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Successful Theocracy or Religion of Intolerance?

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Puritans: A Definition

The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation. The name "Puritans" (they were sometimes called "precisionists") was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies. Although the epithet first emerged in the 1560s, the movement began in the 1530s, when King Henry VIII repudiated papal authority and transformed the Church of Rome into a state Church of England. To Puritans, the Church of England retained too much of the liturgy and ritual of Roman Catholicism.

Did you know? In keeping with their focus on the home, Puritan migration to the New World usually consisted of entire families, rather than the young, single men who comprised many other early European settlements.

Well into the 16th century, many priests were barely literate and often very poor. Employment by more than one parish was common, so they moved often, preventing them from forming deep roots in their communities. Priests were immune to certain penalties of the civil law, further feeding anticlerical hostility and contributing to their isolation from the spiritual needs of the people.

The Church of England

Through the reigns of the Protestant King Edward VI (1547-1553), who introduced the first vernacular prayer book, and the Catholic Mary I (1553-1558), who sent some dissenting clergymen to their deaths and others into exile, the Puritan movement-whether tolerated or suppressed-continued to grow.

Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Still, others were content to remain within the structure of the national church but set themselves against Catholic and episcopal authority.

As they gained strength, Puritans were portrayed by their enemies as hairsplitters who slavishly followed their Bibles as guides to daily life or hypocrites who cheated the very neighbors they judged inadequate Christians.

Yet the Puritan attack on the established church gained popular strength, especially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. The movement found wide support among these new professional classes, who saw in it a mirror for their growing discontent with economic restraints.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, an uneasy peace prevailed within English religious life, but the struggle over the tone and purpose of the church continued. Many men and women were more and more forced to contend with the dislocations-emotional as well as physical-that accompanied the beginnings of a market economy.

Subsistence farmers were called upon to enter the world of production for profit. Under the rule of primogeniture, younger sons tended to enter the professions (especially the law) with increasing frequency and seek their livelihood in the burgeoning cities. The English countryside was plagued by scavengers, highwaymen and vagabonds-a newly visible class of the poor who strained the ancient charity laws and pressed upon the townsfolk new questions of social responsibility.

Puritans in New England

In the early decades of the 17th century, some groups of worshipers began to separate themselves from the main body of their local parish church where preaching was inadequate and to engage an energetic "lecturer," typically a young man with a fresh Cambridge degree, who was a lively speaker and steeped in reform theology. Some congregations went further, declared themselves separated from the national church, and remade themselves into communities of "visible saints," withdrawn from the English City of Man into a self-proclaimed City of God.

One such faction was a group of separatist believers in the Yorkshire village of Scrooby, who, fearing for their safety, moved to Holland in 1608 and then, in 1620, to the place they called Plymouth in New England. We know them now as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

A decade later, a larger, better-financed group, mostly from East Anglia, migrated to Massachusetts Bay. There, they set up gathered churches on much the same model as the transplanted church at Plymouth (with deacons, preaching elders and, though not right away, a communion restricted to full church members, or "saints").

Differences Between Pilgrims and Puritans

The main difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists. They called themselves "nonseparating congregationalists," by which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church. But in practice they acted-from the point of view of Episcopalians and even Presbyterians at home-exactly as the separatists were acting.

By the 1640s, their enterprise at Massachusetts Bay had grown to about 10,000 people. They soon outgrew the bounds of the original settlement and spread into what would become Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Maine, and eventually beyond the limits of New England.

Who Were the Puritans?

The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men). The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life.

The Puritans' ecclesiastical order was as intolerant as the one they had fled. Yet, as a loosely confederated collection of gathered churches, Puritanism contained within itself the seed of its own fragmentation. Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate- Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists-fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith.

Puritanism in American Life

Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.

Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. It supplied ethics that somehow balanced charity and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority was obscure.

By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity. Though "the New England Way" evolved into a relatively minor system of organizing religious experience within the broader American scene, its central themes recur in the related religious communities of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and a whole range of evangelical Protestants.

More recently, the word "Puritan" has once again become a pejorative epithet, meaning prudish, constricted and cold-as in H. L. Mencken's famous remark that a Puritan is one who suspects "somewhere someone is having a good time."

Puritanism, however, had a more significant persistence in American life than as the religion of black-frocked caricatures. It survived, perhaps most conspicuously, in the secular form of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment, virtually the definition of Americanism.

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The Puritans were members of a religious reform movement that arose in the late 16th century and held that the Church of England should eliminate ceremonies and practices not rooted in the Bible.

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Irresponsible Idealists or Conscientious Citizens?

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British Mercantilism and the American Colonies

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British Mercantilism and the American Colonies

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A Justifiable Policy?

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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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A practical beginning for self government or an inoperable model of self government?

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Articles of Confederation - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Articles of Confederation, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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The Colonial Response to British Policies

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The Colonial Response to British Policies

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Warranted or Unwarranted?

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British Reforms and Colonial Resistance, 1763-1766 | The American Revolution, 1763 - 1783 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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When the French and Indian War finally ended in 1763, no British subject on either side of the Atlantic could have foreseen the coming conflicts between the parent country and its North American colonies.

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Justifiable American Expansion or not?

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Mexican-American War - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Mexican-American War, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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What was the impact of this case on the American judicial system?

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What happened in the 1803 United States court case between William Marbury and James Madison? What affect did it have on the young nation?

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The Texans' Demands for independence from Mexico

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The Texans' Demands for independence from Mexico

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To What Extent Were They  Legitimate?

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Find out more about the history of Texas, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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What was its impact on the development of California?

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Sutter's Mill

On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersey, found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Coloma, California.

At the time, Marshall was working to build a water-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia (New Switzerland, which would later become the city of Sacramento). As Marshall later recalled of his historic discovery: "It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold."

Did you know? Miners extracted more than 750,000 pounds of gold during the California Gold Rush.

Days after Marshall's discovery at Sutter's Mill, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and leaving California in the hands of the United States-a remarkable twist of fate with important ramifications for an America eager for westward expansion.

At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6,500 Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican descent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans (barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in 1769).

Sutter, in fact, had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and used them as a free source of labor and makeshift militia to defend his territory and expand his empire.

Gold Fever Strikes

Though Marshall and Sutter tried to keep news of the discovery under wraps, word got out, and by mid-March at least one newspaper was reporting that large quantities of gold were being turned up at Sutter's Mill. Though the initial reaction in San Francisco was disbelief, storekeeper Sam Brannan set off a frenzy when he paraded through town displaying a vial of gold obtained from Sutter's Creek.

By mid-June, shops and businesses stood empty, as some three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had abandoned the city for the gold mines, and the number of miners in the area ballooned to some 4,000 by August.

As news reports-many wildly overblown-of the easy fortunes being made in California spread worldwide, some of the first migrants to arrive were those from lands accessible by boat, such as Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), Mexico, Chile, Peru and China.

Polk Spreads Gold Fever

When the news reached the East Coast, press reports were initially skeptical. Gold fever kicked off nationwide in earnest, however, after December 1848, when President James K. Polk announced the positive results of a report made by Colonel Richard Mason, California's military governor, in his inaugural address.

As Polk wrote, "The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service."

The '49ers Come to California

Throughout 1849, people around the United States (mostly men) with gold fever borrowed money, mortgaged their property or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. In pursuit of the kind of wealth they had never dreamed of, they left their families and hometowns. In turn, women left behind took on new responsibilities such as running farms or businesses and caring for their children alone.

Thousands of would-be gold miners, known as 49ers for the year they arrived, traveled overland across the mountains or by sea, sailing to Panama or even around Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America.

By the end of the year, the non-native population of California was estimated at 100,000, (as compared with 20,000 at the end of 1848 and around 800 in March 1848). To accommodate the needs of the 49ers, gold mining towns had sprung up all over the region, complete with shops, saloons, brothels and other businesses seeking to make their own Gold Rush fortune.

The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, alcoholism, prostitution and violence. San Francisco, for its part, developed a bustling economy and became the central metropolis of the new frontier.

Gold Rush Politics

The Gold Rush undoubtedly sped up California's admission to the Union as the 31st state. In late 1849, California applied to enter the Union with a constitution that barred the Southern system of racial slavery, provoking a crisis in Congress between proponents of slavery and anti-slavery politicians.

According to the Compromise of 1850, proposed by Kentucky's Senator Henry Clay, California was allowed to enter as a free state, while the territories of Utah and New Mexico were left to decide the legal status of slavery for themselves.

California's Mines

After 1850, the surface gold in California largely disappeared, even as miners continued to arrive. Mining had always been difficult and dangerous labor, and striking it rich required good luck as much as skill and hard work. Moreover, the average daily take for an independent miner working with his pick and shovel had by then sharply decreased from what it had been in 1848.

As gold became more and more difficult to reach, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more miners from independence into wage labor. The new technique of hydraulic mining, developed in 1853, brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region's landscape.

Though gold mining continued throughout the 1850s, it had reached its peak by 1852, when some $81 million was pulled from the ground. After that year, the total take declined gradually, leveling off to around $45 million per year by 1857. Settlement in California continued, however, and by the end of the decade the state's population was 380,000.

Impact of the Gold Rush

New mining methods and the population boom in the wake of the California Gold Rush permanently altered the landscape of California. The technique of hydraulic mining brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region's landscape.

Dams designed to supply water to mine sites in summer altered the course of rivers away from farmland, while sediment from mines clogged others. The logging industry in the area was born from the need to construct extensive canals and feed boilers at mines, further consuming natural resources.

In 1884, hydraulic mining was outlawed by court order, and soon agriculture became the dominant industry in California, and it remains so today. While a few mines and Gold Rush towns remain, much of the heritage of that era is preserved at places such as Bodie State Historic Park, a decaying ghost town, and at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, where Sutter's Mill once stood.

Sources

Environmental Impact of the Gold Rush. Calisphere.org.
After the Gold Rush. National Geographic.

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Gold Rush: California, Date & Sutter's Mill | HISTORY

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The Gold Rush in California started in 1848 after gold was found at Sutter's Mill. Within a year, hundreds of thousands of 49ers seeking fortune poured into the state.

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Relocation of Native Americans: Justified or Not?

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click image for close-up

In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the "Trail of Tears," because of its devastating effects. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and exhaustion on the forced march. Over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died.

This picture, The Trail of Tears, was painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. It commemorates the suffering of the Cherokee people under forced removal. If any depictions of the "Trail of Tears" were created at the time of the march, they have not survived.

Image Credit: The Granger Collection, New York

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click image for close-up In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the "Trail of Tears," because of its devastating effects.

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How could it have happened?  Who was to blame?

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Everyone knows the Titanic was big, and we have the hard numbers to prove it. Discover what made it a supersized ship.

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Thomas Paine and the Natural Rights Theory

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Thomas Paine and the Natural Rights Theory

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Was he an American Patriot or irresponsible propagandist?

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The Moral and Political Thought of Thomas Paine

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Thomas Paine accented a keynote for religious reason and political liberty which reverberates for humanity today. His vision of a Republic of Conscience, reasoning over passions, and human rights provide the basis for the emerging civil society and cosmopolis today.

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Did he contribute to the early development of Democracy in the U.S.?

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Though he never attained the highest office of his adopted country, few of America's founders influenced its political system more than Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804). Born in the British West Indies, he arrived in the colonies as a teenager, and quickly embarked on a remarkable career. He was a member of the Continental Congress, an author of the Federalist Papers, a champion of the Constitution and the first secretary of the Treasury, where he helped found the first national bank, the U.S. Mint and a tax collection bureau that would later become the U.S. Coast Guard. Troubled by personal and political scandals in his later years, Hamilton was shot and killed in one of history's most infamous duels by one of his fiercest rivals, the then Vice President Aaron Burr, in July 1804.

Born in the West Indies, Hamilton moved to the mainland in 1772 and entered King's College (now Columbia University) the following year. By 1774 he was speaking at public meetings and writing revolutionary essays, and in 1776 he became a captain of artillery. After taking part in the Battle of Long Island and the retreat from New York City, he joined Washington's staff in 1777, where he remained until February 1781. He commanded a battery of artillery at the Battle of Yorktown.

Did you know? Alexander Hamilton's beloved first-born son, Philip, was killed in a duel in 1801 while attempting to defend his father's honor against attacks by New York lawyer George Eacker. Philip's death devastated the Hamiltons, and many historians believe it led to Hamilton's own reluctance to fire directly at Aaron Burr during their legendary duel just three years later.

In 1780 he married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of the major general and Hudson Valley landlord Philip Schuyler. He was already close to the Livingston family, and the marriage cemented his social position and his political, elitist point of view. He argued throughout the 1780s for strengthening the national government in The Continentalist essays, the two Letters from Phocion, and The Federalist, written with James Madison and John Jay. He served in Congress and the New York state legislature and was a delegate to the Federal Convention of 1787. Although he had been central to the movement that led to the convention, his role was relatively minor and he was privately critical of the Constitution it produced. He nonetheless devoted his full energy to ratification in 1787 and 1788.

As secretary of the treasury Hamilton's great achievement was funding the federal debt at face value, which rectified and nationalized the financial chaos inherited from the Revolution. But he accomplished still more. He was responsible for creating the First Bank of the United States on the model of the Bank of England, and his Report on Manufactures fostered commercial and industrial development in the new nation. He also played a significant role in generating the Washington administration's policy of unfriendly neutrality toward the French Revolution and in establishing a rapprochement with Britain.

Hamilton's policies and actions provoked intense opposition, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Just as Hamilton and Madison had collaborated in the Federalist movement during the 1780s, so Jefferson and Madison now collaborated against Hamilton's Federalist party in the 1790s. The result was division, both within the Washington administration and in the country as a whole. After Hamilton left the Treasury in 1795 to practice law, he continued to be active in Federalist politics, but he was deeply critical of the presidency of John Adams. Nonetheless, at Washington's insistence, he was made inspector general of the army during the Quasi War with France in 1798.

Despite his personal and political dislike of Jefferson, Hamilton was instrumental in securing his victory over Aaron Burr in the presidential election of 1800. That and his subsequent opposition to Burr's bid to become governor of New York led to his death at Burr's hands in a duel in 1804.

Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton, 2 vols. (1957, 1972); Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution (1964).

Edward Countryman

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Though he never attained the highest office of his adopted country, few of America's founders influenced its political system more than Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804). Born in the British West Indies, he arrived in the colonies as a teenager, and quickly embarked on a remarkable career.

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An Ideological Purist or Hypocrite?

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Contents

1. Thomas Jefferson's Early Years

2. Marriage and Monticello

3. Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution

4. Jefferson's Path to the Presidency

5. Jefferson Becomes Third U.S. President

6. Thomas Jefferson's Later Years and Death

7. PHOTO GALLERIES

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, was a leading figure in America's early development. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), Jefferson served in the Virginia legislature and the Continental Congress and was governor of Virginia. He later served as U.S. minister to France and U.S. secretary of state, and was vice president under John Adams (1735-1826). Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican who thought the national government should have a limited role in citizens' lives, was elected president in 1800. During his two terms in office (1801-1809), the U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory and Lewis and Clark explored the vast new acquisition. Although Jefferson promoted individual liberty, he was also a slave owner. After leaving office, he retired to his Virginia plantation, Monticello, and helped found the University of Virginia.

Thomas Jefferson's Early Years

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, a plantation on a large tract of land near present-day Charlottesville, Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson (1707/08-57), was a successful planter and surveyor and his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson (1720-76), came from a prominent Virginia family. Thomas was their third child and eldest son; he had six sisters and one surviving brother.

