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Native Americans

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2200 B.C.—Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)

2200 B.C. to 1600 A.D.

1607—Early settlement at Jamestown

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1. Oral literature: epic narratives, creation myths, stories, poems, songs.

2. Use stories to teach moral lessons and convey practical information about the natural world.

3. Deep respect for nature and animals.

4. Cyclical worldview.

5. Figurative language/parallelism.

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Native Americans spoke more than 300 different languages.

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Since time immemorial, Native Americans have lived on this continent, from the northern reaches of Alaska to the Gulf Coast of Florida. There are more than nine million Native Americans living in what is now the United States, representing hundreds of tribal nations with incredibly diverse languages, cultures and traditions. Here are just a few fascinating facts about the tribes and histories of Native Americans.

1. Native Americans spoke more than 300 languages.

North America was home to a huge number of spoken languages prior to colonization: more than 300, with as many as 500 spoken across the continent.

However, many of these languages have disappeared as a result of assimilation policies by the government. In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant declared, "In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble... their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted."

Beginning in the 1800s, Native Americans were displaced from their communities and moved onto reserves, and children were taken to Indian boarding schools and educated in English. It wasn't until 1972, when Congress passed the Indian Education Act, that Native American tribes were permitted to teach their own languages.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2013 there were 169 Native languages spoken in the United States. Many of them have very small numbers of speakers. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Language Act, which provides support for Native American language preservation and revitalization. This support is critical: all but two Native American languages are in danger of disappearing altogether by 2050.

2. The first newspaper in a Native American language began publishing in 1828.

Prior to colonization, Native American languages were orally transmitted. After the arrival of Europeans, several tribes began to adopt writing systems. Sequoyah, a member of the Cherokee Nation, spent 12 years developing a writing system so that his people could learn to read and write in their language, completing his 86-character syllabary in 1821.

"There are many syllabaries-the Japanese hiragana is the most famous one," says Dr. Ellen Cushman, a member of the Cherokee Nation and professor at Northeastern University. "But Cherokee is the only one that was invented by a Native person, for Native people."

Because the syllabary was created to represent the specific sounds of the Cherokee language, it was easy for the Cherokee to learn. "Within a span of three to five years, the tribe could read and write," says Cushman.

On February 21, 1828, the first edition of the Cherokee Phoenix was published in the Cherokee capital of New Echota, Georgia. The first bilingual newspaper in the United States, it was printed in both English and Cherokee.

3. There are 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States.

Of the 574 federally recognized tribes, 229 are found in Alaska. California has the second-highest number of federally recognized tribes, with 109, as well as the largest Native American population of any state.

These federally recognized tribes have government-to-government relationships with the United States, like other sovereign nations. But many tribes do not have federal recognition, which means they are ineligible for government programs and support.

As of 2020, 66 tribes had received state recognition in 13 states. State recognition does not always entitle tribes to state or federal benefits, but it does acknowledge their historical and contemporary existence.

4. Native Americans cultivated many of the world's most important crops.

Native American tribes have had varied diets that have reflected their local food systems. Many Native American tribes practiced agriculture, domesticating the crops that we eat today. In 2016, it was estimated that as much as 60 percent of the global food supply was based on crops that originated in North America.

Corn was created by Indigenous farmers in southern Mexico and Guatemala perhaps 10,000 years ago. By the time European colonists arrived in North America, Native Americans had been growing it for thousands of years. Native Americans also cultivated beans, squash, potatoes and tomatoes.

5. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is one of the oldest living democracies in the world.

Also called the Iroquois Confederacy by the French, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was formed by five tribal nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. Some researchers believe it was founded in 1142, while the Confederacy itself says it has existed since time immemorial. Regardless, it is considered one of the oldest participatory democracies on earth.

The nations are united by the Great Law of Peace ( Kaianere'ko:wa), which serves as their political constitution. A sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined the Confederacy in the 18th century.

"Many tribes were democratic, but the Haudenosaunee Confederacy brought people together across a large geographic expanse. That's part of what makes them unique," says Dr. Donald A. Grinde Jr., the author of Exemplar of Libertyand a professor with Yamasee heritage at University at Buffalo.

Grinde's research has focused on the influence of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy on the United States Constitution. "There were three major contributions," says Grinde. "First, that sovereignty resides in the people. The second is the separation of powers, the distinct branches of government. And the third is the constitution itself, with articles that can be cited, similar to how the Haudenosaunee recited their Great Law of Peace each year." Unlike the United States Constitution, women played an active role in Haudenosaunee democracy.

6. Native Americans were forcibly displaced by the Indian Relocation Act in 1830.

Prior to colonization, Native Americans lived all across the land that is now known as the United States. But in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. The act was spurred by the desire of white settlers to grow cotton in the South on the valuable lands of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek and other tribes.

The act was used to force Native Americans out of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, and to send them to "Indian territory" located in what is now Oklahoma. Thousands died during these forced migrations.

7. Native Americans were granted American citizenship in 1924.

The Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2, 1924. Some Native Americans were already considered U.S. citizens, because the 1887 Dawes Act, which granted citizenship to those who accepted land grants.

However, even though they had been given full citizenship, many Native Americans were still denied the right to vote. Voting rights were up to states, and many continued to deny them to Native Americans for decades.

States also used discriminatory practices to limit access to the polls. For instance, many used literacy tests, which prevented Native Americans (and others) who could not read and write English from voting. These practices continued until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The Navajo Nation is almost 25,000 square miles-an area about the size of West Virginia, and more than twice as large as Maryland. The nation extends into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

In 2021, the Navajo Nation also surpassed the Cherokee Nation to become the largest tribe by population too, with nearly 400,000 registered members. And as you might expect, Navajo has the most speakers of any Native American language.

9. Not all Native Americans tribes have their own land.

There are around 326 tribal land areas in the United States, compared to 574 federally-recognized tribes. Of the tribes that do have land, it is on average only about 2.6 percent as large as the territory they occupied before colonization. Many of the tribes who were forcibly relocated by the U.S. government were left without any land of their own.

It's commonly cited that only 22 percent of Native Americans live on tribal lands, a statistic that comes from the 2010 Census. However, a 2014 study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that 68 percent of Native Americans and Alaskan Natives live on or near their homelands.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
9 Facts About Native American Tribes | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are more than nine million Native Americans living in the United States, representing hundreds of tribal nations with diverse languages, cultures and traditions.

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Native Americans cultivated many of the world's most important crops.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since time immemorial, Native Americans have lived on this continent, from the northern reaches of Alaska to the Gulf Coast of Florida. There are more than nine million Native Americans living in what is now the United States, representing hundreds of tribal nations with incredibly diverse languages, cultures and traditions. Here are just a few fascinating facts about the tribes and histories of Native Americans.

1. Native Americans spoke more than 300 languages.

North America was home to a huge number of spoken languages prior to colonization: more than 300, with as many as 500 spoken across the continent.

However, many of these languages have disappeared as a result of assimilation policies by the government. In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant declared, "In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble... their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted."

Beginning in the 1800s, Native Americans were displaced from their communities and moved onto reserves, and children were taken to Indian boarding schools and educated in English. It wasn't until 1972, when Congress passed the Indian Education Act, that Native American tribes were permitted to teach their own languages.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2013 there were 169 Native languages spoken in the United States. Many of them have very small numbers of speakers. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Language Act, which provides support for Native American language preservation and revitalization. This support is critical: all but two Native American languages are in danger of disappearing altogether by 2050.

2. The first newspaper in a Native American language began publishing in 1828.

Prior to colonization, Native American languages were orally transmitted. After the arrival of Europeans, several tribes began to adopt writing systems. Sequoyah, a member of the Cherokee Nation, spent 12 years developing a writing system so that his people could learn to read and write in their language, completing his 86-character syllabary in 1821.

"There are many syllabaries-the Japanese hiragana is the most famous one," says Dr. Ellen Cushman, a member of the Cherokee Nation and professor at Northeastern University. "But Cherokee is the only one that was invented by a Native person, for Native people."

Because the syllabary was created to represent the specific sounds of the Cherokee language, it was easy for the Cherokee to learn. "Within a span of three to five years, the tribe could read and write," says Cushman.

On February 21, 1828, the first edition of the Cherokee Phoenix was published in the Cherokee capital of New Echota, Georgia. The first bilingual newspaper in the United States, it was printed in both English and Cherokee.

3. There are 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States.

Of the 574 federally recognized tribes, 229 are found in Alaska. California has the second-highest number of federally recognized tribes, with 109, as well as the largest Native American population of any state.

These federally recognized tribes have government-to-government relationships with the United States, like other sovereign nations. But many tribes do not have federal recognition, which means they are ineligible for government programs and support.

As of 2020, 66 tribes had received state recognition in 13 states. State recognition does not always entitle tribes to state or federal benefits, but it does acknowledge their historical and contemporary existence.

4. Native Americans cultivated many of the world's most important crops.

Native American tribes have had varied diets that have reflected their local food systems. Many Native American tribes practiced agriculture, domesticating the crops that we eat today. In 2016, it was estimated that as much as 60 percent of the global food supply was based on crops that originated in North America.

Corn was created by Indigenous farmers in southern Mexico and Guatemala perhaps 10,000 years ago. By the time European colonists arrived in North America, Native Americans had been growing it for thousands of years. Native Americans also cultivated beans, squash, potatoes and tomatoes.

5. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is one of the oldest living democracies in the world.

Also called the Iroquois Confederacy by the French, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was formed by five tribal nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. Some researchers believe it was founded in 1142, while the Confederacy itself says it has existed since time immemorial. Regardless, it is considered one of the oldest participatory democracies on earth.

The nations are united by the Great Law of Peace ( Kaianere'ko:wa), which serves as their political constitution. A sixth nation, the Tuscarora, joined the Confederacy in the 18th century.

"Many tribes were democratic, but the Haudenosaunee Confederacy brought people together across a large geographic expanse. That's part of what makes them unique," says Dr. Donald A. Grinde Jr., the author of Exemplar of Libertyand a professor with Yamasee heritage at University at Buffalo.

Grinde's research has focused on the influence of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy on the United States Constitution. "There were three major contributions," says Grinde. "First, that sovereignty resides in the people. The second is the separation of powers, the distinct branches of government. And the third is the constitution itself, with articles that can be cited, similar to how the Haudenosaunee recited their Great Law of Peace each year." Unlike the United States Constitution, women played an active role in Haudenosaunee democracy.

6. Native Americans were forcibly displaced by the Indian Relocation Act in 1830.

Prior to colonization, Native Americans lived all across the land that is now known as the United States. But in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. The act was spurred by the desire of white settlers to grow cotton in the South on the valuable lands of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek and other tribes.

The act was used to force Native Americans out of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, and to send them to "Indian territory" located in what is now Oklahoma. Thousands died during these forced migrations.

7. Native Americans were granted American citizenship in 1924.

The Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2, 1924. Some Native Americans were already considered U.S. citizens, because the 1887 Dawes Act, which granted citizenship to those who accepted land grants.

However, even though they had been given full citizenship, many Native Americans were still denied the right to vote. Voting rights were up to states, and many continued to deny them to Native Americans for decades.

