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Trail of Tears forced around 60,000 American Indians to be displaced during 1830-1850 by the US government.

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Slavery was legal in American the man slaves were African Americans they were treated like property.

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When Did Slavery Start in America?

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

After the American Revolution, many colonists-particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy-began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery's abolition.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it valued each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. The Constitution's drafters also guaranteed the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

By the mid-19th century, America's westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Though the Union victory freed the nation's four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

Cotton Gin

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region's businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, most of the northern states abolished slavery or started the process to abolish slavery, but the institution of slavery remained vital to the South.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Rebellions among enslaved people did occur-notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822-but few were successful.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner's group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner's rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them. And fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious "free-labor" argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubmanguided escapees on their journey North, and " stationmasters" included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Althoughestimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen's determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America's explosive growth-and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century-would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government's right to restrict slavery over Missouri's application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri's southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War.

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out-with considerable bloodshed-in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia-in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown's sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal-resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown's hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

Civil War

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln's anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that "slaves within any State, or designated part of a State...in rebellion,...shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn't officially end all slavery in America-that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War's end in 1865-some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples' status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the "equal protection" of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping.

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy-including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)-had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition | HISTORY

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Slavery in America was the legal institution of enslaving human beings, mainly Africans and African Americans. Slavery existed in the United States from its founding in 1776 and became the main cause behind the country's bloody Civil War. Slavery officially ended in America with the passage of the 13th Amendment following the Civil War's end in 1865.

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During the Gilded Age America there were three major problems such as property, unemployment, and corruption.

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Spectacular Settings – Exceptional Elegance – Fascinating Families

Thanks to meticulous historical preservation, many of the Gilded Age mansions in Newport remain standing—and even served as filming locations for the HBO show. – Vogue Magazine read the full article here

The Gilded Age comes alive with engaging audio tours of life in the Newport Mansions. From the soaring marble columns that greet you at Marble House to the platinum wall panels at The Breakers, immerse yourself in these social and architectural landmarks. Hear the fascinating stories of people who lived and worked in these grand houses.

The Gilded Age, approximately 1870-1910, was a period of unprecedented change in America. The expansion of industry and transportation – and the lack of an income tax – gave rise to a new wealthy class of people with names like Vanderbilt, Morgan, Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller. Massive fortunes were made very quickly and spent on lavish lifestyles.

Gilded Age pageantry was nowhere more on display than at the spectacular “summer cottages” of the Newport Mansions, where the new millionaires sought to outshine each other at balls, banquets, carriage parades, concerts, sporting events and other entertainments. Constructed at the height of the Gilded Age, The Breakers, Marble House, The Elms and Rosecliff reflect their owners’ obsession with social status and emulation of European aristocracy.

Not everyone was impressed by the newly rich. They were shunned by the “old money” members of New York society, who considered them invaders. It was a battle that would last for years.

Despite tremendous economic growth and the expansion of the workforce, the gap between rich and poor became ever wider during this period. The term “Gilded Age,” coined by Mark Twain, refers to the thin veneer of wealth that covered a less attractive reality. Yet this period marks the beginning of America’s development into a prosperous, growing, innovative, modern nation.

“The Gilded Age” on HBO

Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes chose the Newport Mansions to provide authentic scenery for his new historical drama The Gilded Age. Scenes were filmed at The Breakers, Marble House, The Elms, Rosecliff, Chateau-sur-Mer and Hunter House. Set in the 1880s, The Gilded Age tells the stories of “old money” New York elites and their escalating feud with nouveau riche neighbors who threaten the established social order. The show airs Mondays, January 24 through March 21, on HBO. Photographs courtesy of Alison Rosa/HBO

Do these rooms look familiar from the show?

Consuelo Vanderbilt's bedroom at Marble House stands in for railroad tycoon George Russell's bedroom in his new Fifth Avenue mansion. The Billiard Room at The Breakers is where Russell intrigues with City Alderman Patrick Morris over a game in Episode 2. And The Breakers Music Room was introduced as the Russells' ballroom, which we're bound to see again.

The kitchen at The Elms is seen frequently as the Russells’ kitchen where their French chef and other servants work. The Butternut Bedroom in Chateau-sur-Mer is used for the apartment of man-about-town Oscar van Rhijn. These are just a few of the real spaces that add magnificence to Lord Fellowes' dramatic tale.

In Episodes 5 and 6, we see Mrs. Berwind’s Bedroom in The Elms as the room of the Russells’ daughter Gladys. And Chateau-sur-Mer appears as the home of Mrs. Fish, with the three-story Great Hall and Dining Room shown during the doll tea party in Episode 6.

In Episode 7, The Breakers Music Room, as the Russell family’s ballroom, stuns the visiting Carrie Astor. Once again we see Consuelo Vanderbilt’s Bedroom in Marble House appear as Mr. Russell’s room. The Elms Kitchen gets plenty of screen time as the Russells’ butler, chef and other servants gather there. And the white front façade of Rosecliff is striking as Mrs. Chamberlain’s house in Manhattan.

Episode 8 featured multiple early scenes set in The Elms Kitchen, where the Russell servant staff is often seen gathering, and The Breakers Music Room, which serves as the Russell family ballroom. The Music Room gets extended camera time during a quadrille practice session, and the observant viewer will catch brief glimpses of The Breakers Morning Room in the background. Later in this episode, when the action shifts to Newport, the character John Adams mentions he is staying at Chateau-sur-Mer with the Wetmores. However, when we see Mrs. Astor’s newly built Beechwood, the exterior shot is of Chateau-sur-Mer while the kitchen Mrs. Russell hastily exits through belongs to Marble House.

The Season 1 finale of "The Gilded Age" features a starring role for The Breakers Music Room as the ballroom where the elite of New York society gathers for the Russells' first ball in their Fifth Avenue mansion. The room's French baroque design, blue-gray marble, crystal chandeliers, mirrors, and rich red and gold fabrics enhance the glamour of the scene. The Music Room was constructed in France by Allard & Sons, then disassembled, shipped to Newport and reassembled inside The Breakers.

Earlier in the episode, Mrs. Berwind's bedroom at The Elms appears as Gladys Russell's room where her friend Carrie Astor is visiting. And toward the end, we again see the Butternut Bedroom in Chateau-sur-Mer as Oscar van Rhijn's apartment.

"The Gilded Age" also draws upon the history and real-life people of the period. The parallels between the character Bertha Russell and Alva Vanderbilt of Marble House are striking. Alva famously manipulated the queen of New York society, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, into attending her gala costume ball by refusing to invite Mrs. Astor's daughter unless Mrs. Astor called upon her. Mrs. Astor called; the Astors then attended the Vanderbilt ball; and Alva secured her place in society.

Although Season 1 of "The Gilded Age" is finished, please continue to visit this page for more content related to the show, as well as interesting facts about the Gilded Age period in American history.

Other spaces in the Newport Mansions directly inspired the sets created by “The Gilded Age” Production Designer Bob Shaw. Bertha Russell’s room is modeled after Alva Vanderbilt’s bedroom in Marble House, while the Marble House grand staircase with its ornate wrought-iron railing influenced its counterpart in the Russells’ mansion.

See these magnificently preserved Gilded Age places in person! The Breakers and Marble House OPEN DAILY.

Hear HBO’s Gilded Age series star Carrie Coon explain how the Newport Mansions inspired the grand settings in the show.

Carrie Coon, who plays Bertha Russell in "The Gilded Age," explains how the Newport Mansions inspired the look of the palatial new home her character occupies in this fascinating look behind the scenes.  Watch the video. Photographs of Carrie Coon courtesy of Alison Rosa/HBO

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The Gilded Age comes alive with engaging audio tours of life in the Newport Mansions. See these magnificently preserved Gilded Age places in person!

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The Civil War was between the Union and Confederacy after years of tension. The reason for the war was because of slavery and the expansion of slavery.

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Abraham Lincoln was mostly known for his great leadership during the American Civil War and signed Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery.

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The 13th Amendment came at the end American Civil War and allowed slaves to be free and end slavery.

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19th Amendment allowed United States citizens the right to vote not matter if they were male or female.

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George Washington he lead the colonial forces to victory over the British and it made him a hero and also wrote the U.S. Constitution.

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Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederate States during the Civil War.

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Jefferson Davis - First President of the Confederacy | Mini Bio | BIO

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Harriet Tubman was born into slavery and escaped. She helped save others from slavery.

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Where the British originally settled in North America, later becoming the United States after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Comprised of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

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English Colonial Expansion

Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Because they could make more money from selling wool than from selling food, many of the nation's landowners were converting farmers' fields into pastures for sheep. This led to a food shortage; at the same time, many agricultural workers lost their jobs.

Did you know? Virginia Dare, the first American-born child of English parents, was born in Roanoke in 1587.

The 16th century was also the age of mercantilism, an extremely competitive economic philosophy that pushed European nations to acquire as many colonies as they could. As a result, for the most part, the English colonies in North America were business ventures. They provided an outlet for England's surplus population and (in some cases) more religious freedom than England did, but their primary purpose was to make money for their sponsors.

The Tobacco Colonies

In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London Company (later the Virginia Company) and the northern half to the Plymouth Company.

The first English settlement in North America had actually been established some 20 years before, in 1587, when a group of colonists (91 men, 17 women and nine children) led by Sir Walter Raleigh settled on the island of Roanoke. Mysteriously, by 1590 the Roanoke colony had vanished entirely. Historians still do not know what became of its inhabitants.

In 1606, just a few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. They reached the Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 and headed about 60 miles up the James River, where they built a settlement they called Jamestown.

The Jamestown colonists had a rough time of it: They were so busy looking for gold and other exportable resources that they could barely feed themselves. It was not until 1616, when Virginia's settlers learned how to grow tobacco, that it seemed the colony might survive. The first enslaved African arrived in Virginia in 1619.

In 1632, the English crown granted about 12 million acres of land at the top of the Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. This colony, named Maryland after the queen, was similar to Virginia in many ways. Its landowners produced tobacco on large plantations that depended on the labor of indentured servants and (later) enslaved workers.

But unlike Virginia's founders, Lord Baltimore was a Catholic, and he hoped that his colony would be a refuge for his persecuted coreligionists. Maryland became known for its policy of religious toleration for all.

The New England Colonies

The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 to found Plymouth Colony. Ten years later, a wealthy syndicate known as the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a much larger (and more liberal) group of Puritans to establish another Massachusetts settlement. With the help of local natives, the colonists soon got the hang of farming, fishing and hunting, and Massachusetts prospered.

As the Massachusetts settlements expanded, they formed new colonies in New England. Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was not pious enough formed the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven (the two combined in 1665). Meanwhile, Puritans who thought that Massachusetts was too restrictive formed the colony of Rhode Island, where everyone-including Jewish people-enjoyed complete "liberty in religious concernments." To the north of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a handful of adventurous settlers formed the colony of New Hampshire.

The Middle Colonies

In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York. The English soon absorbed Dutch New Netherland and renamed it New York.

Most of the Dutch people (as well as the Belgian Flemings and Walloons, French Huguenots, Scandinavians and Germans) who were living there stayed put. This made New York one of the most diverse and prosperous colonies in the New World.

In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn, a Quaker who owned large swaths of land in Ireland. Penn's North American holdings became the colony of "Penn's Woods," or Pennsylvania.

Lured by the fertile soil and the religious toleration that Penn promised, people migrated there from all over Europe. Like their Puritan counterparts in New England, most of these emigrants paid their own way to the colonies and had enough money to establish themselves when they arrived. As a result, Pennsylvania soon became a prosperous and relatively egalitarian place.

The Southern Colonies

By contrast, the Carolina colony, a territory that stretched south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific Ocean, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and-starting in the 1690s-rice.

These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony. (It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.)

In 1732, inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony. In many ways, Georgia's development mirrored South Carolina's.

The Revolutionary War and the Treaty of Paris

In 1700, there were about 250,000 European settlers and enslaved Africans in North America's English colonies. By 1775, on the eve of revolution, there were an estimated 2.5 million. The colonists did not have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was sparked after American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation, embodied by laws like The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts. Mounting tensions came to a head during the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, when the "shot heard round the world" was fired.

It was not without warning; the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770 and the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773 showed the colonists' increasing dissatisfaction with British rule in the colonies.

The Declaration of Independence, issued on July 4, 1776, enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers felt compelled to break from the rule of King George III and parliament to start a new nation. In September of that year, the Continental Congress declared the "United Colonies" of America to be the "United States of America."

France joined the war on the side of the colonists in 1778, helping the Continental Army conquer the British at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and granting the 13 original colonies independence was signed on September 3, 1783.

13 Colonies Flag

During the Revolutionary War, a flag featuring thirteen alternating red and white stripes and thirteen five-pointed stars arranged in a circle was adopted. This variant is also known as the " Betsy Ross Flag," as she was believed to have designed it. The stars and stripes represent the 13 colonies.

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The 13 Colonies: Map, Original States & Facts | HISTORY

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The 13 Colonies were a group of colonies of Great Britain that settled on the Atlantic coast of America in the 17th and 18th centuries. The colonies declared independence in 1776 to found the United States of America.

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American author, publisher, inventor, scientist, and diplomat. One of America's Founding Fathers, Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence.

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Benjamin Franklin: Author of the Declaration of Independence | Full Documentary | Biography

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The Bill of Rights consists of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution of the United States guaranteeing citizens their civil rights and liberties like freedom of speech, press, and religion.

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Español Accordion [accordion classes="" id="59774" expand_first="true"][/accordion] Back to Main Page How Did it Happen?

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A period of technological advancement leading to production, trade, banking, and urban development that took place during the last part of the 18th century beginning with the invention of the steam engine.

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When Was the Industrial Revolution?

Though a few innovations were developed as early as the 1700s, the Industrial Revolution began in earnest by the 1830s and 1840s in Britain, and soon spread to the rest of the world, including the United States.

Modern historians often refer to this period as the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from a second period of industrialization that took place from the late 19th to early 20th centuries and saw rapid advances in the steel, electric and automobile industries.

Spinning Jenny

Thanks in part to its damp climate, ideal for raising sheep, Britain had a long history of producing textiles like wool, linen and cotton. But prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true "cottage industry," with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers.

Starting in the mid-18th century, innovations like the spinning jenny (a wooden frame with multiple spindles), the flying shuttle, the water frame and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. Producing cloth became faster and required less time and far less human labor.

More efficient, mechanized production meant Britain's new textile factories could meet the growing demand for cloth both at home and abroad, where the British Empire's many overseas colonies provided a captive market for its goods. In addition to textiles, the British iron industry also adopted new innovations.

Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was both cheaper and produced higher-quality material, enabling Britain's iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the later growth of the railroad industry.

Impact of Steam Power

An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine. Called the "atmospheric steam engine," Newcomen's invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts.

In the 1760s, Scottish engineer James Watt began tinkering with one of Newcomen's models, adding a separate water condenser that made it far more efficient. Watt later collaborated with Matthew Boulton to invent a steam engine with a rotary motion, a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries, including flour, paper, and cotton mills, iron works, distilleries, waterworks and canals.

Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.

Transportation During the Industrial Revolution

Britain's road network, which had been relatively primitive prior to industrialization, soon saw substantial improvements, and more than 2,000 miles of canals were in use across Britain by 1815.

In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along Britain's rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Banking and Communication in the Industrial Revolution

In 1776, Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith, who is regarded as the founder of modern economics, published The Wealth of Nations. In it, Smith promoted an economic system based on free enterprise, the private ownership of means of production, and lack of government interference.

Banks and industrial financiers soon rose to new prominence during this period, as well as a factory system dependent on owners and managers. A stock exchange was established in London in the 1770s; the New York Stock Exchange was founded in the early 1790s.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States.

Cooke and Wheatstone's system would be used for railroad signaling, as the speed of the new steam-powered trains created a need for more sophisticated means of communication.

Labor Movement

Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation, miserable housing conditions and a lack of safe drinking water.

Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious (and sometimes dangerous), and many workers-including children-were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages.

Such dramatic changes and abuses fueled opposition to industrialization worldwide, including the " Luddites," known for their violent resistance to changes in Britain's textile industry.

Did you know? The word "luddite" refers to a person who is opposed to technological change. The term is derived from a group of early 19th century English workers who attacked factories and destroyed machinery as a means of protest. They were supposedly led by a man named Ned Ludd, though he may have been an apocryphal figure.

In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the formation of labor unions, as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization.

The Industrial Revolution in the United States

The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright's designs across the Atlantic. He later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution."

The United States followed its own path to industrialization, spurred by innovations "borrowed" from Britain as well as by homegrown inventors like Eli Whitney. Whitney's 1793 invention of the cotton gin (short for "engine") revolutionized the nation's cotton industry (and strengthened the hold of slavery over the cotton-producing South).

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems.

By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America's northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world's leading industrial nation.

Effects of the Industrial Revolution

Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex.

On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and environmental pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle with today. On the other, the move to cities and ingenious inventions that made clothing, communication and transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history.

Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society.

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Sources

Robert C. Allen, The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
Claire Hopley, "A History of the British Cotton Industry." British Heritage Travel, July 29, 2006
William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010
Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. New York: Grove Press, 2007
Matthew White, "Georgian Britain: The Industrial Revolution." British Library, October 14, 2009

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Industrial Revolution: Definition, Inventions & Dates - HISTORY

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The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, a time of great growth in technologies and inventions, transformed rural societies into industrialized, urban ones.

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The western half of the Mississippi River basin purchased in 1803 by the US from France. The deal granted that the US be allowed to take land from Indigenous people by force.

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UNDERSTANDABLY, Pierre Clément de Laussat was saddened by this unexpected turn of events. Having arrived in New Orleans from Paris with his wife and three daughters just nine months earlier, in March 1803, the cultivated, worldly French functionary had expected to reign for six or eight years as colonial prefect over the vast territory of Louisiana, which was to be France's North American empire. The prospect had been all the more pleasing because the territory's capital, New Orleans, he had noted with approval, was a city with "a great deal of social life, elegance and goodbreeding." He also had liked the fact that the city had "all sorts of masters-dancing, music, art, and fencing," and that even though there were "no book shops or libraries," books could be ordered from France.

But almost before Laussat had learned to appreciate a good gumbo and the relaxed Creole pace of life, Napoléon Bonaparte had abruptly decided to sell the territory to the United States. This left Laussat with little to do but officiate when, on a sunny December 20, 1803, the French tricolor was slowly lowered in New Orleans' main square, the Placed'Armes, and the American flag was raised. After William C.C. Claiborne and Gen. James Wilkinson, the new commissioners of the territory, officially took possession of it in the name of the United States, assuring all residents that their property, rights and religion would be respected, celebratory salvos boomed from the forts around the city. Americans cried "Huzzah!" and waved their hats, while French and Spanish residents sulked in glum silence. Laussat, standing on the balcony of the town hall, burst into tears.

The Louisiana Purchase, made 200 years ago this month, nearly doubled the size of the United States. By any measure, it was one of the most colossal land transactions in history, involving an area larger than today's France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland and the British Isles combined. All or parts of 15 Western states would eventually be carved from its nearly 830,000 square miles, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. And the price, $15 million, or about four cents an acre, was a breathtaking bargain. "Let the Land rejoice," Gen. Horatio Gates, a prominent New York state legislator, told President Thomas Jefferson when details of the deal reached Washington, D.C. "For you have bought Louisiana for a song."

Rich in gold, silver and other ores, as well as huge forests and endless lands for grazing and farming, the new acquisition would make America immensely wealthy. Or, as Jefferson put it in his usual understated way, "The fertility of thecountry, its climate and extent, promise in due season importantaids to our treasury, an ample provision for our posterity, and a wide-spread field for the blessings of freedom."

American historians today are more outspoken in their enthusiasm for the acquisition. "With the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, this is one of the threethings that created the modern United States," says Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans and coauthor with the late Stephen E. Ambrose of The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation. Charles A. Cerami, author of Jefferson's Great Gamble, agrees. "If we had not made this purchase, it would have pinched off the possibility of our becoming a continental power," he says. "That, in turn, would have meant our ideas on freedom and democracy would have carried less weight with the rest of the world. This was the key to our international influence."

