284 items
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...
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...
"I love you but hate slavery": Frederick Douglass to his former owner, Hugh Auld, ca. 1860
Following his escape from slavery in Maryland to freedom in New York City in 1838, Frederick Douglass became a leader of the abolition movement and its best-known orator. His book Autobiography of an American Slave became a best...
Campaigning against Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, 1940
Franklin Roosevelt’s run in 1940 for a third consecutive term as president was unprecedented. George Washington established a two-term tradition when he declined to run for a third term in 1796, and until 1940, no other president...
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...
Proclamation pardoning Richard Nixon, 1974
"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over." Speaking half an hour after Richard Nixon submitted his resignation letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on August 9, 1974, and minutes after taking the oath of...
The Brotherton Indians of New Jersey, 1780
During the French and Indian War, the Lenni-Lenape (or Delaware) Indians of New Jersey were among the tribes that signed the Treaty of Easton of 1758. The tribes agreed not to support the French in the colonial conflict and to leave...
Henry Knox’s Order of March to Trenton, 1776
On Christmas Day in 1776 the American Revolution was on the verge of collapsing. Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American forces had been driven from New York City to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and reduced...
Benedict Arnold’s 1780 treason and the execution of John Andre recalled, 1823
During the American Revolution, the discovery of General Benedict Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point to the British was a deeply shocking revelation. In a memoir written some forty years after the war, William North, an aide-de...
Bartolomé de Las Casas debates the subjugation of the Indians, 1550
This tract, a summary of a debate concerning the subjugation of Indians, contains the arguments of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico, and Juan Gines Sepulveda, an influential Spanish philosopher, concerning the...
Loyalists and the British evacuation of Philadelphia, 1778
On September 26, 1777, the British began an eight-month occupation of the city of Philadelphia during the American Revolution. This allowed British troops to spend the winter billeted in comfortable quarters, while Washington’s troops...
Andrew Jackson to the Cherokee Tribe, 1835
Elected president in 1828, Andrew Jackson supported the removal of American Indians from their homelands, arguing that the American Indians’ survival depended on separation from whites. In this 1835 circular to the Cherokee people,...
Harry S. Truman responds to McCarthy, 1950
In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged in a speech in West Virginia that more than 200 staff members at the Department of State were known to be members of the Communist Party. During Harry Truman’s press conference on...
Christmas in Kuwait, 1990
Cpl. Brett G. Coughlin arrived with Delta Company in Saudi Arabia at the port of Al Jubail on September 13, 1990. For the next three months the company trained in the northern desert of Saudi Arabia. By Christmas, its headquarters...
Susan B. Anthony on suffrage and equal rights, 1901
Writing at the age of eighty, having just retired from a long public life as an advocate for abolition and women’s rights, Susan B. Anthony trenchantly summarized the gains that had been made in women’s rights. Her energetic tone...
Charles Guiteau's reasons for assassinating President Garfield, 1882
Charles Julius Guiteau employed the unusual medium of poetry to plead his innocence while on trial for assassinating President James Garfield. Guiteau’s odd behavior in court made him a media sensation, and the Gilded Age press...
Secotan, an Algonquian village, ca. 1585
In the 1570s and 1580s, John White served as an artist and mapmaker to several expeditions around the Carolinas. White made numerous watercolor sketches depicting the Algonquian people and stunning American landscapes. This engraving...
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...
Declaration of Independence, 1776
During the spring of 1776, colonies, localities, and groups of ordinary Americans—including New York mechanics, Pennsylvania militiamen, and South Carolina grand juries—adopted resolutions endorsing independence. These resolutions...
Reporting on the Spanish Influenza, 1918
These newspaper articles illustrate the impact on American society of Spanish Influenza (H1N1), which first appeared in the United States in March 1918. [1] There were periodic, minor outbreaks for six months, but in September a...
Creating the Air Force, 1924
In this July 1924 letter to aviation pioneer and publisher Lester D. Gardner, Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell prophesied the coming tide of Japanese militarism. Concerned about Japan’s growing military power in the skies,...
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...
Treaty of Versailles and President Wilson, 1919 and 1921
The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, was drafted at the Paris Peace Conference in the spring of 1919 and shaped by the Big Four powers—Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. This souvenir copy of the Paris...
People’s Party campaign poster, 1892
In July 1892, the Populist Party (or People’s Party), formed by farmers and labor supporters, held its first convention in Omaha, Nebraska. At that convention, the party created and ratified its Omaha Platform and nominated James B....
