The Immigration Restriction League (IRL) was an anti-immigration organization founded by a group of Harvard graduates in 1894. Members of the organization believed that immigration contributed to social problems such as urban crowding, poverty, crime, and labor unrest, and the IRL advocated a literacy requirement for immigrants as a way of limiting the entry of “new immigrants” from eastern Europe into the United States. In 1896, the IRL acheived passage of a Congressional literacy bill with the support of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of...

The Little Rock Nine were nine African American students—Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo Beals—who integrated the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957 after the Supreme Court declared racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional.

Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), an African American lawyer and US Supreme Court justice, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Marshall attended a segregated high school in Baltimore and then went to Lincoln University, where the student body was all black and the faculty all white. Because the University of Maryland Law School refused to accept African Americans, Marshall’s mother pawned her engagement and wedding rings so he could attend Howard Law School. With the legislative and executive branches of government largely...

Slavery played a prominent role in America’s political, social, and economic history in the antebellum era. The “peculiar institution” was at the forefront of discussions ranging from the future of the nation’s economy to western expansion and the admission of new states into the Union. The public discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century exposed the nation’s ambivalence about slavery and race. Politicians were increasingly pressured to make their opinions known, and Abraham Lincoln was no exception.