In addition to abolishing slavery in the rebellious Confederate states on January 1, 1863, Lincoln's Proclamation announced that the Union Army and Navy would accept black men in their ranks. Nearly 200,000 African Americans joined Union forces by…

Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President during a time of national crisis. His election had prompted the secession of South Carolina and six other states, and Federal troops were surrounded at Fort Sumter. In his inaugural address, Lincoln sought to…

The battle of Gettysburg, which took place in July, 1863, was the deadliest in the Civil War. After three sweltering days, Union forces were victorious but 51,000 soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing; 28,000 of them were Confederates. In November,…

In this open letter to Horace Greeley, President Lincoln maintained that the central cause of the Civil War was to keep the country united and not to free the slaves. Greeley was a reformer, abolitionist, and editor of the New York Tribune, an…

This timeline tracks the series of events surrounding the Memphis sanitation workers' strike that began in February, 1968, including the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his assassination the following day.

In the early twentieth century, African Americans had plenty of reasons to leave the rural South: disfranchisement, segregation, poverty, racial violence, lack of educational opportunities, and the drudgery of farm life. As the cartoon below from…

In this speech, Republican Senator from Indiana Albert J. Beveridge strongly advocates the annexation of the Philippines.

In this 1900 speech to Congress, the Republican Senator from Indiana, Albert J. Beveridge, strongly advocates the annexation of the Philippines. The term Malay refers to people from the Malay Peninsula, the Maylay Archipelago, and nearby islands in…

In this 1900 speech to Congress, the Republican Senator from Indiana, Albert J. Beveridge, strongly calls for the United States to annex the Philippines.

Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote this proslavery tract, Liberty and Slavery, in 1856. Bledsoe defended the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, justified slavery as compatible with the Bible, and…