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Harry peered at the document aboard the transport ship bound for the Pacific. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had written to the American troops, “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives: the freedom of the lives of...
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Matter of Influence
One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the poet Langston Hughes called the novel, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time." Hughes’s observation is particularly apt in that it avoids...
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The Pueblo Revolt
In 1680 the people known collectively as "Pueblos" rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. The Spanish had...
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The War against Spain in the Philippines in 1898
Before learning of Commodore George Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on the morning of May 1, 1898, few Americans knew anything about the Philippine Islands. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning In the Days of McKinley ...
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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...
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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...
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“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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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 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...
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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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A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad
We are often focused today on the fact that the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not include women, African Americans, or Indigenous people, and how far this deviated from the spirit of “all men are created equal.” And...
The Religious Diversity of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence was more than a founding political document of an embryonic American nation. It was also a moral summons to united action written and signed by fifty-six men of diverse religious views. The document...
Lockean Liberalism and the American Revolution
The town of Boston took an important step toward rebellion on November 20, 1772, by adopting a declaration of "the Rights of the Colonists" drafted by Sam Adams, the firebrand of the Revolution. Adams summarized these "Natural rights"...
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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...
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"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City
In October 2021, the African Burial Ground National Monument commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the New York City slave cemetery’s rediscovery by the General Services Administration (GSA). In 1991, the GSA started construction...
Early America’s Jewish Settlers
If you had the opportunity to create a new society from scratch, to build its institutions and establish its social structure from the ground up, how would you go about doing it? This is one of the most fruitful ways for teachers and...
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“Rachel Weeping for Her Children”: Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery
During the period leading up to the Civil War, black women all over the North comprised a stalwart but now largely forgotten abolitionist army. In myriad ways, these race-conscious women worked to bring immediate emancipation to the...
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...
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Lincoln’s Civil Religion
His long-time law partner William Herndon once described Abraham Lincoln as "the most shut-mouthed man who ever lived." That phrase wonderfully captured an important characteristic of a politician who had surprisingly few friends and...
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The Puritans and Dissent: The Cases of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson
Every society constructs what one scholar has called a "perimeter fence," which sets the boundary between actions and beliefs that are acceptable and those that are not. [1] This is as true of the United States in the twentieth...
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