What are the 10 Most Important Documents in American History?
HNNtags: pedagogy, teaching, HNN polls, documents, curriculum, historiography, HNN surveys
Announcing the winners in the reader poll "What are the 10 Most Important Documents in American History?" Nearly 800 readers voted -- the most important document in American history is the Marshall Plan!*
Note: The Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights were specifically EXCLUDED from the poll, since they'd be in the top three practically by default. We wanted to give other documents a chance!
- Common Sense (1776)
- The Federalist Papers (1784-1788)
- Northwest Ordinance (1787)
- Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments" (1848)
- Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
- Gettysburg Address (1863)
- Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868)
- Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918)
- George C. Marshall's Marshall Plan speech (1947)
- Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech (1963)
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
* * * * *
Nearly a decade ago, the National Archives teamed up with U.S. News and World Report and National History Day for the "People's Vote" project, which asked ordinary citizens to vote on the 100 most important documents in American history from before the American Revolution through 1965.
Nearly 40,000 people participated, casting nearly 300,000 ballots. The top ten documents, according to the voters, were:
1) The Declaration of Independece
2) The U.S. Constitution
3) The Bill of Rights
4) The Louisiana Purchase Treaty
5) The Emancipation Proclamation
6) The 19th Amendment to the Constitution
7) The 13th Amendment to the Constitution
8) The Gettysburg Address
9) The Civil Rights Act
10) The Social Security Act
With the NARA/History Day/U.S. News list nearly ten years old, with the perennial debate on the U.S. history curriculum in elementary school, high school, and college, and with the recent uptick in interest in Civil War history and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, it seems to be an appropriate time for historians to revisit the question: What are the 10 most important documents in U.S. history? Do American historians generally agree or disagree with the results of the NARA/History Day/U.S. News poll?
*Admittedly, the Marshall Foundation had been promoting the poll on Facebook.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel