist Edmund Wilson, reporting on a visit to the Motor City in the 1930s. As the capital of...
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Change and Crisis: North America on the Eve of the European Invasion
It was around the year 1450. A young man was living alone in the dense forest somewhere southeast of Lake Ontario because there was not enough food in his home village. Many like him were doing the same and some, perhaps even this...
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The Hundred Days and Beyond: What Did the New Deal Accomplish?
There wasn’t anybody in that entire Brains Trust apparently that had given any thought—they had absolutely no plans—or any real study to the problem created by this banking situation. —Walter Wyatt, Federal Reserve official, amazed at...
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Why Sports History Is American History
In the classroom, examples from sports can explain key events in American history and help explore how people in American society have grappled with racial, ethnic, and regional differences in our very diverse nation. Whether it is...
Graft and Oil: How Teapot Dome Became the Greatest Political Scandal of Its Time
In the 1920s, Teapot Dome became synonymous with government corruption and the scandals arising out of the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Since then, it has sometimes been used to symbolize the power and influence of...
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Abolition and Antebellum Reform
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...
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The Rise of an American Institution: The Stock Market
On nearly every workday in the United States, if you watch cable news or browse an Internet news site at 9:30 in the morning and 4:00 in the afternoon (Eastern Time), you’ll probably see two utterly unremarkable events covered live....
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Magellan: Missing in Action
Ferdinand Magellan, celebrated as the first circumnavigator, has long been the orphan of history. Although he did not survive his famous voyage, Magellan became both an icon of exploration and an outcast—disowned by his native...
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Robber Barons or Captains of Industry?
On February 9, 1859, Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times , said something strange about Cornelius Vanderbilt. Raymond didn’t like Vanderbilt, a steamship tycoon with such a vast fleet that he was known as the Commodore,...
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When the Past Speaks to the Present: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History and a professor of history at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which received the Pulitzer...
Bridging the Caribbean: Puerto Rican Roots in Nineteenth-Century America
In recent years, the media has tended to portray US Latinos of Hispanic Caribbean ancestry as new immigrants, but this characterization ignores the long connections between these immigrants and the United States. And because Puerto...
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