13 items
A Civil War soldier’s satirical take on the news, 1863
Between battles, marches, and military exercises, Civil War soldiers spent their free time in camp playing music, writing and reading letters, and, for those with the skill, sketching scenes from the day. This unknown soldier’s...
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...
Late seventeenth-century map of the Northeast, 1682
Like many other explorers, Henry Hudson stumbled upon North America almost by accident. Employed by the Dutch Republic to find a sea passage to the Far East, Hudson and the crew of his ship the Halve Maen landed at what is today New...
The Western Sanitary Commission reports on suffering in the Mississippi Valley, 1863
In 1863 in the war-torn South, thousands were homeless and starving. Some of those most in need of aid were newly liberated enslaved people. The Western Sanitary Commission was organized on September 5, 1861, by General John C....
Don’t Buy a Ford Ever Again, ca. 1960
New Orleans in 1960 was sharply divided over the practice of segregation. The schools were ordered to desegregate, which angered many white people. Members of the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans believed that large companies...
Davy Crockett on the removal of the Cherokees, 1834
In this letter, written in December 1834, Davy Crockett complains about President Andrew Jackson’s forced removal of the Cherokees from their homes to Oklahoma. Crockett opposed that policy and feared Vice President Martin Van Buren...
Olaudah Equiano, 1789
Within ten years of the first North American settlements, Europeans began transporting captured Africans to the colonies as enslaved laborers. Imagine the thoughts and fears of an eleven-year-old boy who was kidnapped from his village...
A View of Savannah, Georgia, 1734
The colony of Georgia was founded in 1732 by James Oglethorpe, a British Member of Parliament. Oglethorpe planned Savannah as a place where the poor could come to make a better life. An attempt to produce a "classless society," this...
Statue of Liberty, 1884
First conceived of in 1865, the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France commemorating the alliance between that country and the United States during the American Revolution as well as their mutual dedication to freedom and democracy....
Sergeant Francis Fletcher of the 54th Massachusetts on equal pay for Black soldiers, 1864
Francis H. Fletcher, a 22-year-old clerk from Salem, Massachusetts, enlisted as a private in Company A of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment on February 13, 1863. One year after the regiment left Boston with great fanfare,...
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