Emancipation Proclamation

Bruce Watson | June 2020

As General Granger read the announcement in the summer of 1865 that slavery had ended, the celebration began. The date would go down in history — June 19th, soon shortened to Juneteenth.

GALVESTON, TEXAS, June 19, 1865 — A balding, brush-bearded officer in Union blue steps onto the balcony of the finest villa in this coastal town. On the plaza below, hundreds of Texans, black and white, wonder what this is all about. Major General Gordon Granger holds out a parch

A Spirit and Power Far Beyond Its Letter

Harold Holzer | Summer 2010

The Emancipation Proclamation opened the door for Pennsylvania's African-American soldiers.

The scene was wild and grand.

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.

All for the Union

Geoffrey C. Ward | May/June 1991

At mid-day on July 12, 1864, as the steamer Peril nosed into the Sixteenth Street wharf in Washington, D.C., and the men of the 2d Rhode Island and 37th Massachusetts Volunteers began to step ashore, they heard the sound of distant fighting.

Five Minutes To Freedom

December 1981

The Vigil That Put an End to Slavery

The crowded, torchlit, tension-filled scene above hangs today in the White House room in which Abraham Lincoln affixed his signature to the Emancipation Proclamation—using a gold nib and writing carefully so that no one, seeing a hesitant line, could ever say

Our Two Greatest Presidents

Clinton Rossiter | February 1959

Without doubt they were Washington, who walked carefully within the Constitution, and Lincoln, who stretched it as far as he dared

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

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.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

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.