92 items
On the morning of September 15, 1963, Denise McNair (age 11), Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Cynthia Wesley (age 14), and Carole Robertson (age 14) were killed when nineteen sticks of dynamite exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist...
Anti-Communist Trading Cards, 1951
On June 25, 1950, war broke out on the Korean peninsula when the Soviet-backed Communist forces in North Korea invaded the recently founded democratic republic of South Korea. Following a unanimous UN resolution condemning the...
Breaking Diplomatic Ties with Iran during the Hostage Crisis, 1980
On April 7, 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced the breaking of diplomatic ties with Iran as a result of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981. The US had first become actively involved in Iran in 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow...
Address to the Nation Announcing Operation Desert Storm, 1991
On January 16, 1991, President George H. W. Bush announced the beginning of the military campaign to end an Iraqi occupation of neighboring Kuwait. The address was broadcast live on radio and television. It was the culmination of five...
"You Drop A Petal in the Water, and It Has a Ripple Effect": The Disability Rights Movement, 1950-1990
Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
Generations of Chinese in America, 1880s–1940s/1940s–1990s
Click here to download Unit 1. Click here to download Unit 2.
Free Speech in US History, 1917-1988
Click here to download the middle school lesson unit. Click here to download the high school lesson unit.
The Origins of US Cold War Fears, 1946–1961
Click here to download this two-lesson unit. This unit was created in partnership with World101 from the Council on Foreign Relations .
The Cold War as a Culture War: Visualizing Values and the Role of Pop Culture
Click here to download this two-lesson unit. This unit was created in partnership with World101 from the Council on Foreign Relations .
Physicists predict a nuclear arms race, 1945
This declaration of concern, written after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, offers insight into the Manhattan Project, an atomic development program led by the United States. The "Preliminary Statement of the...
President Truman’s Farewell Address, 1953
It has none of the catch phrases or warnings of other, more famous presidential inaugural or farewell addresses, no cautions against permanent alliances or military-industrial complexes, no appeals to better angels or declarations...
Robert Kennedy on civil rights, 1963
At the end of 1962, President John F. Kennedy asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to compile a report on the Civil Rights enforcement activities of the Justice Department over the previous year. In this report,...
Civil rights posters, 1968
Memphis sanitation workers, the majority of them African American, went out on strike on February 12, 1968, demanding recognition for their union, better wages, and safer working conditions after two trash handlers were killed by a...
Proclamation pardoning Richard Nixon, 1974
"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over." Speaking half an hour after Richard Nixon submitted his resignation letter to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on August 9, 1974, and minutes after taking the oath of...
Don’t Buy a Ford Ever Again, ca. 1960
New Orleans in 1960 was sharply divided over the practice of segregation. The schools were ordered to desegregate, which angered many white people. Members of the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans believed that large companies...
JFK on the containment of Communism, 1952
In August 1952, as he was campaigning for the US Senate, John F. Kennedy addressed the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Federation of Labor. This manuscript is a draft of the speech Kennedy delivered before the influential labor...
The assassination of John F. Kennedy, 1963
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. This Dow Jones News Service ticker tape tells the story of that day as it happened. The fifteen sheets span the entire day of the...
Albert Einstein on the McCarthy hearings and the Fifth Amendment, 1953
During the "McCarthy hearings" of the 1950s, the government investigated American society and industry in an attempt to root out communist sympathizers. Among those investigated were scientists and scholars, who were called upon to...
George Wallace on segregation, 1964
In 1958, George Wallace ran against John Patterson in his first gubernatorial race. In that Alabama election, Wallace refused to make race an issue, and he declined the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. This move won Wallace the...
President Reagan’s First Inaugural Address, 1981
Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House came at a time of great economic and international turmoil for the United States. His first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, highlights many major issues of the day, including rising...
President Ford’s statement on pardoning Richard Nixon, 1974
In this speech before the Congressional Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, of October 17, 1974, President Gerald Ford explains his decision to pardon former President Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. Nixon had...
