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1870s
Overview The term “Reconstruction” has more than one meaning in American history. Usually it refers to the period from 1863 to 1877, as the federal government worked to “reconstruct” or “restore”...
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1860s
Overview When Booker T. Washington recalled the outbreak of the Civil War, he claimed that “every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that...
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1880s
Overview As a young teacher at the Hampton Institute in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Booker T. Washington was responsible for helping to instruct and assimilate Native American or Indian men. The...
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1890s
Overview Image of “Jim Crow” The nineteenth century had always been an age of certainties, but by the 1890s, some of the post-Civil War consensus about American civilization and progress was beginning...
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1900s
Overview 1908 Ford Model T Near the beginning of his memoir Growing Up (1982), journalist Russell Baker describes the United States of his mother’s childhood, in the first decade of the twentieth...
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1910s
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed many sometimes-wrenching changes, and perhaps no decade was more profoundly revolutionary for the United States and the...
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1920s
No matter how you try to capture the spirit of the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, nothing looms larger in a discussion of that fast-paced decade than the Great Crash of 1929. The collapse of Wall...
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1930s
Overview When Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as president on March 4, 1933, the nation’s economic crisis had become the most severe in its history. Not only was unemployment rising and...
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1940s
Overview The 1940s witnessed the worst military conflict in world history. Out of more than 70 million combatants from 70 different countries, the editors at Digital History estimate about 17 million...
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1780s
Overview The creation of the U.S. Constitution over the summer of 1787 and its subsequent ratification during the following year was a revolution equal in magnitude to the contest for American...
View ArticleESSAY –Lincoln’s Catty Letters
This op-ed by Matthew Pinsker appeared in Time.com on President’s Day 2014 as a way to introduce readers to some of the new Lincoln documents that had been discovered in recent years. Several of the...
View ArticleESSAY –Short History of Campaign Finance Reform
Matthew Pinsker offered this overview of American campaign finance history for the Christian Science Monitor in March 1997. The more things change… American politicians began shaking the money...
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IMAGE –Bingham’s Stump Speaking
Stump Speaking (1854) This classic composition by George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was part of a trio of “Election Paintings” that any classroom might use to illustrate the highs and lows of...
View ArticleESSAY –Lincoln and Obama
This opinion piece by Matthew Pinsker originally appeared in The Weekly Wonk, an online magazine from the New America Foundation, in June 2014. The original title was “Obama’s Lincoln Moment.” There...
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IMAGE: Suffrage Parade (1912)
Suffrage parade (1912) This photograph by the Associated Press depicts a woman’s suffrage parade in New York on Saturday, May 4, 1912. Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of feminist pioneer...
View ArticleESSAY –Election of 1948
In Fall 2016, Dickinson College student Trevor Diamond explained how some older American political customs were dying by the time of the 1948 presidential election. Election of 1948Read more →
View ArticleESSAY –After 1850
This chapter originally appeared in in Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America, 1775-1860 ed. D.A. Pargas, U Press Florida, (2018), 93-115. After 1850: Reassessing the Impact of the...
View ArticleESSAY –General Jackson is Dead
This essay original appeared in The Worlds of James Buchanan – Thaddeus Stevens, ed. Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller, and John W Quist, LSU Press, (2019), 82-108. “General Jackson is dead”:...
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