Did you know? In 1815, Jefferson sold his 6,700-volume personal library to Congress for $23,950 to replace books lost when the British burned the U.S. Capitol, which housed the Library of Congress, during the War of 1812. Jefferson's books formed the foundation of the rebuilt Library of Congress's collections.

In 1762, Jefferson graduated from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he reportedly enjoyed studying for 15 hours, then practicing violin for several more hours on a daily basis. He went on to study law under the tutelage of respected Virginia attorney George Wythe (there were no official law schools in America at the time, and Wythe's other pupils included future Chief Justice John Marshall and statesman Henry Clay). Jefferson began working as a lawyer in 1767. As a member of colonial Virginia's House of Burgesses from 1769 to 1775, Jefferson, who was known for his reserved manner, gained recognition for penning a pamphlet, "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" (1774), which declared that the British Parliament had no right to exercise authority over the American colonies.

Marriage and Monticello

After his father died when Jefferson was a teen, the future president inherited the Shadwell property. In 1768, Jefferson began clearing a mountaintop on the land in preparation for the elegant brick mansion he would construct there called Monticello ("little mountain" in Italian). Jefferson, who had a keen interest in architecture and gardening, designed the home and its elaborate gardens himself. Over the course of his life, he remodeled and expanded Monticello and filled it with art, fine furnishings and interesting gadgets and architectural details. He kept records of everything that happened at the 5,000-acre plantation, including daily weather reports, a gardening journal and notes about his slaves and animals.

On January 1, 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton (1748-82), a young widow. The couple moved to Monticello and eventually had six children; only two of their daughters-Martha (1772-1836) and Mary (1778-1804)-survived into adulthood. In 1782, Jefferson's wife Martha died at age 33 following complications from childbirth. Jefferson was distraught and never remarried. However, it is believed he fathered more children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings (1773-1835), who was also his wife's half-sister.

Slavery was a contradictory issue in Jefferson's life. Although he was an advocate for individual liberty and at one point promoted a plan for gradual emancipation of slaves in America, he owned slaves throughout his life. Additionally, while he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," he believed African Americans were biologically inferior to whites and thought the two races could not coexist peacefully in freedom. Jefferson inherited some 175 slaves from his father and father-in-law and owned an estimated 600 slaves over the course of his life. He freed only a small number of them in his will; the majority were sold following his death.

Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution

In 1775, with the American Revolutionary War recently under way, Jefferson was selected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. Although not known as a great public speaker, he was a gifted writer and at age 33, was asked to draft the Declaration of Independence (before he began writing, Jefferson discussed the document's contents with a five-member drafting committee that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin). The Declaration of Independence, which explained why the 13 colonies wanted to be free of British rule and also detailed the importance of individual rights and freedoms, was adopted on July 4, 1776.

In the fall of 1776, Jefferson resigned from the Continental Congress and was re-elected to the Virginia House of Delegates (formerly the House of Burgesses). He considered the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he authored in the late 1770s and which Virginia lawmakers eventually passed in 1786, to be one of the significant achievements of his career. It was a forerunner to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects people's right to worship as they choose.

From 1779 to 1781, Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, and from 1783 to 1784, did a second stint in Congress (then officially known, since 1781, as the Congress of the Confederation). In 1785, he succeeded Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) as U.S. minister to France. Jefferson's duties in Europe meant he could not attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787; however, he was kept informed of the proceedings to draft a new national constitution and later advocated for including a bill of rights and presidential term limits.

Jefferson's Path to the Presidency

After returning to America in the fall of 1789, Jefferson accepted an appointment from President George Washington (1732-99) to become the new nation's first secretary of state. In this post, Jefferson clashed with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (1755/57-1804) over foreign policy and their differing interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. In the early 1790s, Jefferson, who favored strong state and local government, co-founded the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose Hamilton's Federalist Party, which advocated for a strong national government with broad powers over the economy.

In the presidential election of 1796, Jefferson ran against John Adams and received the second highest amount of votes, which, according to the law at the time, made him vice president.

Jefferson ran against Adams again in the presidential election of 1800, which turned into a bitter battle between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson defeated Adams; however, due to a flaw in the electoral system, Jefferson tied with fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr (1756-1836). The House of Representatives broke the tie and voted Jefferson into office. In order to avoid a repeat of this situation, Congress proposed the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which required separate voting for president and vice president. The amendment was ratified in 1804.

Jefferson Becomes Third U.S. President

Jefferson was sworn into office on March 4, 1801; his was the first presidential inauguration held in Washington, D.C. (George Washington was inaugurated in New York in 1789; in 1793, he was sworn into office in Philadelphia, as was his successor, John Adams, in 1797.) Instead of riding in a horse-drawn carriage, Jefferson broke with tradition and walked to and from the ceremony.

One of the most significant achievements of Jefferson's first administration was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million in 1803. At more than 820,000 square miles, the Louisiana Purchase (which included lands extending between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Canada) effectively doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson then commissioned explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the uncharted land, plus the area beyond, out to the Pacific Ocean. (At the time, most Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean.) Lewis and Clark's expedition, known today as the Corps of Discovery, lasted from 1804 to 1806 and provided valuable information about the geography, American Indian tribes and animal and plant life of the western part of the continent.
READ MORE: Lewis and Clark: A Timeline of the Extraordinary Expedition
In 1804, Jefferson ran for re-election and defeated Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney (1746-1825) of South Carolina with more than 70 percent of the popular vote and an electoral count of 162-14. During his second term, Jefferson focused on trying to keep America out of Europe's Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). However, after Great Britain and France, who were at war, both began harassing American merchant ships, Jefferson implemented the Embargo Act of 1807. The act, which closed U.S. ports to foreign trade, proved unpopular with Americans and hurt the U.S. economy. It was repealed in 1809 and, despite the president's attempts to maintain neutrality, the U.S. ended up going to war against Britain in the War of 1812. Jefferson chose not to run for a third term in 1808 and was succeeded in office by James Madison (1751-1836), a fellow Virginian and former U.S. secretary of state.

Thomas Jefferson's Later Years and Death

Jefferson spent his post-presidential years at Monticello, where he continued to pursue his many interests, including architecture, music, reading and gardening. He also helped found the University of Virginia, which held its first classes in 1825. Jefferson was involved with designing the school's buildings and curriculum, and ensured that unlike other American colleges at the time, the school had no religious affiliation or religious requirements for its students.

Jefferson died at age 83 at Monticello on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Coincidentally, John Adams, Jefferson's friend, former rival and fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, died the same day. Jefferson was buried at Monticello. However, due to the significant debt the former president had accumulated during his life, his mansion, furnishing and slaves were sold at auction following his death. Monticello was eventually acquired by a nonprofit organization, which opened it to the public in 1954.

Jefferson remains an American icon. His face appears on the U.S. nickel and is carved into stone at Mount Rushmore. The Jefferson Memorial, near the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson's birth.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a statesman, Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, was a leading figure in America's early development. One of Jefferson's major legacies was the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the size of the United States.

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Did he abuse Presidential Powers?

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Quick Facts
"Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.""As the general government encroaches upon the rights of the states, in the same proportion does it impair its own power and detract from its ability to fulfill the purposes of its creation.""When it was seen that war was waged upon the state, that the knife and the tomahawk were held over the heads of women and children, that peaceable citizens were murdered, it was time to make resistance.""We must and will be victorious-we must conquer as men who owe nothing to chance; and who, in the midst of victory, can still be mindful of what is due to humanity.""When men of high standing attempt to trample upon the rights of the weak, they are the fittest objects for example or punishment. In general, the great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.""The individual who refuses to defend his rights when called by his government deserves to be a slave, and must be punished as an enemy of his country and friend to her foe.""I will die in the last ditch before I would yield a foot...or see the Union disunited.""Without obedience, without order, without discipline, all your efforts are in vain. The brave man, inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger.""For myself, to have been instrumental in the deliverance of such a country is the greatest blessing that Heaven could confer.""As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience, and of the press, it will be worth defending.""When called by my country to the station which I occupy, it was not without a deep sense of its arduous responsibilities, and a strong distrust of myself, that I obeyed the call.""One man with courage makes a majority.""The bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!""Elevate those guns a little lower."

Name

Andrew Jackson

Birth Date

March 15, 1767

Death Date

June 8, 1845

Did You Know?

President Andrew Jackson joined the military to fight in the Revolutionary War at age 13.

Did You Know?

President Andrew Jackson was the first president to ride on a train in 1833.

Did You Know?

Because his hometown of Waxhaws was on the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, President Andrew Jackson is the only commander-in-chief whose exact state of birth is unknown.

Place of Death

Davidson County, Tennessee

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States. He is known for founding the Democratic Party and for his support of individual liberty.

Who Was Andrew Jackson?

A lawyer and a landowner, Andrew Jackson became a national war hero after defeating the British in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. Jackson was elected the seventh president of the United States in 1828. Known as the "people's president," Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, founded the Democratic Party, supported individual liberty and instituted policies that resulted in the forced migration of Native Americans. He died on June 8, 1845.

Early Life

Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, to Andrew and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, Scots-Irish colonists who emigrated from Ireland in 1765. Though Jackson's birthplace is presumed to have been at one of his uncles' houses in the remote Waxhaws region that straddles North Carolina and South Carolina, the exact location is unknown since the precise border had yet to be surveyed. Jackson's birth came just three weeks after the sudden death of his father at the age of 29.

Growing up in poverty in the Waxhaws wilderness, Jackson received an erratic education in the years before the Revolutionary War came to the Carolinas. After his older brother, Hugh, died in the Battle of Stono Ferry in 1779, the future president joined a local militia at age 13 and served as a patriot courier. Captured by the British along with his brother Robert in 1781, Jackson was left with a permanent scar from his imprisonment after a British officer gashed his left hand and slashed his face with a sword because the young boy refused to polish the Redcoat's boots. While in captivity the brothers contracted smallpox, from which Robert would not recover.

Orphaned at Age 14

A few days after the British authorities released the brothers in a prisoner exchange arranged by their mother, Robert died. Not long after his brother's death, Jackson's mother died of cholera contracted while she nursed sick and injured soldiers. At the age of 14, Jackson was orphaned, and the deaths of his family members during the Revolutionary War led to a lifelong antipathy of the British.

Raised by his uncles, Jackson began studying law in Salisbury, North Carolina, in his late teens. He was admitted to the bar in 1787, and soon after, the 21-year-old Jackson was appointed prosecuting attorney in the western district of North Carolina, an area that is now part of Tennessee. He moved to the frontier settlement of Nashville in 1788 and eventually became a wealthy landowner from the money he accumulated from a thriving law practice. In 1796, Jackson was a member of the convention that established the Tennessee Constitution and was elected Tennessee's first representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected to the U.S. Senate the following year but resigned after serving only eight months. In 1798, Jackson was appointed a circuit judge on the Tennessee superior court, serving in that position until 1804.

Military Career, the War of 1812

Although he lacked military experience, Jackson was appointed a major general of the Tennessee militia in 1802. During the War of 1812, he led U.S. troops on a five-month campaign against the British-allied Creek Indians, who had massacred hundreds of settlers at Fort Mims in present-day Alabama. The campaign culminated with Jackson's victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814, which resulted in the killing of some 800 warriors and the eventual procurement by the United States of 20 million acres of land in present-day Georgia and Alabama. After this military success, the U.S. military promoted Jackson to major general.

Without specific instructions, Jackson led his forces into the Spanish territory of Florida and captured the outpost of Pensacola in November 1814, before pursuing British troops to New Orleans. Following weeks of skirmishes in December 1814, the two sides clashed on January 8, 1815. Although outnumbered nearly two-to-one, Jackson led 5,000 soldiers to an unexpected victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans, the last major engagement of the War of 1812.

Nickname 'Old Hickory'

Dubbed a national hero, Jackson received the thanks of Congress and a gold medal. He was also popular among his troops, who said that Jackson was "as tough as old hickory wood" on the battlefield, earning Jackson the nickname "Old Hickory."

Given command of the Army's southern division, Jackson was ordered back into service during the First Seminole War at the end of 1817. Perhaps exceeding his orders, he invaded Spanish-controlled Florida, captured St. Mark's and Pensacola once again, executed two British subjects for secretly assisting the Indians in the war and overthrew West Florida Governor José Masot.

Adams-Onis Treaty

His actions drew a strong diplomatic rebuke from Spain, and many in Congress and in the cabinet of President James Monroe called for his censure, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams came to Jackson's defense. Spain ceded Florida to the United States under the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, and Jackson held the post of Florida's military governor for several months in 1821.

Senator Andrew Jackson

Jackson's military exploits made him a rising political star, and in 1822 the Tennessee Legislature nominated him for the presidency of the United States. To boost his credentials, Jackson ran for and won election to the U.S. Senate the following year.

In 1824, state factions rallied around "Old Hickory," and a Pennsylvania convention nominated him for the U.S. presidency. Though Jackson won the popular vote, no candidate gained a majority of the Electoral College vote, which threw the election to the House of Representatives. Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who had finished fourth in the electoral vote, pledged his support to Jackson's primary opponent, Adams, who emerged victorious. At first Jackson accepted the defeat, but when Adams named Clay as secretary of state, his backers decried what they saw as a backroom deal that became known as the "Corrupt Bargain."

Presidency

After a bruising campaign, Jackson - with South Carolina's John C. Calhoun as his vice-presidential running mate - won the presidential election of 1828 by a landslide over Adams. With his election, Jackson became the first frontier president and the first chief executive who resided outside of either Massachusetts or Virginia.

Jackson was the first president to invite the public to attend the inauguration ball at the White House, which quickly earned him popularity. The crowd that arrived was so large that furniture and dishes were broken as people jostled one another to get a look at the president. The event earned Jackson the nickname "King Mob."

Accomplishments

New Political Party

The negative reaction to the House's decision resulted in Jackson's re-nomination for the presidency in 1825, three years before the next election. It also split the Democratic-Republican Party in two. The grassroots supporters of "Old Hickory" called themselves Democrats and would eventually form the Democratic Party. Jackson's opponents nicknamed him "jackass," a moniker that the candidate took a liking to - so much so that he decided to use the symbol of a donkey to represent himself. That symbol would later become the emblem of the new Democratic Party.

Jackson's Veto Power

After becoming president, Jackson did not submit to Congress in policy-making and was the first president to assume command with his veto power. While prior presidents rejected only bills they believed unconstitutional, Jackson set a new precedent by wielding the veto pen as a matter of policy.

Still upset at the results of the 1824 election, he believed in giving the power to elect the president and vice president to the American people by abolishing the Electoral College, garnering him the nickname the "people's president." Campaigning against corruption, Jackson became the first president to widely replace incumbent officeholders with his supporters, which became known as the "spoils system."

Second Bank of the United States

In perhaps his greatest feat as president, Jackson became involved in a battle with the Second Bank of the United States, a theoretically private corporation that actually served as a government-sponsored monopoly. Jackson saw the bank as a corrupt, elitist institution that manipulated paper money and wielded too much power over the economy. His opponent for re-election in 1832, Henry Clay, believed the bank fostered a strong economy. Seeking to make the bank a central campaign issue, Clay and his supporters passed a bill through Congress to re-charter the institution. In July 1832, Jackson vetoed the re-charter because it backed "the advancement of the few at the expense of the many."

