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).
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
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."
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,
In 1909 a young immigrant woman made a speech in Yiddish that galvanzied a meeting of garment workers into what became a massive, and ultimately successful, strike. Twenty thousand workers followed Clara Lemlich into the streets of New York. Strikers, mostly women, were supported by professional organizers and women of other classes through the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL) and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU). The strike lasted two months and won many concessions on wages and working conditions. Lemlich’s own factory, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, did
Mark Twain famously said that he had come in with Halley’s Comet in 1835 and expected to go out with it on its return journey. Indeed, Twain did die in 1910 as the comet was making its return pass. In the intervening years Twain became, and remains, one of America’s most beloved writers.
The Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley allows Twain fans access to Twain’s personal and published writings. You can delve into more than 2,400 letters written in the years 1853–1880, each with notes to provide context. All three volumes of Twain’s autobiography and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are
Read an excerpt from Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863 or learn more about the history of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
As we approach the end of November, a month filled with elections and gratitude, let’s take a look back at the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted voting rights to African Americans, and explore a print that celebrates its ratification and shows hope for the future.
Read an essay about the Reconstruction Amendments or listen to Professor Eric Foner speak about Reconstruction and Citizenship.
On December 1, 1955, after a long day of work as a seamstress, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and took a seat.
Parks, a black woman, took a seat in the first row of seats in the rear "colored section." (In mid-20th-century Montgomery, under the Jim Crow laws, the first few rows of seats in public buses were reserved for white passengers, while African American passengers were made to sit in the back rows.) As the bus seats filled up, Parks, along with several other black passengers, was asked by the bus driver to give up her seat to accommodate white
On December 2, 1859, John Brown went to the gallows for his failed raid on the arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown was a polarizing figure. In the image to the left, based on an incident reported in the New York Tribune that later proved to be apocryphal, he appears almost saintlike. Contrast that portrayal with this wild-eyed portrait by Ole Peter Hansen Balling.
The raid on Harpers Ferry was not Brown’s first foray into slavery-related violence. After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, supporters of both slavery and free labor flooded into the territory of Kansas, where violence
The Compromise of 1850 included the controversial Fugitive Slave Law that allowed for the seizure of alleged runaway slaves without due process and prohibited any obstruction to their recovery. Escaped slaves living in the North became fearful of capture and many moved to Canada.
Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Underground Railroad became more active, and abolitionists protested the "reign of terror to the colored population." Henry Weeden, a free African American and an abolitionist in Boston, voiced his objection through his business. Weeden was a tailor, and when he
This hand-drawn card comes from Horatio Loomis Wait’s papers in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Wait, from New York and Chicago, served in the US Navy from July 1862 through July 1870. His letters home often included sketches of mid-19th-century family life.
As the best-books-of-the-year lists proliferate, it’s time to remind ourselves to nurture young writers. Here at the Gilder Lehrman Institute we have a great way for history teachers to highlight their students’ achievements. It’s the time-honored tradition of the student essay contest. (FYI: Your school needs to be a Gilder Lehrman Affiliate School to participate. Find out how easy it is to join.)
The youngest group, students in grades 2–5, are asked to help the first President of the United States choose his priorities for the new country. The Dear George Washington Contest calls for a
Shortly before 8 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack against US armed forces in Hawaii. The Japanese targeted the Army, Navy, and Marine airfields before bombing the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The bombardment lasted nearly two hours and left 2,403 Americans dead and another 1,178 wounded. Two hours after the attack, Japan officially declared war on the United States. Life changed overnight across the United States as the nation geared up for war.
Visit the Gilder Lehrman Collection exhibition of Pearl Harbor photographs and documents at the New-York
Have you ever wanted to really dive deep into an image from history? Get in close to that little figure in the corner? Read the cartoon captions without a magnifying glass? The Gigapixel tool from StoryMapJS will help you do just that. It’s simple. Just watch the video below or print out our handy Gigapixel Tutorial, and you’re on your way.
Find out how to use other online tools from our Digital Literacy Toolbox.
Explore two Gigapixel features from the Gilder Lehrman Collection below.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment was proclaimed by Secretary of State William Seward. Abraham Lincoln had fought to get the amendment passed by the Senate and the House, but he did not live to see this "glorious consummation" of his hope to end slavery.
Read more about Abraham Lincoln’s fight to bring about the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
On December 22, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman sent a message to President Lincoln from Georgia, saying, "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton."
From November 15 until December 21, Sherman had led his notoriously destructive "March to the Sea" from the captured city of Atlanta to Savannah. Supporters of the Union applauded Sherman’s March, while Southerners were especially horrified by the actions of troops under his command.
Sherman’s March
As the winter holidays draw close and Americans everywhere travel to celebrate with their loved ones, it is important to remember how one should act when having dinner with family. The 1950 Encyclopedia Britannica film A Date with Your Family offers some helpful advice for interacting with parents and siblings. Created as an educational tool for teenagers, the film reinforces values of conformity and traditional gender roles by focusing on the ideal Cold War–era family. Father works hard at the office to provide for his family while mother keeps a welcoming home. The teenaged brother and
The Gilder Lehrman Institute is excited to announce the addition of two new self-paced courses, Emancipation and The Kennedy Presidency, to our Self-Paced Course Series. This series offers graduate-level courses in American history taught by eminent historians, available to watch or listen to at your own time and pace.
Emancipation explores the social and political history of the emancipation of four million slaves during the Civil War. The course goes beyond the Emancipation Proclamation to discover the long and complex path, from the Revolution to the Civil War, that led to the abolishment