The bicentennial is being celebrated with yearlong activities in many of the states fashioned from the territory. But the focal point of the celebrations is Louisiana itself. The most ambitious event opens this month at the New Orleans Museum of Art. "Jefferson's America & Napoléon's France" (April 12-August 31), an unprecedented exhibition of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, memorabilia and rare documents, presents a dazzling look at the arts and leading figures of the two countries at this pivotal time in history. "What we wanted to do was enrich people's understanding of the significance of this moment," says Gail Feigenbaum, lead curator of the show. "It's about more than just a humdinger of a real estate deal. What kind of world were Jefferson and Napoléon living and working in? We also show that our political and cultural relationship with France was extraordinarily rich at the time, a spirited interchange that altered the shape of the modern world."

The "Louisiana territory" was born on April 9, 1682, when the French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur (Lord) de La Salle, erected a cross and column near the mouth of the Mississippi and solemnly read a declaration to a group of bemused Indians. He took possession of the whole Mississippi River basin, he avowed, in the name of "the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by Grace of God king of France and Navarre, 14th of that name." And it was in honor of Louis XIV that he named the land Louisiana.

In 1718, French explorer Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded a settlement near the site of La Salle's proclamation, and named it la Nouvelle Orléans for Philippe, Duke of Orléans and Regent of France. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, its population of whites, slaves of African origin and "free persons of color" was about 8,000. A picturesque assemblage of French and Spanish colonial architecture and Creole cottages, New Orleans boasted a thriving economy based largely on agricultural exports.

For more than a century after La Salle took possession of it, the Louisiana Territory, with its scattered French, Spanish, Acadian and German settlements, along with those of Native Americans and American-born frontiersmen, was traded among European royalty at their whim. The French were fascinated by America-which they often symbolized in paintings and drawings as a befeathered Noble Savage standing beside an alligator-but they could not decide whether it was a new Eden or, as the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon declared, a primitive place fit only for degenerate life-forms. But the official view was summed up by Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac, whom Louis XIV named governor of the territory in 1710: "The people are aheap of the dregs of Canada," he sniffed in a 42-page report to the king written soon after he arrived. The soldiers there were untrained and undisciplined, he lamented, and the whole colony was "not worth a straw at the present time." Concluding that the area was valueless, Louis XV gave the territory to his Bourbon cousin Charles III of Spain in 1763. But in 1800, the region again changed hands, when Napoléon negotiated the clandestine Treaty of San Ildefonso with Spain's Charles IV. The treaty called for the return of the vast territory to France in exchange for the small kingdom of Etruria in northern Italy, which Charles wanted for his daughter Louisetta.

When Jefferson heard rumors of Napoléon's secret deal, he immediately saw the threat to America's Western settlements and its vital outlet to the Gulf of Mexico. If the deal was allowed to stand, he declared, "it would be impossible that France and the United States can continue long as friends." Relations had been relaxed with Spain while it held New Orleans, but Jefferson suspected that Napoléon wanted to close the Mississippi to American use. This must have been a wrenching moment for Jefferson, who had long been a Francophile. Twelve years before, he had returned from a five-year stint as American minister to Paris, shipping home 86 cases of furnishings and books he had picked up there.

The crunch came for Jefferson in October 1802. Spain's King Charles IV finally got around to signing the royal decree officially transferring the territory to France, and on October 16, the Spanish administrator in New Orleans, Juan Ventura Morales, who had agreed to administer the colony until his French replacement, Laussat, could arrive, arbitrarily ended the American right to deposit cargo in the city duty-free. He argued that the three-year term of the 1795 treaty that had granted America this right and free passage through Spanish territory on the Mississippi had expired. Morales' proclamation meant that American merchandise could no longer be stored in New Orleans warehouses. As a result, trappers' pelts, agricultural produce and finished goods risked exposure and theft on open wharfs while awaiting shipment to the East Coast and beyond. The entire economy of America's Western territories was in jeopardy. "The difficulties and risks . . . are incalculable," warned the U.S. vice-consul in New Orleans, Williams E. Hulings, in a dispatch to Secretary of State James Madison.

As Jefferson had written in April 1802 to the U.S. minister in Paris, Robert R. Livingston, it was crucial that the port of New Orleans remain open and free for American commerce, particularly the goods coming down the Mississippi River. "There is on the globe one single spot," Jefferson wrote, "the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market." Jefferson's concern was more than commercial. "He had a vision of America as an empire of liberty," says Douglas Brinkley. "And he saw the Mississippi River not as the western edge of the country, but as the great spine that would hold the continent together."

As it was, frontiersmen, infuriated by the abrogation of the right of deposit of their goods, threatened to seize New Orleans by force. The idea was taken up by lawmakers such as Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania, who drafted a resolution calling on Jefferson to form a 50,000-man army to take the city. The press joined the fray. The United States had the right, thundered the New York Evening Post, "to regulate the future destiny of North America," while the Charleston Courier advocated "taking possession of the port . . . by force of arms." As Secretary of State James Madison explained, "The Mississippi is to them everything. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream."

With Congress and a vociferous press calling for action, Jefferson faced the nation's most serious crisis since the American Revolution. "Peace is our passion," he declared, and expressed the concern that hotheaded members of the opposition Federalist Party might "force us into war." He had already instructed Livingston in early 1802 to approach Napoléon's foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, to try to prevent the cession of the territory to France, if this had not already occurred, or, if the deal was done, to try to purchase New Orleans. In his initial meeting with Napoléon after taking up his Paris post in 1801, Livingston had been warned about Old World ways. "You have come to a very corrupt world," Napoléon told him frankly, adding roguishly that Talleyrand was the right man to explain what he meant by corruption.

A wily political survivor who held high offices under the French Revolution, and later under Napoléon's empire and the restored Bourbon monarchy, Talleyrand had spent the years 1792 to 1794 in exile in America after being denounced by the revolutionary National Convention, and had conceived a virulent contempt for Americans. "Refinement," he declared, "does not exist" in the United States. As Napoléon's foreign minister, Talleyrand customarily demanded outrageous bribes for diplomatic results. Despite a clubfoot and what contemporaries called his "dead eyes," he could be charming and witty when he wanted-which helped camouflage his basic negotiating tactic of delay. "The lack of instructions and the necessity of consulting one's government are always legitimate excuses in order to obtain delays in political affairs," he once wrote. When Livingston tried to discuss the territory, Talleyrand simply denied that there was any treaty between France and Spain. "There never was a government in which less could be done by negotiation than here," a frustrated Livingston wrote to Madison on September 1, 1802. "There is no people, no legislature, no counselors. One man is everything."

But Livingston, although an inexperienced diplomat, tried to keep himself informed about the country to which he was ambassador. In March 1802, he warned Madison that France intended to "have a leading interest in the politics of our western country" and was preparing to send 5,000 to 7,000 troops from its Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to occupy New Orleans. But Napoléon's troops in Saint Domingue were being decimated by a revolution and an outbreak of yellow fever. In June, Napoléon ordered Gen. Claude Victor to set out for New Orleans from the French controlled Netherlands. But by the time Victor assembled enough men and ships in January 1803, ice blocked the Dutchport, making it impossible for him to set sail.

That same month Jefferson asked James Monroe, a former member of Congress and former governor of Virginia, to join Livingston in Paris as minister extraordinary with discretionary powers to spend $9,375,000 to secure New Orleans and parts of the Floridas (to consolidate the U.S. position in the southeastern part of the continent). In financial straits at the time, Monroe sold his china and furniture to raise travel funds, asked a neighbor to manage his properties, and sailed for France on March 8, 1803, with Jefferson's parting admonition ringing in his ears: "The future destinies of this republic" depended on his success.

By the time Monroe arrived in Paris on April 12, the situation had, unknown to him, radically altered: Napoléon had suddenly decided to sell the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States. He had always seen Saint Domingue, with a population of more than 500,000, producing enough sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton and cocoa to fill some 700 ships a year, as France's most important holding in the Western Hemisphere. The Louisiana Territory, in Napoléon's view, was useful mainly as a granary for Saint Domingue. With the colony in danger of being lost, the territory was less useful. Then, too, Napoléon was gearing up for another campaign against Britain and needed funds for that.

Napoléon's brothers Joseph and Lucien had gone to see him at the Tuileries Palace on April 7, determined to convince him not to sell the territory. For one thing, they considered it foolish to voluntarily give up an important French holding on the American continent. For another, Britain had unofficially offered Joseph a bribe of £100,000 to persuade Napoléon not to let the Americans have Louisiana. But Napoléon's mind was already made up. The First Consul happened to be sitting in his bath when his brothers arrived. "Gentlemen," he announced, "think what you please about it. I have decided to sell Louisiana to the Americans." To make his point to his astonished brothers, Napoléon abruptly stood up, then dropped back into the tub, drenching Joseph. A manservant slumped to the floor in a faint.

French historians point out that Napoléon had several reasons for this decision. "He probably concluded that, following American independence, France couldn't hope to maintain a colony on the American continent," says Jean Tulard, one of France's foremost Napoléon scholars. "French policy makers had felt for some time that France's possessions in the Antilles would inevitably be 'contaminated' by America's idea of freedom and would eventually take their own independence. By the sale, Napoléon hoped to create a huge country in the Western Hemisphere to serve as a counterweight to Britain and maybe make trouble for it."

On April 11, when Livingston called on Talleyrand for what he thought was yet another futile attempt to deal, the foreign minister, after the de rigueur small talk, suddenly asked whether the United States would perchance wish to buy the whole of the Louisiana Territory. In fact, Talleyrand was intruding on a deal that Napoléon had assigned to the French finance minister, François de Barbé-Marbois. The latter knew America well, having spent some years in Philadelphia in the late 1700s as French ambassador to the United States, where he got to know Washington, Jefferson, Livingston and Monroe. Barbé-Marbois received his orders on April 11, 1803, when Napoléon summoned him. "I renounce Louisiana," Napoléon told him. "It is not only New Orleans that I will cede, it is the whole colony without reservation. I renounce it with the greatest regret. . . . I require a great deal of money for this war [with Britain]."

Thierry Lentz, a Napoléon historian and director of the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, contends that, for Napoléon, "It was basically just a big real estate deal. He was in a hurry to get some money for the depleted French treasury, although the relatively modest price shows that he was had in that deal. But he did manage to sell something that he didn't really have any control over-there were few French settlers and no French administration over the territory-except on paper." As for Jefferson, notes historian Cerami, "he actually wasn't out to make this big a purchase. The whole thing came as a total surprise to him and his negotiating team in Paris, because it was, after all, Napoléon's idea, not his."

Showing up unexpectedly at the dinner party Livingston gave on April 12 for Monroe's arrival, Barbé-Marbois discreetly asked Livingston to meet him later that night at the treasury office. There he confirmed Napoléon's desire to sell the territory for $22,500,000. Livingston replied that he"would be ready to purchase provided the sum was reduced to reasonable limits." Then he rushed home and worked until 3 a.m. writing a memorandum to Secretary of State Madison, concluding: "We shall do all we can to cheapen the purchase; but my present sentiment is that we shall buy."

On April 15, Monroe and Livingston proposed $8 million.

At this, Barbé-Marbois pretended Napoléon had lost interest. But by April 27, he was saying that $15 million was as low as Napoléon would go. Though the Americans then countered with $12.7 million, the deal was struck for $15 million on April 29. The treaty was signed by Barbé-Marbois, Livingston and Monroe on May 2 and backdated to April 30. Although the purchase was undeniably a bargain, the price was still more than the young U.S. treasury could afford. But the resourceful Barbé-Marbois had an answer for that too. He had contacts at Britain's Baring & Co. Bank, which agreed, along with several other banks, to make the actual purchase and pay Napoléon cash. The bank then turned over ownership of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in return for bonds, which were repaid over 15 years at 6 percent interest, making the final purchase price around $27 million. Neither Livingston nor Monroe had been authorized to buy all of the territory, or to spend $15 million-transatlantic mail took weeks, sometimes months, each way, so they had no time to request and receive approval of the deal from Washington. But an elated Livingston was aware that nearly doubling the size of America would make it a major player on the world scene one day, and he permitted himself some verbal euphoria: "We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives," he said. "From this day the United States take their place among the powers of the first rank."

It wasn't until July 3 that news of the purchase reached U.S. shores, just in time for Americans to celebrate it on Independence Day. A Washington newspaper, the National Intelligencer, reflecting how most citizens felt, referred to the "widespread joy of millions at an event which history will record among the most splendid in our annals." Though we have no historical evidence of how Jefferson felt about the purchase, notes Cerami, reports from those in his circle like Monroe refer to the president's "great pleasure," despite his fear that the deal had gone beyond his constitutional powers. Not all Americans agreed, however. The Boston Columbian Centinel editorialized, "We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much." And Congressman Joseph Quincy of Massachusetts so opposed the deal that he favored secession by the Northeastern states, "amicably if they can; violently if they must."

The favorable majority, however, easily prevailed and New England remained in the Union. As for the ever-succinct Thomas Jefferson, he wasted little time on rhetoric. "The enlightened government of France saw, with just discernment," he told Congress, with typical tact, on October 17, 1803, "the importance to both nations of such liberal arrangements as might best and permanently promote the peace, friendship, and interests of both." But, excited by the commercial opportunities in the West, Jefferson, even before official notice of the treaty reached him, had already dispatched Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition to explore the territory and the lands beyond. All the way to the Pacific.
JEFFERSON'S AMERICA, NAPOLEON'S FRANCE
"We have tried to capture the suspense and fascination of a story whose outcome is known, yet was not foreordained," says Gail Feigenbaum, curator of the Jefferson-Napoléon show on view in New Orleans April 12 to August 31, "and to tell it through a rich variety of objects." The variety includes three important documents: a copy of the treaty, which bears Jefferson's signature; a document covering payment of claims by American citizens against France, signed by Napoléon; and the official report of transfer of the Louisiana Territory signed by a bereaved prefect, Pierre de Laussat. The exhibition points up how intertwined the two nations were at the time. A seascape portrays the Marquis de Lafayette's ship La Victoire setting sail to carry him across the Atlantic in 1777 to fight in the American Revolution. (There is also a portrait of the marquis himself and a 1784 painting by French artist Jean Suau, Allegory of France Liberating America.) A mahogany and gilded bronze swan bed that belonged to the famous French beauty Juliette Récamier is also on display. Fashion-conscious American ladies reportedly imitated Récamier's attire, but not her custom of receiving visitors in her bedroom. And John Trumbull's huge painting The Signing of the Declaration of Independence documents the historic American event that so greatly impressed and influenced French revolutionary thinkers. It hangs not far from a color engraving of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was composed in 1789 by Lafayette with the advice of his American friend Thomas Jefferson.

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How the Louisiana Purchase Changed the World

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When Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, he altered the shape of a nation and the course of history

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Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark were commissioned by the US government in 1804 to explore the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest with the goal of finding diplomacy with Indigenous people.

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The First American Expedition | Season 1 | Lewis & Clark

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Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the first American expedition.

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The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling upheld Jim Crow Laws and racial segregation from the end of slavery until the Civil Rights Movement.

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A period of severe economic depression from 1929 - 1939 worldwide.

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Newsreel Announcer (archival): The tremendous crowds which you see gathered outside the stock exchange are due to the greatest crash in the history of the New York Stock Exchange in market prices.

Narrator: December 31st, New Year's Eve. The crash and its terrible consequences were still in the future. Financial leaders, everyone celebrated what had been a decade of prosperity and boundless optimism. They thought the party would last forever. They called it "The New Era," 1929. All the hope and promise and illusion of the 20s converged in that one year.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: The United States is afflicted with new eras. Let us not think for a moment that the illusion, the aberration of the 1920s was unique. It is intimately a part of the American character.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: The mood of the era, I think, can best be remembered by the hit song - was that 1929, Blue Skies?

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: In the 20s, yes, '28, '29.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: How did that go?

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Smiling at me...

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Yeah. Nothing but blue skies do I see. Yes.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: ...Never saw the sun shining so bright, Never saw things going so right. Gray days, all of them gone, nothing but blue skies from now on.

That was the whole tenor of the day. I mean, people believed that everything was going to be great always, always. There was a feeling of optimism in the air that you cannot even describe today.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: And everyone seemed to have an interest in the stock market. Certainly, the boot black, the tailor, the grocer owned shares of one kind or another.

Narrator: This was the first time that many ordinary Americans had begun to invest in stocks. A stock, a share of a company, is bought and sold here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The stocks themselves have no fixed value. As in an auction, if the stock is in demand, its price goes up. No demand and the price goes down. For almost eight straight years, stock values had been rising. By 1929, there seemed to be no upper limits in this world of paper, numbers and dreams.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: It was an arena of unbounded opportunity where somebody like my grandfather could come into it and make a fortune. So many people made so much money in the market that late in the 20s, it seemed that you just couldn't go wrong buying stocks in American companies.

Narrator: Here was a whole new way to make a fortune. Unlike the Carnegies and the Rockefellers of previous decades, who built steel mills and dug oil wells, men like Michael Meehan, Jesse Livermore and Charles Mitchell had amassed their fortunes buying and selling stocks, pieces of paper. The public was fascinated. Bankers, brokers and speculators had become celebrities and they lived like royalty.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: I can hardly believe that a family lived in this kind of house. I mean, today, it would be almost unbelievable. Six stories and these great big rooms.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Enormous. We counted it up the other day. We had 16 live-in help in this house -

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Not counting the chauffeurs and others.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: - not counting the chauffeurs, yes, aside from all the help we had in the Tuxedo Park house and the Southampton house as well. But those days are gone forever.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: I should say.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: But we never thought of it as being grandiose because practically everybody we knew seemed to live in the same way.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: Jesse Livermore had a ticker tape in every home that he owned. They had a beautiful house on 76th Street in Manhattan, on the West side of Central Park. They had a floor at the 813 Fifth Avenue because Dorothy did not like to go to the West Side to change her clothes. So they had a house in Great Neck, they had a summer house in Lake Placid, they had a house in Palm Beach. They had private railroad cars, two yachts. Oh, they lived. They really lived.

Narrator: Few Americans lived like Jesse Livermore, but there was a rising expectation that everyone could have a piece of this prosperity. During his presidential campaign of 1928, candidate Herbert Hoover would make this extraordinary promise.

Herbert Hover (archival): Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.

Robert Sobel, Historian: There was great hope. America came out of World War I with the economy intact. We were the only strong country in the world. The dollar was king. We had a very popular president in the middle of the decade, Calvin Coolidge, and an even more popular one elected in 1928, Herbert Hoover. So things looked pretty good.

Narrator: The economy was changing in this new America. It was the dawn of the consumer revolution. New inventions, mass marketing, factories turning out amazing products like radios, rayon, air conditioners, underarm deodorant.

Robert Sobel, Historian: This is a period in which the American household gets the washing machine, gets a refrigerator, goes off gaslight and gets electricity in some cities. This is period in which people would buy little plugs to put into the outlets in the wall so the electricity wouldn't leak on the floor. "What will they think of next," was a 1920s saying, 'cause new things were continually coming out and they were new things which you could enjoy, not just for the few.

Narrator: One of the most wondrous inventions of the age was consumer credit. Before 1920, the average worker couldn't borrow money. By 1929, "buy now, pay later" had become a way of life.

Robert Sobel, Historian: So there were changes, many changes in the way people viewed the world and all of them optimistic. You extrapolate the curve and what do you have? Permanent prosperity. That was the term one heard in the late 1920s. "We're into the age of permanent prosperity."

Narrator: Wall Street got the credit for this prosperity and Wall Street was dominated by just a small group of wealthy men. Rarely in the history of this nation had so much raw power been concentrated in the hands of a few businessmen, men like William C. Durant.

Aristo Scrobogna, Secretary to William C. Durant: It's almost impossible to realize the power and the significance of the man. In Flint - when Mr. Durant came to Flint occasionally, people used to say, "Durant is in town." Just like that, you know, "Durant is in town." He was bigger than life.

Narrator: Earlier in the century, Durant had founded General Motors. Now, he made his money on Wall Street. Backed by Midwestern auto industrialists, he controlled so much money that he could singlehandedly drive up the price of a stock and then sell, reaping huge profits.

Aristo Scrobogna, Secretary to William C. Durant: He was just at the apotheosis, at the maximum of his power. He managed - according to the voices of the time, according to what was said - anywhere between two to five billion dollars, which in those days was a fabulous - the market was filled with bulls and he was the bull of the bulls.