The American public supported the president's views on the issue, and Jackson won his 1832 re-election campaign against Clay with 56 percent of the popular vote and nearly five times as many electoral votes. During Jackson's second term, attempts to re-charter the bank fizzled, and the institution was shuttered in 1836.

Jackson's Vice President: John C. Calhoun

Another political opponent faced by Jackson in 1832 was an unlikely one - his own vice president. Following the passage of federal tariffs in 1828 and 1832 that they believed favored Northern manufacturers at their expense, opponents in South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the measures null and void in the state and even threatened secession. Vice President Calhoun supported the principle of nullification along with the notion that states could secede from the Union.

Although he believed the tariff to be too high, Jackson threatened to use force to enforce federal law in South Carolina. Already replaced by New York's Martin Van Buren, Jackson's former secretary of state, on the 1832 ticket, Calhoun protested and became the first vice president in American history to resign his office on December 28, 1832. Within weeks, a compromise was passed that included a modest reduction in the tariff along with a provision that empowered the president to use the armed forces if necessary to enforce federal laws. A crisis was averted, but the battle over states' rights foreshadowed the Civil War three decades later.

During Jackson's second term, he was the target of the first presidential assassination attempt in American history. As he was leaving a memorial service for a congressman inside the U.S. Capitol on January 30, 1835, deranged house painter Richard Lawrence emerged from the crowd and pointed a single-shot gold pistol at the president. When the gun failed to shoot, Lawrence pulled out a second pistol, which also misfired. The infuriated Jackson charged the shooter and hammered him with his cane while bystanders subdued the attempted assassin. The English-born Lawrence, who believed he was an heir to the British throne and owed a massive amount of money by the U.S. government, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to institutions for the rest of his life.

Controversial Decisions

Trail of Tears

Despite his popularity and success, Jackson's presidency was not without its controversies. One particularly troubling aspect of it was his dealings with Native Americans. He signed and implemented the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which gave him the power to make treaties with tribes that resulted in their displacement to territory west of the Mississippi River in return for their ancestral homelands.

Jackson also stood by as Georgia violated a federal treaty and seized nine million acres inside the state that had been guaranteed to the Cherokee tribe. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in two cases that Georgia had no authority over the tribal lands, Jackson refused to enforce the decisions. As a result, the president brokered a deal in which the Cherokees would vacate their land in return for territory west of Arkansas. The agreement resulted after Jackson's presidency in the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation westward of an estimated 15,000 Cherokee Indians that claimed the lives of approximately 4,000 who died of starvation, exposure and illness.

Dred Scott Decision

Jackson also nominated his supporter Roger Taney to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Senate rejected the initial nomination in 1835, but when Chief Justice John Marshall died, Jackson re-nominated Taney, who was subsequently approved the following year. Justice Taney went on to be best known for the infamous Dred Scott decision, which declared African Americans were not citizens of the United States and as such lacked legal standing to file a suit. He also stated that the federal government could not forbid slavery in U.S. territories. In his career as Supreme Court Justice, Taney would go on to swear in Abraham Lincoln as president.

While Jackson's supporters formed the Democratic Party, his opponents also coalesced in a new political party, united in their antipathy of the president and his policies. Adopting the same name as anti-monarchists in England, the Whig Party formed during Jackson's second term to protest what it saw as the autocratic policies of "King Andrew I."

The Whig party failed to win the 1836 presidential election, which was captured by Martin Van Buren. Jackson, however, left his successor with an economy ready to crater. "Old Hickory" believed that paper money did not benefit the common man and that it allowed speculators to buy huge swaths of land and drive prices artificially high. Having taken a financial loss from devalued paper notes himself, Jackson issued the Specie Circular in July 1836, which required payment in gold or silver for public lands. Banks, however, could not meet the demand. They began to fail, and the ensuing Panic of 1837 devastated the economy during the course of Van Buren's one-term presidency.

Andrew Jackson's Wife

When Jackson arrived in Nashville in 1788, he met Rachel Donelson Robards, who, at the time, was unhappily married to but separated from Captain Lewis Robards. Rachel and Andrew married before her divorce was officially complete - a fact that was later brought to light during Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign. Although the couple had legally remarried in 1794, the press accused Rachel Jackson of bigamy.

Andrew Jackson Duel

Jackson's willingness to engage his and his wife's many attackers earned him a reputation as a quarrelsome man. During one incident in 1806, Jackson even challenged one accuser, Charles Dickinson, to a duel. Despite being wounded in the chest by his opponent's shot, Jackson stood his ground and fired a round that mortally wounded Dickinson. "Old Hickory" carried the bullet from that fight - along with that from a subsequent duel - in his chest the rest of his life.

The Jacksons never had any biological children but adopted three sons, including a pair of Native American infant orphans Jackson came upon during the Creek War: Theodore, who died in early 1814, and Lyncoya, who was found in his dead mother's arms on a battlefield. The couple also adopted Andrew Jackson Jr., the son of Rachel's brother Severn Donelson.

On December 22, 1828, two months before Jackson's presidential inauguration, Rachel died of a heart attack, which the president-elect blamed on the stress caused by the nasty campaign. She was buried two days later, on Christmas Eve.

Death

After completing his second term in the White House, Jackson returned to Tennessee, where he died on June 8, 1845, at the age of 78. The cause of death was lead poisoning caused by the two bullets that had remained in his chest for several years. He was buried in the plantation's garden next to his beloved Rachel.

Jackson continues to be widely regarded as one of the most influential U.S. presidents in history, as well as one of the most aggressive and controversial. His ardent support of individual liberty fostered political and governmental change, including many prominent and lasting national policies.

Andrew Jackson's House: The Hermitage

In 1798, Jackson acquired an expansive plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee (near Nashville), called the Hermitage. At the outset, nine African American slaves worked on the cotton plantation. By the time of Jackson's death in 1845, however, approximately 150 slaves labored in the Hermitage's fields.

Jackson and President Trump

Jackson was among the favored predecessors of the 45th U.S. president, Donald Trump, who hung a portrait of Old Hickory in the White House. Ironically, that portrait earned a prominent position behind Trump during a November 2017 event to honor the Navajo Code Talkers - Native Americans who assisted the U.S. Marines during World War II by transmitting encrypted messages through their native language.

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Citation Information

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"Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error." "As the general government encroaches upon the rights of the states, in the same proportion does it impair its own power and detract from its ability to fulfill the purposes of its creation."

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More constructive or destructive?

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Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, is the idea that the United States is destined-by God, its advocates believed-to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. The philosophy drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans and other groups from their homes. The rapid expansion of the United States intensified the issue of slavery as new states were added to the Union, leading to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Louisiana Purchase

Thanks to a high birth rate and brisk immigration, the U.S. population exploded in the first half of the 19th century, from around 5 million people in 1800 to more than 23 million by 1850.

Such rapid growth-as well as two economic depressions in 1819 and 1839-would drive millions of Americans westward in search of new land and new opportunities.

President Thomas Jefferson kicked off the country's westward expansion in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, which at some 828,000 square miles nearly doubled the size of the United States and stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. In addition to sponsoring the western expedition of Lewis and Clark of 1805-07, Jefferson also set his sights on Spanish Florida, a process that was finally concluded in 1819 under President James Monroe.

But critics of that treaty faulted Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, for yielding to Spain what they considered legitimate claims on Texas, where many Americans continued to settle.

In 1823, Monroe invoked Manifest Destiny when he spoke before Congress to warn European nations not to interfere with America's Westward expansion, threatening that any attempt by Europeans to colonize the "American continents" would be seen as an act of war. This policy of an American sphere of influence and of non-intervention in European affairs became known as the " Monroe Doctrine." After 1870, it would be used as a rationale for U.S. intervention in Latin America.

Texas Independence

Cries for the "re-annexation" of Texas increased after Mexico, having won its independence from Spain, passed a law suspending U.S. immigration into Texas in 1830.

Nonetheless, there were still more Anglo settlers in Texas than Hispanic ones, and in 1836, after Texas won its own independence, its new leaders sought to join the United States. The administrations of both Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren resisted such calls, fearing both war with Mexico and opposition from Americans who believed calls for annexation were linked with the desire to expand slavery in the Southwest.

But John Tyler, who won the presidency in 1840, was determined to proceed with the annexation. An agreement concluded in April 1844 made Texas eligible for admission as a U.S. territory, and possibly later as one or more states.

Despite opposition to this agreement in Congress, the pro-annexation candidate James K. Polk won the 1844 election, and Tyler was able to push the bill through and sign it before he left office.

The Coining of 'Manifest Destiny'

By the time Texas was admitted to the Union as a state in December 1845, the idea that the United States must inevitably expand westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean had taken firm hold among people from different regions, classes and political persuasions.

The phrase "Manifest Destiny," which emerged as the best-known expression of this mindset, first appeared in an editorial published in the July-August 1845 issue of The Democratic Review.

In it, the writer criticized the opposition that still lingered against the annexation of Texas, urging national unity on behalf of "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

As the phrase also appeared in a nearly identical context in a July 1845 article in the New York Morning News, its originator is believed to be John O'Sullivan, the editor of both the Democratic Review and the Morning News at the time. That December, another Morning News article mentioned "manifest destiny" in reference to the Oregon Territory, another new frontier over which the United States was eager to assert its dominion.

Oregon Territory

An 1842 treaty between Great Britain and the United States partially resolved the question of where to draw the Canadian border, but left open the question of the Oregon Territory, which stretched from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains over an area including what is now Oregon, Idaho, Washington State and most of British Columbia.

Polk, an ardent proponent of Manifest Destiny, had won election with the slogan "54˚ 40' or fight!" (a reference to the potential northern boundary of Oregon as latitude 54˚ 40') and called U.S. claims to Oregon "clear and unquestionable" in his inaugural address.

But as president, Polk wanted to get the issue resolved so the United States could move on to acquiring California from Mexico. In mid-1846, his administration agreed to a compromise whereby Oregon would be split along the 49th parallel, narrowly avoiding a crisis with Britain.

Impact of Manifest Destiny: The Civil War, Native American Wars

By the time the Oregon question was settled, the United States had entered into all-out war with Mexico, driven by the spirit of Manifest Destiny and territorial expansion.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, added an additional 525,000 square miles of U.S. territory, including all or parts of what is now California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

Despite the lofty idealism of Manifest Destiny, the rapid territorial expansion over the first half of the 19th century resulted not only in war with Mexico, but in the dislocation and brutal mistreatment of Native American, Hispanic and other non-European occupants of the territories now being occupied by the United States.

U.S. expansion also fueled the growing debate over slavery, by raising the pressing question of whether new states being admitted to the Union would allow slavery or not-a conflict that would eventually lead to the Civil War.

Sources

Julius W. Pratt, "The Origin of 'Manifest Destiny'," The American Historical Review (July 1927).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005).
Michael Golay, The Tide of Empire: America's March to the Pacific
Era of U.S. Continental Expansion, History, Art & Archives: U.S House of Representatives.
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Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, expressed the philosophy that drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion. It contended that the United States was destined by God to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent.

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Fair or a business decision?

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Hawaii was an independent monarchy, ruled by Queen Liliuokalani. The island nation produced sugar for export to the U.S. in 1893, U.S. Marines invaded the island and overthrew the Queen. In 1898 it was annexed as a U.S. terrirtory, becoming a state in 1959.

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An example of United States Territorial Expansion?

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The Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.

Causes: Remember the Maine!

The war originated in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain, which began in February 1895.

Spain's brutally repressive measures to halt the rebellion were graphically portrayed for the U.S. public by several sensational newspapers engaging in yellow journalism, and American sympathy for the Cuban rebels rose.

Did you know? Yellow journalism was the original fake news. The term was coined in the early 18 century to indicate journalism that relies on eye-catching headlines, exaggeration and sensationalism to increase sales.

The growing popular demand for U.S. intervention became an insistent chorus after the still-unexplained sinking in Havana harbor of the American battleship USS Maine, which had been sent to protect U.S. citizens and property after anti-Spanish rioting in Havana.

War Is Declared

Spain announced an armistice on April 9 and speeded up its new program to grant Cuba limited powers of self-government.

But the U.S. Congress soon afterward issued resolutions that declared Cuba's right to independence, demanded the withdrawal of Spain's armed forces from the island, and authorized the use of force by President William McKinley to secure that withdrawal while renouncing any U.S. design for annexing Cuba.

Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, followed by a U.S. declaration of war on the 25th, which was made retroactive to April 21.

Spanish-American War Begins

The ensuing war was pathetically one-sided, since Spain had readied neither its army nor its navy for a distant war with the formidable power of the United States.

In the early morning hours of May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey led a U.S. naval squadron into Manila Bay in the Philippines. He destroyed the anchored Spanish fleet in two hours before pausing the Battle of Manila Bay to order his crew a second breakfast. In total, fewer than 10 American seamen were lost, while Spanish losses were estimated at over 370. Manila itself was occupied by U.S. troops by August.

The elusive Spanish Caribbean fleet under Adm. Pascual Cervera was located in Santiago harbor in Cuba by U.S. reconnaissance. An army of regular troops and volunteers under Gen. William Shafter (including then-former assistant secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and his 1st Volunteer Cavalry, the "Rough Riders") landed on the coast east of Santiago and slowly advanced on the city in an effort to force Cervera's fleet out of the harbor.

Cervera led his squadron out of Santiago on July 3 and tried to escape westward along the coast. In the ensuing battle all of his ships came under heavy fire from U.S. guns and were beached in a burning or sinking condition.

Santiago surrendered to Shafter on July 17, thus effectively ending the brief but momentous war.

Treaty of Paris

The Treaty of Paris ending the Spanish-American War was signed on December 10, 1898. In it, Spain renounced all claim to Cuba, ceded Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States and transferred sovereignty over the Philippines to the United States for $20 million.

Philippine insurgents who had fought against Spanish rule soon turned their guns against their new occupiers. The Philippine-American War began in February of 1899 and lasted until 1902. Ten times more U.S. troops died suppressing revolts in the Philippines than in defeating Spain.

Impact of the Spanish-American War

The Spanish-American War was an important turning point in the history of both antagonists. Spain's defeat decisively turned the nation's attention away from its overseas colonial adventures and inward upon its domestic needs, a process that led to both a cultural and a literary renaissance and two decades of much-needed economic development in Spain.

The victorious United States, on the other hand, emerged from the war a world power with far-flung overseas possessions and a new stake in international politics that would soon lead it to play a determining role in the affairs of Europe and the rest of the globe.

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The Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America. The war originated in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain, which began in February 1895.

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What was the impact of Reconstruction policies?

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Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive " Black Codes" to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces-including the Ku Klux Klan -would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

At the outset of the Civil War, to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln's troops marched through the South.

Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the "peculiar institution"-that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage-and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which freed more than 3 million enslaved people in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war's end.

Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of Black people (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known.

Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan. In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people-including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military-deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.
READ MORE: How the Black Codes Limited African American Progress After the Civil War
Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states' rights. In Johnson's view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level. Under Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen's Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnson's leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the " black codes," which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples' activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states.

In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills-causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868-the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

Radical Reconstruction

After northern voters rejected Johnson's policies in the congressional elections in late 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, again over Johnson's veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting "equal protection" of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people, before they could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
READ MORE: When Did African Americans Get the Right to Vote?
By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region's history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery.

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the South's first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).
READ MORE: The First Black Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Blocked From Taking His Seat
Reconstruction Comes to an End

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned.

Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874-after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty-the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.
READ MORE: How the 1876 Election Effectively Ended Reconstruction
When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South.

