198 items
The Tuskegee Airmen were an elite group of African American pilots and support personnel who fought in World War II. Their relevance in the African American struggle for equality and respect cannot be overstated. During World War II,...
Dora Dougherty Strother McKeown, Women Airforce Service Pilot in World War II
When Dora Dougherty Strother McKeown was just a kid she couldn’t wait for Sunday. For every Sunday her entire family would climb into their old Oakland motor car and drive to the airport to spend the day watching planes fly. It had...
"Courage to Face the Unknown": The World War II Service and Legacy of Celina Baez Sotomayor
During the 1940s hundreds of thousands of American women left their hometowns to serve in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), a US Army unit created in World War II to enable women to serve in noncombat positions and “free a man to fight.” ...
Harry Katsuharu Fukuhara: A Life of Service in War and Peace
Harry peered at the document aboard the transport ship bound for the Pacific. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had written to the American troops, “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives: the freedom of the lives of...
Reconstructing the West and North
In 1865 the Radicals of the Republican Party regarded the Northern victory in the Civil War as a “golden moment” to remake the Republic. The Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, and, so they thought until Andrew Johnson...
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Frederick Douglass and the Dawn of Reconstruction
Historians today debate precisely when Reconstruction began, yet in many ways that is a very old discussion. At the time, its goals and focus were disputed, and even what to call the federal policy for the collapsing Confederacy was...
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Citizenship in the Reconstruction South
Slaveholders created a system of race, gender, and class inequality in the pre-Civil War South. They justified slavery by arguing that enslaved people could not take care of themselves and needed masters to look after them. White...
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Why I Embrace the Term Latinx
When I first saw the word Latinx —best described as a gender-neutral term to designate US residents of Latin American descent—in print it seemed awkward and hard to pronounce. But rather than giving in to my first instinct, I came to...
Mexicans in the Making of America
Today more than one of every ten Americans claims Mexican descent or heritage. In 2017 Mexican-origin people accounted for 63 percent (thirty-five million) of the nation's total Latino population. By 2050 the Latino share of the...
Hispanics in the United States: Origins and Destinies
In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world...
Risk Takers and History Makers: Mexican Women of the World War II Generation
Escaping poverty and revolution and lured by prospective employment in agriculture, mining, transportation, and the building trades, more than one million Mexicans migrated to the United States between 1910 and 1930, an estimated one...
Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York
Barely a week after arriving in New York, the young poet wrote to his mother: “One reason I am inclined to remain here is the constant communication there is with Havana; it is where I can easily and frequently receive news of my...
The Puerto Rican Experience in World War I
Between 18,000 and 20,000 Puerto Ricans served in the United States Armed Forces during World War I. [1] Puerto Ricans have been serving in the US military since 1899, when Congress authorized the creation of the Battalion of Porto...
Mexican Farm Labor and the Agricultural Economy of the United States
In July of 1958, a Mexican man in Empalme, Mexico, died outside a recruitment center for Mexican men who wanted to participate in a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program. The program, designed and agreed upon by both the...
From Colony to Nation: Liberian Independence and Black Self-Government in the Atlantic World
The emergence of the independent republic of Liberia on the coast of West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century was a historically significant turn of events in several ways. Led by a Black American settler class that sought to rule...
Immigration Policy, Mexican Americans, and Undocumented Immigrants, 1954 to the Present
In 1953, a pamphlet ominously tilted What Price Wetbacks? circulated widely throughout the American Southwest. Its authors warned that a “wetback invasion” was underway, one that posed “a threat to our health, our economy, [and] our...
The 1965 Immigration Act: Opening the Nation to Immigrants of Color
Americans might think their country has always been open to all, but until 1965 people who were not white or did not come from northern or western Europe were not welcomed as immigrants. Only with the passage that year of a new...
Immigrants and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798
Americans were on edge in the spring and summer of 1798. War and revolution were raging in Europe; Ireland was rebelling against England; and France was continuing its attacks on American ships. Although the Jay Treaty, which went...
The Dillingham Commission and the “Immigration Question,” 1907−1921
The Dillingham Commission played a pivotal role in the formation of American immigration policy, notably the establishment of general exclusion as an overarching principle. Created by Congress in 1907 as a compromise between...
“In the Name of America’s Future”: The Fraught Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act
Senator Patrick McCarran (D−NV) was seething after Congress renewed the 1948 Displaced Persons Act in 1950. Incensed, McCarran wrote to his daughter: “I met the enemy and he took me on the DP bill. It’s tough to beat a million or more...
The History of US Immigration Laws: What Students Should Know
The history of US immigration laws can be boiled down to a single question: Who gets to be an American and who does not? This question encompasses who can immigrate to the country, who can stay, and who can become naturalized. We...
Expelling the Poor: The Antebellum Origins of American Deportation Policy
Dehumanizing insults to foreigners, aggressive enforcement of immigration law by overzealous officials, and tragic family separation routinely appear in immigration-related news in the United States today. At the center of the present...
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