States also used discriminatory practices to limit access to the polls. For instance, many used literacy tests, which prevented Native Americans (and others) who could not read and write English from voting. These practices continued until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The Navajo Nation is almost 25,000 square miles-an area about the size of West Virginia, and more than twice as large as Maryland. The nation extends into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

In 2021, the Navajo Nation also surpassed the Cherokee Nation to become the largest tribe by population too, with nearly 400,000 registered members. And as you might expect, Navajo has the most speakers of any Native American language.

9. Not all Native Americans tribes have their own land.

There are around 326 tribal land areas in the United States, compared to 574 federally-recognized tribes. Of the tribes that do have land, it is on average only about 2.6 percent as large as the territory they occupied before colonization. Many of the tribes who were forcibly relocated by the U.S. government were left without any land of their own.

It's commonly cited that only 22 percent of Native Americans live on tribal lands, a statistic that comes from the 2010 Census. However, a 2014 study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that 68 percent of Native Americans and Alaskan Natives live on or near their homelands.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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9 Facts About Native American Tribes | HISTORY

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There are more than nine million Native Americans living in the United States, representing hundreds of tribal nations with diverse languages, cultures and traditions.

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Puritanism and Early Settlement  of First "American" colonies
1600-1800

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1507: Early Settlement of the first American colonies - Jamestown

1692: Salem Witch Trials

1741: Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

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1. Wrote mostly diaries and histories, which expressed the connections between God and their everyday lives.
2. South to "purify" the Church of England by reforming to the simpler forms of worship and church organization described in the New Testament.
3. Saw religion as a personal, inner experience.
4. Believed in original sin and "elect" who would be saved.
5. Used a plain style of writing.

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William Bradford
-"Of Plymouth Plantation"

Anne Bradstreet (poetry)

John Edwards
-"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"

Edward Taylor
-"Huswifery"

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Early settlement was harsh for the colonists. The lack of resources and help, along with Native American conflict, pushed the colonists to their limits.

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Jamestown Colony - Facts, Founding, Pocahontas

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The Jamestown Colony was the first permanent English settlement in North America. It was founded on the banks of Virginia’s James River in 1607.

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In 1619, a Representative democracy would begin to form; however, it would start as a very limited government. For example, only men who owned property had the right to vote.

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In the autumn of 1609, after Smith left, Chief Powhatan began a campaign to starve the English out of Virginia. The tribes under his rule stopped bartering for food and carried out attacks on English parties that came in search of trade. Hunting became highly dangerous, as the Powhatan Indians also killed Englishmen they found outside the fort. Long reliant on the Indians, the colony found itself with far too little food for the winter.

As the food stocks ran out, the settlers ate the colony's animals-horses, dogs, and cats-and then turned to eating rats, mice, and shoe leather. In their desperation, some practiced cannibalism. The winter of 1609-10, commonly known as the Starving Time, took a heavy toll. Of the 500 colonists living in Jamestown in the autumn, fewer than one-fifth were still alive by March 1610. Sixty were still in Jamestown; another 37, more fortunate, had escaped by ship.

On May 24, 1610, two ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, unexpectedly arrived. The colonists who had wrecked on the Bermuda Islands all had survived and managed to rebuild the two ships to carry them onward. Those colonists, led by Gates (the new governor) and George Somers, assumed they would find a thriving colony. Instead they found near-skeletal survivors. Gates and Somers had brought only a small food supply, so Gates decided to abandon the colony. On June 7 all the colonists boarded four small ships to head home. On their way out of the Chesapeake Bay, however, they encountered an incoming fleet of three ships under Thomas West, 12th baron de la Warr, who ordered them to turn around. West brought with him 150 new settlers, ample provisions for the colony, and orders from the company naming him governor and captain-general of Virginia.

In his initial message to Chief Powhatan, West demanded that he return some stolen English tools and weapons and also turn over the perpetrator of the recent murder of an Englishman. Powhatan replied with "proud and disdainful answers" (as one colonist put it), telling West to either keep the colonists within the Jamestown peninsula or leave the country. The exchange brought about a state of war. West left Virginia in March 1611, after struggling with a series of diseases, but the hostilities between the Indians and the English continued.

Peace and the onset of the tobacco economy (1613-14)

Sir Samuel Argall, a mariner who had taken West back to England, returned to the colony and became acquainted with Japazeus, the chief of the Patawomeck tribe. The Patawomeck were located along the Potomac River, beyond Chief Powhatan's empire. In March 1613 Argall chanced to learn that Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas was staying with Japazeus. Argall resolved to kidnap her and ransom her for English prisoners held by the Powhatan Indians and for English weapons and tools the Powhatan had taken.

After persuading Japazeus to cooperate, Argall seized Pocahontas and brought her to Jamestown. He sent a messenger to Chief Powhatan with his demands. Powhatan freed the seven Englishmen he had held captive, but an impasse resulted when he did not return the weapons and tools and refused to negotiate further. Negotiations finally broke down altogether. Pocahontas was taken to an English outpost called Henricus, near present-day Richmond, Virginia. Over the following year, she converted to Christianity and became close to an Englishman named John Rolfe, a pioneering planter of tobacco. Rolfe asked for and received permission from the colony's leaders to marry Pocahontas; the wedding took place in April 1614. As the colony's leaders had anticipated, the marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas brought about peaceful relations between the Powhatans and the English, which lasted almost eight years.

Rolfe, John Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: LC-DIG-pga-03343)

Rolfe's experiments with tobacco quickly transformed the settlement. By replacing native Virginia tobacco with more-palatable plants from the West Indies, he was able to raise a product that could compete with Spanish tobacco in the British market. After Rolfe sent his first barrels to England in 1614, other colonists observed his lucrative results and imitated him. By the end of the decade, the colony had virtually a one-crop economy.

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Jamestown Colony - The Starving Time and near abandonment (1609-11)

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Jamestown Colony - Jamestown Colony - The Starving Time and near abandonment (1609-11): In the autumn of 1609, after Smith left, Chief Powhatan began a campaign to starve the English out of Virginia. The tribes under his rule stopped bartering for food and carried out attacks on English parties that came in search of trade.

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Rationalism

"The Age of Reason"

"The Enlightenment"

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1607 Early Settlement—Jamestown

1775-1783 Revolutionary War

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1. Mostly comprised of philosophers, scientists, writing speeches and pamphlets

2. Human beings can arrive at truth (God's rules) by using deductive reasoning, rather than relying on the authority of the past, on religious faith, or intuition

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Benjamin Franklin
—Autobiography

Patrick Henry
—"Speech to the Virginia Convention"

Thomas Paine
—"The Crisis"

Phyllis Wheatley
—poetry

The Constitution

The Bill of Rights

The Declaration of Independence

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France would be the country to turn a civil war into a worldwide conflict.

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Causes of the Revolutionary War

For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities.

The French and Indian War, or Seven Years' War (1756-1763), brought new territories under the power of the crown, but the expensive conflict lead to new and unpopular taxes. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects.

Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians altered their appearance to hide their identity boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.

Did you know? Now most famous as a traitor to the American cause, General Benedict Arnold began the Revolutionary War as one of its earliest heroes, helping lead rebel forces in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.

In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent. It issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out.

On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord, Massachusetts in order to seize an arms cache. Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilizing to intercept the Redcoats. On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, marking the "shot heard round the world" that signified the start of the Revolutionary War.

HISTORY Vault: The Revolution

Declaring Independence (1775-76)

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates-including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson-voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution's first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed's Hill in Boston. The engagement, known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause.

Throughout that fall and winter, Washington's forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.

By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson. That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe's Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September. Pushed across the Delaware River, Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels' flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.

Saratoga: Revolutionary War Turning Point (1777-78)

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne's army marched south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe's forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne's men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington's army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania, on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge.

Howe's move had left Burgoyne's army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman's Farm in the first Battle of Saratoga. After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

Stalemate in the North, Battle in the South (1778-81)

During the long, hard winter at Valley Forge, Washington's troops benefited from the training and discipline of the Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette. On June 28, 1778, as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington's army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey. The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the Comte d'Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island, in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North.

The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the region, crushing Gates' American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King's Mountain in early October. Nathanael Green replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under Green's command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781.

Revolutionary War Draws to a Close (1781-83)

By the fall of 1781, Greene's American forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia's Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties into Chesapeake Bay. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation. Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his deputy, Charles O'Hara, to surrender; after O'Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.

Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at the Battle of Yorktown, contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

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Revolutionary War - Timeline, Facts & Battles | HISTORY

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The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

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The U.S. wasn't recognized as a sovereign nation until September 3rd, 1783, during the Treaty of Paris.

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Causes of the Revolutionary War

For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities.

The French and Indian War, or Seven Years' War (1756-1763), brought new territories under the power of the crown, but the expensive conflict lead to new and unpopular taxes. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects.

Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians altered their appearance to hide their identity boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.

Did you know? Now most famous as a traitor to the American cause, General Benedict Arnold began the Revolutionary War as one of its earliest heroes, helping lead rebel forces in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.

In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent. It issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out.

On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord, Massachusetts in order to seize an arms cache. Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilizing to intercept the Redcoats. On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, marking the "shot heard round the world" that signified the start of the Revolutionary War.

HISTORY Vault: The Revolution

Declaring Independence (1775-76)

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates-including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson-voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution's first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed's Hill in Boston. The engagement, known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause.

Throughout that fall and winter, Washington's forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.

By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson. That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe's Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September. Pushed across the Delaware River, Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels' flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.

Saratoga: Revolutionary War Turning Point (1777-78)

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne's army marched south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe's forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne's men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington's army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania, on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge.

Howe's move had left Burgoyne's army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman's Farm in the first Battle of Saratoga. After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

Stalemate in the North, Battle in the South (1778-81)

During the long, hard winter at Valley Forge, Washington's troops benefited from the training and discipline of the Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette. On June 28, 1778, as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington's army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey. The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the Comte d'Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island, in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North.

The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the region, crushing Gates' American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King's Mountain in early October. Nathanael Green replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under Green's command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781.

Revolutionary War Draws to a Close (1781-83)

By the fall of 1781, Greene's American forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia's Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties into Chesapeake Bay. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation. Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his deputy, Charles O'Hara, to surrender; after O'Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.

Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at the Battle of Yorktown, contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict. British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

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Revolutionary War - Timeline, Facts & Battles | HISTORY

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The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

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The Age of Enlightenment produced numerous books, documents, essays, etc.

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Table of Contents

1. The Early Enlightenment: 1685-1730

2. The High Enlightenment: 1730-1780

3. The Late Enlightenment and Beyond: 1780-1815

European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the "long 18th century" (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change.

The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.

The Early Enlightenment: 1685-1730

The Enlightenment's important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman René Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Newton published his "Principia Mathematica" (1686) and John Locke his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689)-two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment's major advances.

Did you know? In his essay 'What Is Enlightenment?' (1784), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up the era's motto in the following terms: 'Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!'

Locke argued that human nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained through accumulated experience rather than by accessing some sort of outside truth. Newton's calculus and optical theories provided the powerful Enlightenment metaphors for precisely measured change and illumination.

