169 items
When Dora Dougherty Strother McKeown was just a kid she couldn’t wait for Sunday. For every Sunday her entire family would climb into their old Oakland motor car and drive to the airport to spend the day watching planes fly. It had...
The Revolutionary Era West, before and after American Independence
In December 1772, a year before angry colonists heaved chests of East India tea into Boston Harbor, the British government seemed on the cusp of creating a new North American colony. Named “Vandalia,” in honor of Queen Charlotte’s...
"Courage to Face the Unknown": The World War II Service and Legacy of Celina Baez Sotomayor
During the 1940s hundreds of thousands of American women left their hometowns to serve in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), a US Army unit created in World War II to enable women to serve in noncombat positions and “free a man to fight.” ...
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) and the National Council of American Indians: Leading the Way for Indigenous Self-Representation
Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1876, the same year as the Battle of Greasy Grass (known more commonly in US history as the Battle of Little Big Horn), Gertrude Simmons Bonnin grew up amidst a US-national culture of systemic...
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Winning the Vote: A History of Voting Rights
Voting Rights on the Eve of the Revolution The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a "stake in society." Leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and believed...
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The Origins and Legacy of the Pennsylvania Quakers
Enthusiastic religious conviction among rustic Quakers contributed much to what seems civilized and refined about American culture and society. Although the movement later attracted intellectual and genteel members, Quakerism began as...
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Bridging the Caribbean: Puerto Rican Roots in Nineteenth-Century America
In recent years, the media has tended to portray US Latinos of Hispanic Caribbean ancestry as new immigrants, but this characterization ignores the long connections between these immigrants and the United States. And because Puerto...
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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...
Born Modern: An Overview of the West
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go. At various times places now considered as thoroughly eastern as western Pennsylvania, western...
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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...
Hispanics in the United States: Origins and Destinies
In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world...
Angelina and Sarah Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters
Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah Grimke were legends in their own lifetimes. Together these South Carolina sisters made history: daring to speak before "promiscuous" or mixed crowds of men and women, publishing some of the most...
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From Citizen to Enemy: The Tragedy of Japanese Internment
Although World War II is covered in most school curricula, the story of American citizens who were stripped of their civil liberties here, on American soil, during that war is often omitted. Yet what happened to first-generation...
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The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source
The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation of an African American literary tradition, as well as unique glimpses into the souls of slaves themselves. The roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published in...
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A Poem Links Unlikely Allies in 1775: Phillis Wheatley and George Washington
One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington....
The Myth of the Frontier: Progress or Lost Freedom
For two centuries the frontier West was the setting for America’s most enduring form of popular entertainment. Daniel Boone—master hunter, pathfinder, Indian fighter, and a frontier leader of the American Revolution—was the progenitor...
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Mexicans in the Making of America
Today more than one of every ten Americans claims Mexican descent or heritage. In 2017 Mexican-origin people accounted for 63 percent (thirty-five million) of the nation's total Latino population. By 2050 the Latino share of the...
The Righteous Revolution of Mercy Otis Warren
Seven months after British Regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, three months after King George III declared the colonies in a state of rebellion, and a month after British artillery leveled the town of Falmouth (now Portland,...
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The WPA: Antidote to the Great Depression?
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, estimates of the number of jobless workers in the United States ranged from thirteen million to as high as fifteen million—a quarter of the working population. Every...
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Andrew Jackson’s Shifting Legacy
Of all presidential reputations, Andrew Jackson’s is perhaps the most difficult to summarize or explain. Most Americans recognize his name, though most probably know him (in the words of a famous song) as the general who "fought the...
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The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social History
On June 13, 1866, Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican floor leader in the House of Representatives and the nation’s most prominent Radical Republican, rose to address his Congressional colleagues on the Fourteenth Amendment to the...
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Citizenship in the Reconstruction South
Slaveholders created a system of race, gender, and class inequality in the pre-Civil War South. They justified slavery by arguing that enslaved people could not take care of themselves and needed masters to look after them. White...
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Abolition and Antebellum Reform
When the Boston abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson looked back on the years before the Civil War, he wrote, "there prevailed then a phrase, ‘the Sisterhood of Reforms.’" He had in mind "a variety of social and psychological...
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Mexican Farm Labor and the Agricultural Economy of the United States
In July of 1958, a Mexican man in Empalme, Mexico, died outside a recruitment center for Mexican men who wanted to participate in a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program. The program, designed and agreed upon by both the...
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