73 items
Jim Downs - "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine"
Order Maladies of Empire at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Alaina E. Roberts - "I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land"
Alaina E. Roberts is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. Order I’ve Been Here All the While at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
Susan Schulten - "A History of America in 100 Maps"
Susan Schulten is a professor of history at the University of Denver. Order A History of America in 100 Maps at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you...
Eric Foner, Kathleen DuVal, and Lisa McGirr - "Give Me Liberty! An American History"
Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lisa McGirr is a Charles Warren Professor of American...
Steven A. Steinbach and Maeva Marcus - "With Liberty and Justice for All? The Constitution in the Classroom"
Steven A. Steinbach teaches US history and government at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC and Maeva Marcus is a professor of law at George Washington University. Order With Liberty and Justice for All? at the Gilder...
"Grandfather's Journey"
When he was a young man, Allen Say’s grandfather left his home in Japan to explore the world. He began his journey by crossing the Pacific Ocean on a steamship, then wandered the deserts, farmlands, and cities of North America. Allen...
"Paper Son: The Inspiring Story of Tyrus Wong, Immigrant and Artist"
Before he became an artist named Tyrus Wong, he was a boy named Wong Geng Yeo. He traveled across a vast ocean from China to America with only a suitcase and a few papers. Not papers for drawing–which he loved to do–but immigration...
Official photograph from the "Golden Spike" Ceremony, 1869
This iconic photograph records the celebration marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad lines at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad,...
Jean Pfaelzer- "California, a Slave State"
Jean Pfaelzer is a public historian, commentator, and professor of American studies at the University of Delaware. Order California, a Slave State at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase...
Statistics: Agriculture in America
Farm Production Year Number of Farms* Bales of Cotton* Bushels of Corn* Bushels of Wheat* Price Index 1860=100 1860 2 3.8 839 173 100 1870 2.7 4.4 760 254 140 1880 4 6.6 1,706 502 100 1890 4.6 8.7 2,125 449 90 1900 5.7 10.1 2,662 599...
Gordon Chang - "The Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad"
Order The Ghosts of Gold Mountain at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
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Jane Hong - "Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion"
Order Opening the Gates to Asia at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Catherine Ceniza Choy - "Asian American Histories of the United States"
Catherine Ceniza Choy is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Order Asian American Histories at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
Elliott West - "The Essential West: Collected Essays"
Elliot West is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas Order The Essential West: Collected Essays at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the...
Jia Lynn Yang - "One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965
Jia Lynn Yang is national editor at the New York Times . Order One Mighty and Irresistible Tide at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for...
Survival in the American Wilderness: Fiction v. Nonfiction
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based units. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance....
Rural America: The Westward Movement
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
The Haymarket Affair, 1886
The Haymarket Affair is considered a watershed moment for American labor history, at a time when fears about the loyalties and activities of immigrants, anarchists, and laborers became linked in the minds of many Americans. On May 3,...
The Transcontinental Railroad in Images and Poetry
Unit Objectives Students will analyze a variety of primary sources related to the completion of the transcontinental railroad. investigate celebratory images and a poem to discover some of the key outcomes that arose from the ability...
On the emigrant trail, 1862
Samuel Russell, his mother, and his sisters emigrated to the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1861. The next spring, Russell joined a “down-and-back” wagon train to escort new pioneers to the settlement. These caravans...
Literacy and the immigration of "undesirables," 1903
During the Progressive era, tens of millions of immigrants came to the United States from Europe to fulfill their American dream. During this period most came from southern and eastern Europe, particularly from Italy, Russia, and the...
Verses on Norwegian emigration to America, 1853
Between 1836 and 1865, approximately 55,000 Norwegians sailed to the United States. [1] Like most immigrants, they sought opportunities that didn’t exist at home—religious freedom, economic security, land ownership, and educational...
Ken Burns - "Our America: A Photographic History"
Ken Burns, the producer and director of numerous film series, including The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and Country Music , founded his own documentary film company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His landmark film, The Civil War ,...
Elliott West - "Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion"
Elliott West is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. Order Continental Reckoning at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War
Thomas G. Andrews, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, discusses his Bancroft Prize–winning book, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, and the interconnection between railroads, coal,...
"Locomotive"
It is the summer of 1869, and trains, crews, and family are traveling together, riding America’s brand-new transcontinental railroad. These pages come alive with the details of the trip and the sounds, speed, and strength of the...
"Gittel's Journey: An Ellis Island Story"
Gittel and her mother were supposed to immigrate to America together, but when her mother is stopped by the health inspector, Gittel must make the journey alone. Her mother writes her cousin’s address in New York on a piece of paper....
Inside the Vault: Chinese Exclusion Act
In 1882, the US government passed legislation that prohibited Chinese immigration for ten years and declared Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization. It was the first act in American history to place broad restrictions on...
New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age
Vassar College historian Rebecca Edwards discusses some of the complexities of the Gilded Age with Gilder Lehrman President James Basker. Professor Edwards's 2006 study, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, offers a nuanced view...
Immigration and Migration
The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles,...
The Development of the West
In the summer of 1876, two dramatically different places captured the American nation’s attention. As the summer began, fairgoers in Philadelphia teemed into the Centennial Exhibition held to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary...
The Rise of Industrial America, 1877-1900
When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age , they gave the late nineteenth century its popular name. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner...
History Times: A Nation of Immigrants
Coming to the Land of Opportunity Throughout American history, millions of people around the world have left their homelands for a chance to start a new life in this country—and they continue to come here to this day. People who come...
Emma Goldman on the restriction of civil liberties, 1919
Emma Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (present-day Lithuania). In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, becoming a well-known author and lecturer promoting anarchism, workers’ rights,...
Statistics: Trends in American Farming
Percentage of Labor Force in Agriculture 1860 53% 1870 52% 1880 51% 1890 43% 1900 40% 1910 31% 1920 26% 1930 21% Farming Profession Number of Farms (in thousands) Proportion of Total Population 1940 6,350 23.1% 1950 5,648 15.2% 1960 3...
Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy
In conjunction with our panel, Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy (presented in partnership with the Office of the Governor of Louisiana), the Gilder Lehrman Institute has compiled this list of resources on the Plessy v....
Guided Readings: The Rise of the City
Reading 1 To-day, what is a tenement? . . . When last arraigned before the bar of public justice: “It is generally a brick building from four to six stories high on the street, frequently with a store on the first floor which, when...
Guided Readings: Indian Policy
Reading 1 One [infantry] battalion...left Fort Lyon [Colorado] on the night of the 28th of November, 1864; about daybreak on the morning of the 29th of November we came in sight of the camp of friendly [Cheyenne and Arapaho] Indians.....
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