There was no single, unified Enlightenment. Instead, it is possible to speak of the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment and the English, German, Swiss or American Enlightenment. Individual Enlightenment thinkers often had very different approaches. Locke differed from David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson from Frederick the Great. Their differences and disagreements, though, emerged out of the common Enlightenment themes of rational questioning and belief in progress through dialogue.

The High Enlightenment: 1730-1780

Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French "philosophes" (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot), the High Enlightenment might best be summed up by one historian's summary of Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary": "a chaos of clear ideas." Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged. The signature publication of the period was Diderot's "Encyclopédie" (1751-77), which brought together leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge.

It was an age of enlightened despots like Frederick the Great, who unified, rationalized and modernized Prussia in between brutal multi-year wars with Austria, and of enlightened would-be revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, whose "Declaration of Independence" (1776) framed the American Revolution in terms taken from of Locke's essays.

It was also a time of religious (and anti-religious) innovation, as Christians sought to reposition their faith along rational lines and deists and materialists argued that the universe seemed to determine its own course without God's intervention. Locke, along with French philosopher Pierre Bayle, began to champion the idea of the separation of Church and State. Secret societies-like the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Rosicrucians-flourished, offering European men (and a few women) new modes of fellowship, esoteric ritual and mutual assistance. Coffeehouses, newspapers and literary salons emerged as new venues for ideas to circulate.

The Late Enlightenment and Beyond: 1780-1815

The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade later, to the rise of Napoleon. Still, its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of "Frankenstein" author Mary Shelley) and inspired both the Haitian war of independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguay's first post-independence government.

Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, but 19th-century Liberalism and Classicism-not to mention 20th-century Modernism -all owe a heavy debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

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Enlightenment Period: Thinkers & Ideas | HISTORY

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Enlightenment was a movement of politics, philosophy, science and communications in Europe during the 19th century.

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The Age of Enlightenment directly influenced America and would eventually lead to the American Revolution. The Enlightenment also led to numerous scientific discoveries and philosophies.

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The Enlightenment (Age of Reason) was a revolution in thought in Europe and North America from the late 17th century to the late 18th century. The Enlightenment involved new approaches in philosophy, science, and politics. Above all, the human capacity for reason was championed as the tool by which our knowledge could be extended, individual liberty maintained, and happiness secured.

Origins of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is usually dated from the last quarter of the 17th century to the last quarter of the 18th century. During the Renaissance (1400-1600), when intellectuals and artists looked back to antiquity for inspiration, there arose the humanist movement, which stressed the promotion of civic virtue, that is, realising a person's full potential both for their own good and for the good of the society in which they live. The ideas of the Enlightenment flourished from these roots and blossomed thanks to events like the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648), which diminished the traditional power of the Christian Church in everyday life. Most enlightened thinkers did not want to replace the Church, but they did want greater religious freedom and toleration.

The Enlightenment derives its name 'light' from the contrast to what was then seen as the 'darkness' of the Middle Ages. We now know that the medieval period was perhaps not quite as 'dark' as once thought, but the essential fact remains that religion, superstition, and deference to authority did permeate that period of human existence before philosophers began to challenge these concepts in the 17th century. It was no longer possible to simply accept received wisdom as truth just because it had been unchallenged for centuries.

Not for nothing were the enlightened philosophers also called 'free-thinkers'.

In this new atmosphere of relative intellectual freedom, reason challenged accepted beliefs. Just like the practical experiments scientists were conducting in the Scientific Revolution to discover the laws of nature, so, too, philosophers were keen to apply reason to age-old problems of how we should live together in societies, how we can be virtuous, what is the best form of government, and what constitutes happiness. This was a battle of reason against emotion, superstition, and fear; its principal weapons were optimism for a better world and both the freedom and ability to question absolutely everything. Not for nothing were the new enlightened philosophers also called 'free-thinkers'.

Pre-Enlightenment Thinkers

The Enlightenment was driven forward by philosophers, although given that many were also writers of non-philosophical works or even dabbled in politics, they might be better described today as intellectuals. These thinkers challenged accepted thought and, it is important to stress, each other, since there was never any consensus as to the answers to the questions everyone was trying to answer. What is sure is this process of examining and building knowledge was a long one, with different strands in different places. With hindsight, we can reconstruct the chain of ideas we collectively call the Enlightenment, but the participants at that time were aware that they were involved in a new movement of thought.

There is a group of thinkers who are often called 'pre-Enlightenment' philosophers since they established some of the key foundations upon which the Enlightenment was built. This group includes Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), René Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and John Locke (1632-1704).

Bacon stressed the need for a new combined method of empirical experimentation (i.e. observation and experience) and shared data collection so that humanity might finally discover all of nature's secrets and improve itself. This approach was adopted by many enlightened philosophers. Bacon's thoughts on the need to test our knowledge to see if it is actually true and his belief that we could build a better world if we all applied ourselves were also influential.

Hobbes, an English politician and thinker, proposed the idea of a state of nature, a brutish existence before we got together into societies. Hobbes believed that citizens must sacrifice some liberties in order to gain the security of society, and they do this when they form a social contract between themselves, that is, a collective promise to abide by certain rules of behaviour. He also believed, because of his pessimistic view of human nature, where people act entirely out of self-interest, that a very strong political authority was required, his Leviathan, named after the biblical monster. These ideas and Hobbes' attempt to disentangle philosophy, morality, and politics from religion would all inspire Enlightenment thinkers, either in support or in providing alternative models.

Descartes, a French rationalist philosopher, proposed that all knowledge must be subjected to doubt because our senses are unreliable, we may be dreaming, or we may be living in a deception created by an evil demon. Descartes' conclusion of applying doubt to everything is his founding principle of indubitable truth Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). From Decartes' ideas came Cartesianism and the position that the mind and body (or matter) are two distinct things but, in some way that thinkers had yet to determine, they interact with each other. While some critics point out that Descartes' hunting down of doubts can lead to absurdities and total scepticism, his strategy has importance for the Enlightenment since it demonstrates the value of questioning everything and not taking at face value knowledge we have inherited from previous generations - knowledge that may, in fact, turn out to be not knowledge at all but only belief.

The Dutchman Spinoza attacked superstition and challenged the traditional role of God in human affairs, suggesting God does not interfere in our everyday lives. Combining rationalism and metaphysics, Spinoza was greatly interested in science and believed that by using our reason and studying nature we could come to better know ourselves and the divine. He also called for greater religious toleration.

The Englishman Locke proposed that there should be limits on state power in order to guarantee certain liberties, especially the right to hold property, which he considered a natural right (i.e. it is not given by a government or law code). Locke's perfect state has a separation of powers, and the government can only operate if it has the consent of the people. Further, citizens can overthrow a government if it does not perform its role of protecting their rights. Locke believed humans can work together for a common good. He believed that individuals are more important than institutions like absolute monarchs and the Church. He believed that all citizens are equal and the state should educate its citizens to be reasoned and tolerant citizens. More than any other thinker, perhaps, Locke's ideas not only inspired other thinkers but also influenced real-world affairs.

There were many other thinkers that influenced the Enlightenment, but space precludes discussion of them here; men like the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who believed that all knowledge was interconnected. In short, a whole body of international thinkers had already come up with the essential playing cards of the Enlightenment game before it had even started. Later philosophers now reshuffled these, selected some, and rejected others in their search for the winning hand of just how humans should live and knowledge be acquired.

10 Key Enlightenment Thinkers

Having set the foundation, then, a new wave of thinkers set about building a new edifice of Western knowledge. Disagreeing just as often they agreed with each other, all of the thinkers had the common objective of finding a better world to live in.

One of the first texts of the Enlightenment proper was the 1687 Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newton's book is in many ways a culmination of the Scientific Revolution, and it presents the view that the world around us can be understood, and the best tool for that purpose is science, in particular, mathematics. In his discovery of the force of gravity (and others besides), Newton showed that empiricism and deduction were the best methods to increase knowledge. Philosophers took this approach in their own work. Newton also showed that there was harmony and order in nature, which was something that philosophers sought to recreate in human society.

The French philosophe Montesquieu (1689-1757) was mostly concerned with avoiding authoritarian government. Going beyond Locke, he researched the history of politics - essentially founding political science - and famously articulated a separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judiciary. He is another thinker who advocates the protection of individual liberty through laws, non-government interference, and toleration. To give an idea of the battle with the Establishment many enlightened thinkers had to face, Montesquieu's book The Spirit of the Laws was put on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1751.

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The French author Voltaire (1694-1778) "more than any other represented the Enlightenment to his contemporaries" (Chisick, 430). Less an original philosopher and more a destroyer of the old attitudes, Voltaire was critical of the power of the Catholic Church, he called for more individual liberty and religious toleration, and championed our power of reason and innate capacity for moral behaviour. Voltaire also chastised philosophers for not coming up with practical solutions to society's problems.

David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, who presented a positive view of human nature - we all possess a capacity for sympathy and a natural moral sense - but a sceptical view of religion's usefulness. Hume believed knowledge comes only from experience and observation but also acknowledged there are some things we can never know such as, why is there evil in the world? Hume expanded the notion of reason to include emotion.

The Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) contributed with his mixing of Hobbes and Locke in stating that humans in a state of nature are free, equal, and have two basic instincts: a sense of self-preservation and a pity for others. The people must gather in a community based on consent and with the ultimate objective of that society being the common good. For Rousseau, the general will is a compromise where individuals sacrifice complete liberty to achieve the next best option: a restriction on liberty in order to avoid a situation of no liberty at all. Whatever the general will turns out to be, that is the right one. Rousseau does recognise the need for a system of laws and strong government to guide the general will of the people when it might inadvertently err and to protect property, for him, an unfortunate creation of society. Rousseau was also concerned with ridding society of its obvious inequalities and injustices by having the state encourage its citizens through education to adopt a less self-interested approach to community life.

The thoughts of the Frenchman Denis Diderot (1713-1784) may be summarised as a humanistic belief in individual autonomy and the positive use of modern, non-religious, and, if possible, scientific arguments and methods to challenge age-old knowledge based on faith and superstition alone. Diderot was editor of the multivolume Encyclopedia, often described as the ' Bible of the Enlightenment' and summarised by N. Hampson as "an anthology of 'enlightened' opinions on politics, philosophy, and religion" (86). Diderot spent time advising both Catherine the Great (empress regent of Russia, 1762-1796) and Frederick the Great in Prussia (l. 1712-1786), examples of so-called 'Enlightened despots'.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist. He believed that economics is a science and follows certain laws, what he called the 'Invisible Hand'. These laws, like any laws of nature, can be discovered through the use of reason. Smith called for free trade and limited interference in markets by governments, for which he is seen as the founder of liberal economics. A. Gottlieb describes Smith's The Wealth of Nations as "the founding text of modern economics" (198).

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) challenged the dominance of empiricism and rationalism in Enlightenment thought as he believed that some knowledge must be independent of sensation, examples given include our concepts of space and time. These things are a priori knowledge, things that we can think about without ever experiencing them directly. Consequently, Kant shifted the focus of philosophy to an examination of general concepts and categories. In ethics, Kant stated that moral worth comes from a person's intentions and not from the results of their actions, which could be accidental. Good actions spring from following rules without exceptions like "never tell lies", what he called categorical imperatives. Kant also stressed the need for toleration, education, and cooperation between nations.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) stated that any nation and its institutions, including religious ones, were a product of a rich and long history, and so one particular generation should not simply cast away such time-tested guardians of our safety and liberty. Burke also thought that intuition and imagination were just as important tools as reason in understanding our world.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809), in his pamphlet Common Sense, famously called for the American colonies to rebel against British rule. Paine denounced slavery, was opposed to any form of privilege, believed all men are equal and should have the right to vote, and he called for a system of progressive taxation that could fund a fairer society.

