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Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History and a professor of history at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which received the Pulitzer...
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...
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 Legal Status of Women, 1776–1830
State law rather than federal law governed women’s rights in the early republic. The authority of state law meant that much depended upon where a woman lived and the particular social circumstances in her region of the country. The...
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FDR’s Court-Packing Plan: A Study in Irony
The Great Depression of the 1930s was the nation’s grimmest economic crisis since the founding of the American republic. After the 1932 elections, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a series of innovative remedies—his New Deal—but the...
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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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Lemuel Haynes, Young African American Patriot of the 1770s
In 1776, Lemuel Haynes was a young veteran of the War of Independence who was envisioning his future. He had been an indentured servant from his birth in 1753 to his coming of age in 1774. After being released from indenture, he...
Judith Sargent Murray and the Declaration of Independence
Judith Stevens (as she was then) was just twenty-five years old when a group of men in Philadelphia boldly declared the American colonies’ independence from England. Insisting that all men were created equal, and claiming that all...
The US and Spanish American Revolutions
If one says "American Revolution" in the United States today, it is assumed that what is being referred to is the North American liberation struggles against the British Empire in the late eighteenth century. But the British North...
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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...
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...
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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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...
Voices of Democracy: Jovita Idár, the Idár Family, and the Struggle against Juan Crow
In August 2023, the US Mint will release the Jovita Idár quarter, “the ninth coin in the American Women Quarters Program” authorized by Public Law 116–330. On its website, the Mint states that Idár’s “ideas and practices were ahead of...
The Declaration of Independence as Mission Statement in the Age of Lincoln
At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln made the Declaration of Independence the moment of creation for the American republic from which all else had proceeded. In some mystical sense, the nation had been “conceived” in liberty and...
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...
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An Arduous Path: The Passage and Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment
As we mark the centennial of women’s constitutional right to vote, we should remember that the Nineteenth Amendment, like the suffrage movement itself, was forced to navigate an arduous path. Even at the endgame, even at the dawn of...
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...
With All Due Respect: Understanding Anti-Suffrage Women
Although it may be hard to believe today, not everyone wanted women to have the right to vote. In fact, during the early nineteenth century, very few people thought women capable of political engagement of any kind. As the century...
Modern Women Persuading Modern Men: The Nineteenth Amendment and the Movement for Woman Suffrage, 1916–1920
Today we take women’s suffrage for granted, but many activists of the nineteenth century, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, struggled their whole lives for the vote, and did not live to see it. As a presidential...
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