66 items
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for the second time. The setting itself reflected how much had changed in the past four years. When Lincoln delivered his First Inaugural Address, the new Capitol dome, which...
Women and the Home Front: New Civil War Scholarship
In the 1960s the image of Scarlett O’Hara standing before a Technicolor-drenched panorama from Gone With the Wind (1939) was still firmly planted within the imagination of the American public as a symbol of women on the Civil War home...
Women and Wagoners: Camp Followers in the American War for Independence
An old tune called "The Girl I Left Behind Me" tells of a lovelorn soldier yearning to return home to his waiting fair maid. Although there is a good chance that this song was fifed during the Revolutionary War, the earliest...
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The Other Theater: The War for American Independence beyond the Colonies
After the British signed the peace treaty that ended the American War for Independence in 1783, the City of London decided to commission a work of art to commemorate the conflict. The city’s representatives approached John Singleton...
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Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity
Strictly speaking, all American novels (with the exception of those written by Native Americans) are in one way or another immigrant fiction. But we usually think of immigrant fiction more narrowly as the encounter of the foreign-born...
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The US and Spanish American Revolutions
If one says "American Revolution" in the United States today, it is assumed that what is being referred to is the North American liberation struggles against the British Empire in the late eighteenth century. But the British North...
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The Puerto Rican Experience in World War I
Between 18,000 and 20,000 Puerto Ricans served in the United States Armed Forces during World War I. [1] Puerto Ricans have been serving in the US military since 1899, when Congress authorized the creation of the Battalion of Porto...
American Sabor: A Guided Playlist of Latino Music
The word sabor in Spanish evokes the delights of music, as well as food. It signifies a rich essence that makes our mouths water, or makes our bodies want to move. In this article we highlight a few songs by Latinos and Latinas that...
Risk Takers and History Makers: Mexican Women of the World War II Generation
Escaping poverty and revolution and lured by prospective employment in agriculture, mining, transportation, and the building trades, more than one million Mexicans migrated to the United States between 1910 and 1930, an estimated one...
Spain’s Black Militias in the American Revolution
In 1775, Virginia’s governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, issued a proclamation offering liberty to all enslaved Blacks who would join Great Britain’s military forces and defeat the rebellious Americans fighting for their...
"Courage to Face the Unknown": The World War II Service and Legacy of Celina Baez Sotomayor
During the 1940s hundreds of thousands of American women left their hometowns to serve in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), a US Army unit created in World War II to enable women to serve in noncombat positions and “free a man to fight.” ...
Lemuel Haynes, Young African American Patriot of the 1770s
In 1776, Lemuel Haynes was a young veteran of the War of Independence who was envisioning his future. He had been an indentured servant from his birth in 1753 to his coming of age in 1774. After being released from indenture, he...
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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Lincoln and Whitman
The relationship between Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln has long been the stuff of legend. According to one report, in 1857 Lincoln in his Springfield law office picked up a copy of Whitman’s poetry volume Leaves of Grass , began...
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Hispanics in the United States: Origins and Destinies
In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world...
The Catcher in the Rye: The Voice of Alienation
One of the most widely taught novels in the United States, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) opens with the sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield’s disillusioned departure from what may be the last in a series of schools that...
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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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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....
The Myth of the Frontier: Progress or Lost Freedom
For two centuries the frontier West was the setting for America’s most enduring form of popular entertainment. Daniel Boone—master hunter, pathfinder, Indian fighter, and a frontier leader of the American Revolution—was the progenitor...
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Mexicans in the Making of America
Today more than one of every ten Americans claims Mexican descent or heritage. In 2017 Mexican-origin people accounted for 63 percent (thirty-five million) of the nation's total Latino population. By 2050 the Latino share of the...
The Righteous Revolution of Mercy Otis Warren
Seven months after British Regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, three months after King George III declared the colonies in a state of rebellion, and a month after British artillery leveled the town of Falmouth (now Portland,...
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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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Rethinking Huck
A classic, Mark Twain quipped, is "a book which people praise and don't read." The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the rare classic that is highly praised and widely read. Following World War II, it became required reading in most...
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Mexican Farm Labor and the Agricultural Economy of the United States
In July of 1958, a Mexican man in Empalme, Mexico, died outside a recruitment center for Mexican men who wanted to participate in a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program. The program, designed and agreed upon by both the...
Immigration Policy, Mexican Americans, and Undocumented Immigrants, 1954 to the Present
In 1953, a pamphlet ominously tilted What Price Wetbacks? circulated widely throughout the American Southwest. Its authors warned that a “wetback invasion” was underway, one that posed “a threat to our health, our economy, [and] our...
Abraham Lincoln's "Apple of Gold": The Declaration of Independence
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” [1] So Abraham Lincoln began the most famous speech of...
"I, Too": Langston Hughes’s Afro-Whitmanian Affirmation
To read the text and hear the poem click here. Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S....
Frederick Douglass, Orator
Frederick Douglass was a great speaker before he was a great writer. Many African Americans were renowned as orators in the mid nineteenth-century, particularly preachers and anti-slavery lecturers. The most famous names include...
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From The Editor
Every teacher knows that a novel can sometimes convey the mood and spirit of a historical era or event more powerfully than a textbook. And every teacher also knows that some novels have even made history. These are books that every...
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Voices of Democracy: Jovita Idár, the Idár Family, and the Struggle against Juan Crow
In August 2023, the US Mint will release the Jovita Idár quarter, “the ninth coin in the American Women Quarters Program” authorized by Public Law 116–330. On its website, the Mint states that Idár’s “ideas and practices were ahead of...
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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El enemigo de mi enemigo es mi amigo: Bernardo de Gálvez and the Battle That Saved the United States at Its Birth
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” goes the old adage, which is particularly apt when describing the relationship between Spain and the nascent United States during the War of American Independence. By 1775 when the war began,...
The Years of Magical Thinking: Explaining the Salem Witchcraft Crisis
Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from semi-mythical events such as the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and Salem witchcraft....
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The Spanish Siege of Pensacola
In 1779, the king of Spain declared war on Britain. Like his ally the king of France, he decided to fight his British enemies while they were busy trying to defeat the American Revolution. As soon as he declared war, the Mississippi...
When Myth and Meaning Overshadow History: Remembering the Alamo
Rare are the students who enter US classrooms without some preconceived notions regarding the Alamo. Thanks to more than a dozen films produced at regular intervals over the last century, to Walt Disney’s television series for baby...
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