Featured Primary Sources

Sortable List of All Featured Primary Sources

Gilder Lehrman’s Featured Primary Sources draw from the wealth of letters, diaries, maps, pamphlets, printed books, newspapers, and photographs in the Gilder Lehrman Collection, a unique archive of more than 60,000 American historical documents. Each Featured Primary Resource has an introduction, transcript, image, and questions for discussion. You can access them within each Sub-era in the History by Era section of the website, or see the entire list below, filtering the results by Era, Theme, or Creator.

Title Yearsort icon
Politics and the Texas Revolution, 1836 1836
Lowell Mill Girls and the factory system, 1840 1840
John Quincy Adams and the Amistad case, 1841 1841
Abstinence pledge card, 1842 1842
Lydia Maria Child on women’s rights, 1843 1843
Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom, 1846 1846
Abraham Lincoln, Inventor, 1849 1849
An African American protests the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850 1850
Horace Greeley on a woman’s reform newspaper, 1851 1851
“The whole land is full of blood,” 1851 1851
Runaway slave ad, 1852 1852
Harriet Beecher Stowe sends Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 1852 1852
Verses on Norwegian emigration to America, 1853 1853
Slave auction catalog from Louisiana, 1855 1855
“Bleeding Kansas” and the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856 1856
Slave Patrol Contract, 1856 1856
“I love you but hate slavery”: Frederick Douglass to his former owner, Hugh Auld, 1857 1857
Lincoln speech on slavery and the American Dream, 1858 1858
The “House Divided” Speech, ca. 1857–1858 1858
Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States, 1858 1858
John Brown’s final speech, 1859 1859
Runaway slave ad, 1860 1860
The Union Is Dissolved!, 1860 1860
Poem on a Civil War death: “Only a Private Killed,” 1861 1861
A proposed Thirteenth Amendment to prevent secession, 1861 1861