51 items
The transformation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, into a seemingly foreordained historical narrative began almost as soon as the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. I was teaching an 8 a.m....
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...
A More Perfect Union? Barack Obama and the Politics of Unity
A New York Times headline in January 2009 captured the essence of Barack Obama’s inauguration for many Americans: "A Civil Rights Victory Party on the Mall." An estimated 1.8 million people gathered to celebrate. Many heroes of the...
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A New Era of American Indian Autonomy
The American West is home to the majority of America’s Indian Nations, and, within the past generation, many of these groups have achieved unprecedented political and economic gains. Numerous reservation communities now manage...
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A Place in History: Historical Perspective on Martin Luther King Jr. Day
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...
A Right Deferred: African American Voter Suppression after Reconstruction
In the United States, voting is a constitutionally protected right and an essential symbol of meaningful political participation in our nation’s electoral processes of governing. The right to vote and to have one’s vote count toward...
Antonia Pantoja, a Nuyorican Builder of Institutions
Antonia Pantoja was a fierce community organizer and builder of influential institutions. Throughout her life she created organizations that enhanced the lives of Puerto Ricans and other minoritized communities. She was a dreamer with...
Betty Ford: A New Kind of First Lady
Americans never elected Gerald R. Ford president or even vice president—Richard Nixon appointed him after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973. Today, Ford’s brief presidency is often forgotten. Yet during Ford’s two...
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Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
In October 1950, the newly established People’s Republic of China entered the Korean War on the North Korean side against the United States and other United Nations troops. Many Chinese American citizens expressed deep concern at this...
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Civil Rights Leadership and the 1964 Civil Rights Act
The most important social protest movement of the twentieth century was the civil rights movement, which provided countless numbers of people the opportunity to become involved in the struggle for racial equality. The civil rights...
Constance Baker Motley: A Trailblazer in the Legal Profession
Gary L. Ford Jr. , an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York, is the author of Constance Baker Motley: One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law (2017) and a co...
Dispatches from the Front: The Civil Rights Act and the Pursuit of Greater Freedom in a Small Southern City
The civil rights protests that enveloped the nation in the summer of 1964 occurred against the backdrop of the slow, uncertain progress of the legislation that would eventually become known as the Civil Rights Act. As activists across...
Dora Dougherty Strother McKeown, Women Airforce Service Pilot in World War II
When Dora Dougherty Strother McKeown was just a kid she couldn’t wait for Sunday. For every Sunday her entire family would climb into their old Oakland motor car and drive to the airport to spend the day watching planes fly. It had...
Economic Policy through the Lens of History
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be...
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Eleanor Roosevelt as First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), one of the most admired women in American history, acted as first lady from 1933 until 1945, longer than any other presidential spouse, and put that position on the nation’s political map. Yet,...
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Everyone’s Backyard: The Love Canal Chemical Disaster
It all started quietly. There were no alerts, no sirens, no evacuation plans, no reports from Jim Cantore on the Weather Channel. Most people living in the LaSalle neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, first heard about problems in...
First Ladies’ Contributions to Political Issues and the National Welfare
The US Constitution assigns no duties or responsibilities to the president’s spouse. Every woman had to define for herself the role she wanted to play. From the blank slate that Martha Washington encountered in 1789, the job gradually...
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt—Four-Term President—and the Election of 1944
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided to seek a fourth term in 1944, his campaign would come to mark a major moment in the history of presidential elections for several reasons. No president had run for a fourth term prior...
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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...
Invisible Threats and the Politics of Disaster: Three Mile Island and Covid-19
An invisible, potentially deadly threat. Elected officials saying one thing, and public health experts saying another. A citizenry hungry for information and guidance. A cultural divide between those who are afraid of the threat and...
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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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...
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...
Remembering the Alamo
Just hours before John F. Kennedy was to deliver one of the most important speeches of the 1960 presidential campaign in Houston, Texas, the Massachusetts Democrat stood in front of the Alamo. Here, before some 30,000 San Antonians,...
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Teaching American History to Muslim Exchange Students
Everyone knows that the election of 2004 marked a pivotal turning point for the American people. That point was brought home forcefully by the experience of teaching American history that summer to a group of twenty-one young Muslim...
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