Frederick Douglass

Linda Hirshman | Spring 2023

As he later recounted in his memoirs, Frederick Douglass endured daily beatings and forced labor before taking his chances on the road to freedom.

Born in 1818 a

“What, to the American Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”

Bruce Watson | Summer 2019

In what many consider the greatest anti-slavery oration ever given, Frederick Douglass called for “the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

African Americans In Combat

Fall 2011

Lincoln & Frederick Douglass

Stephen Kendrick, Paul Kendrick | Winter 2009

The former prairie-lawyer and then-president and the ex-slave and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship.

Lincoln & Frederick Douglass

Stephen Kendrick, Paul Kendrick | Winter 2009

The former prairie-lawyer and then-president and the ex-slave and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship.

The Freedman’s Bank

John Steele Gordon | December 1993

A 19th-century blueprint for the savings-and-loan scandal

It was a banking system. The act that made it possible slipped through Congress with hardly any debate and little attention to economic reality. Many of its highest-ranking officials knew little or nothing about the peculiar nature of the banking business.

What Should We Teach Our Children About American History?

Fredric Smoler | February/March 1992

The fiercest struggle going on in education is about who owns the past. Passionate multi-culturalists say that traditional history- teaching has brushed out minority ethnic identities. Their opponents say that radical multi-culturalism leads toward national fragmentation.

In 1987, a sweeping revision of the social studies program in New York State public schools gave the curriculum a strong multicultural slant.

Simply a Man

Geoffrey C. Ward | February/March 1991

In August of 1863, Frederick Douglass called upon the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to explain why the recruiting of black troops for the Union had been slower than some had expected. Black men wanted equal pay, he explained, and a chance for promotion.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.