Few sights or sounds conjure up the passion and purposefulness of the Southern Civil Rights Movement as powerfully as the freedom songs that provided a stirring musical accompaniment to the campaign for racial justice and equality in the region during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Whether sung at mass meetings, on marches and sit-ins, or en route to some of the Jim Crow South’s most forbidding jails, or whether performed on stage or record by one of the musical ensembles formed by civil rights activists, these songs conveyed the moral urgency of the freedom struggle, while...

Although it was the speech that redefined the conflict and effectively changed the meaning of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address is often misunderstood today when it is not simply ignored, at least in American schools. In 1970, as a Phoenix eighth grader, I had to memorize it, but it was just words, learned by rote. My history teacher made no effort to decipher its meaning for us, or to explain why these deceptively simple 271 words challenged the nation to practice what it had long preached. So, in my classes, I ask my students what Lincoln, a most...

Although the twentieth century produced many great athletes, there is no one who stood out more than Jim Thorpe. That is not just my opinion. When Jim Thorpe won two gold medals at the 1912 Olympic Games, the king of Sweden said to him, “Sir, I believe you are the greatest athlete in the world.” (To which Jim responded, “Thanks, King.”) And, more than eight decades later, an ABC Sports poll named Jim as the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. There were plenty of reasons for those writers to choose Jim Thorpe for that honor, even though it was more than half a century...

"The show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday." The comment above could easily have been written about Hamilton , but it was written long before Hamilton ’s composer, lyricist, book-writer, and current star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, was even born. It’s from 1968, and it appeared in the New York Times review by theater critic Clive Barnes of Broadway’s first hit rock musical, Hair . Like Hamilton , Hair was one of the most commercially and critically successful, aesthetically influential Broadway...

Midway through his remarks at the Gettysburg National Soldiers’ Cemetery on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln confided that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." This remarkable (and remarkably off-target) prediction was offered as a way to contrast the "poor power" of even the most stirring words with the still more awe-inspiring actions of 90,000 "brave men, living and dead" who had given the North a badly needed victory. Even if future generations forgot his stirring presidential address, the President was certain that they would always cherish...

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 students, but prohibited Chinese already living in the US from gaining citizenship. The law claimed one’s race as being all-determining, indeed more significant than one’s nationality. It ruled a British citizen of Chinese origin, for example, as de facto excluded on the basis of racial classification. The act was followed by the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone...

To read the text and hear the poem click here. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your...

The American Progressive movement was not simply a response to the domestic conditions produced by industrialization and urbanization. Instead, it was part of a global response to these developments during an era of unregulated capitalism that accelerated the movement of people, ideas, goods, and money. The significance can be assessed, in part, by the fact that direct foreign investment—the globalization of capital—constituted a higher percentage of all investments in the 1890s than in the 1990s. Born out of a period of great wealth and growing inequality, the Progressive era...

Quandra Prettyman , senior associate in the English and Africana Studies departments at Barnard College, was one of the first Black faculty members at the college. She taught the first courses in African American literature there in the 1970s and is the editor of Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction (1975). An accomplished poet, she has been published in I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans (1970) and The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century (1973), both edited by Arnold Adoff. In a letter written on...

"[T]he dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams." So admitted the New York Times just a month after it had reported the grisly slaughter of 3,650 Union and Confederate troops at the Battle of Antietam. On a single afternoon of hideous carnage there, more soldiers had died than at any other place, or on any other day, in American history. Yet as vividly as battlefield correspondents described the carnage, home-front readers still seemed unable to visualize the magnitude of the tragedy—or the depth of individual human sacrifice it entailed. Words seemed...