Here we have considered only ten enlightened thinkers, but there were, of course, many more, but, unfortunately, space precludes their mention. The trend to apply enlightened thought to practical everyday problems was continued. Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) called for prison reform and the end of excessive punishments for criminals. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) called for equal education opportunities for men and women and stressed the benefits to society of improving the situation of women. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) offered a way to measure the success of new laws with his utilitarianism and its "greatest happiness of the greatest number principle". Thinking about a better world had been the priority of the Enlightenment, but as the 18th century wore on, actually making one became the new priority.

A Great Mixing of Ideas

For ideas to spread and take root, there needed to be interaction between intellectuals, and this was achieved (beyond merely physically visiting each other) by several new means. The printing press allowed not only books to be distributed relatively cheaply but also treatises, pamphlets, and magazines. Never before had so much paper been passed across Europe. Ideas, and perhaps even more importantly, critical reaction to those ideas, and so the stimulus for yet more ideas, could be spread faster than ever before.

Another means for intellectuals to interact was the rise of academies and societies, where papers were published in in-house magazines, and meetings and debates were held. People also met in coffee houses to discuss new ideas. Yet another means of spreading ideas was the salon, particularly in Paris, although soon the idea caught on everywhere. These salons, so often managed by women, further aided the transmission of ideas not only between intellectuals but also different sections of society. For the first time, perhaps, philosophers, artists, politicians, and business people were able to meet together informally. Further, there was even some mixing of different levels of society in salons since the intellectuals and artistic creators could now meet aristocrats and those with great wealth, a meeting that often led to patronage, and so yet more ideas could be created.

The Impact of the Enlightenment

A key idea of enlightened thinkers was the belief that human existence could be improved through human endeavour. Developments in science and technology as well as progressive thinking in political philosophy meant that a better standard of living could be achieved for everyone. Reforms were championed that reduced society's inequalities and diminished the impact of such negative but all-too-present phenomena as famine, disease, and poverty. Reformers called for real change in education so that more young people could attend school and become better citizens by developing their natural ability to reason. Just as individuals were to be left to pursue their own liberty and happiness in the new politics of liberalism, there developed the idea of laissez-faire economics, that is, minimising government interference to let the economy develop as the markets dictated it should. Modern liberal democracies then are based on the Enlightenment idea that some areas of life are no business of the state, a marked difference to societies of the Middle Ages.

To these general consequences of the Enlightenment, there can be added definite practical ones. As the Enlightenment specialist N. Hampson notes, the danger of studying the Enlightenment only in intellectual terms can lead to the conclusion that "the Enlightenment was everything in general and nothing in particular" (Cameron, 296). Some practical particulars include the end of the persecution of heretics, no more witches being burnt at the stake, serfdom coming to its final stage, and torture being removed from judicial processes. There were powerful movements to end slavery and the death penalty. The Church was formally separated from the state in some places, notably France. More universities and libraries were founded. Greater fairness was achieved in electoral systems.

The impact of the progress in science would be seen in the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) and its counterparts across the world. Many enlightened thinkers also foresaw the darker side of 'progress', such as an unrestrained individualism opposed to the common good and minority-controlled technological development that alienated large groups of people and destroyed the environment.

It was not just the intellectuals who believed they could shape a better future. It took a long time for the high ideas of intellectuals to filter down to the lower classes, but descend they eventually did. Ordinary people of all classes now considered taking direct action to improve their lot in life and the political systems in which they lived. The two clearest examples of this action for a better world are the French Revolution and the American Revolutionary War. Revolutionaries in both events were inspired by and frequently quoted the works of enlightened philosophers; their revolutionary documents like the French Bill of Rights and the US Declaration of Independence were replete with the language these philosophers were using such as "inalienable rights" and "pursuit of happiness".

Criticisms of the Enlightenment

In some areas like the arts, there was a reaction to the Enlightenment and the new dominance of reason. This reaction was seen most clearly in the movement we call Romanticism (1775-1830), where, in literature and art, emphasis was given to new forms and modes of emotional and spontaneous expression.

Other critics of the Enlightenment lament its contradictory results such as a possible overemphasis on individuals and yet also a strong state. Critics point to the rejection of cultural traditions, the reduction in value of faith and religious beliefs, that economic, scientific, and technological 'progress' is, in fact, only 'regression' in terms of our humanity, and that the Eurocentric philosophers were ignorant of what makes humans different in different places (or even the same place). In short, the Enlightenment has been blamed for all the ills of modernity, whether it be the Holocaust or the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest. One might counterargue, and plenty of historians have, that such blanket criticisms can only be made against the Enlightenment if one takes it as an entirely homogenous collection of ideas, something this article hopefully discourages.

Into the 21st century, the achievements of the Enlightenment, particularly liberty, freedom of thought, and toleration are still in existence in many places, but certainly not everywhere. As the historian H. Chisick points out these freedoms are not immune to ever-present threats like racism, political extremism, and religious fanaticism:

Apparently, the key values of the Enlightenment are not acquired once and for all. Rather, they must be appropriated by each generation and each culture in turn, or they will be submerged and lost. (160)

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The Enlightenment (Age of Reason) was a revolution in thought in Europe and North America from the late 17th century to the late 18th century. The Enlightenment involved new approaches in philosophy...

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Transcendentalism

"The American Renaissance"

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1840-1860

Transcendentalism

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1. Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul.

2. People can use their intuition to behold God's spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls.

3. Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and link conformity to tradition.

4. Important social and political movements include the Abolitionist, Utopian, and Women's Suffrage Movements

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
—Nature
—"Self-Reliance"

Henry David Thoreau
—Walden
—Life in the Woods

Louisa May Alcott
—Little Women

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Transcendentalists believe in a self-centered ideology that you as an individual can somehow acquire knowledge or truth through nature minimalism.

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The Origins of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s and the birth of Unitarianism. It was born from a debate between "New Light" theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and "Old Light" opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.

These "Old Lights" became known first as "liberal Christians" and then as Unitarians, and were defined by the belief that there was no trinity of father, son and holy ghost as in traditional Christian belief, and that Jesus Christ was a mortal.

Various philosophies began to swirl around this crowd, and the ideas that would become Transcendentalism split from Unitarianism over its perceived rationality and instead embraced German Romanticism in a quest for a more spiritual experience.

Thinkers in the movement embraced ideas brought forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ancient Indian scripture known as the Vedas and religious founder Emanuel Swedenborg.

Transcendentalists advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature and opposing materialism.

By the 1830s, literature began to appear that bound the Transcendentalist ideas together in a cohesive way and marked the beginnings of a more organized movement.

The Transcendental Club

On September 12, 1836, four Harvard University alumni-writer and Bangor, Maine, minister Frederic Henry Hodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Unitarian ministers George Ripley and George Putnam-left a celebration of the bicentennial of Harvard to meet at Willard's Hotel in Cambridge.

The purpose was to follow up on correspondence between Hodge and Emerson and to talk about the state of Unitarianism and what they could do about it.

One week later, the four met again at Ripley's house in Boston. This was a meeting of a much larger group that included many Unitarian ministers, intellectuals, writers and reformers. There would be 30 more meetings of what was called "the Transcendental Club" over the next four years, featuring a shifting membership that always included Emerson, Ripley, and Hodge.

The only rule the meetings followed was that no one would be allowed to attend if their presence prevented the group from discussing a topic. Emerson's essay "Nature," published in 1836, presented Transcendentalist philosophy as it had formed in the club meetings.

This group ceased to meet in 1840, but were involved in the publication The Dial, at first helmed by member and pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller, and later by Emerson, with the mission of addressing Transcendentalist thought and concerns.

Henry David Thoreau got his start in The Dial, reporting on wildlife in Massachusetts. After its demise in 1844, Thoreau moved to Walden Pond where he wrote his most famous work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods.

Brook Farm

Inspired by different utopian groups like the Shakers, members of the Transcendental Club were interested in forming a commune to put their ideas to the test. In 1841, a small group of them, including author Nathaniel Hawthorne, moved to a property named Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

The venture, helmed by George Ripley, was covered in the pages of The Dial as an idyllic one that involved farm work by day and creative work by candlelight at night.

Emerson never joined the farm. He approved of the commune but didn't want to give up his privacy, preferring to be a frequent visitor. Thoreau refused to join as well, finding the entire idea unappealing. Margaret Fuller visited but felt the farm was destined for failure.

The farm was run by members buying shares for life-long membership, guaranteeing an annual return on their investment, and allowing members who could not afford a share to compensate with work. As farmers, they were fledglings, but Hawthorne, in particular, was thrilled by the physicality of farming life.

There was also a boarding school onsite that was the farm's primary income source. The farm proved successful enough that in its first year, members had to build new homes on the property to house everyone. There were over 100 residents.

In 1844, following a restructuring that brought further growth, the commune began to fall into a slow decline, with members becoming disillusioned by its mission, as well as financial challenges and other problems, and squabbling amongst themselves. By 1847, this particular Transcendentalist experiment was finished.

Transcendentalism Fades Out

As the 1850s arrived, Transcendentalism is considered to have lost some of its influence, particularly following the untimely death of Margaret Fuller in an 1850 shipwreck.

Though its members remained active in the public eye-notably Emerson, Thoreau and others in their public opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850-following the failure of Brook Farm, it never again materialized as a cohesive group.

Sources

American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura.
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. Chris Jennings.
Transcendentalism. Arizona State University.
Transcendentalism. Stanford University.

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Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s and the birth of Unitarianism. It was born from a debate between "New Light" theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and "Old Light" opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.

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Transcendentalism arose in New England in the 1800's.

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The Origins of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s and the birth of Unitarianism. It was born from a debate between "New Light" theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and "Old Light" opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.

These "Old Lights" became known first as "liberal Christians" and then as Unitarians, and were defined by the belief that there was no trinity of father, son and holy ghost as in traditional Christian belief, and that Jesus Christ was a mortal.

Various philosophies began to swirl around this crowd, and the ideas that would become Transcendentalism split from Unitarianism over its perceived rationality and instead embraced German Romanticism in a quest for a more spiritual experience.

Thinkers in the movement embraced ideas brought forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ancient Indian scripture known as the Vedas and religious founder Emanuel Swedenborg.

Transcendentalists advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature and opposing materialism.

By the 1830s, literature began to appear that bound the Transcendentalist ideas together in a cohesive way and marked the beginnings of a more organized movement.

The Transcendental Club

On September 12, 1836, four Harvard University alumni-writer and Bangor, Maine, minister Frederic Henry Hodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Unitarian ministers George Ripley and George Putnam-left a celebration of the bicentennial of Harvard to meet at Willard's Hotel in Cambridge.

The purpose was to follow up on correspondence between Hodge and Emerson and to talk about the state of Unitarianism and what they could do about it.

