45 items
"9/11" has emerged as shorthand for the four coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States that took place on September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists from the Islamist extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four...
Mary Elizabeth Lease: Populist Reformer
Blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic woes is not a new idea in American history. Over a century ago, Mary Elizabeth Lease, the best-known orator of the Populist era, asserted, "Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a...
"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War
In the spring of 1871, Frederick Douglass was worried. Six years after Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Grant was now President of the United States, the Union of northern and southern states was...
Lincoln and Emancipation: Black Enfranchisement in 1863 Louisiana
As the president of a fractured nation, Abraham Lincoln faced no issue more perplexing than that of restoring the rebel states to the Union. Reconstruction during wartime was, he judged, "the greatest question ever presented to...
"I begin to see it": Lincoln the War President
In the spring of 1864, three years into the Civil War, it seemed that the Union was finally in a position to defeat the Confederacy, taking advantage of the significant losses the Confederacy had suffered in 1863. For three years,...
World War I
War swept across Europe in the summer of 1914, igniting a global struggle that would eventually take nine million lives. World War I pitted the Allies (initially composed of Britain, France, Belgium, Serbia, and Russia, and eventually...
The Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II in the American West
The Great Depression and World War II, far and away the worst economic calamity and the costliest foreign war in American history, profoundly affected every part of the United States. Changes in the West were especially obvious. From...
Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877
In 1877, soon after retiring as president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, embarked with his wife on a two-year tour of the world. At almost every location, he was greeted as a hero. In England, the son of the Duke of...
America the Newcomer: Claiming the Louisiana Purchase
The Lewis and Clark expedition is rightly considered one of the great American stories. In May of 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off by keelboat up the Missouri River with thirty-one men, the "Corps of Discovery," on an...
Cultural Encounters: Teaching Exploration and Encounter to Students
Some 40,000 years from now, give or take a few millennia, someone, somewhere in the universe may find and listen to the Golden Record, NASA’s attempt to describe Earth and its peoples to anyone out there who might be interested. There...
Historical Context: Go West ... and Grow Up with the Country
In 1854 Horace Greeley, a New York newspaper editor, gave Josiah B. Grinnell a famous piece of advice. "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," said Greeley. Grinnell took Greeley's advice, moved west, and later founded...
Historical Context: Immigration Policy in World War II
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suspended naturalization proceedings for Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants, required them to register, restricted their mobility, and prohibited them from owning...
Historical Context: Life on the Trail
Each spring, pioneers gathered at Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, to begin a 2,000 mile journey westward. For many families, the great spur for emigration was economic: the financial depression of the...
Historical Context: The Global Effect of World War I
A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the twentieth century ranked the onset of World War I eighth. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was in one way or...
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...
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...
US Treaties with American Indian Nations
After the American Revolution, the United States and Indian tribal nations governed their diplomatic relations through formal treaties. States could not be signatories to these treaties because the US Constitution required that only...
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