Narrator: Durant came to Wall Street as one of the titans of industry. Jesse Livermore, whose fortune was estimated at over $100 million, never did anything in his life but play the market.

Robert Sobel, Historian: Everything Jesse Livermore touched turned to gold, it seemed. All he had to do was to press a button and a stock would go up ten points. And that meant, of course, that Jesse Livermore would make a lot of money. So the average American would look at this say, "Gee, if only I knew what he doing, I could make money, too. How do you get in on Jesse Livermore's brains?"

Narrator: Livermore was a speculator, pure and simple. He didn't study the health of a company. He didn't care whether it made a profit or paid a dividend. For him, the stock market was an abstract game of numbers.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: Money was not the end for this man at all. Money was a very peripheral thing for him, but beating the odds, winning a game. That was his objective. He was a numbers man. He lived by the numbers, took an elevator by the numbers. He came into town by the numbers. Everything was done by numbers. When he left his house in the morning, he did not leave at 8:10, he left at 8:07. All of the policemen knew, because of his time schedule, that he would be going down Fifth Avenue, let's say, at 8:37. Well, of course, traffic lights were hand-operated then, had policemen on boxes. So the instant that they saw his car, the lights were green. He never stopped for a red light.

Narrator: The success of large speculators like Livermore and Durant lured smaller investors to Wall Street, but Charles Mitchell, president of National City Bank, virtually invented the idea of mass-marketing stocks and bonds to the general public. This was a totally new idea and a huge success.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: The bank, prior to father's being elected president in 1921, was geared mainly to doing business with large corporations. Father pointed the bank, for the first time, in the direction of going after the little man and

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Don't call him the little man. It was Everyman.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Well, jedermann (everyman), all right. How old was he then? Thirty-eight years old. And the National City Company had four offices. And then, within three years, there were over 50 offices and by 1929, it was the largest distributor of securities in the world.

Narrator: Even at the height of the speculative frenzy, only a small percentage of the American public actually invested in stocks, but the market had entered popular culture. Wall Street became Main Street. Everyone was talking stocks. Watching the ticker became a national sport. Popular magazines covered financial news. Dozens of best-sellers promised investors the inside track. The characters in the popular comic strip "Gasoline Alley," were investing in a company called "Rubber Keyhole." Stock tips came from everywhere. Some investors followed the advice of Evangeline Adams, an astrologer.

Manly P. Hall, Founder, Philosophical Research Society: She was able to calculate the variations of the stock exchange so accurately that there was practically no difference to having have read it in a ledger somewhere. Among her more interesting clients were Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and J. Pierpont Morgan.

Narrator: In February, Evangeline Adams looked at the stars and predicted a dramatic upswing in stock prices for the coming months. The stock market, once considered a highly risky place to put your money, was now beginning to attract a whole new group of amateur speculators. Among the new players was one Julius Marx. Everyone knew him by his stage name, Groucho.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: But they were poor and it always affected my father 'cause he was always kind of thrifty and worried about his future and what would become of him when no one else wanted him as an actor anymore. So he was always saving money, turning off the lights and turning off the water around the house even after he was in Hollywood and making a lot of money.

Narrator: Of all the Marx brothers, Groucho was the most financially conservative. In 1929, he took his life's savings and put it in a sure thing, the stock market.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: He was always phoning a broker and getting hot tips and wanting to know what the stocks were that - how they were doing. And if he wasn't on the phone, he would take me into Great Neck, which was a little village at the time but they did have a stockbroker called Newman Brothers & Worms and all these men who were investing in the market, they'd all sit there in chairs like a little theater and watch the ticker tape go by.

Narrator: Groucho, along with record numbers of smaller investors, was borrowing money to buy stocks. It was called "buying on margin." You only needed ten percent down. Just $1,000 would get you $10,000 worth of stock. Suddenly, you were in the same league with the big players or so it seemed. But the stock market was not a level playing field.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: In the 20s and 30s, one of the big features of the stock market is the fact that it wasn't controlled and that operators could do a lot of things that are not permitted today.

Narrator: One of the most common tactics was to manipulate the price of a particular stock, a stock like Radio Corporation of America.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: RCA was, in the 20s, what Xerox was in the 60s, what was a great growth stock. The stock went from - I can't remember the exact numbers, but from something like 20 to 400, split many times and made many people, including my grandfather, very wealthy. It was one of the stocks that was manipulated by a pool.

Narrator: Wealthy investors would pool their money in a secret agreement to buy a stock, inflate its price and then sell it to an unsuspecting public. Most stocks in the 1920s were regularly manipulated by insiders like RCA specialist Michael Meehan.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: In those days, that was legal and it was quite common practice for a group of Wall Streeters to take a stock in hand. And they would acquire a position in the stock early on and then, they would see to it that there was good press on the stock, a lot of publicity.

Robert Sobel, Historian: I would say that practically all the financial journals were on the take. This includes reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Herald-Tribune, you name it. So if you were a pool operator, you'd call your friend at The Times and say, "Look, Charlie, there's an envelope waiting for you here and we think that perhaps you should write something nice about RCA." And Charlie would write something nice about RCA. A publicity man called A. Newton Plummer had canceled checks from practically every major journalist in New York City.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: Then, they would begin to - what was called "painting the tape" and they would make the stock look exciting. They would trade among themselves and you'd see these big prints on RCA and people will say, "Oh, it looks as though that stock is being accumulated."

Robert Sobel, Historian: Now, if they are behind it, you want to join them, so you go out and you buy stock also. Now, what's happening is the stock goes from 10 to 15 to 20 and now, it's at 20 and you start buying, other people start buying at 30, 40. The original group, the pool, they've stopped buying. They're selling you the stock. It's now 50 and they're out of it. And what happens, of course, is the stock collapses.

Narrator: On March 8, 1929, Michael Meehan began one of the most successful pools on Wall Street. From the 8th to the 17th, Meehan and the pool pushed up the value of RCA almost 50 percent. On March 18th, they sold and divided up their profits. In today's money, they had made $100 million for one week's work.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: The pools were a little like musical chairs. When the music stopped, somebody owned the stocks and those were the sufferers.

Narrator: If small investors suffered, they would soon be back for more. They knew the game was rigged, but maybe next time, they could beat the system. Wall Street had its critics, among them economist Roger Babson. He questioned the boom and was accused of lack of patriotism, of selling America short.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: Roger Babson warned of the speculation and said, "There's going to be a crash and the aftermath is going to be quite terrible." And people jumped on Babson from all around for saying such a thing, so that people who were cautious about their personal reputation, who did not want to call down on themselves a lot of calumny, kept quiet.

Narrator: Mobster Al Capone was not a cautious man. From his Chicago headquarters, he condemned the wild speculation on Wall Street. "It's a racket," he said, "Those stock market guys are crooked." Capone invested his money in a $100-million bootleg liquor business. Business was good. On Valentine's Day, 1929, he had just eliminated the competition.

March 4th, Inauguration Day. Republican President Calvin Coolidge had run his administration on the belief that business was the basis of America's prosperity. Government should not interfere. Herbert Hoover had won a landslide victory, promising to carry on the tradition.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: This was a time in our history when governments did not, as now, take responsibility for the economy. They presided over it, but the level of economic activity and the level of economic growth and the stability of prices were not yet everyday concerns of the president. And what Coolidge did was to say how wonderful times were, how happy everybody was going to be and how prosperous everyone was going to be. And Hoover's responsibility was to continue that optimism.

Narrator: Politicians came and went, but in the 20s, the businessman was king. New York City had a dapper, corrupt and vastly popular mayor, Jimmy Walker, but behind the scenes were powerful financial leaders like Charles Mitchell.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Jimmy Walker was high, wide and fancy with the city finances. One day, Father called Mayor Walker up here and he had some other bankers with him. And Mayor Walker was sort of put on the grill in the upstairs library, while these bankers read the riot act to him to try and get some fiscal responsibility instilled into him. And I know that after the meeting, somebody took me into the library and pointed me out the chair that the mayor had been sitting in and he'd been so nervous - what were those, Louis XIV chairs with all the little -

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Louis XV.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Louis XV chairs with all the little tacks in there, the brass tacks.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Yes.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: And he'd pulled out almost all the brass tacks - they were sitting on the floor - out of sheer nerves.

Narrator: The stock market, too, was getting a severe case of nerves. On Friday, March 22nd, all eyes were on that august government body in Washington, the Federal Reserve Board. The board distrusted the boom. They saw the speculation as reckless and dangerous because it was based more and more on the shaky foundation of borrowed money, margin. The board had the power to curb the borrowing, the market was now dependent on borrowed money. Without margin, it would collapse. The board met day after day. Would they ask for regulation of the stock market? They issued no public statements. Their silence was terrifying.

On Monday, March 21st, investors began to sell. Blue chip stocks plunged. Tuesday, another wave of selling swept the market. As it fell, people holding stock on margin were hit hard. They'd put only ten percent down, but the value of their stock dropped more than 10 percent, so their down payment was gone. To hold their stocks, they'd have to put up more money. On March 26th, millions of investors suddenly found themselves in deep trouble.

Robert Sobel, Historian: Your broker would call you and say, "We need more money. You're wiped out." Unless you could give him more money, he would then sell the stock. Now, he would sell the stock, which would cause the stock to go down to 85, 86 and now, more margin calls are triggered. So one margin call triggers another margin call, triggers another margin call and it goes all the way down.

Narrator: With everyone trying to borrow money to cover the falling value of their stocks, there was a credit crunch. Interest rates soared. At 20 percent, few people could afford to borrow more money. The boom was about to collapse like a house of cards.

Charlie Mitchell was horrified. His success, his entire career, his personal fortune had been based on a rising market. If nobody else was going to stop the crash, Charles Mitchell would.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Father, at that point, stepped in and announced that the National City Bank would provide $25 million of credit, which was all very well and very necessary, but he added the fateful words, "whatever the Federal Reserve Board thinks." And Senator Carter Glass, who had been sort of the father of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, took that as a direct slap across the face. But whatever Senator Glass thought, immediately, the credit crisis was alleviated. In fact, within the next 24 hours, call money went from 20 percent to eight percent and that stopped the panic, then, in March.

Narrator: The next day, the market rallied. The Federal Reserve Board remained silent, tacitly accepting defeat. The hero of the day was Charlie Mitchell. He had singlehandedly stopped the crash of '29. With the start of the baseball season, people quickly forgot the break in the market.

New events filled the papers. There was a crisis in Nicaragua, where the nationalist hero, Augusto Sandino, was threatening American marines; tragedy in the British Mandate of Palestine as Jews and Arabs clashed over control of holy sites in Jerusalem. And in Antarctica, Commander Byrd was at his base camp, Little America, waiting for a break in the weather. His elaborately-planned flight over the South Pole was still on ice.

The newsreels had come into their own. Now, in living sound, patrons could keep abreast of the important events of the day.

Woman (archival): The biggest news of the day is not the Naval agreement, not even Prohibition, but the return of the natural waistline.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: Dorothy Livermore was a typical flapper. She has to embody the 20s. She would do almost anything on an impulse. She had some priceless pieces of 18th-century furniture, but the house had settled and the floors were not level. But Mrs. Livermore didn't like to spend money that didn't show, so instead of having the hoist put underneath, she simply solved the problem by having the legs of the furniture cut off to fit the sloping floors, so that the tops of all of the furniture were level, but of course, the legs were on different angles. And this was her typical solution. As long as the tops were level, everything was fine.

Narrator: Everything was not fine that spring with the American economy. It was showing ominous signs of trouble. Steel production was declining. The construction industry was sluggish. Car sales dropped. Customers were getting harder to find. And because of easy credit, many people were deeply in debt. Large sections of the population were poor and getting poorer.

Just as Wall Street had reflected a steady growth in the economy throughout most of the 20s, it would seem that now the market should reflect the economic slowdown. Instead, it soared to record heights. Stock prices no longer had anything to do with company profits, the economy or anything else. The speculative boom had acquired a momentum of its own.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: It was this nature of mass illusion. Prices were going up, people bought. That forced prices up further, that brought in more people. And eventually, the process becomes self-perpetuating. Every increase brings in more people convinced of their God-given right to get rich.

Narrator: The 20s was a decade of all sorts of fast money schemes. Three years earlier, everyone was buying Florida real estate. As prices of land skyrocketed, more people jumped in, hoping to make a killing. Then, overnight, the boom turned to bust and investors lost everything.

Groucho Marx (Film, The Cocoanuts): Florida, folks. Sunshine, sunshine. Perpetual sunshine all the year around. Let's get the auction started before we get a tornado. Right this way. Step forward, everybody.

Narrator: In May, the Marx Brothers were before the cameras with their first film, The Cocoanuts. Its subject? The Florida land boom. Now, in 1929, the gullibility of those naive speculators was something to laugh about.

Groucho Marx (Film, The Cocoanuts): Eight hundred wonderful residences will be built right here. Why, they're as good up, better. You can have any kind of a home you want to. You can get even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco. Now is the time to buy while the new boom is on. Remember that old saying, "A new boom sweeps clean." And don't forget the guarantee.

Narrator: Groucho Marx would film these scenes and then rush to his broker to put more of his savings into the booming market, on margin, of course.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: Max Gordon, a Broadway producer, was also heavily in the market and Gordon could never get over the fact that the market was going up and up and up all the time. And he said to my father, "How long has this been going on, Groucho?" And my father said, "I don't know, but my broker down in Great Neck tells me that it's because there's a worldwide market for American goods and it's never going to go down, that the market'll just keep going up and up and up."

Narrator: May 1929. Stock prices were going up and up. With so much money to be made, people were borrowing more money than ever before to buy stocks. Market leaders like William Durant, far from being worried, were ecstatic. Off on his annual visit to Europe, he announced that everything would be fine as long as we all continued to believe: "Confidence - not halfway confidence, but 100-percent confidence - is the real basis for our prosperity."

Astrologer Evangeline Adams was now putting out a newsletter. Her 100,000 subscribers learned how the Zodiac could influence stock prices. Her advice for the coming summer: buy.

Ben Karol, Former Newspaper Delivery Boy: They thought this was a ride that was never going to end, just goes on and on and on and every day, they got more money and they're counting up their paper profits. And they're selling and buying and buying and selling and they're doing great.

Tom McCormick, Former Stock Sales Clerk: Geez, I'd go to get a shoeshine and they'd say, "How's the market?" You'd go to the barber to get a haircut, "How is the market?" Everybody was in the market.

Robert Sobel, Historian: There were people who were looking for the one lucky break, people who were just hoping that they'd strike it right, you know. You take a rifle and you aim it at the ocean and you hope to hit a fish.

Narrator: Along with the market, temperatures soared that summer. It was a record heat wave and a record three months at the Exchange. Some stocks doubled in value. In June, The New York Times index of stocks rose 52 points. In July, another 25.

In the middle of the summer, the Graf Zeppelin was completing its first leisurely trip around the world. The Marx Brothers had finished shooting their film, The Cocoanuts. Commander Byrd was still at his base camp near the South Pole. He, too, had money in the market and radioed his broker for the latest quotes. Back in Cleveland, George Herman Ruth hit his 500th home run and on the radio, they were playing the latest hit tune, "I'm in the Market for You." On August 17th, Michael Meehan's brokerage firm launched a new service.

Michael Nesbitt, Grandson of Michael J. Meehan: One of my grandfather's innovations was putting brokerage houses on the ocean liners - the first one on the Berengaria - and that allowed you during the - whatever it was, during the six- or seven-day passage to Europe, if you were such a stock market addict that you couldn't stand the withdrawal for that period, you could walk into the office and place your order to buy or sell 100 shares of General Motors or General Electric or whatever. And they would radio that order back to New York. It was being very modern at the time. They were very wealthy people on the trans-Atlantic liners and it gave them something to do.

Narrator: At sea and on land, everyone seemed to be making money. It was a stampede of buying. And major speculators like John Jacob Rascob whipped up the frenzy. He told readers of The Ladies' Home Journal that now everyone could be rich.

September 2nd, Labor Day. It was the hottest day of the year. The markets were closed and people were at the beach. A reporter checked in with astrologer Evangeline to ask about the future of stock prices. Her answer: the Dow Jones could climb to heaven. The very next day, September 3rd, the stock market hit its all-time high.

Ben Karol, Former Newspaper Delivery Boy: My father and I had an ongoing discussion about the stock market. And I used to say, "Pop, everybody's getting rich but you. You know, you work so hard and you're never going to make a nickel. All you do is you keep delivering these newspapers and that's about it. The guy who's shining shoes is in the stock market, the grocery clerk is in the stock market, the school teacher's in the stock market. The teller at the bank is in the stock market. Everybody's in the stock market. You're the only one that's not in the stock market." And he used to sit and laugh and say, "You'll see. You'll see. You'll see."

Narrator: On September 5th, economist Roger Babson gave a speech to a group of businessmen. "Sooner or later, a crash is coming and it may be terrific." He'd been saying the same thing for two years, but now, for some reason, investors were listening. The market took a severe dip. They called it the "Babson Break." The next day, prices stabilized, but several days later, they began to drift lower. Though investors had no way of knowing it, the collapse had already begun.

In the weeks to follow, the market fluctuated wildly up and down. On September 12th, prices dropped ten percent. They dipped sharply again in the 20s. Stock markets around the world were falling, too. Then, on September 25th, the market suddenly rallied.

Reuben L. Cain, Former Stock Salesman: I remember well that I thought, "Why is this doing this?" And then I thought, "Well, I'm new here and these people" - like every day in the paper, Charlie Mitchell would have something to say, the J.P. Morgan people would have something to say about how good things were - and I thought, "Well, they know a lot more about this market than I do. I'm fairly new here and I really can't see why it's going up." But then, when they say it can't go down or if it does go down today, it'll go back tomorrow, you think, "Well, they really are like God. They know it all and it must be the way it's going because they say so."

Narrator: As the market floundered, financial leaders were as optimistic as ever, more so. Just five days before the crash, Thomas Lamont, acting head of the highly conservative Morgan Bank, wrote a letter to President Hoover. "The future appears brilliant. Our securities are the most desirable in the world." Charles Mitchell assured nervous investors that things had never been better.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: Practically every business leader in America, and banker, right around the time of 1929, was saying how wonderful things were and the economy had only one way to go and that was up.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: Unfortunately, he didn't have a crystal ball to predict the future.

Robert Sobel, Historian: There's an old saying on Wall Street that the two most important emotions are fear and greed and you go from fear to greed in about a fraction of a second. So you're very, very greedy and you say to yourself, "I want to make more." And then, the market goes down ten points and you get frightened. "I want to keep what I have," so you sell everything. And that's how you have a panic. So you can panic on the upside - people rushing in to get in before the train takes off - and a panic on the downside, trying to get off the train before disaster hits.

Narrator: Monday, October 21st. Hoover, along with the political and financial leaders of the country, arrives in Dearborn, Michigan to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Edison's invention of the light bulb. The host is Henry Ford. The country is reminded that in 50 short years, men like Ford, Durant and Edison had transformed America from a third-rate power into the industrial giant of the world. And while they celebrated, their world was beginning to fall apart.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: There came a Wednesday, October 23rd, when the market was a little shaky, weak. And whether this caused some spread of pessimism, one doesn't know. It certainly led a lot of people to think they should get out. And so, Thursday, October the 24th - the first Black Thursday - the market, beginning in the morning, took a terrific tumble.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: The market opened in an absolutely free fall and some people couldn't even get any bids for their shares and it was wild panic. And an ugly crowd gathered outside the stock exchange and it was described as making weird and threatening noises. It was, indeed, one of the worst days that had ever been seen down there.

Narrator: There was a glimmer of hope on Black Thursday. Directly across from the New York Stock Exchange was a low, stately building, the House of Morgan. Twenty-two years earlier, J. Pierpont Morgan had stopped the panic of 1907. October 24th, high noon. All eyes were now on acting head, Thomas W. Lamont.

Edward Lamont, Grandson of Thomas W. Lamont: Tom Lamont called a number of the other bankers, like Charles Mitchell of the National City Bank and people from the Bankers Trust and J. Albert Wiggin of the Chase Bank and so forth - there were about a half a dozen of them there - and they were gathered together to really discuss what they could do to stem this tremendous onslaught of selling stocks on the stock exchange that was taking place.