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction as a distinct period, but the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slavery's eradication would continue in the South and elsewhere long after that date. A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.
READ MORE: Black History Milestones: A Timeline

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Reconstruction, the turbulent era following the U.S. Civil War, was an effort to reunify the divided nation, address and integrate African Americans into society by rewriting the nation's laws and Constitution. The steps taken gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan and other divisive groups.

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What was its impact on Westward Expansion?

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Contents

1. Dreams of a Transcontinental Railroad

2. Two Competing Companies: The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad

3. Danger Ahead: Building the Transcontinental Railroad

4. Driving Toward The Last Spike

5. Impact on The United States

6. Photo Galleries

In 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act chartered the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies, tasking them with building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies would race toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

Dreams of a Transcontinental Railroad

Fotosearch/Getty Images

America's first steam locomotive made its debut in 1830, and over the next two decades, railroad tracks linked many cities on the East Coast. By 1850, some 9,000 miles of track had been laid east of the Missouri River. During that same period, the first settlers began to move westward across the United States; this trend increased dramatically after the discovery of gold in California in 1849. The overland journey-across mountains, plains, rivers and deserts-was risky and difficult, and many westward migrants instead chose to travel by sea, taking the six-month route around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, or risking yellow fever and other diseases by crossing the Isthmus of Panama and traveling via ship to San Francisco.

Did you know? Before the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, it cost nearly $1,000 dollars to travel across the country. After the railroad was completed, the price dropped to $150 dollars.

In 1845, the New York entrepreneur Asa Whitney presented a resolution in Congress proposing the federal funding of a railroad that would stretch to the Pacific. Lobbying efforts over the next several years failed due to growing sectionalism in Congress, but the idea remained a potent one. In 1860, a young engineer named Theodore Judah identified the infamous Donner Pass in northern California (where a group of westward emigrants had become trapped in 1846) as an ideal location for constructing a railroad through the formidable Sierra Nevada mountains. By 1861, Judah had enlisted a group of investors in Sacramento to form the Central Pacific Railroad Company. He then headed to Washington, where he was able to convince congressional leaders as well as President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law the following year.

Two Competing Companies: The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad

The Pacific Railroad Act stipulated that the Central Pacific Railroad Company would start building in Sacramento and continue east across the Sierra Nevada, while a second company, the Union Pacific Railroad, would build westward from the Missouri River, near the Iowa- Nebraska border. The two lines of track would meet in the middle (the bill did not designate an exact location) and each company would receive 6,400 acres of land (later doubled to 12,800) and $48,000 in government bonds for every mile of track built. From the beginning, then, the building of the transcontinental railroad was set up in terms of a competition between the two companies.

In the West, the Central Pacific would be dominated by the "Big Four"-Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins. All were ambitious businessmen with no prior experience with railroads, engineering or construction. They borrowed heavily to finance the project, and exploited legal loopholes to get the most possible funds from the government for their planned track construction. Disillusioned with his partners, Judah planned to recruit new investors to buy them out, but he caught yellow fever while crossing the Isthmus of Panama on his way east and died in November 1863, soon after the Central Pacific had spiked its first rails to ties in Sacramento. Meanwhile, in Omaha, Dr. Thomas Durant had illegally achieved a controlling interest in the Union Pacific Railroad Company, giving him complete authority over the project. (Durant would also illegally set up a company called Crédit Mobilier, which guaranteed him and other investors risk-free profits from the railroad's construction.) Though the Union Pacific celebrated its own launch in early December 1863, little would be completed until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Danger Ahead: Building the Transcontinental Railroad

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

After General Grenville Dodge, a hero of the Union Army, took control as chief engineer, the Union Pacific finally began to move westward in May 1866. The company suffered bloody attacks on its workers by Native Americans-including members of the Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes-who were understandably threatened by the progress of the white man and his "iron horse" across their native lands. Still, the Union Pacific moved relatively quickly across the plains, compared to the slow progress of their rival company through the Sierra. Ramshackle settlements popped up wherever the railroad went, turning into hotbeds of drinking, gambling, prostitution and violence and producing the enduring mythology of the "Wild West."

In 1865, after struggling with retaining workers due to the difficulty of the labor, Charles Crocker (who was in charge of construction for the Central Pacific) began hiring Chinese laborers. By that time, some 50,000 Chinese immigrants were living on the West Coast, many having arrived during the Gold Rush. This was controversial at the time, as the Chinese were considered an inferior race due to pervasive racism. The Chinese laborers proved to be tireless workers, and Crocker hired more of them; some 14,000 were toiling under brutal working conditions in the Sierra Nevada by early 1867. (By contrast, the work force of the Union Pacific was mainly Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans.) To blast through the mountains, the Central Pacific built huge wooden trestles on the western slopes and used gunpowder and nitroglycerine to blast tunnels through the granite.

Driving Toward The Last Spike

Buyenlarge/Getty Images

By the summer of 1867, the Union Pacific was in Wyoming, having covered nearly four times as much ground as the Central Pacific. The Central Pacific broke through the mountains in late June, however, and the hard part was finally behind them. Both companies then headed towards Salt Lake City, cutting many corners (including building shoddy bridges or sections of track that would have to be rebuilt later) in their race to get ahead.

By early 1869, the companies were working only miles from each other, and in March the newly inaugurated President Ulysses S. Grant announced he would withhold federal funds until the two railroad companies agreed on a meeting point. They decided on Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake; some 690 track-miles from Sacramento and 1,086 from Omaha. On May 10, after several delays, a crowd of workers and dignitaries watched as the final spike was driven linking the Central Pacific and Union Pacific in the "Golden Spike Ceremony."

The golden spike was made of 17.6-karat gold and was a gift of David Hewes, a San Francisco contractor and friend of "Big Four" member Leland Stanford. During the ceremony, Stanford took the first swing at the spike, but accidentally struck the tie instead. His attempt was followed by Union Pacific Thomas Durant's. Durant swung and missed - likely because of a hangover he was suffering from the previous evening's party in Ogden. A railroad worker ultimately drove the final spike at 12:47 p.m. on May 10, 1869. Telegraph cables immediately went out to President Grant and around the country with the news that the transcontinental railroad had been completed.

The golden spike was removed after the ceremony and replaced with traditional iron spikes. Three other ties-one of gold, one of silver and gold, and one of silver, were also presented at the ceremony. The original golden spike is now part of the collection of Stanford University, which was founded by Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, in 1885 in memory of their only son.

Impact on The United States

The building of the transcontinental railroad opened up the American West to more rapid development. With the completion of the track, the travel time for making the 3,000-mile journey across the United States was cut from a matter of months to under a week. Connecting the two American coasts made the economic export of Western resources to Eastern markets easier than ever before. The railroad also facilitated westward expansion, escalating conflicts between Native American tribes and settlers who now had easier access to new territories.

Photo Galleries

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In 1862, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies began building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies raced toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

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Eleanor Roosevelt’s expansion of the First Lady’s role

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Eleanor Roosevelt’s expansion of the First Lady’s role

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Appropriate or unwarranted?

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Eleanor Roosevelt - First Ladies - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Eleanor Roosevelt, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Wealthy industrialists in the late 1800s

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Wealthy industrialists in the late 1800s

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“Robber Barons” or “Captains of Industry”?
Select one of the following:

1. Andrew Carnegie 2. John D. Rockefeller  3. J.P. Morgan 4. J.J. Hill 5. John J. Astor 6. Cornelius Vanderbilt

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America wasn't discovered, it was built by a group of business-savvy, innovative young men: John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison. Explore the lives of America's first captains of industry on Biography.com.

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Did his personality make him more of an asset or a liability?

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General George Patton led the Third Army in a very successful sweep across France during World War II in 1944. He was skilled at tank warfare.

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Looking after the welfare of the American people or friend of big business?

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Contents

1. Theodore Roosevelt's Early Life and Career

2. Teddy Roosevelt's Unexpected Path to the White House

3. Theodore Roosevelt's Domestic Policy

4. Theodore Roosevelt's Foreign Policy

5. Theodore Roosevelt: After the White House

6. PHOTO GALLERIES

The rising young Republican politician Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly became the 26th president of the United States in September 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley. Young and physically robust, he brought a new energy to the White House, and won a second term on his own merits in 1904. Roosevelt confronted the bitter struggle between management and labor head-on and became known as the great "trust buster" for his strenuous efforts to break up industrial combinations under the Sherman Antitrust Act. He was also a dedicated conservationist, setting aside some 200 million acres for national forests, reserves and wildlife refuges during his presidency. In the foreign policy arena, Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War and spearheaded the beginning of construction on the Panama Canal. After leaving the White House and going on safari in Africa, he returned to politics in 1912, mounting a failed run for president at the head of a new Progressive Party.

Theodore Roosevelt's Early Life and Career

Theodore Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, into a wealthy family in New York City. Known as "Teedie"-later "Teddy"-he was frail and sickly as a boy, and as a teenager followed a program of gymnastics and weightlifting to build up his strength. Upon graduating from Harvard College in 1880, Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee and entered Columbia University Law School, though he dropped out after only one year to enter public service. He was elected to the New York State Assembly at the age of 23, and served two terms (1882-84). Both his wife and mother died on the same day in 1884, and the grieving Roosevelt spent the next two years on a ranch he owned in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory, where he hunted big game, drove cattle and worked as a frontier sheriff. Upon returning to New York, he married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow. The couple would raise six children, including Roosevelt's daughter from his first marriage, Alice.

Did you know? Early in his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt sparked a scandal when he invited the African-American educator Booker T. Washington to dine with him and his family; he was the first president ever to entertain a black man in the White House.

In 1886, Roosevelt ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City. Two years later, President Benjamin Harrison rewarded Roosevelt's service to the Republican Party with a job on the U.S. Civil Service Commission; he was reappointed by Harrison's successor, Grover Cleveland. In 1895, Roosevelt became president of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, and in 1897 William McKinley named him as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Roosevelt left his post as naval secretary to become colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, known as the "Rough Riders." Once in Cuba, Roosevelt led the Rough Riders in a brave, costly uphill charge in the Battle of San Juan; he returned home as one of the war's most visible heroes.

Teddy Roosevelt's Unexpected Path to the White House

The Republican political machine in New York threw their considerable support behind the returning war hero, helping Roosevelt defeat a popular Democratic candidate to win the governorship. Once elected, Roosevelt displayed his characteristic independence and unwillingness to buckle to the pressure of party bosses. In 1900, the leading New York Republican Thomas C. Platt conspired with national party boss Mark Hanna to get Roosevelt named as McKinley's running mate, in order to keep him from running for a second term in the governor's office. Roosevelt campaigned vigorously for McKinley, traveling by train for more than 21,000 miles to speak in 24 states, and McKinley and Roosevelt won in a landslide over Democrats William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson.

On September 6, 1901, a deranged anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley died eight days later, and Roosevelt was sworn in as the 26th president. Only 42 years old when he took office, he was the youngest president in the nation's history, and his youth and vigor immediately transformed the public image of the presidency. From the time of his First Annual Message to Congress in December 1901, Roosevelt expressed the progressive belief that government should mediate between conflicting forces (including capital and labor, isolationism and expansionism and conservation and development) in order to stabilize American society.

Theodore Roosevelt's Domestic Policy

Roosevelt's "Square Deal" domestic program included a promise to battle large industrial combinations, or trusts, which threatened to restrain trade. In 1902, his government brought a successful suit under the previously ineffective Sherman Antitrust Act against the Northern Securities Company, a railroad combination formed by James J. Hill, E.H. Harriman and J.P. Morgan. That same year, he intervened in a prolonged coal strike in Pennsylvania, using a combination of negotiation tactics to halt the strike and gain a modest pay increase for the miners.

Roosevelt also used his executive power to further his passion for conservationism. In June 1902, the National Reclamation Act (dedicated to large-scale irrigation projects in the American West) became the first major legislative achievement of his presidency. In addition, Roosevelt set aside almost 200 million acres-almost five times as much land as all his predecessors combined-for national forests, reserves and wildlife refuges. Despite his progressivism and his reputation as a "trust buster," Roosevelt was able to amass the support of more conservative Republicans and business interests and win a landslide victory over the Democrats in 1904. He was the first president to win reelection after gaining the White House due to the death of his predecessor.

Theodore Roosevelt's Foreign Policy

Like McKinley, Roosevelt sought to bring the United States out of its isolationism and fulfill its responsibility as a world power. He believed that America should "speak softly and carry a big stick" in the realm of international affairs and that its president should be willing to use force to back up his diplomatic negotiations. Roosevelt followed this big-stick policy most conspicuously in his dealings in Latin America. In 1903, he helped Panama secede from Colombia in order to facilitate the beginning of construction on the Panama Canal, which he later claimed as his greatest accomplishment as president. The following year, after several European nations had attempted to forcibly collect on debts owed to them by Latin American nations, Roosevelt issued a "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine stating that the United States would bar foreign intervention in Latin America and act to police the hemisphere, ensuring that countries paid their international debts.

To prepare the United States for its expanded role on the world stage, Roosevelt sought to build up the country's defenses, and by the end of his presidency he had transformed the U.S. Navy into a major international force at sea. Outside the Western Hemisphere, he led negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. He also reached an agreement with Japan that traded diplomatic recognition of that country in return for Japan's acceptance of the ongoing U.S. presence in the Philippines.

Theodore Roosevelt: After the White House

As the 1908 election approached, Roosevelt prepared grudgingly to fulfill the campaign pledge he had made in 1904 not to seek another term, and threw his support behind Secretary of War William Howard Taft. Immediately after leaving office in early 1909, Roosevelt left for a 10-month African safari and a tour of Europe, where he enjoyed international acclaim. Upon his return, Roosevelt found that President Taft had failed to follow through on the promised program of progressive reforms, instead siding with the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. Incensed, Roosevelt campaigned against Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912; when that effort failed, he and his supporters bolted to form the Progressive Party, popularly known as the Bull Moose Party. (Roosevelt had once referred to himself in a letter as being "as strong as a bull moose.")

While campaigning in Milwaukee, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a fanatic, but soon recovered. With the Republican Party split, Democrat Woodrow Wilson took the White House, winning 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt's 88 (Taft received only eight). Despite the loss, Roosevelt's run marked the most successful third-party effort in American history, and many of Wilson's progressive reforms over the next eight years would echo Roosevelt's 1912 platform. Roosevelt was an early advocate of American entry into World War I, which broke out in Europe in 1914, and strongly criticized Wilson's early policy of neutrality. Once the United States entered the war in 1917, all four of Roosevelt's sons volunteered to fight; his beloved youngest son, Quentin, was shot down and killed while flying a mission over Germany. Politically and physically active until the end, Roosevelt died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, at his family home in Oyster Bay, New York, at the age of 60.

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PHOTO GALLERIES

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Theodore Roosevelt's Early Life and Career Teddy Roosevelt's Unexpected Path to the White House Theodore Roosevelt's Domestic Policy Theodore Roosevelt's Foreign Policy Theodore Roosevelt: After the White House PHOTO GALLERIES The rising young Republican politician Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly became the 26th president of the United States in September 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley.

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Did he use his popularity for political purpose?

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Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator who rose to international fame in 1927 after becoming the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean in his monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis. Five years later, Lindbergh's toddler son was kidnapped and murdered in what many called "the crime of the century." In the lead-up to World War II, Lindbergh was an outspoken isolationist, opposing American aid to Great Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany. Some accused him of being a Nazi sympathizer. Late in life, Lindbergh became a conservationist, arguing that he would rather have "birds than airplanes."

