158 items
"Across the Continent" is among the most familiar lithographs of Currier and Ives. It features a locomotive chugging from the foreground toward a far western horizon. To the left of the tracks are the standard images of the coming of...
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The unpublished diary of Ella Jane Osborn (1881–1966) in the Gilder Lehrman Collection opens an extraordinary window into the daily experiences of one American woman stationed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...
Teaching the Revolution
For most Americans, young and old, the history of the American Revolution can be summed up something like this: In 1776, all the colonists rose up in unison to rebel against a tyrannical king and the horrible burden of unfair taxes...
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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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From the Editor
Popular music is the soundtrack to much of our history. When Revolutionary War soldiers went off to war, they did so to the tune of "Yankee Doodle." Abolitionist songs, sung by groups like the Hutchinson Family Singers, brought the...
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...
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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"Ditched, Stalled and Stranded": Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression
During the Great Depression, a top commercial portraitist took to San Francisco’s streets to experiment with representing the social devastation surrounding her. Her photos showed men sleeping on sidewalks and in parks like bundles of...
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Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Thousands of Women Were Elected to Political Office before 1920
In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the well-known leader of the woman’s rights movement, declared her intention to run for Congress, from Brooklyn, New York. Stanton was probably the first woman to campaign for a federal office. It...
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Arturo Alfonso Schomburg: Archivist, Institution Builder, and Advocate of Global Black History
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” So begins one of the most well-known essays of the Harlem Renaissance, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” written by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Published in the March...
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...
Why Immigration Matters
It is difficult today to recapture the iconoclasm signaled by Oscar Handlin’s opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted more than fifty years ago: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I...
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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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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 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...
"Revered By All": The Declaration of Independence in the Reconstruction Era
Although it was the speech that redefined the conflict and effectively changed the meaning of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address is often misunderstood today when it is not simply ignored, at least in American...
The Revolutionary Era West, before and after American Independence
In December 1772, a year before angry colonists heaved chests of East India tea into Boston Harbor, the British government seemed on the cusp of creating a new North American colony. Named “Vandalia,” in honor of Queen Charlotte’s...
Born Modern: An Overview of the West
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go. At various times places now considered as thoroughly eastern as western Pennsylvania, western...
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Why We the People? Citizens as Agents of Constitutional Change
"We the People?" asked Patrick Henry at the Virginia convention to ratify the new Constitution in 1788. "Who authorized them to speak the language of ‘We the People,’ instead of ‘We the States’?" [1] Looking back, we can be grateful...
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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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Women in American Politics in the Twentieth Century
At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were outsiders to the formal structures of political life—voting, serving on juries, holding elective office—and they were subject to wide-ranging discrimination that marked them as...
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Adams v. Jackson: The Election of 1824
James Monroe’s two terms in office as president of the United States (1817–1825) are often called the "Era of Good Feelings." The country appeared to have entered a period of strength, unity of purpose, and one-party government with...
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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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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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A Right Deferred: African American Voter Suppression after Reconstruction
In the United States, voting is a constitutionally protected right and an essential symbol of meaningful political participation in our nation’s electoral processes of governing. The right to vote and to have one’s vote count toward...
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