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, 1775
By April 1775, reconciliation between England and the thirteen colonies had failed. Two months earlier, Parliament had declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion, and on April 14 General Thomas Gage received secret orders...
The death of enslaved Africans on a voyage, 1725
Slavery in English America underwent profound changes during the first two centuries of settlement. During the early seventeenth century, some Black laborers were enslaved; others, however, were treated like White indentured servants...
George Washington’s reluctance to become president, 1789
From 1787 to 1789, as the Constitution was submitted for ratification by the states, most Americans assumed that George Washington would be the first president. In this April 1789 letter to General Henry Knox, his friend from the...
Building Mount Rushmore, 1926
This September 1926 report by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum to the Harney Peak Memorial Association anticipates the construction of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Borglum’s report offers a look...
George Washington from Valley Forge on the urgent need for men and supplies, 1777
George Washington’s words in this letter represent a stirring plea for help at the darkest moment of the American Revolution. As few other documents do, this letter illustrates Valley Forge as an icon of American perseverance and...
Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States, 1858
Though Lincoln spoke frequently during the 1858 Illinois Senate race against Stephen Douglas—a campaign that propelled Lincoln to the political forefront and helped shape him into a presidential candidate—very few Lincoln manuscripts...
A report on the reaction to the Stamp Act, 1765
On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the “Stamp Act” to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the Seven Years’ War. It required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various papers,...
A soldier on the battle for the Philippines, 1945
Witnessing the brutality of war and atrocities against civilians could overwhelm the most fair-minded of men. Sidney Diamond, an officer in the 82nd Chemical Battalion, wrote loving, humorous, and hopeful letters to his fiancée almost...
Landing of Columbus, 1492
This engraving depicts Columbus’s first landing in the New World, on the island he called San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. Columbus is surrounded by his men on the beach. Discussing the landing in his journal, Columbus wrote that he...
Ronald Reagan on the unrest on college campuses, 1967
In his 1966 campaign for California governor, Republican Ronald Reagan promised to "to clean up the mess at Berkeley." Reagan was referring to the unrest prevalent not just at the University of California, Berkeley, but on college...
A proposed Thirteenth Amendment to prevent secession, 1861
In the wake of the presidential election of 1860 that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House, the slaveholding states of the American South, led by South Carolina, began withdrawing from the nation. In the midst of this...
The Whiskey Rebellion, 1794
In 1791, the federal government imposed a tax on distilled spirits to pay off the nation’s debts from the American Revolution. The tax, which was payable only in cash, was particularly hard on small frontier farmers, who bartered and...
Columbus reports on his first voyage, 1493
On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Spain to find an all-water route to Asia. On October 12, more than two months later, Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas that he called San Salvador; the natives called it Guanahani....
Charles Sumner on Reconstruction and the South, 1866
By 1865 there were sharp differences of opinion about the rights of freedmen and the governance of the defeated Southern states among political leaders in Congress and the Executive Branch in Washington, DC. Conflict among Republicans...
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...
Landing of Henrick Hudson, 1609
In 1609, Henry Hudson was chosen by the Dutch East India Company to search for a passage to Asia. In September of that year, Hudson landed on the shores of the river that would be named for him and claimed the lands along it for the...
Civilian defense on the home front, 1942
In the early days of World War II, air raids and other attacks on populated areas in Europe generated fears that similar attacks could happen in the United States. On May 20, 1941, more than six months before the United States entered...
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...
John Quincy Adams and the Amistad case, 1841
On July 1, 1839, fifty-three Africans, recently kidnapped into slavery in Sierra Leone and sold at a Havana slave market, revolted on board the schooner Amistad . They killed the captain and other crew and ordered the two Spaniards...
Abraham Lincoln's last letter to his wife, 1865
This letter, written as the Union captured the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, demonstrates Lincoln’s active, hands-on commitment as commander in chief of the armed forces as well as his devotion to his family. It reads...
Reports on the yellow fever epidemic, 1793
Between August 1 and November 9, 1793, approximately 11,000 people contracted yellow fever in the US capital of Philadelphia. Of that number, 5,000 people, 10 percent of the city’s population, died. The disease gets its name from the...
Activist for Equality: Frederick Douglass at 200
Born to Harriet Bailey, an enslaved woman in Maryland in February 1818, Douglass lived twenty years as a slave and nearly nine years as a fugitive. From the 1840s to his death in 1895, he attained international fame as an...
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