332 items
James Oakes discusses his book, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics.
Historians Now: Lincoln’s Selected Writings edited by David S. Reynolds
David S. Reynolds talks about editing the Norton Critical Edition of Lincoln's Selected Writings. The volume not only includes an wide range of annotated texts, but perspectives on Lincoln's writings from his contemporaries and...
Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1863: Document in a Minute
Gilder Lehrman curator Beth Huffer explores Thomas Nast's celebratory illustration of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclaimation of a day of Thanksgiving. On December 5, Harper’s published a two-page engraving by renowned artist Thomas...
"Your Late Lamented Husband": A Letter from Frederick Douglass to Mary Todd Lincoln
On March 4, 1865, Frederick Douglass attended President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration. Standing in the crowd, Douglass heard Lincoln declare slavery the "cause" and emancipation the "result" of the Civil War. Over the crisp...
America the Newcomer: Claiming the Louisiana Purchase
The Lewis and Clark expedition is rightly considered one of the great American stories. In May of 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off by keelboat up the Missouri River with thirty-one men, the "Corps of Discovery," on an...
Lincoln
No one seemed less well-cast for the role of reformer, in an age of reform, than Abraham Lincoln. To begin with, he was a stranger, emotionally and intellectually, to evangelical Christianity, the great engine of reform in the...
The Road to War
‘A house divided against itself can not stand’ I believe this government can not endure permanently, half slave, and half free . . . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it...
Slavery and Anti-Slavery
Abolitionism emerged in America as part of a massive fusion of reform movements related to religious revivals and dedicated to the goal of creating a righteous society capable of fulfilling America’s high ideals. [1] In part, the...
National Expansion and Reform, 1815–1860
A good way to understand the men and women who created America’s reform tradition and carried it across the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War is to look at the political heritage their parents and grandparents left to them...
The First Age of Reform
"In the history of the world," Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour." [1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in mind a remarkable flowering of reform...
The Age of Jackson
The Age of Jackson has never been easy to define. Broader than his presidency (1829–1837), and narrower than his life (1767–1845), it roughly describes the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the nineteenth century. While some...
Admiration and Ambivalence: Frederick Douglass and John Brown
John Brown did not make it easy for people to love him—until he died on the gallows. Frederick Douglass, from his first meeting with Brown in 1847, through a testy but important relationship in the late 1850s, had long viewed the...
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...
Frederick Douglass: From Slavery to Freedom
Frederick Douglass was one of the first fugitive slaves to speak out publicly against slavery. On the morning of August 12, 1841, he stood up at an anti-slavery meeting on Nantucket Island. With great power and eloquence, he described...
"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War
In the spring of 1871, Frederick Douglass was worried. Six years after Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Grant was now President of the United States, the Union of northern and southern states was...
Douglass and Lincoln: A Convergence
In 1880, Osborn Oldroyd invited Frederick Douglass to write something for a collection of tributes to Abraham Lincoln, published two years later as The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles . Douglass was uncharacteristically brief, but...
"Half slave, half free": Lincoln and the "House Divided"
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all proclaim, "a house divided against itself can not stand." [1] Living in a Bible-reading country, most nineteenth-century Americans knew that metaphor by heart—words that also made good common...
"To give all a chance": Lincoln, Abolition, and Economic Freedom
To read carefully the Lincoln economic parable of the ant (reprinted here) suggests a lost truth about our sixteenth president: during most of Abraham Lincoln’s political career he focused not on anti-slavery but on economic policy....
"That glorious consummation": Lincoln on the Abolition of Slavery
"That man who thinks Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln," wrote Abraham Lincoln’s long-time law partner, William Henry Herndon. "He...
Lincoln and Emancipation: Black Enfranchisement in 1863 Louisiana
As the president of a fractured nation, Abraham Lincoln faced no issue more perplexing than that of restoring the rebel states to the Union. Reconstruction during wartime was, he judged, "the greatest question ever presented to...
"In the end you are sure to succeed": Lincoln on Perseverance
If there was one quality Abraham Lincoln believed essential both to individual success and to social advancement, it was industriousness. A child of the impoverished frontier who went on to take proud advantage of what historian Gabor...
