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Historians increasingly understand emancipation was not a singular event that simply involved the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Instead, emancipation is better understood as...
Race and the American Constitution: A Struggle toward National Ideals
James O. Horton was the Benjamin Banneker Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History at George Washington University and historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He edited,...
When the Past Speaks to the Present: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History and a professor of history at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which received the Pulitzer...
Frank J. Cirillo - "The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union"
Frank J. Cirillo is a historian of slavery and antislavery in the nineteenth-century United States. Order The Abolitionist Civil War at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the...
National Book Prizes | Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
The Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize is awarded annually for the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era. The $50,000 prize was established in 1990 by Richard...
Scholarly Advisory Board
Cawo Abdi, Professor of Sociology University of Minnesota Lauren Acker, History Instructor Pasadena City College Laura Rosanne Adderley, Associate Professor of African Diaspora History Tulane University Westenley Alcenat, Assistant...
National Book Prizes | George Washington Prize
The George Washington Prize is a $50,000 award co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Founded in 2005, the prize recognizes the year’s best works on...
Women’s History Month Resources
March is Women’s History Month, a time to commemorate the significant role women played in shaping American history. The Gilder Lehrman Institute has numerous essays, primary sources, lesson plans, videos, and more on American women’s...
National Book Prizes | Frederick Douglass Book Prize
In partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, the Institute awards an annual prize of $25,000 for an outstanding non-fiction book in English published on the...
2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Recipients Announced
March 1, 2024 — The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announced today that Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant , co-authors of Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University Press), are...
Scholarly Fellowships | How to Apply
FELLOWS ARE REQUIRED TO Complete their research within one year of notification of the award Meet the Director of the Scholarly Fellowship Program at the Gilder Lehrman Institute during their research trip to New York City Submit an...
Scholarly Fellowships | Past Fellows
Below is a list of all recipients of Gilder Lehrman Fellowships since the program’s founding. The fellow’s name, home institution at the time of the fellowship, and project title are followed by the research archive and year of the...
Scholarly Fellowships | Current Fellows
Caroline “C.C.” Borzilleri PhD Candidate in History, The George Washington University “The Personal and Professional Lives of Early American Women Printers” Elizabeth Noble Goodenough Lecturer, Arts and Ideas in the Humanities Program...
James G. Basker
James G. Basker is president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University. As president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute since 1997, Basker has overseen the...
Lewis E. Lehrman
Lewis E. Lehrman was presented the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2001 for his work in American history. He has written for the Finest Hour , Washington Post , The Churchill Project at Hillsdale College, New York...
Iberian Roots of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1640
In its broadest sense, African American history predates the history of the United States, colonial or otherwise; by the time the English colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, Africans and people of African descent had already been...
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Announcing the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Finalists
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize: Frank J. Cirillo , The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union ...
Lincoln’s Interpretation of the Civil War
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for the second time. The setting itself reflected how much had changed in the past four years. When Lincoln delivered his First Inaugural Address, the new Capitol dome, which...
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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The "House Divided" Speech, ca. 1857–1858
By 1850, the extension of slavery into the new territories won through the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 provided a testing ground for competing visions of America. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and the Kansas...
Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom, 1846
After he had escaped from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass became a well-known orator and abolitionist. He wrote an autobiography in 1845, but because he was a runaway slave, its publication increased the chances that he would be...
Lydia Maria Child on women’s rights, 1843
The best-known work of the poet and novelist Lydia Maria Child may be her poem "Over the River and through the Woods," but she is also remembered for her compelling objections to slavery and her support for underrepresented groups....
The Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830
State law rather than federal law governed women’s rights in the early republic. The authority of state law meant that much depended upon where a woman lived and the particular social circumstances in her region of the country. The...
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