The Gilder Lehrman Collection contains more than 15,000 letters written by servicemen from the American Revolution through World War II. These personal letters, largely unpublished, capture the experience of the common soldier and his family and friends in detail, and convey the human experience of war in a way that cannot be captured in a textbook.
Private Christian Marion Epperly
This archive includes 128 letters from Christian Epperly to his wife, Mary, and eight letters from Mary to Christian between January 1862 and March 1865.
Private Christian Marion Epperly from Floyd County, Virginia
Read about the report from the Western Sanitary Commission regarding the conditions of freed slaves in the Mississippi valley.
On October 19, champions of American history education gathered at the Yale Club in New York City to celebrate the 2015 Gilder Lehrman National History Teacher of the Year. The award highlights the crucial importance of American history education by honoring teachers from elementary school through high school.
Mary Huffman of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, was honored as the recipient of the 2015 award. In the eleventh year of the program, Mrs. Huffman, who teaches fifth grade at Charles Pinckney Elementary School, joins an illustrious group of exceptional American history teachers.
Robin
On December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights was ratified when Virginia approved ten of the twelve proposed constitutional amendments.
Historian Carol Berkin talks about the genesis of the first ten amendments to the Constitution and the stubborn advocacy of James Madison in insisting certain rights be explicitly laid out in ink and passed into law. What makes your list of top ten amendments?
Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer discusses Abraham Lincoln’s complex relationship with the press and public opinion. Are you a Lincoln enthusiast? Visit "Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation," an online exhibition about Lincoln and his use of language.
On December 17, 1903, the Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first successful airplane flight.
Historian David McCullough says one of the most enjoyable things about working on his book The Wright Brothers was becoming acquainted with their talented and vital sister Katherine. Learn more about the Wright family from the National Park Service and the Library of Congress.
In 1918, Ella Osborn, a nurse working in New York City, volunteered to serve in the US Army. She kept a diary from January 1918, days before she sailed from New York, to the day of her return to the US and release from service in April 1919. This rare diary, part of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, lets us peek over the shoulder of a nurse serving in challenging conditions in an Army evacuation hospital, just miles behind the fierce battles between Germany and the Allies.
In her diary, Nurse Osborn never comments about the emotional toll of being close to death and caring for horribly wounded
On December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, the second daughter of wealthy patriot Philip Schuyler. One of our favorite documents in the Gilder Lehrman Collection is a love letter from Hamilton to Elizabeth, written two months before their wedding.
In this letter, Hamilton expresses his adoration for his future wife, writing, "I have told you, and I told you truly that I love you too much . . . I meet you in every dream . . . I am to be thus monopolized, by a little nut-brown maid like you—and from a statesman and a soldier metamorphosed into a puny lover." This
Can you tie a sailor’s knot? Can you cook a one-pot meal in the woods? Can you, if necessary, splint a sprained wrist? If you answered yes to these questions, and if you’re anything like 2.8 million women and girls, you may have been a Girl Scout. Girl Scouts around the world celebrate October 31 as Founder’s Day, honoring the birth of founder Juliette "Daisy" Gordon Low.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1860, Juliette Gordon Low belonged to a wealthy, southern family. An adventurous yet accident prone child, Gordon Low had permanent hearing loss but refused to be treated as sickly or delicate.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute is delighted to announce a partnership between the New York City Department of Education and the Broadway musical Hamilton. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, 20,000 NYC public high school students, who would otherwise not have the means or the opportunity to see a Broadway performance, will receive subsidized tickets to attend Hamilton.
The musical Hamilton, written by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, has sparked more public interest in the history of America’s founding than any popular project in recent memory. With a diverse cast starring actors of
On this day in 1842, Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd in her sister’s front parlor in Springfield, Illinois. The wedding came after a two-year courtship and engagement. A mysterious break in the engagement came in 1841, which some historians attribute to Lincoln’s clinical depression. The couple reunited the following fall and married soon after, on November 4, 1842.
Lincoln had previously engaged in other courtships, but something bound Mary Todd and Lincoln together.
Although the marriage between Abraham and Mary is widely considered to have been troubled, little is actually known about
These days, Thanksgiving is all about the food—from the classic turkey to delicious pumpkin pie, Americans look forward to overindulging on favorite foods that we associate with the harvest bounty of 17th-century Massachusetts. But did they have these beloved Thanksgiving foods at the first Thanksgiving in 1621? A deeper look reveals that our "traditional" Thanksgiving feast may not be as traditional as we think.
