101 items
The Revolutionary War divided families. In 1774, eighteen-year-old Lucy Flucker married twenty-four-year-old Henry Knox. Lucy’s parents were powerful, wealthy Tories, and they were not happy with the match. Henry Knox was the son of...
Theodore Roosevelt supports women’s suffrage, 1912
In this letter written in July 1912, during his campaign for a thrid term as president, Theodore Roosevelt informs the state and county chairmen of the Progressive Party of his plan to support women’s suffrage. The document shows the...
Why Documents Matter: An Interactive Digital Edition
Welcome to Why Documents Matter: An Interactive Digital Edition —a selection of primary sources from the Gilder Lehrman Collection curated and annotated for K–12 classrooms (print edition available here ). Scroll through the entire...
Official photograph from the "Golden Spike" Ceremony, 1869
This iconic photograph records the celebration marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad lines at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad,...
Japanese internment, 1942
Responding to fears of Japanese spies within the United States, President Roosevelt signed an order authorizing the forced relocation and confinement of more than 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans living in the West....
Martha Washington on life after the Revolution, 1784
The Revolutionary War disrupted the home life of Americans for eight years. Battles between the British and American armies, as well as tensions between loyalists and patriots, created difficulties that people met with strength and...
Arguments for educating women, 1735
On May 19, 1735, John Peter Zenger republished this essay in the New-York Weekly Journal. Originally printed in the Guardian , a British periodical, the two-page essay supports the education of women “of Quality or Fortune.” The...
Cadet Nurse Corps, 1943
The Cadet Nurse Corps, established by the Nurse Training Act of 1943, recruited women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five to be trained as nurses. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt insisted the act be amended to prevent racial...
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inauguration, 1933
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, the nation was reeling from the Great Depression and was dissatisfied with the previous administration’s reluctance to fight it. Roosevelt declared that...
The Supreme Court upholds national prohibition, 1920
After more than a century of activism, the temperance movement achieved its signal victory with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919. The amendment abolished "the manufacture, sale, or...
Lowell Mill Girls and the factory system, 1840
Lowell, Massachusetts, named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, was founded in the early 1820s as a planned town for the manufacture of textiles. It introduced a new system of integrated manufacturing to the United States and...
"Bleeding Kansas" and the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise, which stated that slavery would not be allowed north of latitude 36°30′. Instead, settlers would use the principle of popular sovereignty and vote to determine...
"Reelect Roosevelt—Friend of Labor," 1936
This Democratic Party campaign poster from 1936 outlines some of the agencies and regulations Franklin Roosevelt put in place to try to solve the most urgent problems of the Great Depression. While it reminds laborers of how they have...
The Haymarket Affair, 1886
The Haymarket Affair is considered a watershed moment for American labor history, at a time when fears about the loyalties and activities of immigrants, anarchists, and laborers became linked in the minds of many Americans. On May 3,...
Literacy and the immigration of "undesirables," 1903
During the Progressive era, tens of millions of immigrants came to the United States from Europe to fulfill their American dream. During this period most came from southern and eastern Europe, particularly from Italy, Russia, and the...
Preventing labor discrimination during World War II, 1942
In early 1942, as men of working age enlisted in the military and war production accelerated, US industries experienced a labor shortage. President Roosevelt established the War Manpower Commission "to assure the most effective...
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