The years from the end of World War II to the end of the 1950s were dominated by four powerful changes in American life. The first was the birth of the Cold War, and the great fears that it created. The second was the dramatic growth of affluence, which transformed the...
In the early hours of June 17, 1972, police officers arrested five men suspected of breaking into...
During an 1841 debate in the House of Representatives...
Lincoln narrowly lost a bid for a seat in the US Senate when the legislature in Springfield, Illinois, elected Lyman Trumbull instead.
Debates in the United States Senate concerning the ratification of the 1898 Treaty of Paris focused on imperialism in early 1899. Though some worried that the treaty would make the US a “vulgar, commonplace empire, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and other classes must forever obey,” Congress eventually did ratify it on February 6, 1899. The treaty ended the Spanish-American War and provided for Spanish cession of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States.
The Seventeenth Amendment, requiring the election of senators by voters of each state (rather than by state legislatures), was ratified.
Senator Joseph McCarthy began a series of televised Congressional investigations into Communists in the US Army. The broadcasts exposed McCarthy as an unscrupulous bully, and the Senate eventually voted to censure McCarthy for his conduct during the hearings.
Ninety-six members of the House and Senate signed the “Southern Manifesto” condemning the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and declaring that the decision would have the effect of “destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races.”