49 items
Richard Brookhiser, senior editor at National Review , discusses his book, Alexander Hamilton, American . Brookhiser recounts Alexander Hamilton's great successes and tragic failures as Revolutionary, bovernment-shaper, financial...
Julie Winch - "Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War"
Order Between Slavery and Freedom 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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Myths of the American Revolution
Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, contrasts the popular memory of the Revolutionary War with its more complicated realities. She argues that although many of us were...
Roundtable discussion on American Antislavery Writings
On December 2, 2014, four scholars joined Gilder Lehrman president and Barnard College professor James G. Basker for a roundtable discussion on American antislavery writings. The panel included Elizabeth Alexander (Yale), Christopher...
An African American soldier’s pay warrant, 1780
During the American Revolution, Sharp Liberty, an African American soldier, served in the Connecticut Line of the Continental Army. Before the war, he had been enslaved in Wallingford, Connecticut. In 1777, he enlisted in the army,...
American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation
James G. Basker (Barnard College, Columbia University) discusses his latest book, American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (The Library of America, 2012). Basker, who is also the president of the Gilder...
Inside the Vault: Black Patriots of the American Revolution
Originally broadcast on October 29, 2020, this session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection explores unique documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection that record the service of Black soldiers in the...
The Social and Intellectual Legacy of the American Revolution
"We can see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice. The mind once enlightened cannot...
Alexander Hamilton’s "gloomy" view of the American Revolution, 1780
By October 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton was discouraged by the apparent apathy of the American people and the ineffectuality of their elected representatives, as well as by the recent discovery of...
Woody Holton - "Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution"
Woody Holton is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Order Liberty Is Sweet at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank...
David Hackett Fischer - "African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals"
David Hackett Fischer is University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History, Emeritus at Brandeis University. Order African Founders at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase...
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...
David Waldstreicher - "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence"
David Waldstreicher is a Distinguished Professor of History, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Order The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We...
Glory Liu- "Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism"
Glory Liu is the assistant director for the Center for Economy and Society and assistant research professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Order Adam Smith’s America at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive...
Guided Readings: Toward Revolution
Reading 1 For fire and water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies in North America. Nothing can exceed the jealousy and emulation which they possess in regard to each other. . . . In short . . . were they left to...
The Post-Revolutionary Generation
Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles, explores how the men and women born after the American Revolution experienced and developed the theoretical ideas of liberty and independence put in place by...
Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, 1775
In April 1775, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and Virginia’s royal governor, threatened to free slaves and reduce the capital, Williamsburg, to ashes if the colonists rebelled against British authority. In the months that followed,...
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Joseph J. Ellis, Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, discusses his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, explains the emergence of the men who led the Revolutionary War and created...
Inside the Vault: The Lives and Works of Phillis Wheatley and Elizabeth Keckley
On the February 4, 2021 session of Inside the Vault: Highlights from the Gilder Lehrman Collection , our curators talk with English Language Arts educator Jeanette Providence and Hamilton cast member Krystal Mackie about the lives...
The Fight over Slavery in the Revolutionary Era
Columbia University professor Christopher Brown, author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006), examines the rise of anti-slavery thought during the Revolutionary era. Focusing on the often contrasting...
The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America: An Introduction
Whatever else the Declaration of Independence encompassed—a proclamation of political sovereignty, an indictment against the King of England, an appeal for allies—its assertion that “all men are created equal” shines as the polestar...
Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, 1770
By the beginning of 1770, there were 4,000 British soldiers in Boston, a city with 15,000 inhabitants, and tensions were running high. On the evening of March 5, crowds of day laborers, apprentices, and merchant sailors began to pelt...
What Does Liberty Look Like?
" We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ." Declaration of...
The Stamp Act, 1765
On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the “Stamp Act” to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the Seven Years’ War. The act required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various...
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...
"Ona Judge Outwits the Washingtons"
Soon after American colonists had won independence from Great Britain, Ona Judge was fighting for her own freedom from one of America’s most famous founding fathers, George Washington. George and Martha Washington valued Ona as one...
Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross - "A Black Women's History of the United States"
Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Kali Nicole Gross is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of African American Studies at Emory...
Black Writers of the Founding Era: A Conversation with James Basker
Black Writers of the Founding Era: A Conversation with James Basker Recorded at Roosevelt House, Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, April 17, 2024.
This discussion of the new Library of America anthology Black Writers of the...
Understanding Slavery via Narratives
James Oliver Horton speaks about slave narratives as an important resource for understanding American history.
Revolutionary in America
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...
Marcus Nevius - "City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856"
Order City of Refuge at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Cuffee Saunders
Cuffee Saunders Revolutionary War Born into slavery, Cuffee Saunders secured his freedom by serving during the Revolutionary War. Image Source: Benjamin Huntington, Oath certifying Cuffee Saunders's purchase of freedom, 1821, Gilder Lehrman...
Manisha Sinha - "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition"
Order The Slave's Cause at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Claire Bellerjeau and Tiffany Yecke Brooks - "Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution"
Order Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution 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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Bruce A. Ragsdale - "Washington and the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery"
Bruce A. Ragsdale has served as the director of the Federal Judicial History Office at the Federal Judicial Center. Order Washington and the Plow at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase...
James G. Basker - "Black Writers of the Founding Era"
James G. Basker is president and CEO of the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Order Black Writers of the Founding Era at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We...
Chris Brown - "Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism"
Order Moral Capital at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Generations in Captivity: Slavery in America
Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland, describes how the complex interplay of regional and generational factors shaped the development of slavery in the antebellum United States.
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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...
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