Craig Mitchell, Son of Charles E. Mitchell: About 12:30, there was an announcement that this group of bankers would make available a very substantial sum to ease the credit stringency and support the market. And right after that, Dick Whitney made his famous walk across the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Narrator: Richard Whitney, vice president of the Exchange, was chosen by the bankers to be their representative. At 1:30 in the afternoon, at the height of the panic, he strolled across the floor and in a loud, clear voice, ordered 10,000 shares of U.S. Steel at a price considerably higher than the last bid. He then went from post to post, shouting buy orders for key stocks.

Horace Silverstone, Former New York Stock Exchange telephone clerk: He stood up on one of the seats at the post and he said, "I give 45 for 50,000 Standard Oil," and everybody started to applaud. "Oh, the crash is over. If Morgan's putting his money in, then maybe the crash is over."

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: And sure enough, this seemed to be evidence that the bankers had moved in to end the panic. And they did end it for that day. The market then stabilized and even went up.

Edward Lamont, Grandson of Thomas W. Lamont: The New York Times said that thanks to the formation of this bankers pool, most observers felt that the panic and the great sell-off was over. And most people did feel that way. Tom Lamont felt that way.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: But Monday was not good. Apparently, people had thought about things over the weekend, over Sunday, and decided maybe they might be safer to get out. And then came the real crash, which was on Tuesday, when the market went down and down and down, without seeming limit.

Narrator: October 29th. Morgan's bankers could no longer stem the tide. It was like trying to stop Niagara Falls. Everyone wanted to sell. AT&T down 50 percent. RCA, once $110 a share, couldn't find buyers at $26. Blue Ridge 100 plunged to $3 and still no buyers. On the floor, they had never seen anything like it.

Horace Silverstone, Former New York Stock Exchange telephone clerk: And it was just like a nightmare and I couldn't believe what was going on here. In those days, every buy order was on a black pad and every sell order was on a red pad. And all I saw was members running around with fistful of red orders.

Tom McCormick, Former Stock Sales Clerk: Just chickens with their head cut off, they didn't know which way to run. They were panicking, screaming. Everybody was bumping into everybody else.

Horace Silverstone, Former New York Stock Exchange telephone clerk: Don't remind him. Anyhow, this is what happened and I tell you - and I was supposed to answer everybody yelling at me - I said, "What am I supposed to do?" I mean, nobody knew what the hell to do.

Narrator: William Durant, the bull of the bulls, now tried singlehandedly to support the market. The further it plunged, the more of his millions he poured into it.

Aristo Scrobogna, Secretary to William C. Durant: He became truly convinced that he was omnipotent. He thought that nothing could really unseat him. It was unfortunate. The forces were too great. There was no one man that could have been so powerful to control the market.

Narrator: There were some people, however, whose investment strategies made money. On October 29th, Jesse Livermore's wife, hearing of the crash, ordered the servants to move all the furniture out of their mansion into a small cottage on the estate.

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: So when Mr. Livermore got home that night, he walked into a totally vacant house. When she told him that she had effected the move because she was sure that they had lost all their money, he told her that he had made more money that day than he had ever made before.

Narrator: For most others, it was all over. In brokers' offices across the country, the small investors - the tailors, the grocers, the secretaries - stared at the moving ticker in numb silence. Hope of an easy retirement, the new home, their children's education, everything was gone.

Arthur Marx, Son of Groucho Marx: My father was ready to kill himself. In the morning of the crash, he got a call and it was Max Gordon and Max Gordon says, "Groucho?" and my father said, "What?" And Gordon said, "Groucho, the jig is up."

Reuben L. Cain, Former Stock Salesman: There were all sorts of rumors and you'd see people going down the street looking up to see if they could catch somebody jumping out the window. Now, it turned out there weren't as many people who jumped out the window as they reported, but some did and others committed suicide other ways.

Narrator: Five hundred miles from Wall Street in the Atlantic, the luxury liner, the Berengaria, was heading home. From Michael Meehan's brokerage office, word spread through the ship: "The bottom's fallen out of the market." Men came running out of their Turkish baths in towels. Card games ended abruptly. Everyone tried to jam into the tiny office, yelling, "Sell at market!" They had left England wealthy men. They docked in New York without a penny.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist: There's nothing unique about this. It is something which happens every 20 or 30 years because that is about the length of the financial memory. It's about the length of time that it requires for a new set of suckers, if you will, a new set of people capable of wonderful self-delusion to come in and imagine that they have a new and wonderful fix on the future.

Narrator: In the 1930s, Charles Mitchell was hounded by Senate committees and the IRS. The crash had left him $12 million in debt.

Rita Mitchell Cushman, Daughter of Charles E. Mitchell: This house was taken over, of course, and things changed. And I began to know what the real world was all about. It was about time. I was 19 years old.

Narrator: Mitchell made a remarkable comeback. He paid off his debts and died in 1955, a highly-respected figure on Wall Street. In 1936, William Durant filed for bankruptcy. His only assets, which he valued at $250, were the clothes on his back. In the late 30s, the founder of General Motors tried his hand at everything from running a bowling alley to selling a cure for dandruff. He died in 1947, still talking about making a comeback.

Herbert Hoover spent much of the early 1930s fishing. He explained in a speech that fishing is a constant reminder of humility and of human frailty, "for all men are equal before fishes."

Patricia Livermore, Daughter-in-Law of Jesse Livermore: The game on Wall Street had changed a great deal for Livermore and the SEC was becoming a powerful factor and the rules were changed. He couldn't operate freely, buy and sell the way he had in the past and he couldn't adapt to the new regulations. So, in a sense, his playing with the market was over and I think a great deal of his interest in life was over at that point. The game was gone.

Narrator: In 1940, the day before Thanksgiving, a photographer snapped this photograph of an old and very tired Jesse Livermore. Several hours later, Livermore would go into a men's washroom and put a bullet through his head.

At the end of 1929, as they celebrated New Year's Eve, all that lay in the future. Nobody knew that the Great Depression was coming - unemployment, bread lines, bank failures - this was unimaginable. But the bubble had burst. Gone was that innocent optimism, the confidence, the illusion of wealth without work. One era had ended. They toasted the coming of the 30s, but somewhere, deep down, they knew the party was over.

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The Crash of 1929 | American Experience | PBS

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The unbounded optimism of the Jazz Age and the shocking consequences when reality finally hit on October 29th, ultimately leading to the Great Depression.

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FDR served as the 32nd President of the US creating relief programs for citizens to recover from the Great Depression.

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Rare Footage: FDR Addresses NIH,1940

Roosevelt addressed crowds at National Institute of Health, October 31, 1940. His speech voiced strong support for public health and medical research. The footage is now available on YouTube and via the NLM's blog.

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Four Presidential Inaugurations

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only American President elected and inaugurated four times. Here is a gallery of historical inauguration materials housed at the FDR Presidential Library & Museum.

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FDR and Polio

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to serve with a significant physical disability. Many believe that the personal struggle with pain and paralysis from polio helped shape FDR, both as a man and as a president.

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FDR's Naval Manuscripts

FDR was a world-class collector famous for his stamps, ship models, naval art and books. But in the archives of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum there is a remarkable collection that FDR spent a lifetime acquiring. FDR called it his “Naval Manuscript Collection” but that does not do it justice. It is one of the largest private archives of rare documents on U.S. maritime history and the adventures and voyages of its greatest heroes.

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FDR on Federal Government Employee Unions

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FDR Timeline

Franklin D. Roosevelt "Day by Day" and the "Presidential Timeline of the Twentieth Century"

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Facts & Figures: Presidency

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Franklin D. Roosevelt - FDR Presidential Library & Museum

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FDR was a world-class collector famous for his stamps, ship models, naval art and books. But in the archives of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum there is a remarkable collection that FDR spent a lifetime acquiring. FDR called it his "Naval Manuscript Collection" but that does not do it justice.

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J.P. Morgan became a powerful railroad magnate at the turn of the 20th century. He restructured and financed companies to make them more profitable like General Electric and U.S. Steel.

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John Adams was the 2nd President of the United States who helped negotiate a peace treaty during the Revolutionary War.

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John Adams, a remarkable political philosopher, served as the second President of the United States (1797-1801), after serving as the first Vice President under President George Washington.

Learned and thoughtful, John Adams was more remarkable as a political philosopher than as a politician. "People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity," he said, doubtless thinking of his own as well as the American experience.

Adams was born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1735. A Harvard-educated lawyer, he early became identified with the patriot cause; a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, he led in the movement for independence.

During the Revolutionary War he served in France and Holland in diplomatic roles, and helped negotiate the treaty of peace. From 1785 to 1788 he was minister to the Court of St. James's, returning to be elected Vice President under George Washington.

Adams' two terms as Vice President were frustrating experiences for a man of his vigor, intellect, and vanity. He complained to his wife Abigail, "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

When Adams became President, the war between the French and British was causing great difficulties for the United States on the high seas and intense partisanship among contending factions within the Nation.

His administration focused on France, where the Directory, the ruling group, had refused to receive the American envoy and had suspended commercial relations.

Adams sent three commissioners to France, but in the spring of 1798 word arrived that the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand and the Directory had refused to negotiate with them unless they would first pay a substantial bribe. Adams reported the insult to Congress, and the Senate printed the correspondence, in which the Frenchmen were referred to only as "X, Y, and Z."

The Nation broke out into what Jefferson called "the X. Y. Z. fever," increased in intensity by Adams's exhortations. The populace cheered itself hoarse wherever the President appeared. Never had the Federalists been so popular.

Congress appropriated money to complete three new frigates and to build additional ships, and authorized the raising of a provisional army. It also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, intended to frighten foreign agents out of the country and to stifle the attacks of Republican editors.

President Adams did not call for a declaration of war, but hostilities began at sea. At first, American shipping was almost defenseless against French privateers, but by 1800 armed merchantmen and U.S. warships were clearing the sea-lanes.

Despite several brilliant naval victories, war fever subsided. Word came to Adams that France also had no stomach for war and would receive an envoy with respect. Long negotiations ended the quasi war.

Sending a peace mission to France brought the full fury of the Hamiltonians against Adams. In the campaign of 1800 the Republicans were united and effective, the Federalists badly divided. Nevertheless, Adams polled only a few less electoral votes than Jefferson, who became President.

On November 1, 1800, just before the election, Adams arrived in the new Capital City to take up his residence in the White House. On his second evening in its damp, unfinished rooms, he wrote his wife, "Before I end my letter, I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."

Adams retired to his farm in Quincy. Here he penned his elaborate letters to Thomas Jefferson. Here on July 4, 1826, he whispered his last words: "Thomas Jefferson survives." But Jefferson had died at Monticello a few hours earlier.

Learn more about John Adams's spouse, Abigail Smith Adams.

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John Adams, a remarkable political philosopher, served as the second President of the United States (1797-1801), after serving as the first Vice President under President George Washington.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made the practice of segregation illegal in the United States of America.

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Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Definition, Summary & Significance | HISTORY

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement.

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After the Civil War millions of immigrants flocked to the United States in hopes of a better life. With the rapid influx of immigrants the U.S passed several laws to help regulate the flow of immigrants into US soil.

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The history and use of Ellis Island as an immigration station and hospital from 1892 to 1954
The architectural history of the construction of the Ellis Island immigration station is extensively represented in the museum archives and library collections which house numerous reports, monographs and documents containing the original design and construction of the buildings, hospitals and support structures, and all the subsequent modifications and restorations on the buildings to the present. Documentation on the rehabilitation of all the buildings and fund raising efforts by the two NPS partners, Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation and Save Ellis Island are included in the museum archives and library.

During rehabilitation of the architectural structures on Ellis Island, actual building components, such as the decorative copper flashing and drainage downspout, that are unique to the site or a time period are collected when the features have both interpretive, exhibit value and use as the template for future restoration or reconstruction of buildings.

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History of Ellis Island from 1892 to 1954 - Ellis Island Part of Statue of Liberty National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)

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The history and use of Ellis Island as an immigration station and hospital from 1892 to 1954 The architectural history of the construction of the Ellis Island immigration station is extensively represented in the museum archives and library collections which house numerous reports, monographs and documents containing the original design and construction of the buildings, hospitals and support structures, and all the subsequent modifications and restorations on the buildings to the present.

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The Social Security Act of 1935 was passed to help provide benefits for older Americans. In addition to older Americans blind, dependent and disabled children were also eligible for monetary benefits.

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Social Security Act of 1935

TITLE I- GRANTS TO STATES FOR OLD-AGE ASSISTANCE

TITLE II- FEDERAL OLD-AGE BENEFITS

TITLE III- GRANTS TO STATES FOR UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION ADMINISTRATION

TITLE IV- GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN

TITLE V- GRANTS TO STATES FOR MATERNAL AND CHILD WELFARE

TITLE VI- PUBLIC HEALTH WORK

TITLE VII- SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD

TITLE VIII- TAXES WITH RESPECT TO EMPLOYMENT

TITLE IX- TAX ON EMPLOYERS OF EIGHT OR MORE

TITLE X- GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID TO THE BLIND

TITLE XI- GENERAL PROVISIONS

The Social Security Act (Act of August 14, 1935) [H. R. 7260]

An act to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of Federal old-age benefits, and by enabling the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws; to establish a Social Security Board; to raise revenue; and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

TITLE I- GRANTS TO STATES FOR OLD-AGE ASSISTANCE

APPROPRIATION

SECTION 1. For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to aged needy individuals, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1936, the sum of $49,750,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Social Security Board established by Title VII (hereinafter referred to as the Board ), State plans for old-age assistance.

STATE OLD-AGE ASSISTANCE PLANS

(b) The Board shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a), except that it shall not approve any plan which imposes, as a condition of eligibility for old-age assistance under the plan-
(1) An age requirement of more than sixty-five years, except that the plan may impose, effective until January 1, 1940, an age requirement of as much as seventy years; or
(2) Any residence requirement which excludes any resident of the State who has resided therein five years during the nine years immediately preceding the application for old-age assistance and has resided therein continuously for one year immediately preceding the application; or (3) Any citizenship requirement which excludes any citizen of the United States.

PAYMENT TO STATES

SEC. 3. (a) From the sums appropriated therefor, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay to each State which has an approved plan for old-age assistance, for each quarter, beginning with the quarter commencing July 1, 1935,
(1) an amount, which shall be used exclusively as old-age assistance, equal to one-half of the total of the sums expended during such quarter as old-age assistance under the State plan with respect to each individual who at the time of such expenditure is sixty-five years of age or older and is not an inmate of a public institution, not counting so much of such expenditure with respect to any individual for any month as exceeds $30, and
(2) 5 per centum of such amount, which shall be used for paying the costs of administering the State plan or for old-age assistance, or both, and for no other purpose: Provided, That the State plan, in order to be approved by the Board, need not provide for financial participation before July 1, 1937, by the State, in the case of any State which the Board, upon application by the State and after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State, finds is prevented by its constitution from providing such financial participation.

(b) The method of computing and paying such amounts shall be as follows:
(1) The Board shall, prior to the beginning of each quarter, estimate the amount to be paid to the State for such quarter under the provisions of clause (1) of subsection (a), such estimate to be based on
(A) a report filed by the State containing its estimate of the total sum to be expended in such quarter in accordance with the provisions of such clause, and stating the amount appropriated or made available by the State and its political subdivisions for such expenditures in such quarter, and if such amount is less than one-half of the total sum of such estimated expenditures, the source or sources from which the difference is expected to be derived,
(B) records showing the number of aged individuals in the State, and
(C) such other investigation as the Board may find necessary.

(2) The Board shall then certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the amount so estimated by the Board, reduced or increased, as the case may be, by any sum by which it finds that its estimate for any prior quarter was greater or less than the amount which should have been paid to the State under clause (1) of subsection (a) for such quarter, except to the extent that such sum has been applied to make the amount certified for any prior quarter greater or less than the amount estimated by the Board for such prior quarter.

(3) The Secretary of the Treasury shall thereupon, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay to the State, at the time or times fixed by the Board, the amount so certified, increased by 5 per centum.

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 4. In the case of any State plan for old-age assistance which has been approved by the Board, if the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan, finds-
(1) that the plan has been so changed as to impose any age, residence, or citizenship requirement prohibited by section 2 (b), or that in the administration of the plan any such prohibited requirement is imposed, with the knowledge of such State agency, in a substantial number of cases; or
(2) that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 2 (a) to be included in the plan; the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that such prohibited requirement is no longer so imposed, and that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until it is so satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 5. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $250,000, for all necessary expenses of the Board in administering the provisions of this title.

DEFINITION

SEC. 6. When used in this title the term old age assistance means money payments to aged individuals.

OLD-AGE BENEFIT PAYMENTS

SEC. 202. (a) Every qualified individual (as defined in section 210) shall be entitled to receive, with respect to the period beginning on the date he attains the age of sixty-five, or on January 1, 1942, whichever is the later, and ending on the date of his death, an old-age benefit (payable as nearly as practicable in equal monthly installments) as follows:
(1) If the total wages (as defined in section 210) determined by the Board to have been paid to him, with respect to employment (as defined in section 210) after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty- five, were not more than $3,000, the old-age benefit shall be at a monthly rate of one-half of 1 per centum of such total wages;
(2) If such total wages were more than $3,000, the old-age benefit shall be at a monthly rate equal to the sum of the following:
(A) One-half of 1 per centum of $3,000; plus
(B) One-twelfth of 1 per centum of the amount by which such total wages exceeded $3,000 and did not exceed $45,000; plus
(C) One-twenty-fourth of 1 per centum of the amount by which such total wages exceeded $45,000.
(b) In no case shall the monthly rate computed under subsection (a) exceed $85.
(c) If the Board finds at any time that more or less than the correct amount has theretofore been paid to any individual under this section, then, under regulations made by the Board, proper adjustments shall be made in connection with subsequent payments under this section to the same individual.
(d) Whenever the Board finds that any qualified individual has received wages with respect to regular employment after he attained the age of sixty-five, the old-age benefit payable to such individual shall be reduced, for each calendar month in any part of which such regular employment occurred, by an amount equal to one month s benefit. Such reduction shall be made, under regulations prescribed by the Board, by deductions from one or more payments of old-age benefit to such individual.

PAYMENTS UPON DEATH

SEC. 203. (a) If any individual dies before attaining the age of sixty-five, there shall be paid to his estate an amount equal to 3 " per centum of the total wages determined by the Board to have been paid to him, with respect to employment after December 31, 1936.
(b) If the Board finds that the correct amount of the old-age benefit payable to a qualified individual during his life under section 202 was less than 3 " per centum of the total wages by which such old-age benefit was measurable, then there shall be paid to his estate a sum equal to the amount, if any, by which such 3 " per centum exceeds the amount (whether more or less than the correct amount) paid to him during his life as old-age benefit.
(c) If the Board finds that the total amount paid to a qualified individual under an old-age benefit during his life was less than the correct amount to which he was entitled under section 202, and that the correct amount of such old-age benefit was 3 " per centum or more of the total wages by which such old-age benefit was measurable, then there shall be paid to his estate a sum equal to the amount, if any, by which the correct amount of the old- age benefit exceeds the amount which was so paid to him during his life.

PAYMENTS TO AGED INDIVIDUALS NOT QUALIFIED FOR BENEFITS

SEC. 204. (a) There shall be paid in a lump sum to any individual who, upon attaining the age of sixty-five, is not a qualified individual, an amount equal to 3 " per centum of the total wages determined by the Board to have been paid to him, with respect to employment after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty-five.
(b) After any individual becomes entitled to any payment under subsection (a), no other payment shall be made under this title in any manner measured by wages paid to him, except that any part of any payment under subsection (a) which is not paid to him before his death shall be paid to his estate.

AMOUNTS OF $500 OR LESS PAYABLE TO ESTATES

SEC. 205. If any amount payable to an estate under section 203 or 204 is $500 or less, such amount may, under regulations prescribed by the Board, be paid to the persons found by the Board to be entitled thereto under the law of the State in which the deceased was domiciled, without the necessity of compliance with the requirements of law with respect to the administration of such estate.

OVERPAYMENTS DURING LIFE

SEC. 206. If the Board finds that the total amount paid to a qualified individual under an old-age benefit during his life was more than the correct amount to which he was entitled under section 202, and was 3 " per centum or more of the total wages by which such old-age benefit was measurable, then upon his death there shall be repaid to the United States by his estate the amount, if any, by which such total amount paid to him during his life exceeds whichever of the following is the greater:
(1) Such 3 " per centum, or
(2) the correct amount to which he was entitled under section 202.

