115 items
The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation of an African American literary tradition, as well as unique glimpses into the souls of slaves themselves. The roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published in...
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The Underground Railroad and the Coming of War
The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were...
The US Banking System: Origin, Development, and Regulation
Banks are among the oldest businesses in American history—the Bank of New York, for example, was founded in 1784, and as the recently renamed Bank of New York Mellon it had its 225th anniversary in 2009. The banking system is one of...
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Transcendentalism and Social Reform
Those Americans who have heard of American Transcendentalism associate it with the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Henry David Thoreau. Asked to name things about the group they remember, most mention Emerson’s ringing...
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Trumbull's Declaration, and Ours
In November 1826 John Trumbull’s paintings of the American Revolution were installed in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, DC. The most famous of them is his depiction of the Declaration of Independence being presented to the...
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Matter of Influence
One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the poet Langston Hughes called the novel, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time." Hughes’s observation is particularly apt in that it avoids...
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When Myth and Meaning Overshadow History: Remembering the Alamo
Rare are the students who enter US classrooms without some preconceived notions regarding the Alamo. Thanks to more than a dozen films produced at regular intervals over the last century, to Walt Disney’s television series for baby...
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Why We the People? Citizens as Agents of Constitutional Change
"We the People?" asked Patrick Henry at the Virginia convention to ratify the new Constitution in 1788. "Who authorized them to speak the language of ‘We the People,’ instead of ‘We the States’?" [1] Looking back, we can be grateful...
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Winning the Vote: A History of Voting Rights
Voting Rights on the Eve of the Revolution The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a "stake in society." Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed...
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Women and the Early Industrial Revolution in the United States
The industrial revolution that transformed western Europe and the United States during the course of the nineteenth century had its origins in the introduction of power-driven machinery in the English and Scottish textile industries...
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Women of the West
Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...
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Women's Long Journey for the Vote
The earliest and most famous expression of the discontent American women felt over their station in life was voiced by Abigail Adams in March 1776 when she urged her husband, the future president John Adams, to “Remember the Ladies, ...
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