Charles A. Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1902. His family moved to Little Falls, Minnesota when he was a toddler, though Lindbergh spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., where his father, Charles August Lindbergh was a U.S. Congressman.

Lindbergh learned to fly planes in 1922 after quitting college. He got his start in aviation as a barnstormer. Barnstormers were pilots who traveled the country performing aerobatic stunts and selling airplane rides.

He joined the United States Army Air Service in 1924, but the Army didn't need active-duty pilots at the time, so Lindbergh soon returned to civilian aviation. He started flying routes between his home in St. Louis and Chicago as an air mail pilot in 1925.

Spirit of St. Louis

Earlier pilots had crossed the Atlantic in stages, but most planes of the era weren't equipped to carry enough fuel to make the trip without stopping to fuel up.

Lindbergh decided, with the backing of several people in St. Louis, to compete for the Orteig Prize-a $25,000 reward put up by French hotelier Raymond Orteig for the first person to fly an airplane non-stop from New York to Paris.

Ryan Airlines of San Diego retrofitted one of their Ryan M-2 aircraft for Lindbergh's flight. The customized plane, dubbed a Ryan NYP (for New York-Paris), had a longer fuselage, a longer wingspan and additional struts to accommodate the weight of extra fuel.

The engine powering the plane was a Wright J5-C manufactured by Wright Aeronautical, the aircraft manufacturer founded by the Wright brothers.

Lindbergh had his plane, now named Spirit of St. Louis in honor of his financial backers, custom-built with extra fuel tanks in the plane's nose and wings.

One gas tank, mounted between the engine and the cockpit, blocked Lindbergh's view through the windshield. Lindbergh had to use instruments to guide him, including a retractable periscope that he could slide out the left-side window for a limited forward view.

Lindbergh, at the age of 25, and the Spirit of St. Louis took off from a muddy runway at Long Island's Roosevelt Field on the morning of May 20, 1927.

He left the plane's side windows open so that cold air and rain would keep him alert on the 33-1/2 hour flight. The sleep-deprived Lindbergh later reported he had hallucinated about ghosts during the flight.

Lindbergh Lands in Paris

Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis landed safely at Paris' Le Bourget airfield on May 21, 1927. An ecstatic crowd of some 150,000 people had gathered at the French airfield to witness the historic moment.

As the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic-and the first person to make the trip solo-Lindbergh became an instant worldwide celebrity. One wag reportedly said that crowds were "behaving as though Lindbergh had walked on water, not flown over it."

He was given a ticker tape parade in New York City-an estimated 4 million people came out that day to see the young hero. Lindbergh won several awards and medals of honor from the United States, France and other countries.

For the next several months, Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the United States and Mexico on a goodwill tour.

He donated the plane to the Smithsonian Institution in 1928 where the Spirit of St. Louis remains on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Lindbergh Kidnapping

On March 1, 1932, Lindbergh's 20-month old son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was kidnapped from his second-floor nursery at the Lindbergh's home near Hopewell, New Jersey.

Lindbergh and his wife Anne discovered a ransom note on the nursery windowsill demanding $50,000. A few days later a new ransom note turned up, demanding $70,000.

The abduction captivated the nation. Many called it "the crime of the century."

When the Lindberghs delivered the money, they were told their baby could be found on a boat named "Nellie," off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. After an exhaustive search there was no sign of the toddler or the boat.

A truck driver found the Lindbergh baby's body on May 12, 1932, about four miles from the Lindbergh home in New Jersey. Investigators estimated the child, partially buried and badly decomposed, had been dead for about two months.

German-born carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptman was convicted of the murder in 1935. He was executed in the electric chair the following year.

America First Committee

In the lead-up to World War II, Lindbergh was an outspoken isolationist. He became the leading voice of the America First Committee-a group of some 800,000 members that opposed American entry into World War II.

Lindbergh spoke at several AFC rallies in 1941. The group was characterized by anti-Semitic, pro-fascist rhetoric, leading some to call Lindbergh a Nazi sympathizer.

The American First Committee dissolved in December 1941 in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Lindbergh publicly supported the United States war effort. He went on to fly dozens of combat missions as a civilian contractor in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Lindbergh the Environmentalist

Lindbergh remembered the sky being black with thousands of ducks as he flew over Nova Scotia on his world-famous 1972 transatlantic flight.

As he grew older, Lindbergh became increasingly concerned that modern technology was taking a toll on the world's animals and plants. He became a staunch conservationist, championing a number of environmental causes.

He campaigned for environmental groups in the 1960s, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. He fought against the disappearance of dozens of endangered species, including blue and humpback whales, tortoises and eagles.

He also lived among tribes in Africa and the Philippines and helped to establish Haleakala National Park in Hawaii.

Lindberg spent the last several years of his life in Hawaii. He died of cancer in 1974 at age 72 and is buried in Kipahulu on the island of Maui.

SOURCES

1927: Charles Lindbergh and the epic flight of the Spirit of St. Louis; USA Today.

Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis; National Air and Space Museum.

Lindbergh Kidnapping: FBI.

'America First': From Charles Lindbergh to President Trump; NPR.

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Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator who rose to international fame in 1927 after becoming the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean in his monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis. Five years later, Lindbergh's toddler son was kidnapped and murdered in what many called "the crime of the century."

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Was it the true voice of the American labor movement?

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The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized in 1886. Its president was Samuel Gompers, who served until 1925. During Gompers' presidency, the AFL rose to more than 4 million members by 1920, after which its membership declined until 1933, when it was not much more than 2 million.

The purpose of the AFL was to organize skilled workers into national unions consisting of others in the same trade. Their purpose was not political, and aimed simply at shorter hours, higher wages, and better working conditions.

The unwillingness of the AFL to address the needs of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in mass production industries led to the establishment of the Committee for Industrial Organization by eight international unions within the AFL. The CIO did not succeed in changing AFL attitudes and the following year, the then-ten members of the CIO were expelled from the AFL. The CIO reorganized in 1938 and changed their name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The AFL and CIO were eventually reunited as the AFL-CIO in 1955.

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The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized in 1886. Its president was Samuel Gompers, who served until 1925. During Gompers' presidency, the AFL rose to more than 4 million members by 1920, after which its membership declined until 1933, when it was not much more than 2 million.

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Was it an effective organization for change?

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The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America's oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country. In the NAACP's early decades, its anti-lynching campaign was central to its agenda. During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today the NAACP has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.

Founding of the NAACP

The NAACP was established in February 1909 in New York City by an interracial group of activists, partially in response to the 1908 Springfield race riot in Illinois.

In that event, two black men being held in a Springfield jail for alleged crimes against white people were surreptitiously transferred to a jail in another city, spurring a white mob to burn down 40 homes in Springfield's black residential district, ransack local businesses and murder two African Americans.

The NAACP's founding members included white progressives Mary White Ovington, Henry Moskowitz, William English Walling and Oswald Garrison Villard, along with such African Americans as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells-Barnett, Archibald Grimke and Mary Church Terrell.

Niagara Movement

Some early members of the organization, which included suffragists, social workers, journalists, labor reformers, intellectuals and others, had been involved in the Niagara Movement, a civil rights group started in 1905 and led by Du Bois, a sociologist and writer.

In its charter, the NAACP promised to champion equal rights and eliminate racial prejudice, and to "advance the interest of colored citizens" in regard to voting rights, legal justice and educational and employment opportunities.

A white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACP's first president. Du Bois, the only black person on the initial leadership team, served as director of publications and research. In 1910, Du Bois started The Crisis, which became the leading publication for black writers; it remains in print today.

The NAACP's Early Decades

Since its inception, the NAACP has worked to achieve its goals through the judicial system, lobbying and peaceful protests. In 1910, Oklahoma passed a constitutional amendment allowing people whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote in 1866 to register without passing a literacy test.

This "grandfather clause" enabled illiterate whites to avoid taking the reading test while discriminating against illiterate blacks, whose ancestors weren't guaranteed the right to vote in 1866, by requiring them to pass a test in order to vote.

The NAACP challenged the law and won a legal victory in 1915 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Guinn v. United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional.

Also in 1915, the NAACP called for a boycott of Birth of a Nation, a movie that portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in a positive light and perpetrated racist stereotypes of blacks. The NAACP's campaign was largely unsuccessful, but it helped raise the new group's public profile.

READ MORE: See America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

Anti-Lynching Campaign

In 1917, some 10,000 people in New York City participated in an NAACP-organized silent march to protest lynchings and other violence against blacks. The march was one of the first mass demonstrations in America against racial violence.

The NAACP's anti-lynching crusade became a central focus for the group during its early decades. Ultimately, the NAACP was unable to get a federal anti-lynching law passed; however, its efforts increased public awareness of the issue and are thought to have contributed to an eventual decline in lynchings.

By 1919, the NAACP had some 90,000 members and more than 300 branches.

Civil Rights Era

The NAACP played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the organization's key victories was the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools.

Pioneering civil-rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), successfully argued the case before the court. Marshall, who founded the LDF in 1940, won a number of other important civil rights cases involving issues such as voting rights and discriminatory housing practices. In 1967, he became the first African American to serve as a Supreme Court justice.

The NAACP also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, one of the biggest civil rights rallies in U.S. history, and had a hand in running 1964's Mississippi Freedom Summer, an initiative to register black Mississippians to vote.

During this era, the NAACP also successfully lobbied for the passage of landmark legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, barring racial discrimination in voting.

The organization received some criticism for its strategy of working through the judicial system and lawmakers to achieve its goals, rather than focusing on more direct methods of protest favored by other national civil rights groups.

At the same time, NAACP members were subject to harassment and violence. In 1962, Medgar Evers, the first NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was assassinated outside his home in Jackson by a white supremacist.

NAACP Today

During the final decades of the 20th century, the NAACP experienced financial difficulties and some members charged that the organization lacked direction.

Today, the NAACP is focused on such issues as inequality in jobs, education, health care and the criminal justice system, as well as protecting voting rights. The group also has pushed for the removal of Confederate flags and statues from public property.

In 2009, the year he became America's first black president, Barack Obama spoke at a celebration of the NAACP's 100th anniversary. By 2017, the NAACP had more than 2,200 branches and more than half a million members worldwide.

Sources

The Racial History Of The "Grandfather Clause." NPR.
Google memorializes the Silent Parade when 10,000 black people protested lynchings.Washington Post.
Anti-Lynching Legislation Renewed. U.S. House of Representatives.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom. Library of Congress.

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The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America's oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country.

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To what extent was it the result of the work of the Woman's Suffrage Movement?

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An October 28, 1943, oath ceremony grants to women who had served in the military the official membership of the Armed Forces. Though women had established a long record of military service dating to the early 1900s, it wasn't until the Women's Army Corps bill was signed into law on July 1, 1943, that they received full status.

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Was it a neighborly act or imperialism?

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the roosevelt corollary and latin america

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The Roosevelt Corollary and Latin America [ushistory.org]

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The Roosevelt Corollary and Latin America

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Panamanian independence or American imperialism?

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A coalition of Panamanian leaders declared independence from the nation of Colombia in November 1903. The United States, which had tried and failed to conclude a treaty with Colombia to construct and maintain a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, unscrupulously encouraged and supported the Panamanian independence movement. As illustrated by the New York World political cartoon below, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt went so far as to order a detachment of U.S. gunboats to Panama to protect the revolutionaries from Colombian military forces.

Shortly after Panama secured its independence, the U.S. and Panama signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty. According to this treaty, Panama granted the U.S. the right to build and operate an inter-ocean canal and also gave the U.S. de facto sovereignty over a ten mile-wide territory around the canal in perpetuity - in effect creating a U.S. colony in Panama. In return, the U.S. paid Panama an up-front sum of $10 million and promised annual payments of $250,000.[1] Considering the circumstances surrounding the Panamanian Revolution and the subsequent Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, why did Panamanian leaders acquiesce to the creation of a U.S. colony if their goal was national independence? Did Panamanian leaders believe that a canal, even if it was controlled by the U.S., would yield economic prosperity for Panama? Were they so thoroughly dissatisfied with the national government in Bogotá that they were willing to surrender some of their sovereignty in exchange for political independence from Colombia?

From pre-Columbian exchange networks to the roads of the Spanish Empire to the highly profitable Panama Railroad, there is a long history of trade across Panama.[2] As such, many Panamanians believed that "a canal across the Panamanian isthmus would transform Panama into one of the great commercial centers of the world."[3] Furthermore, several of the leaders of the 1903 Panamanian Revolution, such as Senator José Augustín Arango and Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero (the first President of Panama), had previous profitable dealings with the U.S. throughthe Panama Railroad Company. Arango was a company lawyer and Amador was the company's head physician.[4] In light of their positive experiences with the U.S., it is understandable why Panamanian leaders like Arango and Amador allied with the U.S. and believed that a U.S.-owned and operated canal would, like the railroad, benefit them.

Despite the importance of the Colombian government's rejection of a canal treaty with the U.S. in 1903, the roots of the Panamanian Revolution date back to the early-mid-nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1840, there were three Panamanian attempts at independence from Colombia. These unsuccessful attempts stemmed from Panamanians' animosity over the national government in Bogotá formulating economic policies for Panama without Panamanian consent.[5] Several decades later, the War of the Thousand Days set the stage for Panama's independence from Colombia.

In 1899, Colombian liberals launched a war against the conservative government in Bogotá. The war, which lasted until 1902, killed over 100,000 people, caused hyperinflation, and distracted the Colombian government from its negotiations with the U.S. over a canal across the Isthmus of Panama.[6] It also exacerbated Colombia's weak authority in Panama. As part of their campaign, Panamanian liberals undermined Colombian rule by spreading their message of federalism. Additionally, after the conclusion of the war with the Treaty of Wisconsin, "Colombia returned to its traditional policy of benign neglect for Panama and thus confirmed in the minds of many Panamanians that neither the conservative nor the liberal parties were the answer to the region's needs."[7] Seen in this light, the 1903 Panamanian Revolution was not merely a knee-jerk reaction to the Colombian government's failure to sign a canal treaty with the U.S., but the culmination of a much longer history of grievances.

So why did Panamanian leaders acquiesce to the creation of a U.S. colony if their goal was national independence? The answer has two parts. First, based on the very long history of profitable trade across the Isthmus of Panama, as well as several Panamanian revolutionaries' positive experiences with the U.S.-owned Panama Railroad Company, most Panamanian leaders believed that an inter-ocean canal, even if it was owned by the U.S, would be a boon to Panama's economy. Second, by 1903, Panamanian leaders were disillusioned and anxious with the national government in Bogotá, which had ignored Panamanian demands for decades. Out of their desire for a canal and their desperation for political independence from Colombia, Panamanian leaders agreed to the terms of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty and surrendered a ten mile-wide section of their new nation over to the U.S.

Justin J. Masucci is a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo. His research fields include U.S. history, modern Latin American history, and the history of U.S. imperialism. You can reach him at jmasucci@buffalo.edu .

Title image: " The Man Behind The Egg," Sunday Times, 1903.

[1] Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu, The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 84 - 85.

[2] Ibid, 6.

[3] Ibid, 189.

[4] Matthew Parker, Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time-The Building of the Panama Canal (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 221.

[5] Robert C. Harding, The History of Panama (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 16.

[6] David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 149 - 151.

[7] René De La Pedraja, Wars of Latin America, 1899 - 1941 (Jefferson, NC : McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006), 45.