METHOD OF MAKING PAYMENTS

SEC. 207. The Board shall from time to time certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the name and address of each person entitled to receive a payment under this title, the amount of such payment, and the time at which it should be made, and the Secretary of the Treasury through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department, and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, shall make payment in accordance with the certification by the Board.

ASSIGNMENT

SEC. 208. The right of any person to any future payment under this title shall not be transferable or assignable, at law or in equity, and none of the moneys paid or payable or rights existing under this title shall be subject to execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal process, or to the operation of any bankruptcy or insolvency law.

PENALTIES

SEC. 209. Whoever in any application for any payment under this title makes any false statement as to any material fact, knowing such statement to be false, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

DEFINITIONS

SEC. 210. When used in this title-- (a) The term wages means all remuneration for employment, including the cash value of all remuneration paid in any medium other than cash; except that such term shall not include that part of the remuneration which, after remuneration equal to $3,000 has been paid to an individual by an employer with respect to employment during any calendar year, is paid to such employer with respect to employment during such calendar year.
(b) The term employment means any service, of whatever nature, performed within the United States by an employee for his employer, except-
(1) Agricultural labor;
(2) Domestic service in a private home;
(3) Casual labor not in the course of the employer s trade or business;
(4) Service performed as an officer or member of the crew of a vessel documented under the laws of the United States or of any foreign country;
(5) Service performed in the employ of the United States Government or of an instrumentality of the United States;
(6) Service performed in the employ of a State, a political subdivision thereof, or an instrumentality of one or more States or political subdivisions;
(7) Service performed in the employ of a corporation, community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.

(c) The term qualified individual means any individual with respect to whom it appears to the satisfaction of the Board that-
(1) He is at least sixty-five years of age; and
(2) The total amount of wages paid to him, with respect to employment after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty-five, was not less than $2,000; and
(3) Wages were paid to him, with respect to employment on some five days after December 31, 1936, and before he attained the age of sixty-five, each day being in a different calendar year.

TITLE III-GRANTS TO STATES FOR UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION ADMINISTRATION APPROPRIATION

SECTION 301. For the purpose of assisting the States in the administration of their unemployment compensation laws, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $4,000,000, and for each fiscal year thereafter the sum of $49,000,000, to be used as hereinafter provided.

PAYMENTS TO STATES

PROVISIONS OF STATE LAWS

SEC. 303. (a) The Board shall make no certification for payment to any State unless it finds that the law of such State, approved by the Board under Title IX, includes provisions for-
(1) Such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are found by the Board to be reasonably calculated to insure full payment of unemployment compensation when due; and
(2) Payment of unemployment compensation solely through public employment offices in the State or such other agencies as the Board may approve; and
(3) Opportunity for a fair hearing, before an impartial tribunal, for all individuals whose claims for unemployment compensation are denied; and
(4) The payment of all money received in the unemployment fund of such State, immediately upon such receipt, to the Secretary of the Treasury to the credit of the Unemployment Trust Fund established by section 904; and
(5) Expenditure of all money requisitioned by the State agency from the Unemployment Trust Fund, in the payment of unemployment compensation, exclusive of expenses of admin- istration; and
(6) The making of such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Board may from time to time require, and compliance with such provisions as the Board may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports; and
(7) Making available upon request to any agency of the United States charged with the administration of public works or assistance through public employment, the name, address, ordinary occupation, and employment status of each recipient of unemployment compensation, and a statement of such recipient s rights to further compensation under such law.
(b) Whenever the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency charged with the administration of the State law finds that in the administration of the law there is--
(1) a denial, in a substantial number of cases, of unemployment compensation to individuals entitled thereto under such law; or
(2) a failure to comply substantially with any provision specified in subsection (a); the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that there is no longer any such denial or failure to comply. Until it is so satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

TITLE IV-GRANTS TO STATES FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN APPROPRIATION

SECTION 401. For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to needy dependent children, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $24,750,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Board, State plans for aid to dependent children.

STATE PLANS FOR AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN

PAYMENT TO STATES

SEC. 403. (a) From the sums appropriated therefor, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay to each State which has an approved plan for aid to dependent children, for each quarter, beginning with the quarter commencing July 1, 1935, an amount, which shall be used exclusively for carrying out the State plan, equal to one-third of the total of the sums expended during such quarter under such plan, not counting so much of such expenditure with respect to any dependent child for any month as exceeds $18, or if there is more than one dependent child in the same home, as exceeds $18 for any month with respect to one such dependent child and $12 for such month with respect to each of the other dependent children.
(b) The method of computing and paying such amounts shall be as follows:
(1) The Board shall, prior to the beginning of each quarter, estimate the amount to be paid to the State for such quarter under the provisions of subsection
(a), such estimate to be based on
(A) a report filed by the State containing its estimate of the total sum to be expended in such quarter in accordance with the provisions of such subsection and stating the amount appropriated or made available by the State and its political subdivisions for such expenditures in such quarter, and if such amount is less than two-thirds of the total sum of such estimated expenditures, the source or sources from which the difference is expected to be derived,
(B) records showing the number of dependent children in the State, and
(C) such other investigation as the Board may find necessary.
(2) The Board shall then certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the amount so estimated by the Board, reduced or increased, as the case may be, by any sum by which it finds that its estimate for any prior quarter was greater or less than the amount which should have been paid to the State for such quarter, except to the extent that such sum has been applied to make the amount certified for any prior quarter greater or less than the amount estimated by the Board for such prior quarter.
(3) The Secretary of the Treasury shall thereupon, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay to the State, at the time or times fixed by the Board, the amount so certified.

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 404. In the case of any State plan for aid to dependent children which has been approved by the Board, if the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan, finds-
(1) that the plan has been so changed as to impose any residence requirement prohibited by section 402 (b), or that in the administration of the plan any such prohibited requirement is imposed, with the knowledge of such State agency, in a substantial number of cases; or
(2) that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 402 (a) to be included in the plan; the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that such prohibited requirement is no longer so imposed, and that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until it is so satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 405. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $250,000 for all necessary expenses of the Board in administering the provisions of this title.

DEFINITIONS

SEC. 406. When used in this title-
(a) The term dependent child means a child under the age of sixteen who has been deprived of parental support or care by reason of the death, continued absence from the home, or physical or mental incapacity of a parent, and who is living with his father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, brother, sister, stepfather, stepmother, stepbrother, stepsister, uncle, or aunt, in a place of residence maintained by one or more of such relatives as his or their own home;
(b) The term aid to dependent children means money payments with respect to a dependent child or dependent children.

PART 1-MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH SERVICES

APPROPRIATION

SECTION 501. For the purpose of enabling each State to extend and improve, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, services for promoting the health of mothers and children, especially in rural areas and in areas suffering from severe economic distress, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $3,800,000. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, State plans for such services.

ALLOTMENTS TO STATES

SEC. 502. (a) Out of the sums appropriated pursuant to section 501 for each fiscal year the Secretary of Labor shall allot to each State $20,000, and such part of $1,800,000 as he finds that the number of live births in such State bore to the total number of live births in the United States, in the latest calendar year for which the Bureau of the Census has available statistics.
(b) Out of the sums appropriated pursuant to section 501 for each fiscal year the Secretary of Labor shall allot to the States $980,000 (in addition to the allotments made under subsection (a)), according to the financial need of each State for assistance in carrying out its State plan, as determined by him after taking into consideration the number of live births in such State.
(c) The amount of any allotment to a State under subsection (a) for any fiscal year remaining unpaid to such State at the end of such fiscal year shall be available for payment to such State under section 504 until the end of the second succeeding fiscal year. No payment to a State under section 504 shall be made out of its allotment for any fiscal year until its allotment for the preceding fiscal year has been exhausted or has ceased to be available.

APPROVAL OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 503. (a) A State plan for maternal and child-health services must (1) provide for financial participation by the State;
(2) provide for the administration of the plan by the State health agency or the supervision of the administration of the plan by the State health agency;
(3) provide such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are necessary for the efficient operation of the plan;
(4) provide that the State health agency will make such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Secretary of Labor may from time to time require, and comply with such provisions as he may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports;
(5) provide for the extension and improvement of local maternal and child-health services administered by local child health units;
(6) provide for cooperation with medical, nursing, and welfare groups and organizations; and
(7) provide for the development of demonstration services in needy areas and among groups in special need.
(b) The Chief of the Children s Bureau shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a) and shall thereupon notify the Secretary of Labor and the State health agency of his approval.

PAYMENT TO STATES

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 505. In the case of any State plan for maternal and child-health services which has been approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, if the Secretary of Labor, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan, finds that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 503 to be included in the plan, he shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until he is satisfied that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until he is so satisfied he shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

PART 2-SERVICES FOR CRIPPLED CHILDREN

APPROPRIATION

SEC. 511. For the purpose of enabling each State to extend and improve (especially in rural areas and in areas suffering from severe economic distress), as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, services for locating crippled children and for providing medical, surgical, corrective, and other services and care, and facilities for diagnosis, hospitalization, and aftercare, for children who are crippled or who are suffering from conditions which lead to crippling, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $2,850,000. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, State plans for such services.

ALLOTMENTS TO STATES

SEC. 512. (a) Out of the sums appropriated pursuant to section 511 for each fiscal year the Secretary of Labor shall allot to each State $20,000, and the remainder to the States according to the need of each State as determined by him after taking into consideration the number of crippled children in such State in need of the services referred to section 511 and the cost of furnishing such service to them
(b) The amount of any allotment to a State under subsection (a) for any fiscal year remaining unpaid to such State at the end of such fiscal year shall be available for payment to such State under section 514 until the end of the second succeeding fiscal year. No payment to a State under section 514 shall be made out of its allotment for any fiscal year until its allotment for the preceding fiscal year has been exhausted or has ceased to be available.

APPROVAL OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 513. (a) A State plan for services for crippled children must
(1) provide for financial participation by the State;
(2) provide for the administration of the plan by a State agency or the supervision of the administration of the plan by a State agency;
(3) provide such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are necessary for the efficient operation of the plan;
(4) provide that the State agency will make such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Secretary of Labor may from time to time require, and comply with such provisions as he may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports;
(5) provide for carrying out the purposes specified in section 511; and
(6) provide for cooperation with medical, health, nursing, and welfare groups and organizations and with any agency in such State charged with administering State laws providing for vocational rehabilitation of physically handicapped children.

(b) The Chief of the Children s Bureau shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a) and shall thereupon notify the Secretary of Labor and the State agency of his approval.

PAYMENT TO STATES

SEC. 514. (a) From the sums appropriated therefor and the allotments available under section 512, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay to each State which has an approved plan for services for crippled children, for each quarter, beginning the quarter commencing July 1, 1935, an amount which shall be used exclusively for carrying out the State plan, equal to one-half of the total sum expended during such quarter for carrying out such plan.
(b) The method of computing and paying such amounts shall be as follows:
(1) The Secretary of Labor shall, prior the beginning of each quarter, estimate the amount to be paid to the State for such quarter under the provisions of subsection (a), such estimate to be based on
(A) a report filed by the State containing its estimate of the total sum to be expended in such quarter in accordance with the provisions of such subsection and stating the amount appropriated or made available by the State and its political subdivisions for such expenditures in such quarter and if such amount is less than one-half of the total sum of such estimated expenditures the source or sources from which the difference is expected to be derived, and
(B) such investigation as he may find necessary.
(2) The Secretary of Labor shall then certify the amount so estimated by him to the Secretary of the Treasury, reduced or increased as the case may be, by any sum by which the Secretary of Labor finds that his estimate for any prior quarter was greater or less than the amount which should have been paid to the State for such quarter, except to the extent that such sum has been applied to make the amount certified for any prior quarter greater or less than the amount estimated by the Secretary of Labor for such prior quarter.
(3) The Secretary of the Treasury shall thereupon, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay to the State, at the time or times fixed by the Secretary of Labor, the amount so certified.

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 515. In the case of any State plan for services for crippled children which has been approved by the Chief of the Children s Bureau, if the Secretary of Labor, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such plan finds that in the administration of the plan there a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 513 to be included in the plan, he shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until he is satisfied that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until he is so satisfied he shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

PART 3- CHILD WELFARE SERVICES

SEC. 521. (a) For the purpose of enabling the United States, through the Children s Bureau, to cooperate with State public-welfare agencies establishing, extending, and strengthening, especially in predominantly rural areas, public-welfare services (hereinafter in this section referred to as child-welfare services ) for the protection and care of homeless, dependent, and neglected children, and children in danger of becoming delinquent, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $1,500,000. Such amount shall be allotted by the Secretary of Labor for use by cooperating State public- welfare agencies on the basis of plans developed jointly by the State agency and the Children s Bureau, to each State, $10,000, and the remainder to each State on the basis of such plans, not to exceed such part of the remainder as the rural population of such State bears to the total rural population of the United States. The amount so allotted shall be expended for payment of part of the cost of district, county or other local child- welfare services in areas predominantly rural, and for developing State services for the encouragement and assist- ance of adequate methods of community child-welfare organization in areas predominantly rural and other areas of special need. The amount of any allotment to a State under this section for any fiscal year remaining unpaid to such State at the end of such fiscal year shall be available for payment to such State under this section until the end of the second succeeding fiscal year. No payment to a State under this section shall be made out of its allotment for any fiscal year until its allotment for the preceding fiscal year has been exhausted or has ceased to be available.
(b) From the sums appropriated therefor and the allotments available under subsection (a) the Secretary of Labor shall from time to time certify to the Secretary of the Treasury the amounts to be paid to the States, and the Secretary of the Treasury shall, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, make payments of such amounts from such allotments at the time or times specified by the Secretary of Labor.

PART 4- VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION

SEC. 531. (a) In order to enable the United States to cooperate with the States and Hawaii in extending and strengthening their programs of vocational rehabilitation of the physically disabled, and to continue to carry out the provisions and purposes of the Act entitled An Act to provide for the promotion of vocational rehabilitation of persons disabled in industry or otherwise and their return to civil employment , approved June 2, 1920, as amended (U.S.C., title 29, ch. 4; U.S.C., Supp. VII title 29, secs. 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39, and 40), there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal years ending June 30, 1936, and June 30, 1937, the sum of $841,000 for each such fiscal year in addition to the amount of the existing authorization, and for each fiscal year thereafter the sum of $1,938,000. Of the sums appropriated pursuant to such authorization for each fiscal year, $5,000 shall be apportioned to the Territory of Hawaii and the remainder shall be apportioned among the several States in the manner provided in such Act of June 2, 1920, as amended.
(b) For the administration of such Act of June 2, 1920, as amended, by the Federal agency authorized to administer it, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal years ending June 30, 1936, and June 30, 1937, the sum of $22,000 for each such fiscal year in addition to the amount of the existing authorization, and for each fiscal year thereafter the sum of $102,000.

PART 5- ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 541. (a) There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $425,000, for all necessary expenses of the Children s Bureau in administering the provisions of this title, except section 531.
(b) The Children s Bureau shall make such studies and investigations as will promote the efficient administration of this title, except section 531.
(c) The Secretary of Labor shall include in his annual report to Congress a full account of the administration of this title, except section 531.

SECTION 601. For the purpose of assisting States, counties, health districts, and other political subdivisions of the States in establishing and maintaining adequate public-health services, including the training of personnel for State and local health work, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30,1936, the sum of $8,000,000 to be used as hereinafter provided.

STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES

SEC. 602. (a) The Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, shall, at the beginning of each fiscal year, allot to the States the total of (1) the amount appropriated for such year pursuant to section 601; and (2) the amounts of the allotments under this section for the preceding fiscal year remaining unpaid to the States at the end of such fiscal year. The amounts of such allotments shall be determined on the basis of (1) the population; (2) the special health problems; and (3) the financial needs; of the respective States. Upon making such allotments the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service shall certify the amounts thereof to the Secretary of the Treasury.
(b) The amount of an allotment to any State under subsection (a) for any fiscal year, remaining unpaid at the end of such fiscal year, shall be available for allotment to States under subsection (a) for the succeeding fiscal year, in addition to the amount appropriated for such year.
(c) Prior to the beginning of each quarter of the fiscal year, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service shall, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, determine in accordance with rules and regulations previously prescribed by such Surgeon General after consultation with a conference of the State and Territorial health authorities, the amount to be paid to each State for such quarter from the allotment to such State, and shall certify the amount so determined to the Secretary of the Treasury. Upon receipt of such certification, the Secretary of the Treasury shall, through the Division of Disbursement of the Treasury Department and prior to audit or settlement by the General Accounting Office, pay in accordance with such certification.
(d) The moneys so paid to any State shall be expended solely in carrying out the purposes specified in section 601, and in accordance with plans presented by the health authority of such State and approved by the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service.

INVESTIGATIONS

SEC. 603. (a) There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year, beginning with the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $2,000,000 for expenditure by the Public Health Service for investigation of disease and problems of sanitation (including the printing and binding of the findings of such investigations), and f or the pay and allowances and traveling expenses of personnel of the Public Health Service, including commissioned officers, engaged in such investigations or detailed to cooperate with the health authorities of any State in carrying out the purposes specified in section 601: Provided, That no personnel of the Public Health Service shall be detailed to cooperate with the health authorities of any State except at the request of the proper authorities of such State.
(b) The personnel of the Public Health Service paid from any appropriation not made pursuant to subsection (a) may be detailed to assist in carrying out the purposes of this title. The appropriation from which they are paid shall be reimbursed from the appropriation made pursuant to subsection (a) to the extent of their salaries and allowances for services performed while so detailed.
(c) The Secretary of the Treasury shall include in his annual report to Congress a full account of the administration of this title.

SECTION 701. There is hereby established a Social Security Board (in this Act referred to as the Board ) to be composed of three members to be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. During his term of membership on the Board , no member shall engage in any other business, vocation, or employment. Not more than two of the members of the Board shall be members of the same political party. Each member shall receive a salary at the rate of $10,000 a year and shall hold office for a term of six years, except that
(1) any member appointed to fill a vacancy occurring prior to the expiration of the term for which his predecessor was appointed, shall be appointed for the remainder of such term; and
(2) the terms of office of the members first taking office after the date of the enactment of this Act shall expire, as designated by the President at the time of appointment, one at the end of two years, one at the end of four years, and one at the end of six years, after the date of the enactment of this Act. The President shall designate one of the members as the chairman of the Board.

DUTIES OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD

SEC. 702. The Board shall perform the duties imposed upon it by this Act and shall also have the duty of studying and making recommendations as to the most effective methods of providing economic security through social insurance, and as to legislation and matters of administrative policy concerning old-age pensions, unemployment compensation, accident compensation, and related subjects.

EXPENSES OF THE BOARD

SEC. 703. The Board is authorized to appoint and fix the compensation of such officers and employees, and to make such expenditures, as may be necessary for carrying out its functions under this Act. Appointments of attorneys and experts may be made without regard to the civil-service laws.

REPORTS

SEC. 704. The Board shall make a full report to Congress, at the beginning of each regular session, of the administration of the functions with which it is charged.

INCOME TAX ON EMPLOYEES

DEDUCTION OF TAX FROM WAGES

SEC. 802. (a) The tax imposed by section 801 shall be collected by the employer of the taxpayer by deducting the amount of the tax from the wages as and when paid. Every employer required so to deduct the tax is hereby made liable for the payment of such tax, and is hereby indemnified against the claims and demands of any person for the amount of any such payment made by such employer.
(b) If more or less than the correct amount of tax imposed by section 801 is paid with respect to any wage payment, then, under regulations made under this title, proper adjustments, with respect both to the tax and the amount to be deducted, shall be made, without interest, in connection with subsequent wage payments to the same individual by the same employer.

DEDUCTIBILITY FROM INCOME TAX

SEC. 803. For the purposes of the income tax imposed by Title I of the Revenue Act of 1934 or by any Act of Congress in substitution therefor, the tax imposed by section 801 shall not be allowed as a deduction to the taxpayer in computing his net income for the year in which such tax is deducted from his wages.

EXCISE TAX ON EMPLOYERS

ADJUSTMENT OF EMPLOYERS TAX

SEC. 805. If more or less than the correct amount of tax imposed by section 804 is paid with respect to any wage payment, then, under regulations made under this title, proper adjustments with respect the tax shall be made, without interest, in connection with subsequent wage payments to the same individual by the same employer.

