22 items
To read the text and hear the poem click here. Whatever we say, whatever we write, whatever we do, we never act alone. Just as John Donne meditated upon the notion that "no man is an island," so, too, in the twentieth century did T.S....
"The Chinese Question"—Unresolved and Ongoing for Americans
In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act—the nation’s first race-based immigration law that was not effectively repealed until 1965–1968. The act exempted Chinese merchants, diplomats, scholars, and...
Appears in:
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...
African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment
Sharon Harley is Associate Professor and former Chair of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She and historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn co-edited the pioneer anthology The Afro-American...
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg: Archivist, Institution Builder, and Advocate of Global Black History
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” So begins one of the most well-known essays of the Harlem Renaissance, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” written by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Published in the March...
Fighting for Democracy in World War I—Overseas and Over Here
Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (2009), and the co-editor of...
Harlem’s Rattlers: African American Regiment of the New York National Guard in World War I
Jeffrey Sammons is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1988) and the co-author, with John H. Morrow, Jr., of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War:...
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:
Indians in the United States: Movements and Empire
Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were relatively few restrictions on international migration. European imperialism and settler colonialism were sustained by mass migration—both the “free” migration of European settlers...
Motor City: The Story of Detroit
"You can see here, as it is impossible to do in a more varied and complex city, the whole structure of an industrial society." So wrote essayist Edmund Wilson, reporting on a visit to the Motor City in the 1930s. As the capital of...
Appears in:
New Orleans and the History of Jazz
New Orleans is a city built in a location that was by any measure a mistake. North American settlers needed a way to import and export goods via the Mississippi River, so a city was created atop swamps. By virtue of its location and...
Appears in:
Sisters of Suffrage: British and American Women Fight for the Vote
The dominant narrative of the entire women’s suffrage movement begins and ends with the United States and Britain. Hundreds of thousands of women petitioned, canvassed, lobbied, demonstrated, engaged in mass civil disobedience, went...
Appears in:
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...
The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
The United States harvested a bumper crop of good immigrants in 1955. About 1,000 highly educated Chinese gained citizenship, including acclaimed scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs such as the architect I. M. Pei, the...
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...
The Repeal of Asian Exclusion
The United States excluded Chinese people beginning in the late nineteenth century and expanded its ban to all Asians in the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts. In addition to creating a national origins quota system best known for...
The Spectacles of 1912
The presidential election year of 1912 began with one unprecedented spectacle, ended with another, and sandwiched a few more in between. In February, former president Theodore Roosevelt stunned the country by challenging President...
Why Sports History Is American History
In the classroom, examples from sports can explain key events in American history and help explore how people in American society have grappled with racial, ethnic, and regional differences in our very diverse nation. Whether it is...
Winning the Vote: A History of Voting Rights
Voting Rights on the Eve of the Revolution The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a "stake in society." Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed...
Appears in:
Women in American Politics in the Twentieth Century
At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were outsiders to the formal structures of political life—voting, serving on juries, holding elective office—and they were subject to wide-ranging discrimination that marked them as...
Appears in:
Women of the West
Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...
Appears in:
파도와 메아리: Waves and Echoes of Korean Migration to the United States
According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay...
Showing results 1 - 22