Busnell, David. The Making of Modern Colombia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

De La Pedraja, René. Wars of Latin America, 1899 - 1941. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006.

Harding, Robert C. The History of Panama. Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006.

Maurer, Noel and Carlos Yu. The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Parker, Matthew. Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal. New York: Anchor Books, 2009.

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Balancing Independence and Imperialism: The Panamanian Revolution of 1903

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By Justin J. Masucci A coalition of Panamanian leaders declared independence from the nation of Colombia in November 1903. The United States, which had tried and failed to conclude a treaty with Colombia to construct and maintain a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, unscrupulously encouraged and supported the Panamanian independence movement.

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as it a justifiable reason for war?

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U.S.S. Maine entering Havana harbor January 25, 1898, about 3 weeks before the explosion and sinking.

There was more than one way to acquire more land. If the globe had already been claimed by imperial powers, the United States could always seize lands held by others. Americans were feeling proud of their growing industrial and military prowess. The long-dormant Monroe Doctrine could finally be enforced. Good sense suggested that when treading on the toes of empires, America should start small. In 1898, Spain was weak and Americans knew it. Soon the opportunity to strike arose.

Involvement in Cuba

The U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, January, 1898

Cuba became the nexus of Spanish-American tensions. Since 1895, Cubans had been in open revolt against Spanish rule. The following year, Spain sent General Valeriano Weyler to Cuba to sedate the rebels. Anyone suspected of supporting independence was removed from the general population and sent to concentration camps. Although few were summarily executed, conditions at the camps led over 200,000 to die of disease and malnutrition. The news reached the American mainland through the newspapers of the yellow journalists. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were the two most prominent publishers who were willing to use sensational headlines to sell papers. Hearst even sent the renowned painter Frederick Remington to Cuba to depict Spanish misdeeds. The American public was appalled.

The Maine Sinks

In February 1898, relations between the United States and Spain deteriorated further. Dupuy de Lôme, the Spanish minister to the United States had written a stinging letter about President McKinley to a personal friend. The letter was stolen and soon found itself on the desk of Hearst, who promptly published it on February 9. After public outcry, de Lôme was recalled to Spain and the Spanish government apologized. The peace was short-lived, however. On the evening of February 15, a sudden and shocking explosion tore a hole in the hull of the American battleship Maine, which had been on patrol in Havana harbor. The immediate assumption was that the sinking of the Maine and the concomitant deaths of 260 sailors was the result of Spanish treachery. Although no conclusive results have ever been proven, many Americans had already made up their minds, demanding an immediate declaration of war.

McKinley proceeded with prudence at first. When the Spanish government agreed to an armistice in Cuba and an end to concentration camps, it seemed as though a compromise was in reach. But the American public, agitated by the yellow press and American imperialists, demanded firm action. "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!" was the cry. On April 11, 1898, McKinley asked the Congress for permission to use force in Cuba. To send a message to the rest of the world that the United States was interested in Cuban independence instead of American colonization, Congress passed the Teller Amendment, which promised that America would not annex the precious islands. After that conscience-clearing measure, American leaders threw caution to the wind and declared open warfare on the Spanish throne.

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On February 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine, patrolling in the Havana harbor, suffered a massive explosion. The ship was lost along with 260 crewman. The incident destroyed relations between Spain and the U.S. and catalyzed the Spanish-American War, though no proof has ever emerged that Spain was involved.

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A true “melting pot” or a “salad bowl”?

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Contents

1. Immigration in the Colonial Era

2. Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

3. Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

4. European Immigration: 1880-1920

5. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

6. PHOTO GALLERIES

The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom. From the 17th to 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans came to America against their will. The first significant federal legislation restricting immigration was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Individual states regulated immigration prior to the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, the country's first federal immigration station. New laws in 1965 ended the quota system that favored European immigrants, and today, the majority of the country's immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America.
WATCH: America: Promised Land on HISTORY Vault
Immigration in the Colonial Era

From its earliest days, America has been a nation of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America tens of thousands of years ago. By the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would become the United States. In 1607, the English founded their first permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

Did you know? On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City's Lower East Side.

Some of America's first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa. The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. By 1680, there were some 7,000 Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to 700,000 by 1790, according to some estimates. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United States as of 1808, but the practice continued. The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 million enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that 500,000 to 650,000 Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

Another major wave of immigration occurred from around 1815 to 1865. The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, almost half of America's immigrants were from Ireland alone. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in cities along the East Coast. Between 1820 and 1930, some 4.5 million Irish migrated to the United States.

Also in the 19th century, the United States received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group.

During the mid-1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States. Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese had migrated there by the early 1850s.

The influx of newcomers resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America's native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while many Catholics-especially the Irish-experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party (also called the Know-Nothings) tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the presidential election of 1856.

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a depression in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.

For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states. However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) designated Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, as a federal immigration station. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to 1954.

European Immigration: 1880-1920

Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade alone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than 4 million had entered the United States. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution also arrived in large numbers; over 2 million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.

The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Within a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, and in the early 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census-a system that favored immigrants from Western Europe-and prohibited immigrants from Asia.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America's foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.

In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which did away with quotas based on nationality and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin. As a result of this act and subsequent legislation, the nation experienced a shift in immigration patterns. Today, the majority of U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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Immigration in the Colonial Era Immigration in the Mid-19th Century Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation European Immigration: 1880-1920 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 PHOTO GALLERIES The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920.

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A destructive fringe movement or powerful force in American life?

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Following the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan emerges to suppress and victimize newly freed slaves.

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Superficial or genuine strides towards equality?

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Dan Bryan, March 6 2012

The right to vote and the rise of new occupations seemed to augur a new independence for women... an independence with limits. Their position in the workplace throughout the 1920s was an indicator of this.

Women voters and the Sheppard-Towner Act

Many people had either feared or anticipated the emergence of a "woman's" voting block, but that did not seem to be the case in 1920.

In the year of a landslide victory for Warren Harding, most votes were still divided on ethnic lines. Women tended to vote for Harding, because most of them who made it to the polls were of upper-class, Republican vintage. Those who were of a lower-class or immigrant background were more likely to vote Democrat, but gender was not the defining issue in either case.

In 1921, the effects of women's suffrage could be clearly seen in the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act. This act provided federal funding for prenatal care and education, including the creation of women and children's health clinics. Spurred on by an intense lobbying effort, including threats of mass defection from the newly franchised women voters, the bill passed Congress by a margin of 279-39. It was the first federally funded social welfare program.

Funding was modest, but there were positive effects on infant and maternal health. In the 1920s, infant mortality dropped from 75 to 64 per 1,000 births, by one estimate, though this could also be attributed to seven years of continuous economic growth.

However, as the 1920s continued and it became apparent that women were not voting much differently than men were, the strength of women's lobbying groups to advocate for such programs dissipated. In 1929, funding for the Sheppard-Towner Act itself was allowed to lapse.

Clerical occupations and the twenties woman

Married women still did not hold jobs in any great numbers, the exception being married black women who were often forced to out of destitution. Among married white women of both native and immigrant backgrounds, only around 10% worked outside of the home.

Among single women, there was a huge increase in employment during this era. Certain occupations had always been weighted towards women -- teachers, social workers, nurses, and librarians. And for those who were working-class, textile mills had been the one type of factory where jobs could be found. And on the farm, women helped out in myriad ways, as they traditionally had.

But now with the rise of the corporate office, a number of other types of jobs opened up. Typists, filing clerks, stenographers, and even some secretarial roles all became possibilities for the ambitious young woman. In an era with absolutely nothing in the way of mass data storage, entire floors of office buildings were filled with the sound of typewriters and filing drawers.

In most offices, desks were lined across a central room in rows, with no cubicle walls and often not even a window. Tasks consisted of things like listening to dictations and typing their contents, of creating and updating ledgers, or of creating bills and sending out requests for payment.

These jobs supported a great number of young women who had fled the poverty of the countryside. In comparison to mills or farming it was an improvement. However, there was little opportunity for advancement and it was monotonous to the extreme.

Creative occupations and the twenties woman

The creative occupations offered the best hope for advancement. The department stores hired women in large numbers, and with skill and intelligence they could work their way up to being designers or buyers. The latter group was entrusted with securing apparel and supply for the major stores, which could include traveling to London or Paris to build connections and fashion knowledge. It was a very lucrative position, if one had the right eye for buying things that sold well.

There were also chances in writing, dancing, acting, and in singing -- those brutally competitive fields of the creative mind. This was the age of Martha Graham, of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, and Clara Bow. On a smaller scale, it was increasingly common to find women creating and producing artistic and literary journals.

As the means for a select few to find autonomy and material success, these fields served admirably. But as in any era, few possessed the talent and connections to capitalize.

Work as a precursor to marriage

"I pay our women well so they can dress attractively and get married." - Henry Ford

There were more professional opportunities for women in the 1920s than there had been before. At the same time, there was a very clear limit to this advancement that was predicated on the idea that women would eventually marry. If anything, there was even more pressure on women to get married than there had been twenty years previously.

For one, the ideal of a virtuous, celibate social worker had been undermined by the advances of Freudian theory. It was now clear that normal adults could not function in a healthy way without enjoying the benefits of sex.

Additionally, as public knowledge of sexuality grew, so too did its knowledge of lesbianism. The Captive was a groundbreaking, successful play that touched on the subject of a lesbian relationship. It was getting harder for single women of a certain age continue to live together, without raising suspicions and eyebrows that might have been absent in the nineteenth century.

While the increase in female employment was important in expanding opportunity and autonomy, there were very clear limits to how far this extended itself. Though outward behavior changed greatly in the 1920s, the dominant path of marriage and homemaking was hardly scathed at all.

About the Author

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Working and Voting -- Women in the 1920s

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Dan Bryan, March 6 2012 The right to vote and the rise of new occupations seemed to augur a new independence for women... an independence with limits. Their position in the workplace throughout the 1920s was an indicator of this.

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What was its role in causing the Spanish-American War?

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Crucible Of Empire : The Spanish-American War - PBS Online

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Was it preventable or inevitable?

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The First Measured Century: Timeline: Events - Stock Market Crash

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Mirror of American life or a force for shaping new values?

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What role did discrimination play in the trial and verdict?

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Sacco-Vanzetti case: Sacco-Vanzetti case, controversial murder trial in Massachusetts, U.S., extending over seven years, 1920-27, and resulting in the execution of the defendants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The trial resulted from the murders in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920, of F.A.

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Was it the main promoter of organized crime?

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Prohibition is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed.

Prohibition was intended to improve, even to ennoble, the lives of all Americans, to protect individuals, families, and society at large from the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. But the enshrining of a faith-driven moral code in the Constitution paradoxically caused millions of Americans to rethink their definition of morality.

Premiered on PBS: October 2, 2011

Watch Clips from the Film

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Prohibition is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed. Full film now streaming.

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What were the causes? What were the effects?

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Great Migration

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.

In the early 1900s, a few middle-class Black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.

How Did the Harlem Renaissance Start?

Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration.

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.

By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poetry, with Claude McKay's collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912, followed b y God's Trombones in 1927, left their mark on the world of fiction.

Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Confusion explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for Black children with Du Bois.

Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes.

Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, as well as powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper's.

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication called FIRE!!

Helmed by white author and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten's previous fiction stirred up interest among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the culture and nightlife there.

Though Van Vechten's work was condemned by older luminaries like DuBois, it was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.

Countee Cullen

Poetry, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem's largest congregation, in 1918.

The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a college student at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going on to Harvard's master's program and publishing his first volume of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl and went on to write plays as well as children's books.

Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen's reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the column "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.

Harlem Renaissance Musicians

The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a great draw for not only Harlem residents but outside white audiences also.

Some of the most celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem- Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson were also popular.

Cotton Club

With the groundbreaking new music came vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and King Oliver.

While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience Black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.

The most successful of these was the Cotton Club, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater acceptance.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave Black actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with non-stereotypical roles.

At the center of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an actor, singer, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying law at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational but approachable figure.

Robeson believed that arts and culture were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.

Josephine Baker

Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along, which launched the career of Josephine Baker.

White patron Van Vechten helped bring a more serious lack of stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. It wasn't until 1929 that a Black-authored play about Black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem, played Broadway.

Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Black actors with several one-act plays written in the 1920s, as well as articles in Opportunity magazine outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater also gave Black actors serious roles.

Aaron Douglas

The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin, explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.

The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas, often called "the Father of Black American Art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well as book illustrations.

Sculptor Augusta Savage's 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that up with small, clay portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Project, a division of the Work Progress Administration (WPA).

James VanDerZee 's photography captured Harlem's daily life, as well as commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the past.

Marcus Garvey

Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica but moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential newspaper Negro World in 1918. His shipping company, Black Star Line, established trade between Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.

Garvey is perhaps best known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for "separate but equal" status for persons of African ancestry with the goal of establishing Black states around the world. Garvey was famously at odds with W.E.B. DuBois, who called him "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views also made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Harlem Renaissance Ends

The end of Harlem's creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Great Depression. It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced by the continuous flow of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.

The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The riot was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.

Why Was the Harlem Renaissance Important?

The Harlem Renaissance was a golden age for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement.

Sources

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Hill.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.

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Harlem Renaissance - Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY

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The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in NYC as a black cultural mecca in the early 20th century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture.

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Was upholding Jim Crow creating a separate but truly equal nation?

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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. A National Struggle . The President | PBS

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The administration of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was initially a continuation of the "gentleman's agreement" within the Democratic party that Northern Democrats would not interfere in race issues on the behalf of black Americans. To ensure the passage of New Deal legislation, Roosevelt could not afford to offend Southern Democrats by challenging the white supremacist system of Jim Crow.

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How did it impact racial issues in the South?

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Mississippi River flood of 1927, also called Great Flood of 1927, flooding of the lower Mississippi River valley in April 1927, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. More than 23,000 square miles (60,000 square km) of land was submerged, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and some 250 people died.

After several months of heavy rain caused the Mississippi River to swell to unprecedented levels, the first levee broke on April 16, along the Illinois shore. Then, on April 21, the levee at Mounds Landing in Mississippi gave way. Over the next few weeks essentially the entire levee system along the river collapsed. In some places, residential areas were submerged in 30 feet (9 metres) of water. At least two months passed before the floodwater completely subsided.

In the aftermath, the flood left an estimated 750,000 people without food and water, clothing, or work, and authorities were severely criticized for favouring the white population during rescue and relief operations. Thousands of plantation workers, most of them African Americans, had been forced to work, in deplorable conditions, shoring up the levees near Greenville, Mississippi. Then, as the waters rose, they were left stranded for days without food or drinking water, while white women and children were hauled to safety. African Americans gathered in relief camps also were forced to participate in relief efforts, while receiving inferior provisions for themselves, and to clean up flooded areas. At least one black man was shot, reportedly for refusing to work.

The flood brought about long-term social and political changes in the country. Over time, African Americans largely switched their loyalty from the historically antislavery Republican Party (the party of U.S. Pres. Calvin Coolidge, in office during the disaster) to the Democratic Party. In addition, the disaster contributed to the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to cities in the North. The flood also found its place in folklore, music, literature, and films. Popular songs about the event included Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks" (1929), reworked in 1971 by the English rock group Led Zeppelin, and Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" (1974).

John P. Rafferty, Editor.

Mississippi River flood of 1927

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Mississippi River flood of 1927 | Description & Facts

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Mississippi River flood of 1927, flooding of the lower Mississippi River valley in April 1927, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. More than 23,000 square miles (60,000 square km) of land was submerged, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, and some 250 people died.