One week later, the four met again at Ripley's house in Boston. This was a meeting of a much larger group that included many Unitarian ministers, intellectuals, writers and reformers. There would be 30 more meetings of what was called "the Transcendental Club" over the next four years, featuring a shifting membership that always included Emerson, Ripley, and Hodge.

The only rule the meetings followed was that no one would be allowed to attend if their presence prevented the group from discussing a topic. Emerson's essay "Nature," published in 1836, presented Transcendentalist philosophy as it had formed in the club meetings.

This group ceased to meet in 1840, but were involved in the publication The Dial, at first helmed by member and pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller, and later by Emerson, with the mission of addressing Transcendentalist thought and concerns.

Henry David Thoreau got his start in The Dial, reporting on wildlife in Massachusetts. After its demise in 1844, Thoreau moved to Walden Pond where he wrote his most famous work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods.

Brook Farm

Inspired by different utopian groups like the Shakers, members of the Transcendental Club were interested in forming a commune to put their ideas to the test. In 1841, a small group of them, including author Nathaniel Hawthorne, moved to a property named Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

The venture, helmed by George Ripley, was covered in the pages of The Dial as an idyllic one that involved farm work by day and creative work by candlelight at night.

Emerson never joined the farm. He approved of the commune but didn't want to give up his privacy, preferring to be a frequent visitor. Thoreau refused to join as well, finding the entire idea unappealing. Margaret Fuller visited but felt the farm was destined for failure.

The farm was run by members buying shares for life-long membership, guaranteeing an annual return on their investment, and allowing members who could not afford a share to compensate with work. As farmers, they were fledglings, but Hawthorne, in particular, was thrilled by the physicality of farming life.

There was also a boarding school onsite that was the farm's primary income source. The farm proved successful enough that in its first year, members had to build new homes on the property to house everyone. There were over 100 residents.

In 1844, following a restructuring that brought further growth, the commune began to fall into a slow decline, with members becoming disillusioned by its mission, as well as financial challenges and other problems, and squabbling amongst themselves. By 1847, this particular Transcendentalist experiment was finished.

Transcendentalism Fades Out

As the 1850s arrived, Transcendentalism is considered to have lost some of its influence, particularly following the untimely death of Margaret Fuller in an 1850 shipwreck.

Though its members remained active in the public eye-notably Emerson, Thoreau and others in their public opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850-following the failure of Brook Farm, it never again materialized as a cohesive group.

Sources

American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura.
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. Chris Jennings.
Transcendentalism. Arizona State University.
Transcendentalism. Stanford University.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s and the birth of Unitarianism. It was born from a debate between "New Light" theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and "Old Light" opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.

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Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)

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Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)

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Event happened on December 1, 1955

Protest happened from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956.

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1. Began the first large-scale U.S. protest against segregation in America.

2. Led to the Supreme Court ruling Montgomery to integrate its bus system.

3. Led to the rise of Martin Luther King Jr.

4. Ultimately led to the activism against racial segregation in America.

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Rosa Parks

- Activist

Martin Luther King Jr.

- Activist

"Rosa Parks: My Story"

- Rosa Parks, Jim Haskins

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On June 5, 1956, Montgomery ruled it unconstitutional to racially segregate people according to the 14th Amendment.

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Rosa Parks' Bus

In 1955, African Americans were still required by a Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance to sit in the back half of city buses and to yield their seats to white riders if the front half of the bus, reserved for whites, was full.

But on December 1, 1955, African American seamstress Rosa Parks was commuting home on Montgomery's Cleveland Avenue bus from her job at a local department store. She was seated in the front row of the "colored section." When the white seats filled, the driver, J. Fred Blake, asked Parks and three others to vacate their seats. The other Black riders complied, but Parks refused.

She was arrested and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. This was not Parks' first encounter with Blake. In 1943, she had paid her fare at the front of a bus he was driving, then exited so she could re-enter through the back door, as required. Blake pulled away before she could re-board the bus.

Did you know? Nine months before Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery for the same act. The city's Black leaders prepared to protest, until it was discovered Colvin was pregnant and deemed an inappropriate symbol for their cause.

Although Parks has sometimes been depicted as a woman with no history of civil rights activism at the time of her arrest, she and her husband Raymond were, in fact, active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), and Parks served as its secretary.

Upon her arrest, Parks called E.D. Nixon, a prominent Black leader, who bailed her out of jail and determined she would be an upstanding and sympathetic plaintiff in a legal challenge of the segregation ordinance. African American leaders decided to attack the ordinance using other tactics as well.

The Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of Black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried in municipal court. The boycott was organized by WPC President Jo Ann Robinson.

Montgomery's African Americans Mobilize

As news of the boycott spread, African American leaders across Montgomery (Alabama's capital city) began lending their support. Black ministers announced the boycott in church on Sunday, December 4, and the Montgomery Advertiser, a general-interest newspaper, published a front-page article on the planned action.

Approximately 40,000 Black bus riders-the majority of the city's bus riders-boycotted the system the next day, December 5. That afternoon, Black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The group elected Martin Luther King Jr., the 26-year-old-pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its president, and decided to continue the boycott until the city met its demands.

Initially, the demands did not include changing the segregation laws; rather, the group demanded courtesy, the hiring of Black drivers, and a first-come, first-seated policy, with whites entering and filling seats from the front and African Americans from the rear.

Ultimately, however, a group of five Montgomery women, represented by attorney Fred D. Gray and the NAACP, sued the city in U.S. District Court, seeking to have the busing segregation laws totally invalidated.

Although African Americans represented at least 75 percent of Montgomery's bus ridership, the city resisted complying with the protester's demands. To ensure the boycott could be sustained, Black leaders organized carpools, and the city's African American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents-the same price as bus fare-for African American riders.

Many Black residents chose simply to walk to work or other destinations. Black leaders organized regular mass meetings to keep African American residents mobilized around the boycott.

Integration at Last

On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, adopted in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War, guarantees all citizens-regardless of race-equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws.

The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's decision on December 20, 1956. Montgomery's buses were integrated on December 21, 1956, and the boycott ended. It had lasted 381 days.

Bus Boycott Meets With Violence

Integration, however, met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves were integrated, Montgomery maintained segregated bus stops. Snipers began firing into buses, and one shooter shattered both legs of a pregnant African American passenger.

In January 1957, four Black churches and the homes of prominent Black leaders were bombed; a bomb at King's house was defused. On January 30, 1957, the Montgomery police arrested seven bombers; all were members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group. The arrests largely brought an end to the busing-related violence.

Boycott Puts Martin Luther King Jr. in Spotlight

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was significant on several fronts. First, it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for additional large-scale actions outside the court system to bring about fair treatment for African Americans.

Second, in his leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a prominent national leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance. King's approach remained a hallmark of the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.

Shortly after the boycott's end, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a highly influential civil rights organization that worked to end segregation throughout the South. The SCLC was instrumental in the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, and the March on Washington in August of that same year, during which King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The boycott also brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles occurring in the United States, as more than 100 reporters visited Montgomery during the boycott to profile the effort and its leaders.

Rosa Parks, while shying from the spotlight throughout her life, remained an esteemed figure in the history of American civil rights activism. In 1999, the U.S. Congress awarded her its highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott - Facts, Significance & Rosa Parks | HISTORY

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For 382 days, almost the entire African American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses. The protests marked a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

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The Bus Boycotts led to violence in Montgomery including examples such as snipers and bombers.

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Rosa Parks' Bus

In 1955, African Americans were still required by a Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance to sit in the back half of city buses and to yield their seats to white riders if the front half of the bus, reserved for whites, was full.

But on December 1, 1955, African American seamstress Rosa Parks was commuting home on Montgomery's Cleveland Avenue bus from her job at a local department store. She was seated in the front row of the "colored section." When the white seats filled, the driver, J. Fred Blake, asked Parks and three others to vacate their seats. The other Black riders complied, but Parks refused.

She was arrested and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. This was not Parks' first encounter with Blake. In 1943, she had paid her fare at the front of a bus he was driving, then exited so she could re-enter through the back door, as required. Blake pulled away before she could re-board the bus.

Did you know? Nine months before Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery for the same act. The city's Black leaders prepared to protest, until it was discovered Colvin was pregnant and deemed an inappropriate symbol for their cause.

Although Parks has sometimes been depicted as a woman with no history of civil rights activism at the time of her arrest, she and her husband Raymond were, in fact, active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), and Parks served as its secretary.

Upon her arrest, Parks called E.D. Nixon, a prominent Black leader, who bailed her out of jail and determined she would be an upstanding and sympathetic plaintiff in a legal challenge of the segregation ordinance. African American leaders decided to attack the ordinance using other tactics as well.

The Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of Black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried in municipal court. The boycott was organized by WPC President Jo Ann Robinson.

Montgomery's African Americans Mobilize

As news of the boycott spread, African American leaders across Montgomery (Alabama's capital city) began lending their support. Black ministers announced the boycott in church on Sunday, December 4, and the Montgomery Advertiser, a general-interest newspaper, published a front-page article on the planned action.

Approximately 40,000 Black bus riders-the majority of the city's bus riders-boycotted the system the next day, December 5. That afternoon, Black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The group elected Martin Luther King Jr., the 26-year-old-pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its president, and decided to continue the boycott until the city met its demands.

Initially, the demands did not include changing the segregation laws; rather, the group demanded courtesy, the hiring of Black drivers, and a first-come, first-seated policy, with whites entering and filling seats from the front and African Americans from the rear.

Ultimately, however, a group of five Montgomery women, represented by attorney Fred D. Gray and the NAACP, sued the city in U.S. District Court, seeking to have the busing segregation laws totally invalidated.

Although African Americans represented at least 75 percent of Montgomery's bus ridership, the city resisted complying with the protester's demands. To ensure the boycott could be sustained, Black leaders organized carpools, and the city's African American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents-the same price as bus fare-for African American riders.

Many Black residents chose simply to walk to work or other destinations. Black leaders organized regular mass meetings to keep African American residents mobilized around the boycott.

Integration at Last

On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, adopted in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War, guarantees all citizens-regardless of race-equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws.

The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's decision on December 20, 1956. Montgomery's buses were integrated on December 21, 1956, and the boycott ended. It had lasted 381 days.

Bus Boycott Meets With Violence

Integration, however, met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves were integrated, Montgomery maintained segregated bus stops. Snipers began firing into buses, and one shooter shattered both legs of a pregnant African American passenger.

In January 1957, four Black churches and the homes of prominent Black leaders were bombed; a bomb at King's house was defused. On January 30, 1957, the Montgomery police arrested seven bombers; all were members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group. The arrests largely brought an end to the busing-related violence.

Boycott Puts Martin Luther King Jr. in Spotlight

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was significant on several fronts. First, it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for additional large-scale actions outside the court system to bring about fair treatment for African Americans.

Second, in his leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a prominent national leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance. King's approach remained a hallmark of the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.

Shortly after the boycott's end, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a highly influential civil rights organization that worked to end segregation throughout the South. The SCLC was instrumental in the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, and the March on Washington in August of that same year, during which King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The boycott also brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles occurring in the United States, as more than 100 reporters visited Montgomery during the boycott to profile the effort and its leaders.