REFUNDS AND DEFICIENCIES

SEC. 806. If more or less than the correct amount of tax imposed by section 801 or 804 is paid or deducted with respect to any wage payment and the overpayment or underpayment of tax cannot be adjusted under section 802 (b) or 805 the amount of the overpayment shall be refunded and the amount of the underpayment shall be collected in such manner and at such times (subject to the statutes of limitations properly applicable thereto) as may be prescribed by regulations made under this title.

COLLECTION AND PAYMENT OF TAXES

SEC. 807. (a) The taxes imposed by this title shall be collected by the Bureau of Internal Revenue under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury and shall be paid into the Treasury of the United States as internal- revenue collections. If the tax is not paid when due, there shall be added as part of the tax interest (except in the case of adjustments made in accordance with the provisions of sections 802 (b) and 805) at the rate of one-half of 1 per centum per month from the date the tax became due until paid.
(b) Such taxes shall be collected and paid in such manner, at such times, and under such conditions, not inconsistent with this title (either by making and filing returns, or by stamps, coupons, tickets, books, or other reasonable devices or methods necessary or helpful in securing a complete and proper collection and payment of the tax or in securing proper identification of the taxpayer), as may be prescribed by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury.
(c) All provisions of law, including penalties, applicable with respect to any tax imposed by section 600 or section 800 of the Revenue Act of 1926 and the provisions of section 607 of the Revenue Act of 1934, shall, insofar as applicable and not inconsistent with the provisions of this title, be applicable with respect to the taxes imposed by this title.
(d) In the payment of any tax under this title a fractional part of a cent shall be disregarded unless it amounts to one-half cent or more, in which case it shall be increased to 1 cent.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

SEC. 808. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, shall make and publish rules and regulations for the enforcement of this title.

SALE OF STAMPS BY POSTMASTERS

SEC. 809. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue shall furnish to the Postmaster General without prepayment a suitable quantity of stamps, coupons, tickets, books, or other devices prescribed by the Commissioner under section 807 for the collection or payment of any tax imposed by this title, to be distributed to, and kept on sale by, all post offices of the first and second classes, and such post offices of the third and fourth classes as
(1) are located in county seats, or
(2) are certified by the Secretary of the Treasury to the Postmaster General as necessary to the proper administration of this title. The Postmaster General may require each such postmaster to furnish bond in such increased amount as he may from time to time determine, and each such postmaster shall deposit the receipts from the sale of such stamps, coupons, tickets, books, or other devices, to the credit of, and render accounts to, the Postmaster General at such times and in such form as the Postmaster General may by regulations prescribe. The Postmaster General shall at least once a month transfer to the Treasury, as internal- revenue collections all receipts so deposited together with a statement of the additional expenditures in the District of Columbia and elsewhere incurred by the Post Office Department in performing the duties imposed upon said Department by this Act, and the Secretary of the Treasury is hereby authorized and directed to advance from time to time to the credit of the Post Office Department from appropriations made for the collection of the taxes imposed by this title, such sums as may be required for such additional expenditures incurred by the Post Office Department.

PENALTIES

SEC. 810. (a) Whoever buys, sells, offers for sale, uses, transfers, takes or gives in exchange, or pledges or gives in pledge, except as authorized in this title or in regulations made pursuant thereto, any stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device, prescribed by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue under section 807 for the collection or payment of any tax imposed by this title, shall be fined not more than $1,000 or imprisoned for not more than six months, or both.
(b) Whoever, with intent to defraud, alters, forges, makes, or counterfeits any stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device prescribed by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue under section 807 for the collection or payment of any tax imposed by this title, or uses, sells, lends, or has in his possession any such altered, forged, or counterfeited stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device, or makes, uses, sells, or has in his possession any ma- terial in imitation of the material used in the manufacture of such stamp, coupon, ticket, book, or other device, shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

DEFINITIONS

IMPOSITION OF TAX

SECTION 901. On and after January 1, 1936, every employer (as defined in section 907) shall pay for each calendar year an excise tax, with respect to having individuals in his employ, equal to the following percentages of the total wages (as defined in section 907) payable by him (regardless of the time of payment) with respect to employment (as defined in section 907) during such calendar year:
(1) With respect to employment during the calendar year 1936 the rate shall be 1 per centum;
(2) With respect to employment during the calendar year 1937 the rate shall be 2 per centum;
(3) With respect to employment after December 31, 1937, the rate shall be 3 per centum.

CREDIT AGAINST TAX

SEC. 902. The taxpayer may credit against the tax imposed by section 901 the amount of contributions, with respect to employment during the taxable year, paid by him (before the date of filing of his return for the taxable year) into an unemployment fund under a State law. The total credit allowed to a taxpayer under this section for all contributions paid into unemployment funds with respect to employment during such taxable year shall not exceed 90 per centum of the tax against which it is credited, and credit shall be allowed only for contributions made under the laws of States certified for the taxable year as provided in section 903.

CERTIFICATION OF STATE LAWS

SEC. 903 (a) The Social Security Board shall approve any State law submitted to it, within thirty days of such submission, which it finds provides that-
(1) All compensation is to be paid through public employment offices in the State or such other agencies as the Board may approve;
(2) No compensation shall be payable with respect to any day of unemployment occurring within two years after the first day of the first period with respect to which contributions are required;
(3) All money received in the unemployment fund shall immediately upon such receipt be paid over to the Secretary of the Treasury to the credit of the Unemployment Trust Fund established by section 904;
(4) All money withdrawn from the Unemployment Trust Fund by the State agency shall be used solely in the payment of compensation, exclusive of expenses of administration;
(5) Compensation shall not be denied in such State to any otherwise eligible individual for refusing to accept new work under any of the following conditions:
(A) If the position offered is vacant due directly to a strike, lockout, or other labor dispute;
(B) if the wages, hours, or other conditions of the work offered are substantially less favorable to the individual than those prevailing for similar work in the locality;
(C) if as a condition of being employed the individual would be required to join a company union or to resign from or refrain from joining any bona-fide labor organization;
(6) All the rights, privileges, or immunities conferred by such law or by acts done pursuant thereto shall exist subject to the power of the legislature to amend or repeal such law at any time. The Board shall, upon approving such law, notify the Governor of the State of its approval.
(b) On December 31 in each taxable year the Board shall certify to the Secretary of the Treasury each State whose law it has previously approved, except that it shall not certify any State which, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency, the Board finds has changed its law so that it no longer contains the provisions specified in subsection (a) or has with respect to such taxable year failed to comply substantially with any such provision.
(c) If, at any time during the taxable year, the Board has reason to believe that a State whose law it has previously approved, may not be certified under subsection (b), it shall promptly so notify the Governor of such State.

UNEMPLOYMENT TRUST FUND

ADMINISTRATION, REFUNDS, AND PENALTIES

INTERSTATE COMMERCE

SEC. 906. No person required under a State law to make payments to an unemployment fund shall be relieved from compliance therewith on the ground that he is engaged in interstate commerce, or that the State law does not distinguish between employees engaged in interstate commerce and those engaged in intrastate commerce.

DEFINITIONS

SEC. 907. When used in this title -- (a) The term employer does not include any person unless on each of some twenty days during the taxable year, each day being in a different calendar week, the total number of individuals who were in his employ for some portion of the day (whether or not at the same moment of time) was eight or more.
(b) The term wages means all remuneration for employment, including the cash value of all remuneration paid in any medium other than cash.
(c) The term employment means any service, of whatever nature, performed within the United States by an employee for his employer, except-
(1) Agricultural labor;
(2) Domestic service in a private home;
(3) Service performed as an officer or member of a crew of a vessel on the navigable waters of the United States;
(4) Service performed by an individual in the employ of his son, daughter, or spouse, and service performed by a child under the age of twenty-one in the employ of his father or mother;
(5) Service performed in the employ of the United States Government or of an instrumentality of the United States;
(6) Service performed in the employ of a State, a political subdivision thereof, or an instrumentality of one or more States or political subdivisions;
(7) Service performed in the employ of a corporation, community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.
(d) The term State agency means any State officer, board, or other authority, designated under a State law to administer the unemployment fund in such State.
(e) The term unemployment fund means a special fund, established under a State law and administered by a State agency, for the payment of compensation.
(f) The term contributions means payments required by a State law to be made by an employer into an unemployment fund, to the extent that such payments are made by him without any part thereof being deducted or deductible from the wages of individuals in his employ.
(g) The term compensation means cash benefits payable to individuals with respect to their unemployment.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

SEC. 908. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, shall make and publish rules and regulations for the enforcement of this title, except sections 903, 904, and 910.

ALLOWANCE OF ADDITIONAL CREDIT

SEC. 909. (a) In addition to the credit allowed under section 902, a taxpayer may, subject to the conditions imposed by section 910, credit against the tax imposed by section 901 for any taxable year after the taxable year 1937, an amount, with respect to each State law, equal to the amount, if any, by which the contributions, with respect to employment in such taxable year, actually paid by the taxpayer under such law before the date of filing his return for such taxable year, is exceeded by whichever of the following is the lesser- (1) The amount of contributions which he would have been required to pay under such law for such taxable year if he had been subject to the highest rate applicable from time to time throughout such year to any employer under such law; or (2) Two and seven-tenths per centum of the wages payable by him with respect to employment with respect to which contributions for such year were required under such law.
(b) If the amount of the contributions actually so paid by the taxpayer is less than the amount which he should have paid under the State law, the additional credit under subsection (a) shall be reduced proportionately.
(c) The total credits allowed to a taxpayer under this title shall not exceed 90 per centum of the tax against which such credits are taken.

CONDITIONS OF ADDITIONAL CREDIT ALLOWANCE

SEC. 910. (a) A taxpayer shall be allowed the additional credit under section 909, with respect to his contribution rate under a State law being lower, for any taxable year, than that of another employer subject to such law, only if the Board finds that under such law--
(1) Such lower rate, with respect to contributions to a pooled fund, is permitted on the basis of not less than three years of compensation experience;
(2) Such lower rate, with respect to contributions to a guaranteed employment account, is permitted only when his guaranty of employment was fulfilled in the preceding calendar year, and such guaranteed employment account amounts to not less than 7 " per centum of the total wages payable by him, in accordance with such guaranty, with respect to employment in such State in the preceding calendar year;
(3) Such lower rate, with respect to contributions to a separate reserve account, is permitted only when
(A) compensation has been payable from such account throughout the preceding calendar year, and
(B) such account amounts to not less than five times the largest amount of compensation paid from such account within any one of the three preceding calendar years, and
(C) such account amounts to not less than 7 " per centum of the total wages payable by him (plus the total wages payable by any other employers who may be contributing to such account) with respect to employment in such State in the preceding calendar year.
(b) Such additional credit shall be reduced, if any contributions under such law are made by such taxpayer at a lower rate under conditions not fulfilling the requirements of subsection (a), by the amount bearing the same ratio to such additional credit as the amount of contributions made at such lower rate bears to the total of his contributions paid for such year under such law.
(c) As used in this section-
(1) The term reserve account means a separate account in an unemployment fund, with respect to an employer or group of employers, from which compensation is payable only with respect to the unemployment of individuals who were in the employ of such employer, or of one of the employers comprising the group.
(2) The term pooled fund means an unemployment fund or any part thereof in which all contributions are mingled and undivided, and from which compensation is payable to all eligible individuals, except that to individuals last employed by employers with respect to whom reserve accounts are maintained by the State agency, it is payable only when such accounts are exhausted.
(3) The term guaranteed employment account means a separate account, in an unemployment fund, of contributions paid by an employer (or group of employers) who
(A) guarantees in advance thirty hours of wages for each of forty calendar weeks (or more, with one weekly hour deducted for each added week guaranteed) in twelve months, to all the individuals in his employ in one or more distinct establishments, except that any such individual s guaranty may commence after a probationary period (included within twelve or less consecutive calendar weeks), and
(B) gives security or assurance, satisfactory to the State agency, for the fulfillment of such guaranties, from which account compensation shall be payable with respect to the unemployment of any such individual whose guaranty is not fulfilled or renewed and who is otherwise eligible for compensation under the State law.
(4) The term year of compensation experience , as applied to an employer, means any calendar year throughout which compensation was payable with respect to any individual in his employ who became unemployed and was eligible for compensation.

SECTION 1001. For the purpose of enabling each State to furnish financial assistance, as far as practicable under the conditions in such State, to needy individuals who are blind, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936, the sum of $3,000,000, and there is hereby authorized to be appropriated for each fiscal year thereafter a sum sufficient to carry out the purposes of this title. The sums made available under this section shall be used for making payments to States which have submitted, and had approved by the Social Security Board, State plans for aid to the blind.

STATE PLANS FOR AID TO THE BLIND

SEC. 1002. (a) A State plan for aid to the blind must
(1) provide that it shall be in effect in all political subdivisions of the State, and, if administered by them, be mandatory upon them;
(2) provide for financial participation by the State;
(3) either provide for the establishment or designation of a single State agency to administer the plan, or provide for the establishment or designation of a single State agency to supervise the administration of the plan;
(4) provide for granting to any individual, whose claim for aid is denied, an oppor- tunity for a fair hearing before such State agency;
(5) provide such methods of administration (other than those relating to selection, tenure of office, and compensation of personnel) as are found by the Board to be necessary for the efficient operation of the plan;
(6) provide that the State agency will make such reports, in such form and containing such information, as the Board may from time to time require, and comply with such provisions as the Board may from time to time find necessary to assure the correctness and verification of such reports; and
(7) provide that no aid will be furnished any individual under the plan with respect to any period with respect to which he is receiving old-age assistance under the State plan approved under section 2 of this Act.
(b) The Board shall approve any plan which fulfills the conditions specified in subsection (a), except that it shall not approve any plan which imposes, as a condition of eligibility for aid to the blind under the plan-
(1) Any residence requirement which excludes any resident of the State who has resided therein five years during the nine years immediately preceding the application for aid and has resided therein continuously for one year immediately preceding the application or
(2) Any citizenship requirement which excludes any citizen of the United States.

PAYMENT TO STATES

OPERATION OF STATE PLANS

SEC. 1004. In the case of any State plan for aid to the blind which has been approved by the Board, if the Board, after reasonable notice and opportunity for hearing to the State agency administering or supervising the administration of such a plan, finds--
(1) that the plan has been so changed as to impose any residence or citizenship requirement prohibited by section 1002 (b), or that in the administration of the plan any such prohibited requirement is imposed, with the knowledge of such State agency, in a substantial number of cases; or
(2) that in the administration of the plan there is a failure to comply substantially with any provision required by section 1002 (a) be included in the plan; the Board shall notify such State agency that further payments will not be made to the State until the Board is satisfied that such prohibited requirement is no longer so imposed, and that there is no longer any such failure to comply. Until it is satisfied it shall make no further certification to the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to such State.

ADMINISTRATION

SEC. 1005. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936 the sum of $30,000, for all necessary expenses of the Board in administering the provisions of this title.

DEFINITION

SEC. 1006. When used in this title the term aid to the blind means money payments to blind individuals.

RULES AND REGULATIONS

SEC. 1102. The Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Social Security Board respectively, shall make and publish such rules and regulations, not inconsistent with this Act, as may be necessary to the efficient administration of the functions with which each is charged under this Act.

SEPARABILITY

SEC. 1103. If any provision of this Act, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of the Act, and the application of such provision to other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby.

RESERVATION OF POWER

SEC. 1104. The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.

SHORT TITLE

SEC. 1105. This Act may be cited as the Social Security Act.

Approved, August 14, 1935.

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Section 201. (a) There is hereby created an account in the Treasury of the United States to be known as the Old-Age Reserve Account hereinafter in this title called the Account. There is hereby authorized to be appropriated to the Account for each fiscal year,…

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Andrew Carnegie help build the American Steel Industry in the early 1900's

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Biography: Andrew Carnegie | American Experience | PBS

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Andrew Carnegie helped build the formidable American steel industry, a process that turned a poor young man into the richest man in the world.

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(NLRB) The National Labor Relations board was established to give workers in the US the ability to unionize also it prevent unfair labor practices and helped regulate safe working conditions.

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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is comprised of a team of professionals who work to assure fair labor practices and workplace democracy nationwide.

The National Labor Relations Board is an independent federal agency vested with the power to safeguard employees' rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative. The agency also acts to prevent and remedy unfair labor practices committed by private sector employers and unions.

The National Labor Relations Board protects the rights of most private-sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions. If you believe your rights have been violated, or that an employer or a union has engaged in unlawful conduct, you may file a charge through one of our regional offices. Petitions for representation and decertification elections may also be filed at regional offices.

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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is comprised of a team of professionals who work to assure fair labor practices and workplace democracy nationwide. The National Labor Relations Board is an independent federal agency vested with the power to safeguard employees' rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative.

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Thousands of Americans protested to the Vietnam War took to the U.S capital to peacefully protest the war.

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Largest Anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C. - 1969  | Movietone Moment | 13 November 2020

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President Abraham Lincoln passed a law January 1, 1963, declaring all slaves free.

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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery's final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.

The original of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, is in the National Archives in Washington, DC. With the text covering five pages the document was originally tied with narrow red and blue ribbons, which were attached to the signature page by a wafered impression of the seal of the United States. Most of the ribbon remains; parts of the seal are still decipherable, but other parts have worn off.

The document was bound with other proclamations in a large volume preserved for many years by the Department of State. When it was prepared for binding, it was reinforced with strips along the center folds and then mounted on a still larger sheet of heavy paper. Written in red ink on the upper right-hand corner of this large sheet is the number of the Proclamation, 95, given to it by the Department of State long after it was signed. With other records, the volume containing the Emancipation Proclamation was transferred in 1936 from the Department of State to the National Archives of the United States.

The Emancipation Proclamation

Select Resources

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Enlarge The Emancipation Proclamation (page 1) Record Group 11 General Records of the United States View in National Archives Catalog Español President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war.

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Dred Scott was former slave whose case was decided by the Supreme court who ruled in his favor ultimately granting him his freed from his slave master's widow.

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The U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision on Sanford v. Dred Scott, a case that intensified national divisions over the issue of slavery.

In 1834, Dred Scott, an enslaved man, had been taken to Illinois, a free state, and then Wisconsin territory, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery. Scott lived in Wisconsin with his master, Dr. John Emerson, for several years before returning to Missouri, a slave state. In 1846, after Emerson died, Scott sued his master’s widow for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived as a resident of a free state and territory. He won his suit in a lower court, but the Missouri supreme court reversed the decision.

Scott appealed the decision, and as his new master, J.F.A. Sanford, was a resident of New York, a federal court decided to hear the case on the basis of the diversity of state citizenship represented. After a federal district court decided against Scott, the case came on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was divided along slavery and antislavery lines; although the Southern justices had a majority.

During the trial, the antislavery justices used the case to defend the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, which had been repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The Southern majority responded by ruling on March 6, 1857, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Three of the Southern justices also held that African Americans who were enslaved or whose ancestors were enslaved were not entitled to the rights of a federal citizen and therefore had no standing in court.

These rulings all confirmed that, in the view of the nation’s highest court, under no condition did Dred Scott have the legal right to request his freedom. The Supreme Court’s verdict further inflamed the irrepressible differences in America over the issue of slavery, which in 1861 erupted with the outbreak of the American Civil War.

