171 items
In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world...
Mexicans in the Making of America
Today more than one of every ten Americans claims Mexican descent or heritage. In 2017 Mexican-origin people accounted for 63 percent (thirty-five million) of the nation's total Latino population. By 2050 the Latino share of the...
Mexican Farm Labor and the Agricultural Economy of the United States
In July of 1958, a Mexican man in Empalme, Mexico, died outside a recruitment center for Mexican men who wanted to participate in a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program. The program, designed and agreed upon by both the...
The Puerto Rican Experience in World War I
Between 18,000 and 20,000 Puerto Ricans served in the United States Armed Forces during World War I. [1] Puerto Ricans have been serving in the US military since 1899, when Congress authorized the creation of the Battalion of Porto...
Risk Takers and History Makers: Mexican Women of the World War II Generation
Escaping poverty and revolution and lured by prospective employment in agriculture, mining, transportation, and the building trades, more than one million Mexicans migrated to the United States between 1910 and 1930, an estimated one...
Why I Embrace the Term Latinx
When I first saw the word Latinx —best described as a gender-neutral term to designate US residents of Latin American descent—in print it seemed awkward and hard to pronounce. But rather than giving in to my first instinct, I came to...
Immigration Policy, Mexican Americans, and Undocumented Immigrants, 1954 to the Present
In 1953, a pamphlet ominously tilted What Price Wetbacks? circulated widely throughout the American Southwest. Its authors warned that a “wetback invasion” was underway, one that posed “a threat to our health, our economy, [and] our...
The 1965 Immigration Act: Opening the Nation to Immigrants of Color
Americans might think their country has always been open to all, but until 1965 people who were not white or did not come from northern or western Europe were not welcomed as immigrants. Only with the passage that year of a new...
“In the Name of America’s Future”: The Fraught Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act
Senator Patrick McCarran (D−NV) was seething after Congress renewed the 1948 Displaced Persons Act in 1950. Incensed, McCarran wrote to his daughter: “I met the enemy and he took me on the DP bill. It’s tough to beat a million or more...
Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity
Strictly speaking, all American novels (with the exception of those written by Native Americans) are in one way or another immigrant fiction. But we usually think of immigrant fiction more narrowly as the encounter of the foreign-born...
Appears in:
Bridging the Caribbean: Puerto Rican Roots in Nineteenth-Century America
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...
Appears in:
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...
Appears in:
Reconstruction and the Remaking of the Constitution
Reprinted by permission of Eric Foner from the preface to his book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (Norton, 2019) The Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed form the...
Appears in:
Reconstructing the West and North
In 1865 the Radicals of the Republican Party regarded the Northern victory in the Civil War as a “golden moment” to remake the Republic. The Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, and, so they thought until Andrew Johnson...
Appears in:
Frederick Douglass and the Dawn of Reconstruction
Historians today debate precisely when Reconstruction began, yet in many ways that is a very old discussion. At the time, its goals and focus were disputed, and even what to call the federal policy for the collapsing Confederacy was...
Appears in:
Citizenship in the Reconstruction South
Slaveholders created a system of race, gender, and class inequality in the pre-Civil War South. They justified slavery by arguing that enslaved people could not take care of themselves and needed masters to look after them. White...
Appears in:
The Rise (and Fall) of the First Ku Klux Klan
Some of the historical details in this essay could be disturbing for younger readers. In 1866, a group of defeated Confederate veterans created the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee. The group consisted of the local newspaper editor,...
Appears in:
The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail
Sometimes excavating American history involves more virtual digging than it does plying the soil with trowels. Sometimes it’s less about reassembling broken pottery than it is about reassembling broken information that’s buried just...
Appears in:
Historical Archaeology, Kingsley Plantation, and the Construction of Past Time
Archaeology is the study of the past—people and everything they were, their public acts and private hopes—or at least it is an earnest attempt to “construct” this past through a meticulous examination of material objects, the greater...
Appears in:
Yellow Fever 1793
Late in August 1793 Philadelphia was struck by a strange and virulent disease. Patients developed aches, chills, and fever, vomited black bile, and turned yellow. Some recovered, but many died. The yellow fever, as it was called, had...
Adella Hunt Logan: Suffragist and Educator
My new book, Princess of the Hither Isles , traces the life of my paternal grandmother, Adella Hunt Logan, who’s intrigued me for as long as I can remember. During my childhood, she felt like a major presence in my life. Not only was...
The Heart and Soul of Fannie Lou Hamer, An Extraordinary African American Leader
Fannie Lou Hamer was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, to Ella and James Lee Townsend (her sharecropping parents), who taught her to never quit in her endeavors-a creed she tried to live by her entire life. Of...
The Persistence of Ida B. Wells: Reform Leader and Civil Rights Activist
In an 1892 speech, Ida B. Wells told her audience, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” [1] She lived these words, determinedly and vocally confronting every social injustice she encountered. Wells (1862...
Ten Ways to Teach Rosa Parks
Adapted and reprinted with permission from The Nation [Issue of December 1, 2015] On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Her courageous action galvanized a yearlong community...
Showing results 26 - 50