Rosa Parks, while shying from the spotlight throughout her life, remained an esteemed figure in the history of American civil rights activism. In 1999, the U.S. Congress awarded her its highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott - Facts, Significance & Rosa Parks | HISTORY

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For 382 days, almost the entire African American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses. The protests marked a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

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Romanticism

Industrialization

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1800-1860

The War of 1812

1812-1815

California Gold Rush

1848-1855

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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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1. Valued feeling, intuition, idealism, and inductive reasoning.

2. Placed faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination.

3. Shunned the artificiality of civilization and sought unspoiled nature as a path to spirituality.

4. Championed individual freedom and the worth of the individual

5. Saw poetry as the highest expression of the imagination

6. Dark Romantics: used dark and supernatural themes/settings (Gothic style)

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Washington Irving
—"Rip van Winkle"

Emily Dickinson
—poetry

Walt Whitman
—Leaves of Grass

Edgar Allan Poe
—"The Raven"

Nathaniel Hawthorne
—The Scarlet Letter

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Romanticism focuses on the characteristics of nature; it attempts to perfect nature through literature.

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Image Credits

characteristics of romanticism represented by woman's dress

Tony Marturano / iStock / Getty Images

Understanding the characteristics of Romanticism in literature can help you become a better reader, and it can give you a leg up on literary essays and discussions. This period in literary history is fascinating and dramatic, and once you know the telltale signs, you'll be able to identify work that typifies it.

What Is Romanticism in Literature?

Popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Romanticism was a literary movement that emphasized nature and the importance of emotion and artistic freedom. In many ways, writers of this era were rebelling against the attempt to explain the world and human nature through science and the lens of the Industrial Revolution. In Romanticism, emotion is much more powerful than rational thought.

What Are the Characteristics of Romanticism in Literature?

Although literary Romanticism occurred from about 1790 through 1850, not all writers of this period worked in this style. There are certain characteristics that make a piece of literature part of the Romantic movement. You won't find every characteristic present in every piece of Romantic literature; however, you will usually find that writing from this period has several of the key characteristics.

1. Glorification of Nature

Nature, in all its unbound glory, plays a huge role in Romantic literature. Nature, sometimes seen as the opposite of the rational, is a powerful symbol in work from this era. Romantic poets and writers give personal, deep descriptions of nature and its wild and powerful qualities.

Natural elements also work as symbols for the unfettered emotions of the poet or writer, as in the final stanza of " To Autumn " by John Keats. Keats was aware that he was dying of consumption throughout much of his short life and career, and his celebration of autumn symbolizes the beauty in the ephemeral.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

2. Awareness and Acceptance of Emotions

A focus on emotion is a key characteristic of nearly all writing from the Romantic period. When you read work of this period, you'll see feelings described in all forms, including romantic and filial love, fear, sorrow, loneliness, and more. This focus on emotion offered a counterpoint to the rational, and it also made Romantic poetry and prose extremely readable and relatable.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers a perfect example of this characteristic of Romanticism. Here, Frankenstein's monster shows great self-awareness of his feelings and offers a vivid emotional description full of anger and sadness.

I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death. When I thought of my friends, of the mild voice of De Lacey, the gentle eyes of Agatha, and the exquisite beauty of the Arabian, these thoughts vanished and a gush of tears somewhat soothed me. But again when I reflected that they had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger, and unable to injure anything human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects. As night advanced I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage, and after having destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced impatience until the moon had sunk to commence my operations.

3. Celebration of Artistic Creativity and Imagination

In contrast to the previous generations' focus on reason, writers of the Romantic movement explored the importance of imagination and the creative impulse. Romantic poets and prose writers celebrated the power of imagination and the creative process, as well as the artistic viewpoint. They believed that artists and writers looked at the world differently, and they celebrated that vision in their work.

You can see this in William Wordsworth's poem, " The Prelude."

Imagination-here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,

At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;

Halted without an effort to break through;

But to my conscious soul I now can say-

"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength

Of usurpation, when the light of sense

Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed

The invisible world....

4. Emphasis on Aesthetic Beauty

Romantic literature also explores the theme of aesthetic beauty, not just of nature but of people as well. This was especially true with descriptions of female beauty. Writers praised women of the Romantic era for their natural loveliness, rather than anything artificial or constrained.

A classic example of this characteristic is George Gordon, or Lord Byron's, poem " She Walks in Beauty."

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that's best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

5. Themes of Solitude

Writers of the Romantic era believed that creative inspiration came from solitary exploration. They celebrated the feeling of being alone, whether that meant loneliness or a much-needed quiet space to think and create.

You'll see solitary themes in many literary works from this period, including in this excerpt from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem " Frost at Midnight."

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry

Came loud-and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully ...

6. Focus on Exoticism and History

Romantic-era literature often has a distinct focus on exotic locations and events or items from history. Poems and prose touch on antiques and the gifts of ancient cultures around the world, and far-away locations provide the setting for some literary works of this era.

One great example is Percy Byssche Shelley's poem " Ozymandias."

I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said-"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

7. Spiritual and Supernatural Elements

The writers of the Romantic era did not turn away from the darker side of emotion and the mysteries of the supernatural. They explored the contrast between life and death. Many pieces have Gothic motifs, such as manor houses in disrepair, dark and stormy nights, and more.

Some of the supernatural elements serve as symbols for emotions of guilt, depression, and other darker feelings, as you can see in this excerpt from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth --in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated --an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit-an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

8. Vivid Sensory Descriptions

Another essential characteristic of nearly all Romantic-era literature is vivid sensory descriptions. The poems and prose of this period include examples of simile and metaphor, as well as visual imagery and other sensory details. Poets and other writers went beyond simply telling about things and instead gave the information readers need to feel and taste and touch the objects and surroundings in Romantic-era writing.

Wordsworth uses vivid descriptions, including similes and metaphors, in his famous poem, " I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze ...

9. Use of Personification

Romantic poets and prose writers also used personification in their work. You can see examples of personification of everything from birds and animals to natural events or aspects. These works even personify feelings like love or states like death.

You can see Romantic personification in the work of the famous naturalist and writer, Karl von Martius. Here is an excerpt about the trees of the Amazon from his book Flora Brasiliensis.

I am impelled by some inner urge to tell you, gentle reader, these thoughts of my mind, since I am presenting to your eyes a picture of those most ancient trees which I once saw beside the Amazon River. Even today, after many years have gone by, I feel myself struck by the appearance of those giants of great age, in the same way as by the face of some giant human being. Even today those trees speak to me and fill my spirit with a certain pious fear, even today they excite in my breast that silent wonder with which my spirit was held at that time. This wonder is like a broad and deep river; the thoughts of the human mind are its waves; not all feelings of the heart are to be expressed with words....

10. Focus on the Self and Autobiography

Many works of Romantic-era literature are deeply personal, and they often explore the self of the writer. You'll see autobiographical influences in poems and prose of the period. One characteristic of this movement was the importance placed on feelings and creativity, and the source of much of this emotional and artistic work was the background and real-life surroundings of the writer. This self-focus preceded confessional poetry of the mid-1900s, but you can see its profound influence on that movement.

One key example of Romantic autobiography is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. In this work, he endeavored to create an unvarnished look at his own upbringing and life.

I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

Key Poetic Forms of Romanticism

If you are studying poetry of the Romantic era, it's helpful to know the forms that were popular during this time. These included odes, sonnets and lyrics. Take a look at examples of odes by Romantic poets like Keats, as well as sonnet examples by the likes of Percy Shelley. Understanding these poetic forms and their relationship to Romanticism will give you a deeper appreciation of this work.

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10 Key Characteristics of Romanticism in Literature

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What are the characteristics of romanticism in literature? There are many, but we help you easily identify which are part of the powerful literary movement.

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Romanticism prioritizes emotions and feelings as extremely important in literature.

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Image Credits

characteristics of romanticism represented by woman's dress

Tony Marturano / iStock / Getty Images

Understanding the characteristics of Romanticism in literature can help you become a better reader, and it can give you a leg up on literary essays and discussions. This period in literary history is fascinating and dramatic, and once you know the telltale signs, you'll be able to identify work that typifies it.

What Is Romanticism in Literature?

Popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Romanticism was a literary movement that emphasized nature and the importance of emotion and artistic freedom. In many ways, writers of this era were rebelling against the attempt to explain the world and human nature through science and the lens of the Industrial Revolution. In Romanticism, emotion is much more powerful than rational thought.

What Are the Characteristics of Romanticism in Literature?

Although literary Romanticism occurred from about 1790 through 1850, not all writers of this period worked in this style. There are certain characteristics that make a piece of literature part of the Romantic movement. You won't find every characteristic present in every piece of Romantic literature; however, you will usually find that writing from this period has several of the key characteristics.

1. Glorification of Nature

Nature, in all its unbound glory, plays a huge role in Romantic literature. Nature, sometimes seen as the opposite of the rational, is a powerful symbol in work from this era. Romantic poets and writers give personal, deep descriptions of nature and its wild and powerful qualities.

Natural elements also work as symbols for the unfettered emotions of the poet or writer, as in the final stanza of " To Autumn " by John Keats. Keats was aware that he was dying of consumption throughout much of his short life and career, and his celebration of autumn symbolizes the beauty in the ephemeral.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

2. Awareness and Acceptance of Emotions

A focus on emotion is a key characteristic of nearly all writing from the Romantic period. When you read work of this period, you'll see feelings described in all forms, including romantic and filial love, fear, sorrow, loneliness, and more. This focus on emotion offered a counterpoint to the rational, and it also made Romantic poetry and prose extremely readable and relatable.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers a perfect example of this characteristic of Romanticism. Here, Frankenstein's monster shows great self-awareness of his feelings and offers a vivid emotional description full of anger and sadness.

I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protectors had departed and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to control them, but allowing myself to be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death. When I thought of my friends, of the mild voice of De Lacey, the gentle eyes of Agatha, and the exquisite beauty of the Arabian, these thoughts vanished and a gush of tears somewhat soothed me. But again when I reflected that they had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger, and unable to injure anything human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects. As night advanced I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage, and after having destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced impatience until the moon had sunk to commence my operations.

3. Celebration of Artistic Creativity and Imagination

In contrast to the previous generations' focus on reason, writers of the Romantic movement explored the importance of imagination and the creative impulse. Romantic poets and prose writers celebrated the power of imagination and the creative process, as well as the artistic viewpoint. They believed that artists and writers looked at the world differently, and they celebrated that vision in their work.

You can see this in William Wordsworth's poem, " The Prelude."

Imagination-here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,

At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;

Halted without an effort to break through;

But to my conscious soul I now can say-

"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength

Of usurpation, when the light of sense

Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed

The invisible world....

4. Emphasis on Aesthetic Beauty

Romantic literature also explores the theme of aesthetic beauty, not just of nature but of people as well. This was especially true with descriptions of female beauty. Writers praised women of the Romantic era for their natural loveliness, rather than anything artificial or constrained.

A classic example of this characteristic is George Gordon, or Lord Byron's, poem " She Walks in Beauty."

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that's best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

5. Themes of Solitude

Writers of the Romantic era believed that creative inspiration came from solitary exploration. They celebrated the feeling of being alone, whether that meant loneliness or a much-needed quiet space to think and create.