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What happened to Amelia Earhart?

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On the morning of July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, on one of the last legs in their historic attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Their next destination was Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some 2,500 miles away. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, waited there to guide the world-famous aviator in for a landing on the tiny, uninhabited coral atoll.

But Earhart never arrived on Howland Island. Battling overcast skies, faulty radio transmissions and a rapidly diminishing fuel supply in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra plane, she and Noonan lost contact with the Itasca somewhere over the Pacific. Despite a search-and-rescue mission of unprecedented scale, including ships and planes from the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard scouring some 250,000 square miles of ocean, they were never found.

In its official report at the time, the Navy concluded that Earhart and Noonan had run out of fuel, crashed into the Pacific and drowned. A court order declared Earhart legally dead in January 1939, 18 months after she disappeared. From the beginning, however, debate has raged over what actually happened on July 2, 1937 and afterward. Several alternate theories have surfaced, and many millions of dollars have been spent searching for evidence that would reveal the truth of Earhart's fate.

The Castaway Theory

In her last radio transmission, made at 8:43 am local time on the morning she disappeared, Earhart reported flying "on the line 157 337...running north and south," a set of directional coordinates that describe a line running through Howland Island.

In 1989, an organization called the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) launched its first expedition to Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific atoll that is part of the Republic of Kiribati. TIGHAR and its director, Richard Gillespie, believe that when Earhart and Noonan couldn't find Howland Island, they continued south along the 157/337 line some 350 nautical miles and made an emergency landing on Nikumaroro (then called Gardner Island). According to this theory, they lived for a period of time as castaways on the tiny, uninhabited island, and eventually died there.

U.S. Navy planes flew over Gardner Island on July 9, 1937, a week after Earhart's disappearance, and saw no sign of Earhart, Noonan or the plane. But they did report seeing signs of recent habitation, though no one had lived on the atoll since 1892.

In 1940, British officials retrieved a partial human skeleton from a remote part of Nikumaroro; a physician subsequently measured the bones and concluded they came from a man. The bones themselves were later lost, but TIGHAR analyzed their measurements in 1998 and claimed that in fact they most likely belonged to a woman of European ancestry, of around Earhart's height (5-foot-7 to 5-foot-8). In 2018, a forensic analysis of the bone measurements conducted by anthropologists from the University of Tennessee (in cooperation with TIGHAR) showed that "the bones have more similarity to Earhart than to 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample," according to a university statement at the time.

Taken Prisoner by the Japanese

A competing theory argues that when they failed to reach Howland Island, Earhart and Noonan were forced to land in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands. According to this theory, the Japanese captured Earhart and Noonan and took them to the island of Saipan, some 1,450 miles south of Tokyo, where they tortured them as presumed spies for the U.S. government. They later died in custody (possibly by execution).

Since the 1960s, the Japanese capture theory has been fueled by accounts from Marshall Islanders living at the time of an "American lady pilot" held in custody on Saipan in 1937, which they passed on to their friends and descendants. Some of the theory's advocates suggest that Earhart and Noonan were in fact U.S. spies, and their around-the-world mission was a cover-up for efforts to fly over and observe Japanese fortifications in the Pacific. At the time, more than four years before the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan was not yet the Americans' enemy in World War II.

Some have suggested that Earhart didn't die on Saipan after her capture, but was released and repatriated to the United States under an assumed name. Beginning in the 1970s, some proponents of this theory have argued that a New Jersey woman named Irene Bolam was in fact Earhart. Bolam herself vigorously denied these claims, calling them "a poorly documented hoax," but they persisted even long after her death in 1982.

Lingering Mystery

Since 1989, TIGHAR has made at least a dozen expeditions to Nikumaroro, turning up artifacts ranging from pieces of metal (possibly airplane parts) to a broken jar of freckle cream -but no conclusive proof that Earhart's plane landed there.

Amid ongoing controversy, spanning more than 80 years of debate among researchers and historians, the crash-and-sink theory remains the most widely accepted explanation of Earhart's fate. But over three expeditions since 2002, the deep-sea exploration company Nauticos has used sonar to scan the area off Howland Island near where Earhart's last radio message came from, covering nearly 2,000 square nautical miles without finding a trace of the wreckage of the Electra. Until that wreckage-or some other definitive piece of evidence-is found, the mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart's final flight will likely endure.

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On the morning of July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from Lae, New Guinea, on one of the last legs in their historic attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Their next destination was Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some 2,500 miles away. A U.S.

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Would the U.S. have entered World War II without it?

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Pearl Harbor is a U.S. naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii, that was the scene of a devastating surprise attack by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. Just before 8 a.m. on that Sunday morning, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes descended on the base, where they managed to destroy or damage nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight battleships, and over 300 airplanes. More than 2,400 Americans died in the attack, including civilians, and another 1,000 people were wounded. The day after the assault, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.

Japan and the Path to War
WATCH VIDEO: The Path to Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, but Japan and the United States had been edging toward war for decades.

The United States was particularly unhappy with Japan's increasingly belligerent attitude toward China. The Japanese government believed that the only way to solve its economic and demographic problems was to expand into its neighbor's territory and take over its import market.

To this end, Japan declared war on China in 1937, resulting in the Nanking Massacre and other atrocities.

American officials responded to this aggression with a battery of economic sanctions and trade embargoes. They reasoned that without access to money and goods, and especially essential supplies like oil, Japan would have to rein in its expansionism.

Instead, the sanctions made the Japanese more determined to stand their ground. During months of negotiations between Tokyo and Washington, D.C., neither side would budge. It seemed that war was all but inevitable.
WATCH: Pearl Harbor: The Last Word on HISTORY Vault
Where Is Pearl Harbor?

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is located near the center of the Pacific Ocean, roughly 2,000 miles from the U.S. mainland and about 4,000 miles from Japan. No one believed that the Japanese would start a war with an attack on the distant islands of Hawaii.

Additionally, American intelligence officials were confident that any Japanese attack would take place in one of the (relatively) nearby European colonies in the South Pacific: the Dutch East Indies, Singapore or Indochina.

Because American military leaders were not expecting an attack so close to home, the naval facilities at Pearl Harbor were relatively undefended. Almost the entire Pacific Fleet was moored around Ford Island in the harbor, and hundreds of airplanes were squeezed onto adjacent airfields.

To the Japanese, Pearl Harbor was an irresistibly easy target.

USS Arizona

The Japanese plan was simple: Destroy the Pacific Fleet. That way, the Americans would not be able to fight back as Japan's armed forces spread across the South Pacific. On December 7, after months of planning and practice, the Japanese launched their attack.

At about 8 a.m., Japanese planes filled the sky over Pearl Harbor. Bombs and bullets rained onto the vessels moored below. At 8:10, a 1,800-pound bomb smashed through the deck of the battleship USS Arizona and landed in her forward ammunition magazine. The ship exploded and sank with more than 1,000 men trapped inside.

Next, torpedoes pierced the shell of the battleship USS Oklahoma. With 400 sailors aboard, the Oklahoma lost her balance, rolled onto her side and slipped underwater.

Less than two hours later, the surprise attack was over, and every battleship in Pearl Harbor- USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, USS California, USS West Virginia, USS Utah, USS Maryland, USS Pennsylvania, USS Tennessee and USS Nevada-had sustained significant damage. (All but USS Arizona and USS Utah were eventually salvaged and repaired.)

Impact of the Pearl Harbor Attack
WATCH VIDEO: Pearl Harbor Survivors Recall the Morning of the Attack
In all, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor crippled or destroyed nearly 20 American ships and more than 300 airplanes. Dry docks and airfields were likewise destroyed. Most importantly, more than 2,000 people died.

But the Japanese had failed to cripple the Pacific Fleet. By the 1940s, battleships were no longer the most important naval vessel: Aircraft carriers were, and as it happened, all of the Pacific Fleet's carriers were away from the base on December 7. (Some had returned to the mainland and others were delivering planes to troops on Midway and Wake Islands.)

Moreover, the Pearl Harbor assault had left the base's most vital onshore facilities-oil storage depots, repair shops, shipyards and submarine docks-intact. As a result, the U.S. Navy was able to rebound relatively quickly from the attack.

How Many People Died in Pearl Harbor?

The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, including sailors, soldiers and civilians. Additionally, 1,178 people were wounded. 129 Japanese soldiers were killed.

Half of the dead at Pearl Harbor were on the USS Arizona. Today the sunken battleship serves as a memorial to all Americans who died in the attack.
READ MORE: 8 Tales of Pearl Harbor Heroics
President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress on December 8, the day after the crushing attack on Pearl Harbor.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941-a date which will live in infamy-the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

He went on to say, "No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again."
Click here to watch the full episode on Pearl Harbor and more from WWII in HD on HISTORY Vault
America Enters World War II

After the Pearl Harbor attack, and for the first time during years of discussion and debate, the American people were united in their determination to go to war.

The Japanese had wanted to goad the United States into an agreement to lift the economic sanctions against them; instead, they had pushed their adversary into a global conflict that ultimately resulted in Japan's first occupation by a foreign power.

Did you know? The single vote against Congress's declaration of war against Japan came from Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana. Rankin was a pacifist who had also voted against the American entrance into World War I. "As a woman," she said, "I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else."

On December 8, Congress approved Roosevelt's declaration of war on Japan. Three days later, Japan's allies Germany and Italy declared war against the United States.

For the second time, Congress reciprocated, declaring war on the European powers. More than two years after the start of World War II, the United States had entered the conflict.

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Pearl Harbor is a U.S. naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii, that was the scene of a devastating surprise attack by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. The day after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan.

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What was the impact of propaganda and its use in the United States?

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Was it a reasonable reaction to a real threat or expression of racial prejudice?

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Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent would be interred in isolated camps. Enacted in reaction to Pearl Harbor and the ensuing war, the Japanese internment camps are now considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century.

Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 with the intention of preventing espionage on American shores.

Military zones were created in California, Washington and Oregon -states with a large population of Japanese Americans-and Roosevelt's executive order commanded the relocation of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

Executive Order 9066 affected the lives about 117,000 people-the majority of whom were American citizens.

Canada soon followed suit, relocating 21,000 of its Japanese residents from its west coast. Mexico enacted its own version, and eventually 2,264 more people of Japanese descent were removed from Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the United States.

Anti-Japanese Activity

Weeks before the order, the Navy removed citizens of Japanese descent from Terminal Island near the Port of Los Angeles.

On December 7, 1941, just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets.

In January, the arrestees were transferred to facilities in Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota, many unable to inform their families and most remaining for the duration of the war.

Concurrently, the FBI searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese residents on the West Coast, seizing items considered contraband.

One-third of Hawaii's population was of Japanese descent. In a panic, some politicians called for their mass incarceration. Japanese-owned fishing boats were impounded.

Some Japanese residents were arrested and 1,500 people-one percent of the Japanese population in Hawaii-were sent to camps on the U.S. mainland.

John DeWitt

Lt. General John L. DeWitt, leader of the Western Defense Command, believed that the civilian population needed to be taken control of to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

To argue his case, DeWitt prepared a report filled with known falsehoods, such as examples of sabotage that were later revealed to be the result of cattle-damaging power lines.

DeWitt suggested the creation of the military zones and Japanese detainment to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle. His original plan included Italians and Germans, though the idea of rounding-up Americans of European descent was not as popular.

At Congressional hearings in February 1942, a majority of the testimonies, including those from California Governor Culbert L. Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren, declared that all Japanese should be removed.

Biddle pleaded with the president that mass evacuation of citizens was not required, preferring smaller, more targeted security measures. Regardless, Roosevelt signed the order.

War Relocation Authority

After much organizational chaos, about 15,000 Japanese Americans willingly moved out of prohibited areas. Inland state citizens were not keen for new Japanese residents, and they were met with racist resistance.

Ten state governors voiced opposition, fearing the Japanese might never leave, and demanded they be locked up if the states were forced to accept them.

A civilian organization called the War Relocation Authority was set up in March 1942 to administer the plan, with Milton S. Eisenhower from the Department of Agriculture to lead it. Eisenhower only lasted until June 1942, resigning in protest over what he characterized as incarcerating innocent citizens.

Relocation to Assembly Centers

Army-directed evacuations began on March 24. People had six days notice to dispose of their belongings other than what they could carry.

Anyone who was at least 1/16th Japanese was evacuated, including 17,000 children under 10, as well as several thousand elderly and handicapped.

Japanese Americans reported to centers near their homes. From there they were transported to a relocation center where they might live for months before transfer to a permanent wartime residence.

These centers were located in remote areas, often reconfigured fairgrounds and racetracks featuring buildings not meant for human habitation, like horse stalls or cow sheds, that had been converted for that purpose. In Portland, Oregon, 3,000 people stayed in the livestock pavilion of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Facilities.

The Santa Anita Assembly Center, just several miles northeast of Los Angeles, was a de-facto city with 18,000 interred, 8,500 of whom lived in stables. Food shortages and substandard sanitation were prevalent in these facilities.

Life in Assembly Centers

Assembly centers offered work to detainees with the policy that they should not be paid more than an Army private. Jobs ranged from doctors to teachers to laborers and mechanics. A couple of assembly centers were the sites of camouflage net factories, which provided work.

There were opportunities for farm work during a labor shortage, and over 1,000 internees were sent to other states to do seasonal farm work. Over 4,000 internees were allowed to leave to attend college.

Conditions in Relocation Centers

There were a total of 10 permanent housing camps called Relocation Centers. Typically some form of barracks, several families were housed together, with communal eating areas. Residents that were designated as dissidents went to a special camp in Tule Lake, California.

Two relocation centers in Arizona were located on Indian reservations, despite the protests of tribal councils, who were overruled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Each relocation center was its own town, featuring schools, post offices and work facilities, as well as farmland for growing food and keeping livestock, all surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

Net factories offered work at several relocation centers. One housed a naval ship model factory. There were also factories in different centers that manufactured items for use in other centers, including garments, mattresses and cabinets. Several centers had agricultural processing plants.

Violence in Relocation Centers

Violence occasionally occurred in centers. In Lordsburg, New Mexico, internees were delivered by trains and marched two miles at night to the camp.

An elderly man attempted to flee and was shot and killed. After settling in, at least two men were shot and killed while trying to escape.

On August 4, 1942, a riot broke out in the Santa Anita facility, the result of anger about insufficient rations and overcrowding. At Manzanar, California, tensions resulted in the beating of a Japanese American Citizens League member by six masked men. Fearing a riot, police tear-gassed crowds, and one man was killed by police.

At the Topaz Relocation Center, a man was shot and killed by military police for going too close to the perimeter. Two months later, a couple was shot at for the same reason.

In 1943, a riot broke out at Tule Lake following an accidental death. Tear gas was dispersed, and martial law declared until agreements were reached.

Fred Korematsu

In 1942, 23-year-old Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to a Japanese internment camp. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued in Korematsu v. United States that Executive Order 9066 violated the Fifth Amendment. He lost the case, but he went on to become a civil rights activist and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. With the creation of California's Fred Korematsu Day, the U.S. saw its first U.S. holiday named for an Asian American. But it would take another Supreme Court decision to halt the internment of Japanese Americans

Mitsuye Endo

The internment camps ended in 1945 following a Supreme Court decision.

In Endo v. the United States, it was ruled that the War Relocation Authority "has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure."

