127 items
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...
The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America
Kevin Phillips is the author of eight books, a journalist and a national elections commentator for CBS News during l988, 1992 and 96 presidential elections In the Cousins’ Wars, Phillips poses the question, how did Anglo-America ...
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...
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...
Jefferson as Revolutionary
Frank Cogliano, professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, discusses Thomas Jefferson's legacy as it relates to the American Revolution, and looks at how Jefferson himself wished to be remembered--as the author of...
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
Gordon Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University and the author of The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Wood presents an unusual portrait of this celebrated American folk hero, tracing...
Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York
Historian Richard Ketchum is the author of the classic studies Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill ; The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton ; and Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War . In...
The Real Treason of Aaron Burr
In 1807, Aaron Burr was tried and acquitted on charges of treason for his "adventures" in the American West, but he had fallen out of favor in American life long before, after he had run for president against Thomas Jefferson, served...
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Kissinger: A Biography, traces Benjamin Franklin’s life from runaway apprentice to Founding Father, exploring the breadth of his passions and accomplishments as writer,...
Understanding Slavery via Narratives
James Oliver Horton speaks about slave narratives as an important resource for understanding American history.
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...
His Excellency George Washington
Joseph J. Ellis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation and the National Book Award for American Sphinx , examines George Washington’s career as a general and the challenges he faced as the...
Washington, Grant, Marshall: Three Soldiers and American Ways of War, Part 1: Washington
Josiah Bunting III is president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the author of Ulysses S. Grant (2004). In a series of three lectures, Josiah Bunting III examines the lives of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and...
American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence
Pauline Maier, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discusses several aspects of her book American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence . She reveals that...
Alexander Hamilton, American
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...
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...
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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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...
Reason and Emotion in Revolutionary America
New York University historian Nicole Eustace discusses the "tempest of emotion" that swept through the Age of Reason, epitomized by the earliest call for a full break between the American colonies and Great Britain, Thomas Paine’s...
Taxation and Representation: The Imperial Debate between Britain and the Americans
Brown University historian Gordon Wood describes the British and American conceptions of representation during the eighteenth century, widely diverging points of view that were forged by radically different experiences with...
Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character
Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, discusses the "fatal twins," Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, whose military, legal, and political careers intersected for nearly thirty years before they came to duel in...
The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States
Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood, the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University, discusses his 2011 essay collection, The Idea of America: Reflections on the...
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...
Historians Now: "The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764-1776"
Gordon Wood discusses the book "The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764-1776".
The War for Independence
On July 4, 1774, exactly two years before the United States declared independence, a patriotic club in Worcester, Massachusetts, decided that each member should have in the ready two pounds of gunpowder and twelve flints. With the...
The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective
No American document has had a greater global impact than the Declaration of Independence. It has been fundamental to American history longer than any other text because it was the first to use the name "the United States of America":...
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: Witness to the Founding Era
This series of online exhibitions explores the importance of Alexander Hamilton to the founding of the United States. Each mini-exhibition features locations where Alexander Hamilton made history and documents written by or about him...
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