291 items
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all proclaim, "a house divided against itself can not stand." [1] Living in a Bible-reading country, most nineteenth-century Americans knew that metaphor by heart—words that also made good common...
"Hidden Practices": Frederick Douglass on Segregation and Black Achievement, 1887
Frederick Douglass recalled his feelings when slavery came to an end, after so much work and so many sacrifices. "I felt that I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life," he admitted. But Douglass hardly...
"I begin to see it": Lincoln the War President
In the spring of 1864, three years into the Civil War, it seemed that the Union was finally in a position to defeat the Confederacy, taking advantage of the significant losses the Confederacy had suffered in 1863. For three years,...
"That glorious consummation": Lincoln on the Abolition of Slavery
"That man who thinks Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln," wrote Abraham Lincoln’s long-time law partner, William Henry Herndon. "He...
"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...
"Your Late Lamented Husband": A Letter from Frederick Douglass to Mary Todd Lincoln
On March 4, 1865, Frederick Douglass attended President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration. Standing in the crowd, Douglass heard Lincoln declare slavery the "cause" and emancipation the "result" of the Civil War. Over the crisp...
1945 to the Present
No event proved more important to the course of modern American history than World War II. The war cast America onto the world stage as a mighty economic and military giant. It rescued the country from the Great Depression, created...
Abraham Lincoln and the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment
"Those who knew Mr. Lincoln best," wrote Illinois Congressman Isaac Arnold, "knew that he looked, confidently, to the ultimate extinction of slavery" and used "every means which his prudent and scrupulous mind recognized as right and...
Ada Ferrer - "Cuba: An American History"
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Admiration and Ambivalence: Frederick Douglass and John Brown
John Brown did not make it easy for people to love him—until he died on the gallows. Frederick Douglass, from his first meeting with Brown in 1847, through a testy but important relationship in the late 1850s, had long viewed the...
Adrian Brettle - "Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World"
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African Americans and Emancipation
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...
Akhil Reed Amar - "The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation: 1760-1840"
Akhil Reed Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. Order The Words That Made Us at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided....
Alaina E. Roberts - "I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land"
Alaina E. Roberts is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. Order I’ve Been Here All the While at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
Alan Taylor - "American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850"
Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Order American Republics at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link...
Alan Taylor - "Thomas Jefferson's Education"
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Alexander Keyssar - "Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?"
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Alice Baumgartner - "South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War"
Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. Order South to Freedom at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided....
Allen C. Guelzo - "Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment"
Allen C. Guelzo serves as the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Order Our Ancient Faith at the Gilder...
Allen C. Guelzo - "Robert E. Lee: A Life"
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Allen Guelzo - "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion"
Allen C. Guelzo is the senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and the director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship. Order Gettysburg: The Last Invasion at...
Amanda Bellows - "American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination"
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America the Newcomer: Claiming the Louisiana Purchase
The Lewis and Clark expedition is rightly considered one of the great American stories. In May of 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off by keelboat up the Missouri River with thirty-one men, the "Corps of Discovery," on an...
America's Role in the World: World War I to World War II
Between World War I and World War II the United States emerged on the world stage as a superpower. This ascendancy had military, economic, humanitarian, and cultural dimensions. Some Americans expressed discomfort with this unwelcome...
American Indians
If history is the story of what people have done, then American history began thousands of years ago, and by far most of it is that of Indian peoples and their ancestors before Europeans arrived. Historians, however, disagree over...
An Introduction to Juneteenth
Juneteenth is the most widely recognized, long-lived Black commemoration of slavery’s demise. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when federal troops commanded by General George Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to proclaim freedom to...
Anastasia C. Curwood - "Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics"
Anastasia Curwood is a professor of history and director of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies at the University of Kentucky. Order Shirley Chisholm at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from...
Anna Malaika Tubbs - "The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation"
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Annette Gordon-Reed - "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and a professor of history at Harvard. Order The Hemingses of Monticello at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the...
Anti-Communism in the 1950s
In 1950, fewer than 50,000 Americans out of a total US population of 150 million were members of the Communist Party. Yet in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American fears of internal communist subversion reached a nearly hysterical...
Ava Chin - "Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming"
Ava Chin is a best-selling author and professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. Order Mott Street at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission...
Barbara Perry - "Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier"
Barbara Perry is the Gerald L. Baliles Professor and director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia. Order Jacqueline Kennedy at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase...
Benjamin L. Carp - "The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution"
Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College and also teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Order The Great New York Fire of 1776 at the Gilder Lehrman Book...
Beth Bailey - "An Army Afire: How the U.S. Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era"
Beth Bailey is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at The University of Kansas and the founding director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies. Order An Army Afire at the Gilder Lehrman...
Beverly Gage - "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century"
Beverly Gage is a professor of twentieth-century American history at Yale and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Order G-Man at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided....
Brandon Byrd - "The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti"
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Brenda Stevenson - "What Is Slavery?"
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Brenda Stevenson - "What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast? A History of the Enslaved Black Family"
Brenda E. Stevenson holds the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women’s History at St. John’s College, Oxford University and the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles ...
Brooke Barbier - "King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father"
Brooke Barbier is a public historian and independent scholar with a doctorate in American history from Boston College. Order King Hancock at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through...
Bruce A. Ragsdale - "Washington and the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery"
Bruce A. Ragsdale has served as the director of the Federal Judicial History Office at the Federal Judicial Center. Order Washington and the Plow at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase...
Bruce Henderson - "Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War II"
Bruce Henderson is an American journalist and author of more than thirty nonfiction books, including a #1 New York Times bestseller. Order The Bridge to the Sun at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from...
Bruce Levine - "Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice"
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Buzz Bissinger - "The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II"
Buzz Bissinger is a journalist who has won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Order The Mosquito Bowl at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank...
C. Patrick Burrowes - "Liberia & the Quest for Freedom"
Carl Patrick Burrows is a leading Liberian historian. He has served as vice president for academic affairs at Cuttington University and the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Professor at Marshall University. Order Liberia & the...
C. W. Goodyear - "President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier"
C. W. Goodyear is an author and historian based in Washington, DC. Order President Garfield at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through the link provided. Thank you for supporting...
Carl Smith - "Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City"
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Carol Berkin - "Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence"
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Carol Berkin - "Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte"
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Caroline Janney - "Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox"
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Caroline Winterer - "American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason"
Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University. Order American Enlightenments at the Gilder Lehrman Book Shop We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase through...
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