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 dollars and it’s something worthwhile to give the rotten gang a good fight anyway, and they know they have been to a fight for its not over yet.”[1] Guided by a mix of anti-Communism, nativism, and antisemitism, McCarran believed that any changes to the country’s immigration system placed the United States at risk “from a flood of undesirables” and blamed passage…

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 South. Anti-slavery Northern black women felt the sting of oppression personally. Like the slaves, they too were victims of color prejudice; some had been born in Northern bondage; others had family members still enslaved; and many interacted daily with self-emancipated people who constantly feared being returned south.Anti-slavery women such as Sojourner Truth and…

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. class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that morning, so the first I heard of what had happened came from a colleague who greeted me at the door of the lecture hall with the simple words, "We’re at war." Like hundreds of millions of others in the United States and around the world, I spent the rest of the day glued to a television screen, internalizing the images…

Thanksgiving stands as one of the most American of holidays, an autumnal ritual fixed in the imagination as honoring the piety and perseverance of the nation’s earliest arrivals during colonial days. But what were the origins of this quintessentially American tradition? And how and when did the observance become an official part of our national identity and holiday calendar? Harvest festivals have been recorded from ancient to modern times, from the Greeks honoring the goddess Demeter with a nine-day festival to the Jewish celebration of the Feast of the Tabernacles. And from ancient to modern…

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 of them contributed to the broader struggle against Jim Crow. No battle exemplifies the interaction of the local and national better than the campaign for equal rights in the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.During the late 1940s and early 1950s, civil rights activists in Washington waged a battle against racial discrimination in the city that had always been…

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 black freedom struggle enjoyed places of honor. The inaugural committee set aside seats for a few hundred surviving Tuskegee Airmen, members of a celebrated all-black unit during World War II. The dignitaries on the platform included ninety-six-year-old Dorothy Height, who began her career as a civil rights activist in Harlem during the Great Depression and who…

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 rightly so: these kinds of exclusions and contradictions would haunt the United States for decades to come. But we might also wish to remind ourselves of the seeds of inclusiveness that were evident in the collection of men who formed the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration. By the standards of the day, they were a surprisingly diverse group. As the…

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 diversified economies. These economic gains—best exemplified by the gambling casinos—and the political gains that have accompanied them have emerged from within Indian country itself, yet they are best understood in the context of, and as a response to, historic federal Indian policies. This new era of Indian autonomy, in short, is linked to the past. Sovereignty and…

To most Americans the Great Plains are the Great Flyover, or maybe the Great Drivethrough. Viewed from a window seat the plains seem nearly devoid of interest, something to get across enroute to someplace far worthier to explore or live in. Yet anyone who has spent time on the plains knows better. Walk around in western Nebraska or the Texas panhandle and you will find a geography that is mixed and surprising and sometimes disorienting. Most people consider plains history much like the land—flat, featureless, and undeserving of more than a glance between sips of a soda. But spend some time in…

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 assassination. Passage of this bill had not been easy, as some conservatives and southern members of Congress had issued strong objections to it. During the debate in the Senate, Senator Jesse Helms, Republican from North Carolina, delivered a speech declaring that although there was no evidence that King was a member of the Communist Party, some suspected that he…