Wilson released a decoded telegram from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to Mexico. Zimmermann proposed that, if the US entered the war, Mexico go to war with the US as a German ally. Zimmermann promised that if Mexico allied with Germany, Germany would provide “financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”
The Emergency Quota Act ended most immigration from outside the Americas and created an ethnic quota system for admitting immigrants to the United States.
The National Origins Act refined the immigration quota system, created by the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, to favor northern and western European immigration over southern and eastern European immigration.
The United States joined the military and economic committees of the Baghdad Pact, a defense alliance that included Britain, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and Iraq.
Congress passed the Internal Security Act over President Truman’s veto. Also known as the McCarran Act or the Subversive Activities Control Act, it strengthened laws against espionage, allowed investigation and deportation of immigrants who were suspected of subversive activities or of promoting communism or fascism, and allowed the limitation of free speech for national security reasons. President Truman vigorously opposed the law that he believed “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights [and] would actually weaken our internal...
The United States Committee on Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, was an agency headed by progressive journalist George Creel during World War I. The committee directed the government’s propaganda effort, encouraging public support for the war through pro-war films and publications and the recruitment of volunteer patriotic speakers.
The League of Nations was an international organization conceived by President Woodrow Wilson and established by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Wilson had introduced the idea of a “general association of nations” for collective security, arbitration, and diplomacy in his Fourteen Points and lobbied for its creation at the Paris Peace Conference. Though the conference adopted the Covenant of the League of Nations as part of the Treaty of Versailles, the United States never became a member because Wilson was unable to convince Congress to...
Christopher Columbus was a sailor and navigator (ca. 1454–1514) born in the Republic of Genoa. He embarked early on a naval career and then, at the age of 21, entered a formal apprenticeship as a merchant/trader. Following the writings of the classical geographer Ptolemy, Columbus, like most of his generation, understood that the world was round, but like Ptolemy, Columbus believed that it was much smaller than it actually is. This error suggested to him that it would be possible to sail westward from Europe and arrive in Asia more easily...