You'll see solitary themes in many literary works from this period, including in this excerpt from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem " Frost at Midnight."

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry

Came loud-and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully ...

6. Focus on Exoticism and History

Romantic-era literature often has a distinct focus on exotic locations and events or items from history. Poems and prose touch on antiques and the gifts of ancient cultures around the world, and far-away locations provide the setting for some literary works of this era.

One great example is Percy Byssche Shelley's poem " Ozymandias."

I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said-"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

7. Spiritual and Supernatural Elements

The writers of the Romantic era did not turn away from the darker side of emotion and the mysteries of the supernatural. They explored the contrast between life and death. Many pieces have Gothic motifs, such as manor houses in disrepair, dark and stormy nights, and more.

Some of the supernatural elements serve as symbols for emotions of guilt, depression, and other darker feelings, as you can see in this excerpt from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth --in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated --an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit-an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

8. Vivid Sensory Descriptions

Another essential characteristic of nearly all Romantic-era literature is vivid sensory descriptions. The poems and prose of this period include examples of simile and metaphor, as well as visual imagery and other sensory details. Poets and other writers went beyond simply telling about things and instead gave the information readers need to feel and taste and touch the objects and surroundings in Romantic-era writing.

Wordsworth uses vivid descriptions, including similes and metaphors, in his famous poem, " I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze ...

9. Use of Personification

Romantic poets and prose writers also used personification in their work. You can see examples of personification of everything from birds and animals to natural events or aspects. These works even personify feelings like love or states like death.

You can see Romantic personification in the work of the famous naturalist and writer, Karl von Martius. Here is an excerpt about the trees of the Amazon from his book Flora Brasiliensis.

I am impelled by some inner urge to tell you, gentle reader, these thoughts of my mind, since I am presenting to your eyes a picture of those most ancient trees which I once saw beside the Amazon River. Even today, after many years have gone by, I feel myself struck by the appearance of those giants of great age, in the same way as by the face of some giant human being. Even today those trees speak to me and fill my spirit with a certain pious fear, even today they excite in my breast that silent wonder with which my spirit was held at that time. This wonder is like a broad and deep river; the thoughts of the human mind are its waves; not all feelings of the heart are to be expressed with words....

10. Focus on the Self and Autobiography

Many works of Romantic-era literature are deeply personal, and they often explore the self of the writer. You'll see autobiographical influences in poems and prose of the period. One characteristic of this movement was the importance placed on feelings and creativity, and the source of much of this emotional and artistic work was the background and real-life surroundings of the writer. This self-focus preceded confessional poetry of the mid-1900s, but you can see its profound influence on that movement.

One key example of Romantic autobiography is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. In this work, he endeavored to create an unvarnished look at his own upbringing and life.

I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

Key Poetic Forms of Romanticism

If you are studying poetry of the Romantic era, it's helpful to know the forms that were popular during this time. These included odes, sonnets and lyrics. Take a look at examples of odes by Romantic poets like Keats, as well as sonnet examples by the likes of Percy Shelley. Understanding these poetic forms and their relationship to Romanticism will give you a deeper appreciation of this work.

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10 Key Characteristics of Romanticism in Literature

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What are the characteristics of romanticism in literature? There are many, but we help you easily identify which are part of the powerful literary movement.

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"Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) has been called the finest example of American nature writing and the first great example of modern American prose."

-- ("Literature: An American Renaissance", Encylopedia.com)

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American Literature for an American People. In the early years of the nineteenth century American authors such as William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), Washington Irving (1783-1759), and James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) achieved critical recognition in America and England for their literary merits. While they saw the need for an American literature that treated issues and depicted scenes that were distinctively American, these writers modeled their own poetry or fiction after that of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and other well-known British writers of the time. Yet by 1837, the year in which Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) published his "American Scholar" address, the United States was well on its way to having its own national voice in literature. In "The American Scholar" Emerson proclaimed that "our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," expressing a sentiment widely shared by Americans of his time. With the population of the United States more than doubling from nearly 13 million in 1830 to nearly 39.9 million 1870, there had developed an audience of American readers that could sustain a significant number of professional authors, many of whom achieved fame and fortune by responding to Americans' desire to read about their own country.

THOREAU IN THE WOODS

Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) has been called the finest example of American nature writing and the first great example of modern American prose. Readers still enjoy Thoreau's account of self-sufficiency and solitude in the woods and long for the simple communion with nature that the book celebrates. Yet during his two years in a cabin by Walden Pond (1846-1847), Thoreau was never as independent or as alone as his book suggests. Living only a mile or two from the village of Concord, Massachusetts, he visited his neighbors there nearly every day. He often arrived at the Emersons' or Alcotts' home in time to be invited for dinner. Though Walden gives the impression that he grew or caught most of his own food, the meals he ate in his cabin came mainly from the fresh provisions that his mother and sister brought him every Saturday.

One incident alone must have convinced the people of Concord that Thoreau lacked the necessary skills to be a self-sufficient woodsman. One day, planning to cook some fish he had caught, Thoreau started a fire in a hollowed-out tree stump and accidentally burned three hundred acres of woods.

Source: Karen L. Rood, ed., American Literary Almanac, from 1608 to the Present ( New York & Oxford: Facts on File, 1988).

Transcendentalism on the Wane. New England Transcendentalism originated in the area around Concord, Massachusetts. Never a fully organized movement, the Transcendentalists were a group of highly individualistic writers-including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), and George Ripley (1802-1880)-with a loosely related set of principles. Though they often disagreed, they shared the belief that people can "transcend" the limits of the senses and discover higher truths directly through intuition, rather than through participation in a conventional church. From 1836 through 1855 Transcendentalism developed into a full-scale rejection of the established order. Its message was in accord with the frontier spirit of the young United States, whose citizens shared the conviction that through self-reliance and determination, Americans could create a new and improved society for themselves. By 1850, however, Transcendentalism was in decline. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), an early American feminist and co-editor of the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial, died in that year, and Emerson, though still active as a lecturer, had gradually become less productive as a writer since the death of his five-year-old son, Waldo, in 1842. During the 1850s, as the debate over the extension of slavery to new states and territories became more and more heated, Americans increasingly lost patience with the naive optimism generally associated with Transcendentalist

thought. The best-known Transcendentalist literary work, Thoreau's Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), an account of his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, near Concord, is also one of the last significant literary productions to come from the group.

Hawthorne's Power of Darkness. During the second third of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), a native of Salem, Massachusetts, explored complex moral and psychological conflicts in his highly symbolic fiction. After writing an unsuccessful first novel, Fanshawe (1829), and the tales collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), he produced The Scarlet Letter (1850), the novel that is widely regarded as his masterpiece. In this novel and his next, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he examined the gloomy, brooding spirit of Puritanism and the moral consequences of sin. In his next novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne satirized Transcendentalist ideas, drawing on his own experiences as a member of the Transcendental commune Brook Farm from less than a year in 1841. His final published novel, The Marble Faun (1860), set in Italy, is an early example of the international novel, a genre that American realist Henry James (1843-1916) later employed to compare the cultures of America and Europe. Also widely respected for his short fiction, Hawthorne-along with Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)-helped establish the American short story as a distinctive, important art form.

An Artist in the Rigging. Born in New York City, Herman Melville (1819-1891) wrote his first great books at the same time that Hawthorne published Mosses From an Old Manse and his last in the same decade that Stephen Crane published The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Melville's grappling with moral issues was as profound as Hawthorne's, and his view of life was darker and more realistic. Melville's youthful experiences on a whaling ship (1841-1842) and ashore in the Marquesas (where he was captured by cannibals) and other South Sea islands led him to write Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and other popular romances. Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), the tale of a whaling captain's obsessive search for the white whale that had dismembered him, is at once a gripping adventure story, a deeply philosophical inquiry into the human condition, an allegory about evil, and one of the most challenging and impenetrable novels ever written. Both Moby-Dick and Melville's next novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), were misunderstood and poorly received by his contemporaries. Though ill, deeply in debt, and disheartened by his failure to win an audience, Melville continued to write, producing such important works as The Piazza Tales (1856)-a short-story collection including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" - The Confidence Man (1857), and the novella Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924). After working as a customs inspector in New York City for nineteen years, Melville died poor and obscure. He did not receive the recognition he deserved until more than thirty years after his death, but he has now become the most remarkable example of an author who was forgotten during his lifetime and elevated to the highest rank of American writers after his death.

A Barbaric Yawp. At thirty Walt Whitman (1819-1892), who was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, began to travel America to record in poetry his impressions of the nation and its people. Whitman printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) himself, and throughout his life he continued to publish expansions and revisions of the work. He sent copies of the first edition to well-known literary men, including Emerson, who wrote back, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career" and called the book "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom yet contributed to American literature." Whitman published Emerson's letter of praise in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973);

Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957);

F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaisance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).

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literature: an american renaissance
sources

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Literature: An American Renaissance Sources Source for information on Literature: An American Renaissance: American Eras dictionary.

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The American Renaissance led to profound writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson.

-- ("American Rennaissance", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature)

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“American Renaissance” published on by Oxford University Press.

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"The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s."

-- ("Red Scare," History.com)

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Table of Contents

1. First Red Scare: 1917-1920

2. Cold War Concerns About Communism

3. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

4. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

5. Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

6. Red Scare Impact

The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Communists were often referred to as "Reds" for their allegiance to the red Soviet flag.) The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. Federal employees were analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, investigated allegations of subversive elements in the government and the Hollywood film industry. The climate of fear and repression linked to the Red Scare finally began to ease by the late 1950s.

First Red Scare: 1917-1920

In the United States, labor strikes were on the rise, and the press sensationalized them as being caused by immigrants bent on bringing down the American way of life. The Sedition Act of 1918 targeted people who criticized the government, monitoring radicals and labor union leaders with the threat of deportation.

The fear turned to violence with the 1919 anarchist bombings, a series of bombs targeting law enforcement and government officials. Bombs went off in a wide number of cities including Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, D.C., and New York City.

The first Red Scare climaxed in 1919 and 1920, when United States Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer ordered the Palmer raids, a series of violent law-enforcement raids targeting leftist radicals and anarchists. They kicked off a period of unrest that became known as the "Red Summer."

Cold War Concerns About Communism

Did you know? FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was quick to equate any kind of protest with communist subversion, including the civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover labeled King a communist and covertly worked to intimidate and discredit the civil rights leader.

Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

The information obtained by the FBI proved essential in high-profile legal cases, including the 1949 conviction of 12 prominent leaders of the American Communist Party on charges that they had advocated the overthrow of the government. Moreover, Hoover's agents helped build the case against Julius Rosenberg (1918-53) and his wife, Ethel Rosenberg (1915-53), who were convicted of espionage in 1951. The Rosenbergs were executed two years later.

Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

Public concerns about communism were heightened by international events. In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear bomb and communist forces led by Mao Zedong (1893-1976) took control of China. The following year saw the start of the Korean War (1950-53), which engaged U.S. troops in combat against the communist-supported forces of North Korea. The advances of communism around the world convinced many U.S. citizens that there was a real danger of "Reds" taking over their own country. Figures such as McCarthy and Hoover fanned the flames of fear by wildly exaggerating that possibility.

