81 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...
American Indians' service in World War I, 1920
More than 11,000 American Indians served with the American forces during World War I. Nearly 5,000 Native men enlisted and approximately 6,500 were drafted—despite the fact that almost half of American Indians were not citizens and...
Robert Kennedy on civil rights, 1963
At the end of 1962, President John F. Kennedy asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to compile a report on the Civil Rights enforcement activities of the Justice Department over the previous year. In this report,...
Japan declares war, 1941
On December 7, 1941, two hours after the Japanese attack on American military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japan declared war on the United States and Great Britain, marking America’s entry into World War II. The Japanese...
Emma Goldman on the restriction of civil liberties, 1919
Emma Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (present-day Lithuania). In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, becoming a well-known author and lecturer promoting anarchism, workers’ rights,...
Why Black men fought in World War I, 1919
During World War I, approximately 370,000 black men in the US military served in segregated regiments and were often relegated to support duties such as digging trenches, transporting supplies, cleaning latrines, and burying the dead....
A World War II poster: "Starve the Squander Bug," 1943
Before he became world-renowned as Dr. Seuss for his children’s books and illustrations, Theodor Geisel worked for the US government during World War II designing posters such as this one, encouraging patriotism and investment. The...
Diary of World War I nurse Ella Osborn, 1918–1919
At the outbreak of World War I, Ella Jane Osborn was a surgical nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. In January 1918, she volunteered to serve with the American Expeditionary Forces as a member of the Red Cross’s nursing...
An African American protests the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850
This 1850 letter written by Henry Weeden is a statement against slavery by a free African American. Weeden was one of Boston’s leading abolitionists. In the 1840s, he had been an activist for the integration of Boston’s schools. [1]...
The World War II experience of Robert L. Stone, 1942–1945
Lieutenant Robert “Bob” Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific during World War II. Born on December 19, 1921 in New York City, Bob was a nineteen-year-old...
The Union Army and Juneteenth, 1865
This engraving depicts a White Union soldier reading the Emancipation Proclamation to an enslaved family. It was published in 1864 by Lucius Stebbins, based on a painting by Henry W. Herrick. According to Stebbins, the scene ...
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....
“Columbia’s Noblest Sons”: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, 1865
Abraham Lincoln’s death on April 14, 1865, stunned the nation. He was the first US president to be assassinated and the third to die in office. As Americans mourned, they also began to see him as a martyr and the savior of the Union....
Anti-Communist Trading Cards, 1951
On June 25, 1950, war broke out on the Korean peninsula when the Soviet-backed Communist forces in North Korea invaded the recently founded democratic republic of South Korea. Following a unanimous UN resolution condemning the...
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...
The Fort Pillow Massacre, 1864
"Among the stories of the stormy days of the Republic, few will longer be remembered than the heroic defense and almost utter annihilation of the garrison of Fort Pillow." —Mack J. Leaming, April 1893 On April 12, 1864, fifteen...
Spain authorizes Coronado's conquest in the Southwest, 1540
This letter, written on behalf of the king of Spain by Francisco Garcia de Loaysa, the president of the Council of the Indies, acknowledges Francisco Coronado’s report of the famous Niza expedition of the previous year and authorizes...
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advice to high school students, 1922
In 1922, Sharpless Dobson Green, a teacher at Senior High School in Trenton, New Jersey, wrote to influential people around the world to get their advice for his students. In his request, he explained his project: There are about 400...
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,...
Condolence letter from General MacArthur, 1950
In 1950, with Soviet support, North Korea invaded South Korea. The ensuing war lasted until 1953, with the United Nations and the United States entering the conflict soon after it began. For the United States, participation in the...
“Defence of Fort McHenry” or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” 1814
In September 1814, Francis Scott Key, an attorney and DC insider, watched the American flag rise over Baltimore, Maryland’s Fort McHenry from a British ship in the harbor. Key had been negotiating the release of an American captive...
Frederick Douglass on Jim Crow, 1887
Frederick Douglass tirelessly labored to end slavery but true equality remained out of reach. Despite the successful passage of several Constitutional amendments and federal laws after the Civil War, unwritten rules and Jim Crow laws...
A Ku Klux Klan threat, 1868
This page contains language that may be offensive or inappropriate for some viewers. Reconstruction politics was a catalyst for widespread racism and hatred that freed people experienced throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan, founded...
A frightening mission over Iwo Jima, 1945
Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click...
The Gettysburg Address, 1863
On November 19, 1863, four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, a ceremony was held at the site in Pennsylvania to dedicate a cemetery for the Union dead. The battle had been a Union victory, but at great cost—about 23,000 Union...
Surrender of the British General Cornwallis to the Americans, October 19, 1781
These three documents—a map, a manuscript, and a print—tell the story of the surrender of British commander Charles Cornwallis to American General George Washington. In October 1781, the successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia, by...
A Founding Father on the Missouri Compromise, 1819
In 1819 a courageous group of Northern congressmen and senators opened debate on the most divisive of antebellum political issues—slavery. Since the Quaker petitions of 1790, Congress had been silent on slavery. That silence was...
President Truman’s Farewell Address, 1953
It has none of the catch phrases or warnings of other, more famous presidential inaugural or farewell addresses, no cautions against permanent alliances or military-industrial complexes, no appeals to better angels or declarations...
Voting restrictions for African Americans, 1944
In 1944 a group of southern editors and writers documented cases of voter suppression in southern states. They took this step because, in the presidential election of 1944, only 28 percent of potential voters in the South participated...
The Sedition Act, 1798
On August 14, 1798, the Columbian Centinel , a Boston newspaper aligned with the Federalist Party, printed this copy of the Sedition Act. It was the last in a series of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the...
Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper: Sedition charges, 1815
Even though the Sedition Act of 1798 had expired in 1801, individuals could still be charged with sedition. On January 20, 1815, Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper, publishers of the Massachusetts newspaper The Yankee , printed an article...
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...
A soldier’s reasons for enlisting, 1942
"Our country is the entire world and mankind our countrymen!!!" In April of 1942, Sidney Diamond, a chemical engineering student at City College in New York, enlisted in the United States Army against the wishes of his friends and...
Breaking Diplomatic Ties with Iran during the Hostage Crisis, 1980
On April 7, 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced the breaking of diplomatic ties with Iran as a result of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981. The US had first become actively involved in Iran in 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow...
Jefferson on British aggression, 1815
In this letter in defense of American nationalism, Thomas Jefferson denounced the blustering of certain members of the British House of Lords who blamed the War of 1812 on US aggression. Jefferson’s letter followed a report from James...
The Middle Passage, 1749
Historians estimate that approximately 472,000 Africans were kidnapped and brought to the North American mainland between 1619 and 1860. Of these, nearly 18 percent died during the transatlantic voyage from Africa to the New World....
A soldier’s reaction to the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1945
Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click...
Japanese announcement of the attack at Pearl Harbor, 1941
In January 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto began developing a plan to attack the American base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. For eleven months, the Japanese continued to refine their plans while at the same time working diplomatically to...
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,...
Slave Patrol Contract, 1856
In the 1800s, particularly after Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, the legislatures of slave states passed increasingly strict laws governing the activities of enslaved and free African Americans and the interactions between whites and...
Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831
In the early hours of August 22, 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led more than fifty followers in a bloody revolt in Southampton, Virginia, killing nearly 60 white people, mostly women and children. The local authorities stopped the...
The British evacuation of Boston, 1776
On March 25, 1776, only eight days after the British evacuation of Boston, the Continental Congress authorized a medal, “George Washington before Boston,” to commemorate the event. During the war, Congress commissioned eleven medals...
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