Prologue: Pieces of History

“My station is new; and, if I may use the expression, I walk on untrodden ground.” –George Washington in a letter, January 9, 1790 Today’s post comes to us from Michael Hussey, education and exhibition specialist at the National Archives. In  honor of the 2013 Inauguration, the first and last page of Washington’s first Inauguration [...]

In honor of Lady Bird Johnson’s 100th birthday on December 22, 2012, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library unveiled a newly redesigned space to give visitors a new look at the 36th president. The library houses 45 million pages of historical documents, 650,000 photos, one million feet of film, 2,000 oral histories, and 5,000 hours of recordings from [...]

Today’s blog post comes from David J. Gerleman, assistant editor of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln’s two-year stint as a Illinois Whig congressman is one of the lesser-known periods of his eventful life. Had he remained in obscurity, it might have remained the crowning achievement of a fizzled frontier political career. Having been [...]

Today’s blog post comes from National Archives social media intern Anna Fitzpatrick. The news of the Emancipation Proclamation was greeted with joy, even though it did not free all the slaves. Because of the limitations of the proclamation, and because it depended on a Union military victory, President Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation would [...]

Today’s blog post comes from National Archives social media intern Anna Fitzpatrick. On the first day of the new year in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, declaring freedom for slaves in parts of the Confederacy that had not yet come under Union control. Historian John Hope Franklin described the day: [It] was a [...]