61 items
Order The First Reconstruction at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
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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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...
The Battle of Horseshoe Bend and the end of the Creek War, 1814
On May 12, 1814, Tennessee settler Isaac Stephens wrote to his uncle Henry Mackey in Virginia about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. In that battle on March 27, 1814, US Army and Tennessee militia troops under General Andrew...
Kate Masur - "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction"
Order Until Justice Be Done at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
Annette Gordon-Reed - "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and a professor of history at Harvard. Order The Hemingses of Monticello at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the...
Alan Taylor - "American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850"
Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Order American Republics at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
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...
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...
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...
Washington Encourages a Prospective Immigrant: The Economic Potential of the States in 1796
During his second presidential term, George Washington enjoyed a lively correspondence with Sir John Sinclair, member of Parliament and leader of Britain’s scientific agriculture movement, on matters of mutual interest to the two...
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...
Inside the Vault: Fighting for the Rights of Black Lives in the Founding Era
Prince Hall and James Forten protested the treatment of Black Americans during the Founding Era. In 1788 in Boston, Hall wrote a petition demanding the Massachusetts government protect Black sailors from being kidnapped and sold into...
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...
"Brick by Brick"
The home of the United States president was built by many hands, including those of enslaved persons, who undertook this amazing achievement long before there were machines to do those same jobs. Stirring and emotional, Floyd Cooper...
"No Small Potatoes: Junius G. Groves and His Kingdom in Kansas"
Junius G. Groves came from humble beginnings in the Bluegrass State. Born in Kentucky into slavery, freedom came when he was still a young man and he intended to make a name for himself. Along with thousands of other African...
Sally Hemings
Exploring extraordinary Black lives of the Founding Era, such as that of Sally Hemings, can transform our understanding of American history. Born in Virginia in 1773, Sally Hemings was an enslaved woman in the household of Thomas...
Historical Context: The Constitution and Slavery
On the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the US Constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, said that the Constitution was "defective from the start." He pointed out that the framers...
"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...
Study Aid: Major Slave Rebellions
New York City, 1712 Like many later revolts, this one occurred during a period of social dissension among White colonists following Leisler’s Rebellion. The rebels espoused traditional African religions. Stono Rebellion, 1739 The...
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...
A map of the Louisiana Territory, 1806
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France during Thomas Jefferson’s first term as president more than doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson’s next step was to learn all about this new territory of the United States. He chose...
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...
Jefferson on the French and Haitian Revolutions, 1792
When Thomas Jefferson wrote this letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, three revolutions—the American, French, and Haitian—occupied the minds of these two renowned leaders. While the American Revolution had been won nearly a decade...
The Story of America: Essays on Origins
Historian Jill Lepore (David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard and a staff writer at the New Yorker ) discusses her 2012 book, The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton University Press).
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Black Volunteers in the Nation’s First Epidemic, 1793
The new republic was only four years old, its capital recently established in Philadelphia, when the country suffered its first catastrophic epidemic. Yellow fever broke out in August 1793 and ravaged the city for three months, only...
John Adams on the abolition of slavery, 1801
On January 24, 1801, President John Adams responded to two abolitionists who had sent him an anti-slavery pamphlet by Quaker reformer Warner Mifflin (1745–1798). In the letter, Adams expresses his views on slavery, the dangers posed...
The horrors of slavery, 1805
Originally circulated in 1805 to educate the public about the treatment of slaves, this broadside, entitled "Injured Humanity," continues to inform twenty-first-century audiences of the true horrors of slavery. As evidenced by this...
Daina Ramey Berry & Leslie Harris - "Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas"
Order Sexuality and Slavery at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
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!
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!
Slavery and the Constitution
Historian James Oliver Horton briefly examines the protections for slavery embedded in the US Constitution.
Making a Covenant with Death: Slavery in the Constitutional Structure
Materials US Constitution , Our Documents Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson . New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001. Essential Question Why did the Founders find it necessary to provide...
Slavery in the New York State census, 1800
While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures...
George Washington on the abolition of slavery, 1786
Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one...
Alan Taylor - "Thomas Jefferson's Education"
Order Thomas Jefferson's Education 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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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!
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