Social Studies Documents

This text is an excerpt from the first chapter ("Anarchism and War") of Richard Polenberg's book Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court a...

Frozen in Time:  The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, tells the story of the men who had served with Franklin, t...

In this letter, Caroline Purdy explains how the famous Star-Spangled Banner flag was made. 

Page two of the letter, Caroline Purdy [Mary Pickersgill's daughter] wrote to Georgiana Appleton [Major Armistead's daughter] describing how the Fort ...

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 permitted slave-hunters to seize an alleged fugitive slave without the slightest due process of law.  It also proh...

Long before Americans fought a Civil War - beginning in 1861 - slaves were running away.  This document, from the U.S. National Archives, depicts...

In his book, The Underground Railroad, William Still includes a story about four slaves who wanted to escape from Delaware (a slave state which remain...

Image of a front page of the Galveston Tribune a few months after the 1900 Hurricane which crippled the city and devastated its residents.  ...

Were crematoria, at Nazi camps, used to dispose of bodies of people who were gassed at these camps? The issue is still debated, particularly by indivi...

George Bentley was an 8-year-old child who worked long, hard hours in a British coal mine. In addition to his workday, George walked 1.5 miles, each w...

This is the second page of George Mason's objections to the U.S. Constitution which he would not sign because it lacked a Bill of Rights. He set-fort...

George Washington became the Colonials' Commander-in-Chief in 1775. His Commission, a key document from America's Revolutionary Era, depicts his offic...