The case was brought on behalf of Mitsuye Endo, the daughter of Japanese immigrants from Sacramento, CA. After filing a habeas corpus petition, the government offered to free her, but Endo refused, wanting her case to address the entire issue of Japanese internment.

Two years later, the Supreme Court made the decision, but gave Roosevelt the chance to begin camp closures before the announcement. One day after Roosevelt made his announcement, the Supreme Court revealed its decision.

Reparations

The last Japanese internment camp closed in March 1946. President Gerald Ford officially repealed Executive Order 9066 in 1976, and in 1988 Congress issued a formal apology and passed the Civil Liberties Act awarding $20,000 each to over 80,000 Japanese Americans as reparations for their treatment.

SOURCES

Japanese Relocation During World War II. National Archives.
Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites. J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord and R. Lord.
Lordsburg Internment POW Camp. Historical Society of New Mexico.
Smithsonian Institute.

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Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent would be interred in isolated camps.

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Was it necessary to end the war?

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On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan's Emperor Hirohito announced his country's unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of "a new and most cruel bomb."

The Manhattan Project

Even before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists-many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe-became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. In 1940, the U.S. government began funding its own atomic weapons development program, which came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. entry into World War II. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with spearheading the construction of the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program, codenamed "The Manhattan Project " (for the engineering corps' Manhattan district).

Over the next several years, the program's scientists worked on producing the key materials for nuclear fission-uranium-235 and plutonium (Pu-239). They sent them to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer worked to turn these materials into a workable atomic bomb. Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device -a plutonium bomb-at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

No Surrender for the Japanese

By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan's militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with "prompt and utter destruction" if they refused.

General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed "Operation Downfall." They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided-over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists-to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Proponents of the A-bomb-such as James Byrnes, Truman's secretary of state-believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world.

'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' Are Dropped

Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. After arriving at the U.S. base on the Pacific island of Tinian, the more than 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb was loaded aboard a modified B-29 bomber christened Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). The plane dropped the bomb-known as "Little Boy"-by parachute at 8:15 in the morning, and it exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city.

Hiroshima's devastation failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, however, and on August 9 Major Charles Sweeney flew another B-29 bomber, Bockscar, from Tinian. Thick clouds over the primary target, the city of Kokura, drove Sweeney to a secondary target, Nagasaki, where the plutonium bomb "Fat Man" was dropped at 11:02 that morning. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. The topography of Nagasaki, which was nestled in narrow valleys between mountains, reduced the bomb's effect, limiting the destruction to 2.6 square miles.

Aftermath of the Bombing

At noon on August 15, 1945 (Japanese time), Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender in a radio broadcast. The news spread quickly, and "Victory in Japan" or "V-J Day" celebrations broke out across the United States and other Allied nations. The formal surrender agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Because of the extent of the devastation and chaos-including the fact that much of the two cities' infrastructure was wiped out-exact death tolls from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unknown. However, it's estimated roughly 70,000 to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation.

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Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Causes, Impact & Lives Lost

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On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, immediately killing 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.

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Were they guilty of spying?

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Synopsis

Born in 1915 in New York City, Ethel Rosenberg went to Seward High School. After finishing school in 1931, she went to work for the National New York Packing and Shipping Company. Rosenberg became involved in a workers' union there and soon became a supporter of the Communist Party. In 1939, she married Julius Rosenberg. The couple had two sons, Michael and Robert. In the 1940s, her husband acted as an agent for the Soviet Union. Shortly after his arrest in 1950, Ethel was brought into custody as a co-conspirator in a plot to give U.S. military secrets to the Soviets. She and her husband were convicted in 1951 and executed in 1953.

Early Life

Born on September 28, 1915, in New York City, Ethel Rosenberg grew up on the city's Lower East Side. She was the oldest child of Barney and Tessie Greenglass. Her father, an immigrant from Russia, also had a son from an earlier marriage. The family, all crowded together in a tenement apartment, later grew to include two brothers, Bernard and David.

Rosenberg attended Seward Park High School where she had an interest in acting. She appeared in such school productions before graduating in 1931. Rosenberg soon found a job with the National New York Packing and Shipping Company. Through her job, she became involved in social and political causes. It was at a union event that she met Julius Rosenberg. The two began dating, and they each developed a strong interest in the Community Party.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg married in 1939. The couple eventually had two children together: son Michael was born in 1943, and son Robert was born in 1947.

Atomic Secrets Spy Case

Ethel Rosenberg's role in one of the most infamous U.S. cases of espionage has remained unclear. Her husband, Julius, reportedly recruited her younger brother, David Greenglass, to give information to the Soviets. While serving in the U.S. Army, Greenglass had been assigned to work on the famed Manhattan Project, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb, and he delivered notes and sketches of classified materials to Julius Rosenberg. According to Greenglass, Ethel took the notes and typed them up for the Soviets. This accusation seems to be the only direct evidence of Ethel's involvement in her husband's spying activities.

In 1950, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage along with David Greenglass and Rosenberg's friend, Morton Sobell. Many experts believe that Ethel was charged in the case as a way to force Julius to give up names of other conspirators. But the move backfired. The couple remained steadfast in proclaiming their innocence.

The Rosenbergs went to trial in March 1951. David Greenglass testified against them in exchange for a lesser sentence. With the pervasive anticommunist crusade already under way in the United States, the Rosenbergs had little chance of a fair trial. Ethel Rosenberg was convicted and sentenced to death, despite a lack of direct evidence linking her to Julius's activities.

Death and Aftermath

Supporters of the Rosenbergs campaigned and protested on behalf of the couple. Both presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower were asked to give them clemency, but refused to grant a presidential pardon. The Rosenbergs fought for their lives through a series of court appeals, but to no avail.

Ethel Rosenberg was executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, on June 19, 1953, just minutes after her husband was put to death. A rabbi had reportedly asked to Ethel to cooperate with authorities after Julius's death to stop her execution, but she refused. According to The New York Times, she said, "I have no names to give. I'm innocent."

The case against Ethel Rosenberg has been questioned extensively since her death. While more evidence on her husband has emerged over the years, Ethel's role in the conspiracy has remained unclear. The most damaging testimony came from her own brother. David Greenglass, however, later admitted that he lied about his sister's involvement in the case.

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Born in 1915 in New York City, Ethel Rosenberg went to Seward High School. After finishing school in 1931, she went to work for the National New York Packing and Shipping Company. Rosenberg became involved in a workers' union there and soon became a supporter of the Communist Party.

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Was separating blacks from whites truly “separate but equal?”

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that "separate-but-equal" education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.

SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws-and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION VERDICT

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

LITTLE ROCK NINE

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

IMPACT OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that "separate-but-equal" education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.

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Did it affect/mirror the removal of other barriers for African
Americans in society in general?

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African-American Baseball | History Detectives | PBS

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1946 saw the beginning of the end of the Negro Leagues, when Jackie Robinson was signed by owner/manager Branch Rickey to be the first black player for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Black baseball fans followed their favorite players to the Major Leagues and slowly the Negro League teams disbanded.

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How did they change the role of African American women in science/ math careers?

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If you're a person of color in America right now, it may feel like you're riding a carousel of darkness. Viral stories of black killings, once occasional events, morphed into déjà vu in 2016 - potentially triggering PTSD-like trauma. The rise of the alt-right, a white nationalist movement, echoes sentiments of public segregation once thought long gone. Meanwhile, Jim Crow-era restrictions on social, economic and political mobility have evolved new facades, namely gentrification and gerrymandering.

Hidden Figures offers a counter-narrative of hope and a prescient blueprint for unity against what feels like a vicious cycle of inequality. This bestselling biography-turned- Hollywood biopic reveals the untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and hundreds of black female mathematicians who made crucial contributions to America's space program.

But the narrative also charts how Hampton, Virginia emerged as a driving force for aeronautics innovation and racial integration - even as the state fought against the rise of civil rights.
Hampton Haven
Writer Margot Lee Shetterly decided to pursue Hidden Figures in 2010, while visiting her parents for Christmas. After church one day, she and her father began chatting about his days as a scientist at Hampton's Langley Research Center - the first field facility for NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Eventually, the conversation drifted onto the black and white women who worked as mathematicians - so-called human computers - during the center's early years.

"I knew the women. Many of them worked with my dad, and I'd seen them growing up," Shetterly told NewsHour. "But I didn't know much about their particular stories - how they had come to work at NASA, or why there were black women working there."

Shetterly spent the next three years combing through historical documents. She checked local newspapers, especially ones for the black community, where she found her canvass for describing daily life in Hampton. One clipping went as far as reporting what Mary Jackson wore at her wedding, she said. Shetterly also sorted through heaps of archival material on NACA and NASA.

"So a Langley historian, this woman named Mary Gainer, is amazing. She and her staff put so many of the early documents online - photos, badges, artifacts," Shetterly said. At one point, Shetterly figured out which women had desks in the same room, based on a collection of phone books and floor plans. Meanwhile, she interviewed Katherine Johnson, now in her late-90s, Johnson's children, the surviving family members of Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn as well as other people who worked with them.

Had I known these women existed, maybe I would have dreamed to be a rocket scientist?

The result is a time machine that marches, moment by moment, through the American aeronautics revolution and desegregation. NACA and the Langley Research Center were founded during World War I, as planes began to flex their muscles in warfare. As the aviation industry expanded over the next two decades and into World War II, so too did the need for aeronautics research - and human computers. As the pool of qualified male candidates fizzled, NACA departed from sexist norms, and Langley hired its first female computers in 1935.

After Franklin Roosevelt relaxed discriminatory employment practices for war projects, NACA trail-blazed once more in 1943 by considering applications from black women, as Shetterly catalogues in her book:

"No photo advised as to the applicant's color - that requirement, instituted under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, was struck down as the Roosevelt administration tried to dismantle discrimination in hiring practices. But the applicants' alma maters tipped their hand: West Virginia State University, Howard, Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal, Hampton Institute just across town - all Negro schools. Nothing in the applications indicated anything less than fitness for the job. If anything, they came with more experience than the white women applicants, with many years of teaching experience on top of math or science degrees.

...

The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the United States would consider one of its greatest victories."

The move transformed Hampton and Langley into a bastion of aeronautical supremacy, while also eroding racial divides over subsequent decades. Virginia was one of the last state's to abandon Jim Crow policies such as segregated schools, even after federal cases like Brown vs Board of Education and other legislation called for change. Shetterly traces Hampton's trail to integration, showing how America struggled with racial reforms through the lens of one progressive city and the nation's space race with the Soviet Union.

Dorothy Vaughn joined NACA's segregated West Area Computing Unit in December 1943 - a group she would run six years later thanks to her mathematical prowess and leadership tenacity. Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson landed at NACA in the early 1950s. All three were math whizzes at early ages, but Shetterly exposes how these women juggled their love for numbers with desires for family life and battles against segregation.

Each would ultimately make major contributions to aeronautics. Vaughn mastered computer programming and helped the agency transition from human to IBM computers. Jackson became NASA's first black female engineer and a leader in research on supersonic flight. And Johnson made the crucial calculations that guided the late John Glenn and America's first manned missions into suborbit, orbit and beyond. Shetterly plans to keep documenting these biographies as part of a series called The Human Computer Project.
Movie Trajectories
The Hidden Figures movie took shape in 2014, soon after HarperCollins agreed to publish Shetterly's book. Film producer Donna Gigliotti (Silver Linings Playbook, Shakespeare in Love) caught wind of the story, auctioned the book proposal and recruited director Theodore Melfi to the project. He was fascinated by the story, but also shocked given the typical depictions of life in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

"You've never seen anything in film, or documentary, that tells you that women were involved in the space program at that time," Melfi told NewsHour. "Everything you see is an image of a white male."

Gigliotti also recruited musician Pharrell Williams, who was raised in Hampton, to co-produce the film and soundtrack. Williams was drawn to the story given this untold story with three female African-American protagonists happened so close to his childhood home.

"You recognize these three beautiful stories are victims of the era and circumstance. It's the 1960s, and the era is not one that necessarily celebrated, or highlighted a woman's contribution to a narrative," Williams said. He also enjoyed the premise due to a childhood fascination with space, NASA and rockets. (This influence percolates in his music as well. One of his earliest acts was called The Neptunes, while songs like Wonderful Place and Love Bomb carry space themes too.)

For Hidden Figures' music, Williams and his co-composers - Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch - call upon 1960s-era styles. Doo Wop and rock melodies - performed by Williams, Hidden Figures actress Janelle Monáe and Mary J. Blige on the soundtrack - mirror the civil rights storylines from the movie.

Monáe said she leapt at the opportunity to play Mary Jackson when she first learned of the story. "It became a personal responsibility to me, to make sure that no young girl, no human being, no American went through life not knowing these true American heroes," she said.

Monáe, Taraji P. Henson (Johnson) and Octavia Spencer (Vaughn) capture key elements of their characters, such as Vaughn's leadership, Johnson's knack with analytical geometry and Jackson's barrier-breaking spirit. Spencer, whose performance is nominated for a Golden Globe, and the other members of the cast spent time with mathematicians to prep for their roles.

"For me, it was about knowing who she was as a woman, knowing who she was at work," Spencer said. "She not only had the mind of an engineer, but she was mechanically inclined. I was proficient at math, but this is rocket science."

Henson said she felt robbed by not knowing about these pioneers as a child: "Had I known these women existed, maybe I would have dreamed to be a rocket scientist? But growing up there was a universal understanding that math and science wasn't for girls."

Kevin Costner, who plays a forward-thinking NASA director, lamented that Katherine Johnson's contributions remained outside the mainstream as America's first rides into space were cemented into history. But he viewed Hidden Figures as a turning point.

"You'd like to think the best ideas are getting to the top. I think the beauty of our movie is that when you're done watching it, you can realize that, well, the best idea got to the top," Costner said.

The film takes liberties with timelines and events - creating amalgams of their mathematical achievements and the racial discrimination experienced across their careers. For instance, Johnson's landmark paper from 1960 - that described rocket trajectories for the Mercury missions - gets spread across multiple scenes with chalkboards...so many chalkboards. However, Johnson's ability to innovate new math and much of the film's climax involving her and Glenn are steeped in truth, according to Shetterly's book.

NASA engineer Shelia Nash-Stevenson, who wasn't involved with film's production, felt the depiction landed on solid ground even with the fudging.

"It's okay for them to take a few liberties, as long as they're 90 percent accurate," said Nash-Stevenson, who was the first African-American female in the state of Alabama to receive a PhD in physics. "Nobody wants to see you actually sit there for days on end calculating a formula or trajectory."

Plus, Nash-Stevenson said Hidden Figures would encourage children, especially young girls, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math.

"Dorothy and the rest of the ladies, Katherine, and Mary were brilliant," Nash-Stevenson said. "What these girls don't realize these days is that they, too, are brilliant."
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race is available through HarperCollins. The cinematic adaptation opens in select theaters on December 25, 2016. Stay tuned for NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown's interview with the cast and crew, which will air before the wide release on January 6, 2017.

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'Hidden Figures' and the journey to celebrate NASA's black female pioneers

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If you're a person of color in America right now, it may feel like you're riding a carousel of darkness. Viral stories of black killings, once occasional events, morphed into déjà vu in 2016 - potentially triggering PTSD-like trauma. The rise of the alt-right, a white nationalist movement, echoes sentiments of public segregation once thought long gone.

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How did they change the role of African Americans in the military/society?  What was ironic about their experience?

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The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps (AAC), a precursor of the U.S. Air Force. Trained at the Tuskegee Army