READ MORE: America's History of Slavery Began Long Before Jamestown

On March 6, 1981, CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite signs off with his trademark valediction, "And that's the way it is," for the final time. Over the previous 19 years, Cronkite had established himself not only as the nation's leading newsman but as "the most trusted man ...read more

On March 6, 1836, after 13 days of intermittent fighting, the Battle of the Alamo comes to a gruesome end, capping off a pivotal moment in the Texas Revolution. Mexican forces were victorious in recapturing the fort, and nearly all of the roughly 200 Texan defenders—including ...read more

Helmut Kohl, the interim chancellor of West Germany since the fall of Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democrat government in 1982, is elected German chancellor as his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party is voted back into power. Elected as Rhine-Palatinate state premier in 1969, Kohl ...read more

Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of the Italian Renaissance artists, is born in the small village of Caprese on March 6, 1475. The son of a government administrator, he grew up in Florence, a center of the early Renaissance movement, and became an artist’s apprentice at age ...read more

The German company Bayer patents aspirin on March 6, 1899. Now the most common drug in household medicine cabinets, acetylsalicylic acid was originally made from a chemical found in the bark of willow trees. In its primitive form, the active ingredient, salicin, was used for ...read more

On March 6, 1902, the Madrid Foot Ball Club is founded by a group of fans in Madrid, Spain. Later known as Real Madrid, the club would become the most successful European football (soccer) franchise of the 20th century. With its trademark blue-and-white uniforms (originally ...read more

On March 6, 1820, President James Monroe signs the Missouri Compromise, also known as the Compromise Bill of 1820, into law. The bill attempted to equalize the number of slave-holding states and free states in the country, allowing Missouri into the Union as a slave state while ...read more

Georgia O’Keeffe, the artist who gained worldwide fame for her austere minimalist paintings of the American southwest, dies in Santa Fe at the age of 98. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887, O’Keeffe grew up in Virginia and first studied painting at the Art Institute of ...read more

In the year 2000, a new company called Napster created something of a music-fan’s utopia—a world in which nearly every song ever recorded was instantly available on your home computer—for free. Even to some at the time, it sounded too good to be true, and in the end, it was. The ...read more

A British ferry leaving Zeebrugge, Belgium, capsizes, drowning 188 people, on March 6, 1987. Shockingly poor safety procedures led directly to this deadly disaster. Lord Justice Barry Sheen, an investigator of the accident, later said of it, from top to bottom, the body ...read more

The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins in New York Southern District federal court. Judge Irving R. Kaufman presides over the espionage prosecution of the couple accused of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians (treason could not be charged because the United States was ...read more

Just one day after the death of long-time Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Georgy Malenkov is named premier and first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Malenkov’s tenure was extremely brief, and within a matter of weeks he was pushed aside by Nikita Khrushchev. ...read more

A committee of the New York Provincial Congress instructs Major William Malcolm to dismantle the Sandy Hook lighthouse in the then-disputed territory of Sandy Hook, now in New Jersey, on March 6, 1776, telling him to “use your best discretion to render the light-house entirely ...read more

Members of the Dutch Resistance who were attempting to hijack a truck in Apeldoorn, Holland, ambush Lt. Gen. Hanns Rauter, an SS officer. During the following week, the German SS executed 263 Dutch in retaliation. The Dutch Resistance was one of the fiercest of all the ...read more

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Millions of Americans opposed the World War and argued the US should not meddle in European affairs. Millions felt American's did not gain but lost more in coming to the aid of some of the US allies.

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American intervention saved Western Europe in World War I, but the result was a failed armistice.

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. The ongoing conflict ended just 19 months later with an Allied victory.

The United States did not win the war alone, given the far earlier and greater sacrifices of Great Britain, France, Italy, and czarist Russia.

But America's late arrival, with some 2 million doughboys who landed in France less than three years after the start of the war, saved the teetering Allied cause. By late 1917, Germany had knocked Russia out of the war and seemed likely to swarm the sole Western front and finish off the exhausted British and French armies.

On this centennial of America's entry into the war, debate still rages over the cause and results of World War I in a way not true of the far more lethal World War II (an estimated 60 million dead) just two decades later.

Until World War II, the conflict was initially known as the Great War, on the naïve premise that the "war to end all wars" would never have to be repeated. But World War I did not solve problems as much as it led to even greater ones.

Unfortunately, World War I ended with an armistice - at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 - and not with an unconditional surrender of the defeated. Although Germany and Austria-Hungary clearly lost the war, their countries were not occupied and monitored, as would be true afterWorld War II.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles that was supposed to bring peace is often blamed for being too harsh on the losers. But it was more complicated than that. The settlement of Versailles combined the very worst of both worlds: blaming the defeated side, but without any means of ensuring that the humiliated losers would not rearm and try their luck again.

The victorious Allies soon hosted conferences outlawing deadly weapons, declaring war obsolete, and calling for collective security through the new League of Nations.

In response, the losing Germans often blamed back stabbers for their defeat and first interpreted such utopianism as Allied guilt - and later as weakness. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany rearmed and began absorbing neighboring borderlands eager to replay the verdict of World War I.

The United States was depressed that World War I seemed to have brought no lasting peace. It returned to its former isolationism during the depression years of the 1930s, disarmed, and was determined to never again become involved in Europe's nihilistic wars.

Yet that very disengagement weakened the European democracies' common front. Both European appeasement and American isolationism only encouraged the new Axis Powers to become even more determined to reverse the outcome of World War I.

World War I broke out in 1914 at an age when new offensive technology - machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, mass-produced artillery shrapnel shells, submarines - had vastly outpaced the arts of defense and medical care. It proved far easier to kill than to protect soldiers. And it was the first major war that was truly global, spreading beyond Europe to areas of the Middle East and Africa.

Mass deaths - especially during the great flu outbreak of 1918 - in the trenches from the Swiss border to the North Sea over four years of fighting nearly destroyed Europe. The war finished off the German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

In time, savage new ideologies - Fascism, Nazism, Communism - filled the void and promised to restore national pride and prosperity.

What can Americans learn 100 years later from the belated entry of the United States into World War I, and from the war's beginning, conduct, and aftermath?

Seemingly isolated incidents - such as the assassination of Austria's archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 - can lead to nearly 20 million dead.

Isolationism and disarmament only encourage aggressors to do something stupid. Military power and deterrence persuade them not to try.

Had the United States been fully armed in 1914 (or again in 1939) and ready to help its allies, Germany might not have invaded Western Europe, or at least not have achieved such initial successes.

Wars - easy to start, hard to end - usually last far beyond what the original belligerents imagined.

Stalemate at the front ensures horrendous casualties. The Allies had no strategic plans - or ability - to attack German industries or invade German cities. And Germany and Austria could not reach the heart of Allied power in London, Paris, or New York.

Defeat and occupation force an enemy to cease its aggression. Armistices without a definite result only lead to postponements - and eventually more war.

World War I's terrible irony is that today its horrible carnage seems even more senseless than the far greater death toll of World War II, which ended quite differently and did not lead to another world war - at least so far.

Victor Davis Hanson - NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, ofThe Case for Trump. @vdhanson

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The Yanks over There - 100 Years Ago | National Review

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American intervention saved Western Europe in World War I, but the result was a failed armistice. One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. The ongoing conflict ended just 19 months later with an Allied victory.

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The native people were a prosperous people before interference and colonization from Europeans. They had their own cultures, customs, agriculture, and functioning societies.

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Native American societies before contact (video) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Motivations for European Conquest of the New World

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Motivations for European Conquest of the New World

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"Historians generally recognize three motives for European exploration and colonization in the New World: God, gold, and glory."

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If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

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Motivation for European conquest of the New World (article) | Khan Academy

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God, gold, and glory motivated European nations to explore and create colonies in the New World.

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The Spanish started their quest in conquesting early to establish dominance with multiple colonies across the world. They established dominance through slavery and caste systems.

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Spanish colonization (video) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Some scientists discuss the theory of a land bridge that might have connected eastern Europe to present day Alaska, demonstrating the possibility of human migration from there.

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The Bering Land Bridge Theory - Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (U.S. National Park Service)

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The continent of North America has been inhabited by humans for at least 16,500 years. As early as the 1500s, early settlers and European thinkers were interested in discovering how humans had come to populate North and South America. One theory suggested the migration of Norsemen across Greenland i…

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Introduction of Eurasian Germs to Native Americans 

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Introduction of Eurasian Germs to Native Americans 

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The immune systems of the indigenous were not equipped to deal with the introduction of new germs from Eurasia. Not only were they being violently killed by weaponry, they were also being killed by deadly disease brought to their lands.

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The Story Of... Smallpox - and other Deadly Eurasian Germs

Much of the credit for European military success in the New World can be handed to the superiority of their weapons, their literary heritage, even the fact they had unique load-bearing mammals, like horses. These factors combined, gave the conquistadors a massive advantage over the sophisticated civilisations of the Aztec and Inca empires.

But weapons alone can't account for the breathtaking speed with which the indigenous population of the New World were completely wiped out.

Within just a few generations, the continents of the Americas were virtually emptied of their native inhabitants - some academics estimate that approximately 20 million people may have died in the years following the European invasion - up to 95% of the population of the Americas.

No medieval force, no matter how bloodthirsty, could have achieved such enormous levels of genocide. Instead, Europeans were aided by a deadly secret weapon they weren't even aware they were carrying: Smallpox.

Smallpox acted as a form of biological weapon

Smallpox is a viral infection which usually enters the body through the nose or throat. From here the virus travels to the lungs, where it multiplies and spreads to the lymphatic system. Within a few days, large pustules begin to appear all over the victim's skin.

Starting with the hands and the face, and then spreading to cover the rest of the body, each blister is packed full of smallpox DNA. If punctured, these blisters become highly infectious, projecting fresh smallpox particles into the air and onto surrounding surfaces -such as someone else's skin. It is a disease that requires close human contact to replicate and survive.

The total incubation period lasts 12 days, at which point the patient will will either have died or survived. But throughout that period, if gone unchecked, they may have passed the disease to an enormous number of people. But the disease requires close human contact to replicate and survive.

Smallpox is a remarkably effective, and remarkably stable, infection - research has shown that over the course of 10 years, as few as three individual bases may change in a strain's DNA. The disease found an effective formula thousands of years ago, and there's no reason to change it.

So where does this deadly disease come from, and why was it linked to Europeans?

For thousands of years, the people of Eurasia lived in close proximity to the largest
variety of domesticated mammals in the world - eating, drinking, and breathing in the germs these animals bore. Over time, animal infections crossed species, evolving into new strains which became deadly to man. Diseases like smallpox, influenza and measles were in fact the deadly inheritance of the Eurasian farming tradition - the product of thousands of years spent farming livestock.

These epidemic Eurasian diseases flourished in dense communities and tended to explode in sudden, overwhelming spates of infection and death. Transmitted via coughing, sneezing and tactile infection, they wreaked devastation throughout Eurasian history - and in the era before antibiotics, thousands died.

But not everyone.

With each epidemic eruption, some people survived, acquiring antibodies and immunities which they passed on to the next generation. Over time, the population of Europe gained increased immunity, and the devastating impact of traditional infections decreased.

Yet the people of the New World had no history of prior exposure to these germs. They farmed only one large mammal - the llama - and even this was geographically isolated. The llama was never kept indoors, it wasn't milked and only occasionally eaten - so the people of the New World were not troubled by cross-species viral infection.

When the Europeans arrived, carrying germs which thrived in dense, semi-urban populations, the indigenous people of the Americas were effectively doomed. They had never experienced smallpox, measles or flu before, and the viruses tore through the continent, killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans.

Smallpox is believed to have arrived in the Americas in 1520 on a Spanish ship sailing from Cuba, carried by an infected African slave. As soon as the party landed in Mexico, the infection began its deadly voyage through the continent. Even before the arrival of Pizarro, smallpox had already devastated the Inca Empire, killing the Emperor Huayna Capac and unleashing a bitter civil war that distracted and weakened his successor, Atahuallpa.

In the era of global conquest which followed, European colonizers were assisted around the world by the germs which they carried. A 1713 smallpox epidemic in the Cape of Good Hope decimated the South African Khoi San people, rendering them incapable of resisting the process of colonization. European germs also wreaked devastation on the aboriginal communities of Australia and New Zealand.

More victims of colonization were killed by Eurasian germs, than by either the gun or the sword, making germs the deadliest agent of conquest.

Where to next?

Find out more about germs go to the Story of... Malaria.

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Guns Germs & Steel: Variables. Smallpox | PBS

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The Story Of... Smallpox - and other Deadly Eurasian Germs Much of the credit for European military success in the New World can be handed to the superiority of their weapons, their literary heritage, even the fact they had unique load-bearing mammals, like horses.

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Some conquerers were met with warm greetings from the indigenous, revered as gods or as those with higher spiritual power and were taught how to survive. Others viewed the conquerers with hostility, strangers in their land. Whatever method the conquerers used, (religion, force, etc), these lands were taken and conquered.

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The dramatic encounters of European and American peoples from 1492 to 1600 varied considerably from place to place and over time. This section of the exhibit examines the immediate consequences of contact in the five geographical areas of America reviewed previously.

The Indian peoples sometimes greeted Europeans warmly, provided them with food, and taught them important new survival skills. In some cases, they perceived them as being divine, or at least spiritually powerful. Some used the newcomers as allies against old enemies. Others saw them as new enemies, to be grudgingly tolerated or strongly resisted. However, native peoples were quickly disillusioned by treachery or mistreatment at European hands.

The Europeans brought technologies, ideas, plants, and animals that were new to America and would transform peoples' lives: guns, iron tools, and weapons; Christianity and Roman law; sugarcane and wheat; horses and cattle. They also carried diseases against which the Indian peoples had no defenses.

The interaction among groups produced a complex mosaic of relationships. Varying forms of resistance and adaptation among Indian, African, and European peoples occurred throughout the region.

The Carribean-Las Indias

The arrival of Europeans proved disastrous for the people of the Caribbean. Within 20 years, it is estimated that native population of Hispaniola dropped from one million to 30,000.

The Spaniards settled first on the island of Hispaniola and later moved on to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, forcing the Taínos to mine for gold. The local population quickly declined as a result of mistreatment, flight, disruption of agriculture, and disease. African slaves were imported as early as 1502 to replace the dwindling labor supply.

As mining decreased, the Spanish introduced livestock, crops, and fruit trees. Cattle ranching and sugarcane became important as a stable Spanish society took hold in the large islands. The Caribbean played a crucial role as a staging ground for further exploration and conquest, and as a strategic defensive point for the Spanish empire.

Middle America-Creating New Spain

After having organized the expedition in Cuba, Hernando Cortés led the conquest of the Mexica (Aztec) empire from 1519-1521. Tenochtitlán, the capital city, was razed and rebuilt as Mexico, the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain.

Within thirty years, it had the first printing press in the Americas, a cathedral, and a university. Indian residents far outnumbered the 8,000 or so Spaniards, and perhaps the 5,000 Africans of diverse origins living there by 1550. From the capital, the Spanish spread out to adjoining areas and eventually into today's New Mexico and Guatemala.

Silver mining assured that the economy would flourish. Spaniards used Indian laborers to establish their farms, ranches, and towns, and religious orders mounted intensive missionary campaigns. Despite a great reduction in population, native cultures and communities nonetheless survived, adapting to the new circumstances of Spanish rule.

Testimony from Huejotzingo

A hand-painted document, presented as testimony in a court case against the Spanish crown, provides a record of a people whose vibrant culture was beginning to reflect the influence of a new political and religious system. Ten years after allying with Cortés in the siege of Tenochtitlán, the people of Huejotzingo asked him for help in a legal battle - this time against the extremely burdensome tributes exacted by Spanish administrators sent to rule New Spain.

The paintings are on native amatl, a pre-European paper made of fig tree bark or maguey. They describe tributes paid, including loads of stones, bricks, foodstuffs, and bolts of woven cloth. One sheet depicts a banner made of gold and feathers, bearing an image of the Madonna and Child. According to the painting, eight male slaves and twelve female slaves were sold in order to pay for the gold.

By 1531, the conqueror Hernando Cortés had acquired dominion over far-reaching properties in Mexico and the title of Governor of New Spain. After a lengthy absence from the region, he was asked by the people of the town of Huejotzingo (located in the current state of Puebla) to initiate a lawsuit against certain members of the high court of New Spain, concerning their burdensome utilization of the people and the unjust use of the incomes and profits secured from the town during his absence. The written legal document that ensued and the accompanying testimony-eight sheets of handsome indigenous drawings on native paper of maguey and amatl-are known today as the Huejotzingo Codex of 1531.

This poignant and visually stimulating document reveals a highly stratified Nahuatl Indian social structure, with a complex and precise accounting system and an impressive diversity of crops, products, and professions. It contains one of the earliest known images of the Madonna and Child in these types of documents, a representation of a costly banner made of precious feathers and gold. The use of this highly revered form of indigenous artwork to display a Christian symbol introduced by the Iberian religious missionaries is striking testimony to the confluence of Spanish and Indian cultures and belief systems that was to occur later throughout America.

Rendering of the national symbol of Mexico (eagle, snake, and cactus).

Conquest in the Andes

The conquest of Peru was similar to that of Mexico in many ways. Inspired by rumors of a rich empire, Francisco Pizarro and other Spaniards reconnoitered the western coast of South America in the 1520s. In 1532, in the midst of a civil war, the Spaniards seized the Inca emperor Atahaullpa. After exacting a huge ransom in gold and silver, they executed him, but it was some time before they consolidated their conquest.

The Spaniards conquered the Inca capital of Cuzco, but found the imperial city too high and remote. Instead, they established a new capital, Lima, near the coast. Highland communities, therefore, experienced less contact with Spanish culture than did lowland communities. However, all Indian communities were subject to Spanish tribute and labor demands, adapted from the Incan mita system. These often onerous obligations brought disruption, change, and hardship.

According to legend, Santiago (St. James) converted Spain to Christianity and after his death his remains were moved to Santiago de Compostela. A later addition to the legend has Santiago riding a white steed and carrying a white banner, appearing in a radiant cloud above Christian troops battling Muslim forces. The notion of Santiago symbolizing Christian triumph over non-Christians was part of the mental world that the conquistadores brought with them to America. Chroniclers report that Santiago was invoked numerous times in battles against indigenous peoples. This illustration shows such a scene.

This church in Cuzco was constructed on top of the remains of an Incan temple. The obvious combination of Christian, Muslim, and Incan cultures are all evident in this photograph.

Europeans Along the South Atlantic

Portugal's claim to Brazil resulted not only from Cabral's 1500 landing, but also from the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. French efforts to exploit the resources and to establish settlements in the area persisted through much of the 16th century. The Spanish concentrated on the Rio de la Plata region and established the cities of Buenos Aires in 1536 and Asuncion in 1537.

Intense Portuguese colonization of Brazil began in the same decade. The capital, Salvador, was established in 1549 at the Bay of All Saints. The first Jesuits, who would play a crucial role in Brazilian society, arrived the same year. They established missionary settlements called aldeas in which they hoped to bring Tupinambas and other groups into "civilized" society by subjecting them to a disciplined routine and making them full-time farmers. Portuguese efforts to use indigenous labor were never very successful. Gradually they began to import African slaves as sugarcane cultivation got underway in the northeast.

The Portuguese, after first attempting to develop the brazilwood trade, changed, in the mid-16th century to sugarcane production and the importation of African slaves to work in that industry.

Incursions in North America

The French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English arrived in North America in the 16th century, sporadically and in small numbers. Fishermen plied their trade off the Newfoundland coast from around 1500. Some Europeans hoped to find an alternative route to Asia (the Northwest Passage), wealthy civilizations, or precious metals, but few found what they sought. They did not, however, confront an untamed wilderness, but rather people who often lived in villages and towns.

The European intruders depended almost entirely on the indigenous people, who provided them food and guides, sometimes under duress. They made few serious attempts to settle in the early years. Frequently, the most enduring impact of their expeditions was negative. Their diseases devastated native populations, and violence and wholesale commandeering of food supplies left a legacy of fear and hostility.

The Spanish and French Disrupt Life in Florida

Almost from the outset, European arrivals in the Florida peninsula produced violent confrontations. The Spanish came first, presumably as an extension of slave raiding in the Caribbean islands. Ponce de Leon's expeditions, in 1513 and 1521, failed because of Timucua and Calusa resistance. Subsequent Spanish expeditions moved on without founding any permanent settlements until St. Augustine was established in 1565.

In the early 1560s, French Huguenots established a colony at the mouth of the Saint Johns River. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, who mapped the area and wrote an account of his experiences, survived the 1565 Spanish attack that destroyed the French colony. Engravings based on his drawings show the site in Florida where the French first landed; Timucua men and women carrying fruit; and a battle scene in which French soldiers aided their ally Outina against his enemy Potanou.

The French initially touched the Florida coast near the St. Mary's River in the early 1560s, attempted settlements in the region, created alliances with the various Indian settlements, and eventually were annihilated by the Spanish in 1565.

The contacts of the French with the Timucua peoples of what is now northern Florida were documented by Jacques Le Moyne. In this view, the alliance of the French with the Chief Outina is used to overwhelm his arch-enemy Potanou.