President Ford’s remarks in Japan, 1974
In November 1974, Gerald Ford became the first sitting American president to visit Japan—the trip was also Ford’s first abroad since replacing Nixon in August of that year. He used the trip to reinforce US-Japanese relations, and in...
Reagan Speech: "Tear down this wall," 1987
President Ronald Reagan’s "Tear Down This Wall" speech marked his visit to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 12, 1987, following the G7 summit meeting in Venice. As Reagan spoke, his words were amplified to both sides of the...
Ronald Reagan on economics and political parties, 1962
In May 1962, Ronald Reagan wrote this letter expressing his ideas about economic policy and the nation’s political parties. Reagan wrote as a supporter of the conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. Reagan had spent much of...
George W. Bush on the 9/11 attacks, 2001
President George W. Bush delivered this address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, little more than a week after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The nation was reeling. New York City below Canal Street was still...
Discovering a mass grave in Iraq, 2003
Mark Rickert wrote this email while serving as a journalist with the 372nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment in Iraq. On this day, he and his group were investigating rumors of a mass grave. The letter is written to his grandfather,...
Christmas in Kuwait, 1990
Cpl. Brett G. Coughlin arrived with Delta Company in Saudi Arabia at the port of Al Jubail on September 13, 1990. For the next three months the company trained in the northern desert of Saudi Arabia. By Christmas, its headquarters...
Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address, 2009
The inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2009 was a historic moment not only because Obama was the first African American ever sworn into executive office but also because he entered the presidency at a...
Condolence letter from General MacArthur, 1950
In 1950, with Soviet support, North Korea invaded South Korea. The ensuing war lasted until 1953, with the United Nations and the United States entering the conflict soon after it began. For the United States, participation in the...
John Kennedy compares US and Soviet military power, 1953
On October 16, 1953, Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy spoke at an executive meeting of the American Legion at the organization’s national headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. Addressing members of the United States’ largest...
The United Nations and the international community, 1967
In this 1967 letter, Dr. Israel Goldstein, a prominent American rabbi and Zionist, comments on the United Nations as a peacekeeping organization. After World War II, Goldstein, with other rabbis, had lobbied members of the newly...
Ronald Reagan on the unrest on college campuses, 1967
In his 1966 campaign for California governor, Republican Ronald Reagan promised to "to clean up the mess at Berkeley." Reagan was referring to the unrest prevalent not just at the University of California, Berkeley, but on college...
Guided Readings: Origins of the Cold War: The Containment Policy
Reading 1 Soviet power...bears within itself the seeds of its own decay, and the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced...[If] anything were ever to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet...
Guided Readings: Origins of the Cold War and Soviet-American Confrontation
Reading 1 From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague,...
Guided Readings: The Korean War
Reading 1 In Korea the Government forces, which were armed to prevent border raids and to preserve internal security, were attacked by invading forces from North Korea. . . . The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that...
Guided Readings: Anti-Communism at Home
Reading 1 Sec. 2: (a) It shall be unlawful for any person— (1) to knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United...
Guided Readings: Major Social Issues of the 1960s
Reading 1: Civil Rights The separate but equal doctrine has failed in three important respects. First it is inconsistent with the fundamental equalitarianism of the American way of life in that it marks groups with the brand of...
Guided Readings: World War II
Reading 1 It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to...
Guided Readings: The Atomic Bomb
Reading 1 Nuclear bombs cannot possible remain a "secret weapon" at the exclusive disposal of this country for more than a few years. The scientific facts on which their construction is based are well known to scientists of other...
Martin Luther King Jr.: His Legacy as Seen Through the Mississippi Summer Freedom Project
Background Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 21, is celebrated by Americans each year to remember and recognize the life and work of the man. Martin Luther King Jr., however, represents far more than the contributions of a single...
Challenging Segregation in Public Education
Background The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, during the congressional Reconstruction era. The amendment’s most significant provision —"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or...
Securing the Right to Vote: The Selma-to-Montgomery Story
Essential Question What conditions created the need for a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, and what did that march achieve? Background Throughout American history, African Americans have struggled to gain...
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