The Pilgrims’ autumn harvest of 1621 was plentiful. Of course, they owed a lot of that success to their Wampanoag neighbors, who had helped them grow crops and taught them how to
Read about historical campaigns in Elections: History Now 1 (Fall 2004) or Electing a President: History Now 33 (Fall 2012).
In 1904, the US took over a massive overseas building project—a ship canal in Panama that would connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This wasn’t a new idea. In his first message to Congress as president in 1869, Ulysses S. Grant had called for the construction of a canal connecting the Pacific and Caribbean.
On November 9, 1906, with the Panama Canal project finally realized and underway, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first US president to make an overseas diplomatic visit while in office when he journeyed to Panama to inspect construction of the canal. In a letter to
Do you want to explore an image down to the smallest detail? StoryMapJS Gigapixel is a great free tool to help you do that.
Check out our gigapixel on The War of 1812 in the West.
View this tutorial as a printable PDF. If you need more help, or if you’d like to explore more digital tools, check out our digital literacy toolbox.
Set yourself a challenge: Map Lewis and Clark’s journey west with diary entries . . . Take a walk around the haunts of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts. . . . Wherever you want to recreate history, the open-source StoryMapJS from Northwestern University’s Knight Lab is the perfect tool.
View this tutorial as a printable PDF. If you need more help, or if you’d like to explore more digital tools, check out our digital literacy toolbox.
George Tillotson from Greene, New York, enlisted in the 89th New York Infantry in November 1861. Some of his Civil War–era letters are among the 15,000 letters in the Gilder Lehrman Collection written by servicemen. He wrote home on a wide range of topics, from gruesome descriptions of the war to witty observations of people and events, and even flirty endearments to his wife and her "kissing battery." Tillotson’s letters are both jovial and caustic as he describes camp life in detail and complains about the war.
Although there are few letters from his family in the collection, through George
The Gilder Lehrman Education Department is pleased to announce that the application for 2016 Teacher Seminars is now open.
Each summer, Gilder Lehrman offers academically rigorous seminars for K–12 educators and National Park Service interpreters. Held at colleges and historic sites across the US and abroad, Gilder Lehrman’s weeklong seminars offer teachers lectures and discussions with eminent historians, visits to historic sites, and hands-on work with primary sources. Room, board, and tuition are fully paid for public school teachers, and matching funds are available for independent
Read about the journey for equal rights for women in Women’s Suffrage: History Now 7 (Spring 2006).
Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore describes how, within a single generation, relations between the settlers and the Wampanoags declined from the fabled First Thanksgiving to a devastating war. Lepore notes: "When Philip himself was killed in August of 1676 over half of all the English towns in New England had been destroyed. In fact, in proportion to population, King Philip’s War was the most fatal war in American history."
Read a transcript of the Dow Jones News Service ticker tape and read about the power of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in Great Inaugural Addresses: History Now 36 (Summer 2013).
Read about the Gettysburg Address or watch the lecture "The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through His Words" by Professor Ronald C. White of the University of California, Los Angeles.
In October of 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House. As the founder of the Tuskegee Institute and a respected leader of the African American community, Washington was an important ally for Roosevelt. The new president needed advice about appointments in the South and about the black vote, and looked to Washington for guidance.
Roosevelt had previously hosted African Americans for dinner at the New York governor’s mansion, and African Americans had previously attended events at the White House. The invitation to dinner, however—and its tacit
A day after appointing a committee to write the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress named another committee to write the Articles of Confederation. The members worked from June 1776 until November 17, 1777, when they sent a draft to the states for ratification. Maryland was the last state to ratify, holding out until March 1, 1781.
More of a treaty—or a "firm league of friendship"—than a constitution, the Articles of Confederation in no way infringed upon the sovereignty of the original thirteen states. The Congress, the primary organ of the new national government,
What was once the biggest secret in America is being commemorated in public—building the bomb. The National Park Service and the Department of Energy announced last week the establishment of three national historic parks at Manhattan Project sites. The three sites, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington, will commemorate the places where work on the atomic bomb was completed during World War II. In a White House ceremony last week, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz expressed a desire to tell a complete story of the atomic bomb
