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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...
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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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...
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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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...
Women in American Politics in the Twentieth Century
At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were outsiders to the formal structures of political life—voting, serving on juries, holding elective office—and they were subject to wide-ranging discrimination that marked them as...
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Labor Day: From Protest to Picnics
In the 1880s a surge in growth of the American labor movement led to the creation of two workers’ holidays, Labor Day and May Day. May Day soon spread abroad, as European unions and socialist groups adopted it as an occasion to...
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The Supreme Court Then and Now
The framers of the United States Constitution made clear that the document was to be regarded as fundamental law. Article VI states that the Constitution and those laws "which shall be made in pursuance thereof" (as well as treaties)...
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Technology in the Persian Gulf War of 1991
In August 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. Five short months later, a powerful coalition led by the United States would launch Operation Desert Storm, one of the most rapid, decisive, and bloodless victories of all time. In just...
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