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1492: An Ongoing Voyage Europe Claims America: The Atlantic Joined

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The dramatic encounters of European and American peoples from 1492 to 1600 varied considerably from place to place and over time. This section of the exhibit examines the immediate consequences of contact in the five geographical areas of America reviewed previously. The Indian peoples sometimes greeted Europeans warmly, provided them with food, and taught them important new survival skills.

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During this time of conquest, new animals, plants, and diseases were transferred back and forth in between North America and Europe.

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Columbian Exchange, the largest part of a more general process of biological globalization that followed the transoceanic voyaging of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ecological provinces that had been torn apart by continental drift millions of years ago were suddenly reunited by oceanic shipping, particularly in the wake of Christopher Columbus's voyages that began in 1492. The consequences profoundly shaped world history in the ensuing centuries, most obviously in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The phrase "the Columbian Exchange" is taken from the title of Alfred W. Crosby's 1972 book, which divided the exchange into three categories: diseases, animals, and plants.

Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.

In the centuries after 1492, these infections swirled as epidemics among Native American populations. Physical and psychological stress, including mass violence, compounded their effect. The impact was most severe in the Caribbean, where by 1600 Native American populations on most islands had plummeted by more than 99 percent. Across the Americas, populations fell by 50 percent to 95 percent by 1650.

The disease component of the Columbian Exchange was decidedly one-sided. However, it is likely that syphilis evolved in the Americas and spread elsewhere beginning in the 1490s. More assuredly, Native Americans hosted a form of tuberculosis, perhaps acquired from Pacific seals and sea lions. But they had no counterparts to the suite of lethal diseases they acquired from Eurasians and Africans. The paucity of exportable infections was a result of the settlement and ecological history of the Americas: The first Americans arrived about 25,000 to 15,000 years ago. The domestication of species other than dogs was yet to come. So none of the human diseases derived from, or shared with, domestic herd animals such as cattle, camels, and pigs (e.g. smallpox, influenza) yet existed anywhere in the Americas. Unlike these animals, the ducks, turkeys, alpacas, llamas, and other species domesticated by Native Americans seem to have harboured no infections that became human diseases.

The animal component of the Columbian Exchange was slightly less one-sided. Horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep, and several other species adapted readily to conditions in the Americas. Broad expanses of grassland in both North and South America suited immigrant herbivores, cattle and horses especially, which ran wild and reproduced prolifically on the Pampas and the Great Plains. Pigs too went feral. Sheep prospered only in managed flocks and became a mainstay of pastoralism in several contexts, such as among the Navajo in New Mexico.

With the new animals, Native Americans acquired new sources of hides, wool, and animal protein. Horses and oxen also offered a new source of traction, making plowing feasible in the Americas for the first time and improving transportation possibilities through wheeled vehicles, hitherto unused in the Americas. Donkeys, mules, and horses provided a wider variety of pack animals. Thus, the introduced animal species had some important economic consequences in the Americas and made the American hemisphere more similar to Eurasia and Africa in its economy.

The new animals made the Americas more like Eurasia and Africa in a second respect. With goats and pigs leading the way, they chewed and trampled crops, provoking between herders and farmers conflict of a sort hitherto unknown in the Americas except perhaps where llamas got loose. This pattern of conflict created new opportunities for political divisions and alignments defined by new common interests.

One introduced animal, the horse, rearranged political life even further. The Native Americans of the North American prairies, often called Plains Indians, acquired horses from Spanish New Mexico late in the 17th century. On horseback they could hunt bison (buffalo) more rewardingly, boosting food supplies until the 1870s, when bison populations dwindled. Additionally, mastery of the techniques of equestrian warfare utilized against their neighbours helped to vault groups such as the Sioux and Comanche to heights of political power previously unattained by any Amerindians in North America.

The Columbian Exchange was more evenhanded when it came to crops. The Americas' farmers' gifts to other continents included staples such as corn (maize), potatoes, cassava, and sweet potatoes, together with secondary food crops such as tomatoes, peanuts, pumpkins, squashes, pineapples, and chili peppers. Tobacco, one of humankind's most important drugs, is another gift of the Americas, one that by now has probably killed far more people in Eurasia and Africa than Eurasian and African diseases killed in the Americas.

Some of these crops had revolutionary consequences in Africa and Eurasia. Corn had the biggest impact, altering agriculture in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It underpinned population growth and famine resistance in parts of China and Europe, mainly after 1700, because it grew in places unsuitable for tubers and grains and sometimes gave two or even three harvests a year. It also served as livestock feed, for pigs in particular.

In Africa about 1550-1850, farmers from Senegal to Southern Africa turned to corn. Today it is the most important food on the continent as a whole. Its drought resistance especially recommended it in the many regions of Africa with unreliable rainfall.

Corn had political consequences in Africa. After harvest, it spoils more slowly than the traditional staples of African farms, such as bananas, sorghums, millets, and yams. Its longer shelf life, especially once it is ground into meal, favoured the centralization of power because it enabled rulers to store more food for longer periods of time, give it to loyal followers, and deny it to all others. Previously, without long-lasting foods, Africans found it harder to build states and harder still to project military power over large spaces. In the moist tropical forests of western and west-central Africa, where humidity worked against food hoarding, new and larger states emerged on the basis of corn agriculture in the 17th century. Some of them, including the Asante kingdom centred in modern-day Ghana, developed supply systems for feeding far-flung armies of conquest, using cornmeal, which canoes, porters, or soldiers could carry over great distances. Such logistical capacity helped Asante become an empire in the 18th century. To the east of Asante, expanding kingdoms such as Dahomey and Oyo also found corn useful in supplying armies on campaign.

The durability of corn also contributed to commercialization in Africa. Merchant parties, traveling by boat or on foot, could expand their scale of operations with food that stored and traveled well. The advantages of corn proved especially significant for the slave trade, which burgeoned dramatically after 1600. Slaves needed food on their long walks across the Sahara to North Africa or to the Atlantic coast en route to the Americas. Corn further eased the slave trade's logistical challenges by making it feasible to keep legions of slaves fed while they clustered in coastal barracoons before slavers shipped them across the Atlantic.

Cassava, or manioc, another American food crop introduced to Africa in the 16th century as part of the Columbian Exchange, had impacts that in some cases reinforced those of corn and in other cases countered them. Cassava, originally from Brazil, has much that recommended it to African farmers. Its soil nutrient requirements are modest, and it withstands drought and insects robustly. Like corn, it yields a flour that stores and travels well. It helped ambitious rulers project force and build states in Angola, Kongo, West Africa, and beyond. Farmers can harvest cassava (unlike corn) at any time after the plant matures. The food lies in the root, which can last for weeks or months in the soil. This characteristic of cassava suited farming populations targeted by slave raiders. It enabled them to vanish into the forest and abandon their crop for a while, returning when danger had passed. So while corn helped slave traders expand their business, cassava allowed peasant farmers to escape and survive slavers' raids.

The potato, domesticated in the Andes, made little difference in African history, although it does feature today in agriculture, especially in the Maghreb and South Africa. Farmers in various parts of East and South Asia adopted it, which improved agricultural returns in cool and mountainous districts. But its strongest impact came in northern Europe, where ecological conditions suited its requirements even at low elevations. From central Russia across to the British Isles, its adoption between 1700 and 1900 improved nutrition, checked famine, and led to a sustained spurt of demographic growth.

Potatoes store well in cold climates and contain excellent nutrition. In the Andes, where potato production and storage began, freeze-dried potatoes helped fuel the expansion of the Inca empire in the 15th century. A few centuries later potatoes fed the labouring legions of northern Europe's manufacturing cities and thereby indirectly contributed to European industrial empires. Both Catherine the Great in Russia and Frederick II (the Great) in Prussia encouraged potato cultivation, hoping it would boost the number of taxpayers and soldiers in their domains. Like cassava, potatoes suited populations that might need to flee marauding armies. Potatoes can be left in the ground for weeks, unlike northern European grains such as rye and barley, which will spoil if not harvested when ripe. Frequent warfare in northern Europe prior to 1815 encouraged the adoption of potatoes.

Over-reliance on potatoes led to some of the worst food crises in the modern history of Europe. In 1845-52 a potato blight caused by an airborne fungus swept across northern Europe with especially costly consequences in Ireland, western Scotland, and the Low Countries. A million starved, and two million emigrated-mostly Irish.

Eurasian and African crops had an equally profound influence on the history of the American hemisphere. Until the mid-19th century, "drug crops" such as sugar and coffee proved the most important plant introductions to the Americas. Together with tobacco and cotton, they formed the heart of a plantation complex that stretched from the Chesapeake to Brazil and accounted for the vast majority of the Atlantic slave trade.

Introduced staple food crops, such as wheat, rice, rye, and barley, also prospered in the Americas. Some of these grains-rye, for example-grew well in climates too cold for corn, so the new crops helped to expand the spatial footprint of farming in both North and South America. Rice, on the other hand, fit into the plantation complex: imported from both Asia and Africa, it was raised mainly by slave labour in places such as Suriname and South Carolina until slavery's abolition. By the late 19th century these food grains covered a wide swathe of the arable land in the Americas. Beyond grains, African crops introduced to the Americas included watermelon, yams, sorghum, millets, coffee, and okra. Eurasian contributions to American diets included bananas; oranges, lemons, and other citrus fruits; and grapes.

The Columbian Exchange, and the larger process of biological globalization of which it is part, has slowed but not ended. Shipping and air travel continue to redistribute species among the continents. Kudzu vine arrived in North America from Asia in the late 19th century and has spread widely in forested regions. The North American gray squirrel has found a new home in the British Isles. Zebra mussels have colonized North American waters since the 1980s. However, the consequences of recent biological exchanges for economic, political, and health history thus far pale next to those of the 16th through 18th century.

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Columbian Exchange | Diseases, Animals, & Plants

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Columbian Exchange, the largest part of a more general process of biological globalization that followed the transoceanic voyaging of the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly in the wake of Christopher Columbus's voyages that began in 1492. It profoundly shaped world history in the ensuing centuries.

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Colonizers forced the indigenous into slavery. This is how they achieved expansion and settlement when they arrived.

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The story of European colonialism in the Americas and its victimization of Africans and Indians follows a central paradigm in most textbooks. The African "role" encompasses the transportation, exploitation, and suffering of many millions in New World slavery, while Indians are described in terms of their succumbing in large numbers to disease, with the survivors facing dispossession of their land. This paradigm-a basic one in the history of colonialism-omits a crucial aspect of the story: the indigenous peoples of the Americas were enslaved in large numbers. This exclusion distorts not only what happened to American Indians under colonialism, but also points to the need for a reassessment of the foundation and nature of European overseas expansion.

Without slavery, slave trading, and other forms of unfree labor, European colonization would have remained extremely limited in the New World. The Spanish were almost totally dependent on Indian labor in most of their colonies, and even where unfree labor did not predominate, as in the New England colonies, colonial production was geared toward supporting the slave plantation complex of the West Indies. Thus, we must take a closer look at the scope of unfree labor-the central means by which Europeans generated the wealth that fostered the growth of colonies.

Modern perceptions of early modern slavery associate the institution almost solely with Africans and their descendants. Yet slavery was a ubiquitous institution in the early modern world. Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans kept slaves before and after Columbus reached America. Enslavement meant a denial of freedom for the enslaved, but slavery varied greatly from place to place, as did the lives of slaves. The life of a genizaro (slave soldier) of the Ottoman Empire, who enjoyed numerous privileges and benefits, immensely differed from an American Indian who worked in the silver mines of Peru or an African who produced sugar cane in Barbados. People could be kept as slaves for religious purposes (Aztecs and Pacific Northwest Indians) or as a by-product of warfare, where they made little contribution to the economy or basic social structure (Eastern Woodlands). In other societies, slaves were central to the economy. In many areas of West Africa, for instance, slaves were the predominant form of property and the main producers of wealth.

As it expanded under European colonialism to the New World in the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, slavery took on a new, racialized form involving the movement of millions of peoples from one continent to another based on skin color, and the creation of a vast slave-plantation complex that was an important cog in the modernization and globalization of the world economy. Africans provided the bulk of labor in this new system of slavery, but American Indians were compelled to labor in large numbers as well.

In the wake of the deaths of indigenous Americans from European-conveyed microbes from which they had no immunity, the Spanish colonists turned to importing Africans. A racist and gross misinterpretation of this event posited that most Indians could not be enslaved because of their love for freedom, while Africans were used to having their labor controlled by "big men" in Africa. This dangerous view obscured a basic fact of early modern history: Anyone could be enslaved. Over a million Europeans were held as slaves from the 1530s through the 1780s in Africa, and hundreds of thousands were kept as slaves by the Ottomans in eastern Europe and Asia. (John Smith, for instance, had been a slave of the Ottomans before he obtained freedom and helped colonize Virginia.) In 1650, more English were enslaved in Africa than Africans enslaved in English colonies. Even as late as the early nineteenth century, United States citizens were enslaved in North Africa. As the pro-slavery ideologue George Fitzhugh noted in his book, Cannibals All (1857), in the history of world slavery, Europeans were commonly the ones held as slaves, and the enslavement of Africans was a relatively new historical development. Not until the eighteenth century did the words "slave" and "African" become nearly synonymous in the minds of Europeans and Euro-Americans.

With labor at a premium in the colonial American economy, there was no shortage of people seeking to purchase slaves. Both before and during African enslavement in the Americas, American Indians were forced to labor as slaves and in various other forms of unfree servitude. They worked in mines, on plantations, as apprentices for artisans, and as domestics-just like African slaves and European indentured servants. As with Africans shipped to America, Indians were transported from their natal communities to labor elsewhere as slaves. Many Indians from Central America were shipped to the West Indies, also a common destination for Indians transported out of Charleston, South Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts. Many other Indians were moved hundreds or thousands of miles within the Americas. Sioux Indians from the Minnesota region could be found enslaved in Quebec, and Choctaws from Mississippi in New England. A longstanding line of transportation of Indian slaves led from modern-day Utah and Colorado south into Mexico.

The European trade in American Indians was initiated by Columbus in 1493. Needing money to pay for his New World expeditions, he shipped Indians to Spain, where there already existed slave markets dealing in the buying and selling of Africans. Within a few decades, the Spanish expanded the slave trade in American Indians from the island of Hispaniola to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas. The great decline in the indigenous island populations which largely owed to disease, slaving, and warfare, led the Spanish to then raid Indian communities in Central America and many of the islands just off the continent, such as Curacao, Trinidad, and Aruba. About 650,000 Indians in coastal Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras were enslaved in the sixteenth century. Conquistadors then entered the inland American continents and continued the process. Hernando de Soto, for instance, brought with him iron implements to enslave the people of La Florida on his infamous expedition through the American southeast into the Carolinas and west to the Mississippi Valley. Indians were used by the conquistadors as tamemes to carry their goods on these distant forays. Another form of Spanish enslavement of Indians in the Americas was yanaconaje, which was similar to European serfdom, whereby Indians were tied to specific lands to labor rather than lords. And under the encomienda system, Indians were forced to labor or pay tribute to an encomendero, who, in exchange, was supposed to provide protection and conversion to Christianity. The encomenderos' power survived longest in frontier areas, particularly in Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, and in the Mexican Yucatan into the nineteenth century.

By 1542 the Spanish had outlawed outright enslavement of some, but not all, Indians. People labeled cannibals could still be enslaved, as could Indians purchased from other Europeans or from Indians. The Spanish also created new forms of servitude for Indians. This usually involved compelling mission Indians to labor for a period of time each year that varied from weeks to months with little or no pay. Repartimiento, as it was called, was widespread in Peru and Mexico, though it faded quickly in the latter. It persisted for hundreds of years as the main system for organizing Indian labor in Colombia, Ecuador, and Florida, and survived into the early 1820s in Peru and Bolivia. Indian laborers worked in the silver mines and built forts, roads, and housing for the army, church, and government. They performed agriculture and domestic labor in support of civilians, government contractors, and other elements of Spanish society. Even in regions where African slavery predominated, such as the sugar plantations in Portuguese Brazil and in the West Indies, Indian labor continued to be used. And in many Spanish colonies, where the plantations did not flourish, Indians provided the bulk of unfree labor through the colonial era. In other words, the growth of African slavery in the New World did not diminish the use of unfree Indian labor, particularly outside of the plantation system.

Whereas in South America and the islands of the West Indies, Europeans conducted the bulk of slaving raids against Indians, (except in Brazil, where bandeirantes of mixed blood were employed for slaving), much of the enslavement of Indians in North America above Mexico was done by Indians. North American Europeans did enslave Indians during wars, especially in New England (the Pequot War, King Philip's War) and the southeast (the Tuscarora War, the Yamasee War, the Natchez War, just to name a few), but ordinarily Europeans, especially the English and French, purchased their Indian slaves from Indians. Colonists lured Indians to supply Indian slaves in exchange for trade goods and to obtain alliances with the Europeans and their Indian allies. Indians slaved against not only their enemies, but Indians they had never met. Many Indians recognized they had little choice but to become slavers. If they did not do the Europeans' bidding they could easily become victimized themselves. It was not unusual for peoples victimized by slaving to become slavers, and for those who had been slavers to become the object of raids.

Colonists participated in Indian slave trading to obtain capital. It was as if capital could be created out of thin air: one merely had to capture an Indian or find an Indian to capture another. In South Carolina, and to a lesser extent in North Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana, Indian slavery was a central means by which early colonists funded economic expansion. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a frenzy of enslaving occurred in what is now the eastern United States. English and allied Indian raiders nearly depopulated Florida of its American Indian population. From 1670 to 1720 more Indians were shipped out of Charleston, South Carolina, than Africans were imported as slaves-and Charleston was a major port for bringing in Africans. The populous Choctaws in Mississippi were repeatedly battered by raiders, and many of their neighboring lower Mississippi Valley Indians also wound up spending their lives as slaves on West Indies plantations. Simultaneously, the New England colonies nearly eliminated the Native population from southern New England through warfare, slaving, and forced removal. The French in Canada and in Louisiana purchased many Indian slaves from their allies who swept through the Great Lakes region, the Missouri Country, and up into Minnesota. All the colonies engaged in slaving and in the purchase of Indian slaves. Only in the colonial region of New York and Pennsylvania was slaving limited, in large part because the neighboring Iroquois assimilated into their societies many of those they captured instead of selling them to the Europeans-but the Europeans of those colonies purchased Indian slaves from other regions.

Slaving against Indians did begin to decline in the east in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, largely a result of Indians' refusal to participate in large-scale slaving raids, but the trade moved westward where Apaches, Sioux, and others continued to be victimized by Comanche and others. From Louisiana to New Mexico, large-scale enslavement of American Indians persisted well into the nineteenth century. Slave markets were held monthly in New Mexico, for instance, to facilitate the sale of Indians from the American West to northern Mexico. After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson sent federal troops into the West to put an end to Indian slavery, but it continued to proliferate in California.

The paradigm of "what happened" to American Indians under European colonialism must be revised. Instead of viewing victimization of Africans and Indians as two entirely separate processes, they should be compared and contrasted. This will shed more light on the consequences of colonialism in the Americas, and how racism became one of the dominant ideologies of the modern world. It is time to assess the impact of slave trading and slavery on American Indian peoples, slave and free.

Alan Gallay is the Warner R. Woodring Chair of Atlantic World and Early American History at The Ohio State University, where he is Director of The Center for Historical Research. He received the Bancroft Prize for The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (2003).

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The story of European colonialism in the Americas and its victimization of Africans and Indians follows a central paradigm in most textbooks. The African "role" encompasses the transportation, exploitation, and suffering of many millions in New World slavery, while Indians are described in terms of their succumbing in large numbers to disease, with the survivors facing dispossession of their land.

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The Columbian Exchange describes how plants, livestock, and diseases travelled from Eurasia to the Americas and vice versa. This resource more specifically goes into the plants.

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Many plants were exchanged between the New World and the Old World, both intentional and unintentional. The Spanish brought sugar to Mexico and Peru in the 16th century. Sugar was soon grown in the Caribbean islands and other South American countries and began to grow very fast.

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Columbian Exchange of Gold, Diseases, Livestock, and Plants

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Columbian Exchange of Gold, Diseases, Livestock, and Plants

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Gold was another major player in the Columbian Exchange and a driving force to conquest and colonialism.