207 items
In recent years, the media has tended to portray US Latinos of Hispanic Caribbean ancestry as new immigrants, but this characterization ignores the long connections between these immigrants and the United States. And because Puerto...
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The Great Depression: An Overview
Herbert Hoover got many things wrong about the great economic calamity that destroyed his presidency and his historical reputation, but he got one fundamental thing right. Much legend to the contrary, the Great Depression was not...
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Remembering the Alamo
Just hours before John F. Kennedy was to deliver one of the most important speeches of the 1960 presidential campaign in Houston, Texas, the Massachusetts Democrat stood in front of the Alamo. Here, before some 30,000 San Antonians,...
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The Consequences of Defeat in Vietnam
As historians of the Vietnam War know all too well, the amount of documentation about the conflict available in US archives—to say nothing of foreign repositories—can be overwhelming. To master even a small slice of this material is a...
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The Riddles of "Confederate Emancipation"
In July 1861, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, was exulting over the victory of his troops at the first Battle of Manassas (or Bull Run) and calling it a sign of eventual triumph in the war as a...
A Place in History: Historical Perspective on Martin Luther King Jr. Day
In the late fall of 1983, the US Congress passed a bill declaring the third Monday of January each year as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law on November 2, 1983, fifteen years after King’s...
Lincoln’s Religion
"Lincoln often, if not wholly, was an atheist," insisted one of Lincoln’s political associates, James H. Matheny. The young Lincoln had "called Christ a bastard," "ridiculed the Bible," and duped pious voters into believing he was "a...
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Matter of Influence
One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the poet Langston Hughes called the novel, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time." Hughes’s observation is particularly apt in that it avoids...
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Before Jackie: How Strikeout King Satchel Paige Struck Down Jim Crow
Satchel Paige was pitching in the Negro Leagues in California when he got the news he had been anticipating for two decades. Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey had just signed a Negro to a big-league contract—the first Negro in...
“Rachel Weeping for Her Children”: Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery
During the period leading up to the Civil War, black women all over the North comprised a stalwart but now largely forgotten abolitionist army. In myriad ways, these race-conscious women worked to bring immediate emancipation to the...
Truman and His Doctrine: Revolutionary, Unprecedented, and Bipartisan
In February 1947, the British government privately told the United States that it would no longer be able to guarantee the security and independence of Greece and Turkey. President Harry S. Truman had known this time would come and...
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From Citizen to Enemy: The Tragedy of Japanese Internment
Although World War II is covered in most school curricula, the story of American citizens who were stripped of their civil liberties here, on American soil, during that war is often omitted. Yet what happened to first-generation...
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A Local and National Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Postwar Washington, DC
The history of the Civil Rights Movement is the story of numerous grassroots campaigns loosely coordinated and assisted by a small number of national organizations. Every local struggle had its own actors, issues, and nuances, and all...
Lincoln’s Civil Religion
His long-time law partner William Herndon once described Abraham Lincoln as "the most shut-mouthed man who ever lived." That phrase wonderfully captured an important characteristic of a politician who had surprisingly few friends and...
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The Emancipation Proclamation: Bill of Lading or Ticket to Freedom?
Of all the speeches, letters, and state papers he had written, Abraham Lincoln believed that the greatest of them was his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. With one document of only 713 words, Lincoln declared more than...
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Iran and the United States in the Cold War
As the latest wave of revolutionary uncertainty sweeps across the Middle East, Iran remains one of the region’s biggest question marks. The Islamic regime that temporarily crushed the Green Movement after Iran’s controversial...
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The League of the Iroquois
No Native people affected the course of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American history more than the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of present-day upstate New York. Historians have been attempting to explain how and why ever since,...
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"The Politics of the Future Are Social Politics": Progressivism in International Perspective
The American Progressive movement was not simply a response to the domestic conditions produced by industrialization and urbanization. Instead, it was part of a global response to these developments during an era of unregulated...
Angelina and Sarah Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters
Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah Grimke were legends in their own lifetimes. Together these South Carolina sisters made history: daring to speak before "promiscuous" or mixed crowds of men and women, publishing some of the most...
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The Columbian Exchange
Millions of years ago, continental drift carried the Old World and New Worlds apart, splitting North and South America from Eurasia and Africa. That separation lasted so long that it fostered divergent evolution; for instance, the...
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The WPA: Antidote to the Great Depression?
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, estimates of the number of jobless workers in the United States ranged from thirteen million to as high as fifteen million—a quarter of the working population. Every...
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Patriotism Crosses the Color Line: African Americans in World War II
Although African Americans have been the victims of racial oppression throughout the history of the United States, they have always supported the nation, especially during wartime. When World War II erupted, over 2.5 million black men...
The Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830
State law rather than federal law governed women’s rights in the early republic. The authority of state law meant that much depended upon where a woman lived and the particular social circumstances in her region of the country. The...
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