214 items
"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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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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Martha Washington Creates the Role of First Lady
During nearly forty-one years of marriage, Martha and George Washington lived together in harmony and mutual enjoyment. Never did he play the overbearing patriarch nor she the querulous nag. Theirs was a peaceful domestic partnership,...
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"No Event Could Have Filled Me with Greater Anxieties": George Washington and the First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789
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...
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A More Perfect Union? Barack Obama and the Politics of Unity
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...
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FDR’s First Inaugural Address
Several years ago when I was researching a very different subject at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, I happened across several archival documents related to FDR’s first inaugural address. As a...
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Sharing a Civil War Photo with a Million People
A tree falls on a shed and all but destroys it. A passing student notices that from a certain angle the portion of the shed still standing looks just like a man on horseback. It is uncanny; a talented artist could hardly do better....
"The Brave Men, Living and Dead": Common Soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg
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)...
Field Relief Work at Gettysburg
On Independence Day in 1863, a Saturday, it was raining in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as burial details and medical officers took account of the recent battle. Some 50,000 men had fallen in three days, 8,000 of them killed outright and...
How the Town Shaped the Battle: Gettysburg 1863
We think we know who the important players at the Battle of Gettysburg were: Robert E. Lee, or George G. Meade, or the Union Army of the Potomac, or the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. But there is one major player from whom,...
The Origins of the Transcontinental Railroad
The completion in 1869 of the first transcontinental railroad—the Pacific Railway, as the combination of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific was called—created two of the most iconic symbols in American history. The first is a...
Financing the Transcontinental Railroad
The first transcontinental railroad, built between 1864 and 1869, was the greatest construction project of its era. It involved building a line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, across a vast, largely unmapped territory...
A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington
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....
Disasters and the Politics of Memory
The controversy that erupted around the opening of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum on May 21, 2014, reminds us that much is at stake in the way disasters are remembered. Costing some $700 million to build, with an annual...
"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900
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...
The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood
In the latter part of August 1926, the sky darkened over much of the central United States and a heavy and persistent rain began to fall. Rain pelted first Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma, then edged eastward into Iowa...
Revolutionary Philadelphia
The image is so clear in our minds, seen first in elementary school and reinforced countless times since: a few dozen gentlemen with powdered wigs and period suits (coats, waistcoats, and knee-length breeches) gathered in a large...
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The Passage of the Civil Rights Act
When the Civil Rights Act passed fifty years ago, it was immediately hailed as one of the most important pieces of legislation of the twentieth century. Not only did it ban discrimination in hotels, restaurants, public parks, schools,...
Civil Rights Leadership and the 1964 Civil Rights Act
The most important social protest movement of the twentieth century was the civil rights movement, which provided countless numbers of people the opportunity to become involved in the struggle for racial equality. The civil rights...
Dispatches from the Front: The Civil Rights Act and the Pursuit of Greater Freedom in a Small Southern City
The civil rights protests that enveloped the nation in the summer of 1964 occurred against the backdrop of the slow, uncertain progress of the legislation that would eventually become known as the Civil Rights Act. As activists across...
Teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964
As is the case with most historical events, the key to teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) is context. The CRA by itself is simply a piece of congressional legislation—structurally complicated and textually byzantine. Still,...
"Dear Girl, how much I love you": The Revolutionary War Letters of Henry and Lucy Knox
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...
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...
"Dear Miss Cole": World War I Letters of American Servicemen
"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...
Race and the Good War: An Oral History Interview with Calvin D. Cosby, World War II Veteran
Calvin D. Cosby was born in 1918, in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was my hometown as well. I first knew Calvin Cosby as the husband of my beloved second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ima Bradford Cosby. Mr. and Mrs. Cosby and their daughter...
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