In trying to understand why people migrate, some scholars emphasize individual decision-making, while others stress broader structural forces. Many early scholars of migration emphasized the importance of "push" and "pull" factors. According to this viewpoint, people decide to leave their homeland when conditions there are no longer satisfactory and when conditions in another area are more attractive.In recent years, many scholars have argued that a thorough understanding of the decision to migrate involves looking at various levels of explanation: the individual, the familial and the…

A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the twentieth century ranked the onset of World War I eighth. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was in one way or another a result of World War I, including the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, World War II, the Holocaust, and the development of the atomic bomb. The Great Depression, the Cold War, and the collapse of European colonialism can also be traced, at least indirectly, to the First World War.World War I killed more people--more than 9 million soldiers, sailors, and…

For most Americans, young and old, the history of the American Revolution can be summed up something like this: In 1776, all the colonists rose up in unison to rebel against a tyrannical king and the horrible burden of unfair taxes the British had imposed upon them for over a hundred years. During the long war that followed, citizen soldiers shivered in the cold, shared the hardships together, admired George Washington, and won the war singlehandedly against the most powerful army in the world. Then they created a democracy and everyone lived happily ever after. Except for the part about…

Throughout the twentieth century, many influential Hollywood films, such as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Glory, and Amistad, have helped shape the way Americans have thought about slavery and its legacy. Birth of a Nation (1915) Birth of a Nation was the most popular film of the silent era. Its innovative techniques made it the most important silent film ever produced. But the film also provided historical justification for segregation and disfranchisement. The message embedded in the film was that Reconstruction was an unmitigated disaster, that African Americans could never be…

Few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944 called Capitalism and Slavery. Its author, Eric Williams, later the prime minister of Trinidad and Tabago, charged that black slavery was the engine that propelled Europe's rise to global economic dominance. He maintained that Europeans' conquest and settlement of the New World depended on the enslavement of millions of black slaves, who helped amass the capital that financed the industrial revolution. Europe's economic progress, he insisted, came at the expense of black slaves whose labor built the…

Reading 1:The aristocracy of our country . . . continually contrive to change their party name. It was first Tory, then Federalist, then no party . . . then National Republican, now Whig. . . . But by whatever name they reorganize themselves, the true democracy of the country, the producing classes, ought to be able to distinguish the enemy. Ye may know them by their fruit. Ye may know them by their deportment toward the people. Ye may know them by their disposition to club together, and constitute societies and incorporations for the enjoyment of exclusive privileges and for countenancing and…

Reading 1 Toward the aborigines of this country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people. Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excites…

Reading 1:It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make…

Reading 1:And, sir, let it be remembered that a revenue system, grossly and palpably unequal in itself--a system which, under the most favorable modification, would levy the entire amount of the federal taxes from one-fifth part of the productions of the Union, while the other four-fifths are entirely exempted...that this is the substratum upon which has been reared this monstrous and iniquitous superstructure--the protecting system....Let me, then, beseech the advocates of that system...relieve a high-minded and patriotic people from an unconstitutional and oppressive burden, which they…

Reading 1 From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. The safety of the world, ladies and gentlemen, requires a unity in…