79 items
At the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco still reigned as the major seaport on the Pacific coast. The city traced its origins to 1776, when a Spanish expedition planted a mission and a military post at the end of the...
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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...
Graft and Oil: How Teapot Dome Became the Greatest Political Scandal of Its Time
In the 1920s, Teapot Dome became synonymous with government corruption and the scandals arising out of the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Since then, it has sometimes been used to symbolize the power and influence of...
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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 Square Deal: Theodore Roosevelt and the Themes of Progressive Reform
Progressivism arrived at a moment of crisis for the United States. As the nineteenth century came to a close, just decades after the Civil War, many feared the nation faced another explosive and violent conflict, this time between the...
The US Banking System: Origin, Development, and Regulation
Banks are among the oldest businesses in American history—the Bank of New York, for example, was founded in 1784, and as the recently renamed Bank of New York Mellon it had its 225th anniversary in 2009. The banking system is one of...
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"Show Them What an Indian Can Do": The Example of Jim Thorpe
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...
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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...
The Spectacles of 1912
The presidential election year of 1912 began with one unprecedented spectacle, ended with another, and sandwiched a few more in between. In February, former president Theodore Roosevelt stunned the country by challenging President...
Women of the West
Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...
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Why Immigration Matters
It is difficult today to recapture the iconoclasm signaled by Oscar Handlin’s opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted more than fifty years ago: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I...
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The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood
In the latter part of August 1926, the sky darkened over much of the central United States and a heavy and persistent rain began to fall. Rain pelted first Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma, then edged eastward into Iowa...
New Orleans and the History of Jazz
New Orleans is a city built in a location that was by any measure a mistake. North American settlers needed a way to import and export goods via the Mississippi River, so a city was created atop swamps. By virtue of its location and...
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Arturo Alfonso Schomburg: Archivist, Institution Builder, and Advocate of Global Black History
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” So begins one of the most well-known essays of the Harlem Renaissance, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” written by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Published in the March...
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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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...
The Transnational Nature of the Progressive Era
In teaching the era of progressive reforms, it is hard to resist the temptation to focus on the two progressive presidents. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, figures of enormous power and striking failings, are the sorts of...
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The Jungle and the Progressive Era
The publication of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result. At the time he began working on the...
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Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Thousands of Women Were Elected to Political Office before 1920
In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the well-known leader of the woman’s rights movement, declared her intention to run for Congress, from Brooklyn, New York. Stanton was probably the first woman to campaign for a federal office. It...
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"The New Colossus": Emma Lazarus and the Immigrant Experience
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...
Amateurism and Jim Thorpe at the Fifth Olympiad
Thorpe’s deception and subsequent confession deals amateur sport in America the hardest blow it has ever had to take and disarranges the scheme of amateur athletics the world over. New York Times , January 28, 1913 The early years of...
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Age of Excess
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were guilty of many things. They were impetuous, they were known to drink too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever...
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Coming to America: Ellis Island and New York City
New York City is a kind of archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the American mainland. There are some forty islands in the city beyond Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long...
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Women's Long Journey for the Vote
The earliest and most famous expression of the discontent American women felt over their station in life was voiced by Abigail Adams in March 1776 when she urged her husband, the future president John Adams, to “Remember the Ladies, ...
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