Abraham Lincoln and the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment
"Those who knew Mr. Lincoln best," wrote Illinois Congressman Isaac Arnold, "knew that he looked, confidently, to the ultimate extinction of slavery" and used "every means which his prudent and scrupulous mind recognized as right and...
"I begin to see it": Lincoln the War President
In the spring of 1864, three years into the Civil War, it seemed that the Union was finally in a position to defeat the Confederacy, taking advantage of the significant losses the Confederacy had suffered in 1863. For three years,...
Brenda Stevenson - "What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast? A History of the Enslaved Black Family"
Brenda E. Stevenson holds the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women’s History at St. John’s College, Oxford University and the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles ...
The Right to Vote, Part 1: The Early Republic through the Civil War
The Right to Vote: Part 1 The Early Republic through the Civil War
Who could vote in the founding and Jacksonian eras? Scroll through to view the exhibition (above). Recorded readings of select components in the exhibition...
Jon Meacham - "And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle"
Jon Meacham is a historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. Order And There Was Light at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting...
Paul Ortiz - "An African American and Latinx History of the United States"
Paul Ortiz is an associate professor of history and the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida. Order An African American and Latinx History of the United States at the Gilder Lehrman Book...
Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery
TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The...
Clint Smith - "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America"
Order How the Word is Passed at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Edward L. Ayers —“American Visions: The United States, 1800–1860”
Edward L. Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. Order American Visions at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided....
Guided Readings: Roots of Reform: Religion and Social Reform
From 1801 for years a blessed revival of religion spread through almost the entire inhabited parts of the West. . . . The Presbyterians and Methodists in a great measure united in this work, met together, prayed together, and preached...
Guided Readings: Impact of the Revolution on Women and African Americans
Reading 1 I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If...
Guided Readings: Religion and Social Reform: Abolitionism
Reading 1 Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” . . . I shall strenuously contend...
Guided Readings: Political Battles of the Jacksonian Era: The Bank War
Reading 1: It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or...
Guided Readings: Using Primary and Secondary Sources: Slavery in the Founding Era
Primary and secondary sources can provide different kinds of information about the past. In the context of slavery, Phillis Wheatley is considered the most important figure of the eighteenth century. Two accounts of her experience...
Guided Readings: Manifest Destiny
Reading 1: Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. John L. O'Sullivan, 1845 Reading 2: Texas has been absorbed into the Union as the...
Guided Readings: Slavery and Abolition
Sid Lapidus Collection: Liberty and the American Revolution Introduction The campaign to end slavery was a prolonged struggle. In England and in America in the eighteenth century, some authors such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson...
Guided Readings: Antebellum Social Reform
Reading 1: “The elementary schools throughout the state are irresponsible institutions, established by individuals, from mere motives of private speculation or gain, who are sometimes destitute of character, and frequently, of the...
Guided Readings: Slavery
Reading 1: The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the...most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.....Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is...
Guided Readings: Sectional Conflict
Reading 1 I do not . . . hesitate to avow before this House and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the...
Guided Readings: Jacksonian Democracy
Reading 1: The aristocracy of our country . . . continually contrive to change their party name. It was first Tory, then Federalist, then no party . . . then National Republican, now Whig. . . . But by whatever name they reorganize...
Guided Readings: Indian Removal
Reading 1 Toward the aborigines of this country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people. Humanity...
The Gettysburg Address: Identifying Text, Context, and Subtext
Objective This lesson is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These resources were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
H.W. Brands - "Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics"
H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Order Founding Partisans at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
Using Works of Art in Teaching American History
The best teachers of Western Civilization courses have long made use of the European fine arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts—to bring the subject alive to their students. It is perhaps less well recognized...
Guided Readings: Political Battles of the Jacksonian Era: Nullification
Reading 1: And, sir, let it be remembered that a revenue system, grossly and palpably unequal in itself--a system which, under the most favorable modification, would levy the entire amount of the federal taxes from one-fifth part of...
Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective
Of the ten to sixteen million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, more than one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in...
Jonathan W. White - "Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade"
Jonathan W. White is a professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University. Order Shipwrecked at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for...
Elizabeth Varon- "Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South"
Elizabeth R. Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. Order Longstreet at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
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