329 items
On July 5, 1863, Dr. William H. Boyle wrote to a fellow member of the local Columbus Lodge of the International Organization of Odd Fellows, Isaac McCauley, describing the devastation the Confederates had caused in Chambersburg,...
"Men of Color, To Arms! To Arms," 1863
After the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted on January 1, 1863, black leaders including Frederick Douglass swiftly moved to recruit African Americans as soldiers. "A war undertaken and brazenly carried on for the perpetual...
"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...
Abraham Lincoln: A Man for All Seasons
Overview At one time in our country’s history we stood divided as a nation over the issue of slavery. It was Abraham Lincoln’s ideology and sense of purpose that helped to unite our country and set us on a path toward realizing the...
Deadly Diseases: A Fate Worse than Dying on the Battlefield
Background Cannons blasted and bayonets tore through flesh in America’s worst war, the American Civil War. This war was gruesome for many different reasons. It tore the country apart and created divides that exist to this day. One of...
The Supreme Court and the Fourteenth Amendment
Overview: The Founding Fathers created the Supreme Court in Article III of the Constitution of the United States. The most influential role of the Court, however, was defined later through the appeal process, in cases involving the...
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
Unit Objective This lesson on Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core–based units. These units were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts...
Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugural Addresses
Objective This lesson on President Lincoln’s two inaugural addresses is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based units. These units enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of...
Infographic: Industrialization: American Labor
View this infographic as a downloadable PDF. If you would like to learn more about Industrialization, view " Industrialization: Changing Living Standards " and " Industrialization: The Growth of Industry ."
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Statistics: Agriculture in America
Farm Production Year Number of Farms* Bales of Cotton* Bushels of Corn* Bushels of Wheat* Price Index 1860=100 1860 2 3.8 839 173 100 1870 2.7 4.4 760 254 140 1880 4 6.6 1,706 502 100 1890 4.6 8.7 2,125 449 90 1900 5.7 10.1 2,662 599...
Historical Context: The Confederacy Begins to Collapse
By early 1863, the Civil War had begun to cause severe hardship on the southern home front. Not only was most of the fighting taking place in the South, but also as the Union blockade grew more effective and the South's railroad...
Lincoln speech on slavery and the American Dream, 1858
Through the 1830s and 1840s, Abraham Lincoln’s primary political focus was on economic issues. However, the escalating debate over slavery in the 1850s, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in particular, compelled Lincoln to change his...
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...
Enslaved Children of New Orleans, 1863
Photographs of emancipated children were sold to raise money for the education of freed slaves in New Orleans. The children featured in this photograph drew attention to the fact that slavery was not solely a matter of color. If a...
Women and the Civil War
Introduction The growth of manufacturing in the decades prior to the Civil War transformed the country. The nation experienced the appearance of cities, manufacturing, and a commitment to wage labor at the same time as the expansion...
“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....
"The whole land is full of blood," 1851
"The whole land is full of blood." These ominous words were uttered by James W. C. Pennington, a former slave and noted abolitionist, in the wake of Thomas Sims’s infamous trial. Sims had escaped from slavery in Georgia before being...
Traitors and Spies in the Time of War: How the Supreme Court Determined Who Would Live and Who Would Die
Overview In April 1865 over 600,000 Americans lay dead from battle wounds and other causes directly related to their service in the armies of the Confederacy and Union during the four-year Civil War. If we adjusted the number of dead...
What Events Led to Lincoln’s Assassination?
Overview Fourth-grade students often associate Abraham Lincoln with three things: He wore a tall hat, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and he was assassinated. The murder of Lincoln, whom most historians consider one of the...
An "Unconstitutional" Act? The Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus
Background At the beginning of the Civil War, as the number of dead increased daily, a force of opposition to the war efforts began to intensify in the Congress and in the voices of the American people. Abraham Lincoln, in an effort...
Lincoln and Civil Liberties
Overview The tension between individual rights and a government’s need to preserve and protect national security during times of war has represented a constant theme throughout American history. During the John Adams administration, a...
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...
American History and the World
NYU Professor of the Humanities Thomas Bender argues that the idea of American exceptionalism has hobbled the study of American history. Bender traces the study of history from the "men of letters" historians of the nineteenth...
"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...
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, chair of Afro-American Studies, director of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and author of seminal works on African American literary criticism and...
The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America
Kevin Phillips is the author of eight books, a journalist and a national elections commentator for CBS News during l988, 1992 and 96 presidential elections In the Cousins’ Wars, Phillips poses the question, how did Anglo-America ...
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom
Catherine Clinton, professor of US history at Queen’s University Belfast, has wrtten or edited more than twenty historical books for both children and adults, including The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South and I,...
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