31 items
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...
Lincoln’s Civil Religion
His long-time law partner William Herndon once described Abraham Lincoln as "the most shut-mouthed man who ever lived." That phrase wonderfully captured an important characteristic of a politician who had surprisingly few friends and...
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Two Revolutions in the Atlantic World: Connections between the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution
The late eighteenth century saw two successful anti-colonial revolutions unfold in the Americas. The first was in the United States, culminating in 1783. The second was in Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. That...
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Abolition and Religion
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...
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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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Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Matter of Influence
One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the poet Langston Hughes called the novel, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time." Hughes’s observation is particularly apt in that it avoids...
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"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City
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...
The Invention of the Fourth of July
The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, as it has come to be known, is perhaps the most and the least American of holidays. It is the most American because it marks the beginning of the nation, because it rapidly became an occasion...
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Transcendentalism and Social Reform
Those Americans who have heard of American Transcendentalism associate it with the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Henry David Thoreau. Asked to name things about the group they remember, most mention Emerson’s ringing...
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Iberian Roots of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1640
In its broadest sense, African American history predates the history of the United States, colonial or otherwise; by the time the English colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, Africans and people of African descent had already been...
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Venezuela’s First Declaration of Independence and US Republicanism: Convergences and Divergences
On the eve of the nineteenth century, Venezuela was a rich dominion of the Spanish Empire in South America. Coffee, indigo, and cacao, grown on large plantations and sold to European merchants, connected the rural region to the...
The Filibuster King: The Strange Career of William Walker, the Most Dangerous International Criminal of the Nineteenth Century
On November 8, 1855, on the central plaza of the Nicaraguan city of Granada, a line of riflemen shot General Ponciano Corral, the senior general of the Conservative government. Curiously, the members of the firing squad hailed from...
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Avast! How the US Built a Navy, Sent In the Marines, and Faced Down the Barbary Pirates
In October 1784, an American merchant vessel, the Betsey , was on a trade run from her home port of Boston to Tenerife in the Canary Islands when she was approached by an un-flagged vessel. Suddenly, "sabers grasped between their...
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The Pueblo Revolt
In 1680 the people known collectively as "Pueblos" rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. The Spanish had...
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The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s America
Nathaniel Hawthorne is the strange American author who has never been out of fashion; since his death in 1864, his stories and novels have resisted the tides of taste, canon reformation, and critical vicissitude. Herman Melville had...
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Unruly Americans in the Revolution
Nearly all of the blockbuster biographies of the Founding Fathers—whether the subject is George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams—portray the vast majority of ordinary Americans as mere bystanders. Although the authors of...
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The William Shepp Diaries: Combat and Danger in World War I
"Disappointments," wrote Private William Shepp, "are common in the army." At the time, Shepp, an aspiring teacher from a small community in West Virginia, was pondering the seemingly unrewarding and unending work that he and the men...
The Diary of Ella Jane Osborn, World War I US Army Nurse
The unpublished diary of Ella Jane Osborn (1881–1966) in the Gilder Lehrman Collection opens an extraordinary window into the daily experiences of one American woman stationed in a US Army hospital in a dangerous and contested battle...
Sisters of Suffrage: British and American Women Fight for the Vote
The dominant narrative of the entire women’s suffrage movement begins and ends with the United States and Britain. Hundreds of thousands of women petitioned, canvassed, lobbied, demonstrated, engaged in mass civil disobedience, went...
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Perils of the Ocean in the Early Modern Era
A traveler considering an ocean voyage around 1600 had much to contemplate. Voyage by voyage, explorers and colonists alike needed knowledge about the seas and lands in the Atlantic world. Unfortunately, information was never shared...
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The Declaration of Independence and the Origins of Modern Self-Determination
Ask any American what the opening lines of the US Declaration of Independence of 1776 are and chances are they might reply, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then go on to recite its inspiring statements on human equality...
Teaching American History to Muslim Exchange Students
Everyone knows that the election of 2004 marked a pivotal turning point for the American people. That point was brought home forcefully by the experience of teaching American history that summer to a group of twenty-one young Muslim...
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The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
The United States harvested a bumper crop of good immigrants in 1955. About 1,000 highly educated Chinese gained citizenship, including acclaimed scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs such as the architect I. M. Pei, the...
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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Ralph W. Kirkham: A Christian Soldier in the US-Mexican War
North of Mexico’s border, most Americans know the 1846 conflict that established that boundary (if they know it at all) as the training ground for Civil War heroes. Generals Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and...
The WPA: Antidote to the Great Depression?
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, estimates of the number of jobless workers in the United States ranged from thirteen million to as high as fifteen million—a quarter of the working population. Every...
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Advice (Not Taken) for the French Revolution from America
"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...
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Exiles by the Streams of Babylon: Newport Jews in the Colonial Era
Newport, Rhode Island, wears its colonial past like a badge of honor. Visitors to its historic district encounter numerous plaques, markers, and monuments as they wend the town’s narrow and cobblestoned streets. As contemporary...
Globalizing Protest in the 1980s: Musicians Collaborate to Change the World
"There something’s happening here," Stephen Stills sang in "For What It’s Worth," a 1966 song about a confrontation between students and police in Los Angeles. And for a time, there was. Radio stations filled the air with protest...
A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad
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...
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