As the Red Scare intensified, its political climate turned increasingly conservative. Elected officials from both major parties sought to portray themselves as staunch anticommunists, and few people dared to criticize the questionable tactics used to persecute suspected radicals. Membership in leftist groups dropped as it became clear that such associations could lead to serious consequences, and dissenting voices from the left side of the political spectrum fell silent on a range of important issues. In judicial affairs, for example, support for free speech and other civil liberties eroded significantly. This trend was symbolized by the 1951 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dennis v. United States, which said that the free-speech rights of accused Communists could be restricted because their actions presented a clear and present danger to the government.

Red Scare Impact

Americans also felt the effects of the Red Scare on a personal level, and thousands of alleged communist sympathizers saw their lives disrupted. They were hounded by law enforcement, alienated from friends and family and fired from their jobs. While a small number of the accused may have been aspiring revolutionaries, most others were the victims of false allegations or had done nothing more than exercise their democratic right to join a political party.

Though the climate of fear and repression began to ease in the late 1950s, the Red Scare has continued to influence political debate in the decades since. It is often cited as an example of how unfounded fears can compromise civil liberties.

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Red Scare: Cold War, McCarthyism & Facts | HISTORY

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The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War era.

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Victims of McCarthyism lost their jobs, reputation, were blacklisted, and some even committed suicide.

-- ("McCarthyism," Encyclopedia. Mccarthyism | Encyclopedia.com)

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McCarthyism's goal was to dismantle labor union leaders and even social activists working for gender, racial, and economic equality.

-- ("McCarthyism," Encyclopedia. Mccarthyism | Encyclopedia.com)

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Walt Whitman was born in Long Island. New York, in 1819, and was raised in Brooklyn, NY.

-- ("11 Important and Interesting Facts about Walt Whitman," Interesting Literature. 11 Important and Interesting Facts about Walt Whitman – Interesting Literature)

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Walt Whitman is considered to be one of the most important American poets of the nineteenth century.

-- ("11 Important and Interesting Facts about Walt Whitman," Interesting Literature. 11 Important and Interesting Facts about Walt Whitman – Interesting Literature)

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Walt Whitman began working at the age of 11 for a printing business.

-- ("10 Things You Might Not Know About Walt Whitman," Mental Floss. 10 Things You Might Not Know About Walt Whitman | Mental Floss)

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Known as the "Bard of Democracy," poet and journalist Walt Whitman-who was born on May 31, 1819-used unconventional verse and frank talk of sexuality and politics to become one of the most lauded writers of the 19th century. He might be best known for Leaves of Grass (which also happens to play a crucial role in the climax of AMC's Breaking Bad). But there's a lot more to Whitman than that. Check out some facts about his life, his love of nudity, and how he managed to write rave reviews of his own work.

1. Walt Whitman started working at age 11.

Whitman's formal education didn't last very long. Living in New York with his parents, and with his father struggling to make ends meet, Whitman left school at age 11 to help contribute to the household. He got work assisting a law office in the city before turning to the printing business, developing skills that would later inform his work in self-publishing. He continued to educate himself, eventually becoming a teacher at the age of 17.

2. Whitman kept revising Leaves of Grass.

After stints in teaching and journalism, Whitman collected 12 of his poems for Leaves of Grass, a self-published 1855 book that would go on to become his best-known work. But where most authors leave finished titles behind, Whitman considered Leaves to be a malleable volume. He repeatedly went back to it, changing the order of poems, adding new ones, retitling old ones, and tinkering with the typeset. By the time of his death in 1892, nine versions of Leaves had been published, the last with around 400 poems (including two annexes).

3. Whitman reviewed-and raved-about Leaves of Grass (anonymously).

To stir up interest for Leaves, Whitman took the audacious step of "reviewing" his book for New York area newspapers without a byline. "An American bard at last!" he wrote, raving, "Transcendent." The endorsements apparently didn't help sales much, with the initial run of the book selling just a few copies.

4. One version of Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston.

Whitman's tinkering with Leaves of Grass reflected his evolving attitudes regarding human sexuality, including the then-unpopular belief that homosexuality was natural. In 1882, Boston district attorney Oliver Stevens banned a version of the book that Whitman purposely had printed to resemble a Bible. The contents, Stevens believed, violated statutes about "obscene literature."

5. Whitman was a missionary during the Civil War.

Whitman, nearly 42, was an unlikely candidate for a soldier when the Civil War began, but his brother George enlisted in the Army. When Whitman saw his brother's name listed as one of the wounded in 1862, he traveled to Washington and then Virginia to visit. George was fine, but Whitman was struck by the physical toll the war had taken on other soldiers. He stayed in Washington and began a steady rotation of the area's hospitals, bringing food and books to the wounded. The goods were paid for by donations from friends, as well as Whitman's own salary working for the Army Paymaster.

6. Whitman was a health and fitness guru.

Whitman did not cut a figure as a man of action, but he was still very much interested in physical fitness. He wrote a series of articles for the New York Atlas in the 1850s under the pen name "Mose Velsor" that detailed his approach to diet and wellness. Whitman advocated "manly training" like brisk walks, dancing, and frequent bathing to cure ills and ward off depression. He also considered beards to be effective barriers against germs.

7. Whitman liked to be nude around friends.

Whitman's exhortations about nature extended to having a cavalier attitude about being constrained by clothing. In the 1870s and 1880s, Whitman was known to visit with friends while being completely nude. Nakedness, Whitman wrote, was freeing: "Nature was naked, and I was also." Whitman historians continue to debate whether a series of photos taken by photographer Thomas Eakins in the mid-1880s were of an elderly Whitman posing in the nude.

8. Bram Stoker was a big fan of Whitman's.

The future author of Dracula was so enamored with Whitman's work that he and his friends called themselves "Walt Whitmanites." Stoker didn't consider himself a peer, however: After composing a gushing letter to Whitman in 1872, he kept it in a drawer for four years before working up the courage to send it. "I do not know whether it is unusual for you to get letters from utter strangers who have not even the claim of literary brotherhood to write you," Stoker wrote. "If it is you must be frightfully tormented with letters and I am sorry to have written this. I have, however, the claim of liking you-for your words are your own soul and even if you do not read my letter it is no less a pleasure to me to write it." Whitman wrote a gracious letter back thanking him for the kind words.

9. Whitman wrote a mystery novel that was lost for more than 165 years.

In 1852, Whitman serialized a short 36,000 word mystery novel titled The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle in a New York newspaper. Few readers paid it much attention, and fewer still had any reason to try and retrieve it from any archives-Whitman published it without a byline. It was rediscovered in 2017 by Whitman historian Zach Turpin, who found some familiar phrases during an online newspaper search for Whitman material. The book was reissued that year. The finding pleased Whitman enthusiasts but probably would not have been pleasing to Whitman himself, who threatened to "shoot" anyone who dredged up his earlier, "crude" works for republication.

10. Whitman designed his own tomb.

As a final creative impulse, Whitman elected to design his own granite mausoleum in Camden, New Jersey's Harleigh Cemetery. Shaped like a house, the monument was paid for using monetary gifts given by admirers. Visitors sometimes leave letters or pennies at the iron gate in front of the grave-the latter because the coin bears the image of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman wrote a well-known elegy for following his death in 1865.

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10 Things You Might Not Know About Walt Whitman

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Known as the "Bard of Democracy," poet and journalist Walt Whitman-who was born on May 31, 1819-used unconventional verse and frank talk of sexuality and politics to become one of the most lauded writers of the 19th century.

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Emily Dickerson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

-- ("11 Fascinating Facts About Emily Dickinson," Mental Floss. 11 Facts About Emily Dickinson (mentalfloss.com))

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Emily Dickerson never published any poems under her own name.

-- ("11 Fascinating Facts About Emily Dickinson," Mental Floss. 11 Facts About Emily Dickinson (mentalfloss.com))

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Only ten of Dickerson's poems, and one letter, were ever published during her lifetime.

-- ("10 Important and Interesting Facts about Emily Dickinson," Interesting Literature. 10 Important and Interesting Facts about Emily Dickinson – Interesting Literature)

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Edgar Allan Poe published his first book at the age of 18.

-- ("15 Edgar Allan Poe Facts: The Man Behind the Myths," Your Dictionary. 15 Edgar Allan Poe Facts: The Man Behind the Myths | YourDictionary)

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Edgar Allen Poe is considered the first American Professional Writer.

-- ("15 Edgar Allan Poe Facts: The Man Behind the Myths," Your Dictionary. 15 Edgar Allan Poe Facts: The Man Behind the Myths | YourDictionary)

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Edgar Allen Poe had competition with fellow writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

-- ("15 Edgar Allan Poe Facts: The Man Behind the Myths," Your Dictionary. 15 Edgar Allan Poe Facts: The Man Behind the Myths | YourDictionary)

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Civil War
1861-1865

Reconstruction Era
1865-1877

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1. Feelings of disillusionment.
2. Common subjects: slums of rapidly growing cities, factories replacing farmlands, poor factory workers, corrupt politicians.
3. Represented the manner and environment of everyday life and ordinary people as realistically as possible (Regionalism).
4. Sought to explain behavior (psychologically/socially).

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Mark Twain
-Huckleberry Finn

Jack London
-Call of the Wild
-"To Build a Fire"

Stephen Crane
-"The Open Boat"

Ambrose Bierce
-"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

Kate Chopin
-"Story of an Hour"
-The Awakening

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Twain's education was limited during his early life as he worked jobs as a printer and a typesetting job. However, Twain also moved to different U.S. cities throughout his life.

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8 Things You May Not Know About Mark Twain | HISTORY

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Check out eight fascinating facts about the world-famous author, including why his riverboat career was marred by tragedy and who served as the real-life model for Huck Finn.

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Twain served with a confederate militia during his early life.

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8 Things You May Not Know About Mark Twain | HISTORY

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Check out eight fascinating facts about the world-famous author, including why his riverboat career was marred by tragedy and who served as the real-life model for Huck Finn.

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Twain based his novel, "Adventures of Huckleberry Fin" on a real person.

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8 Things You May Not Know About Mark Twain | HISTORY

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Check out eight fascinating facts about the world-famous author, including why his riverboat career was marred by tragedy and who served as the real-life model for Huck Finn.

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Susan Glaspell attended college at the age of 21 at Drake university.

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23 Facts About Susan Glaspell | FactSnippet

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Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. 23 Facts About Susan Glaspell | FactSnippet.

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Susan Glaspell wrote the play Alison's House, where she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1931.

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23 Facts About Susan Glaspell | FactSnippet

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Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. 23 Facts About Susan Glaspell | FactSnippet.

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Susan Glaspell was raised on a rural homestead just below the bluffs of the Mississippi River along the western edge of Davenport, Iowa.

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23 Facts About Susan Glaspell | FactSnippet

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Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. 23 Facts About Susan Glaspell | FactSnippet.

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World War I

1914-1918

The Great Depression

1929-1939

World War II

1939-1945

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1. Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the "American Dream": the independent, self-reliant, individual will triumph.

2. Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form over the traditional.

3. Interest in the inner workings of the human mind (ex. Stream of consciousness).

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Lorraine Hansberry
-A Raisin in the Sun

F. Scott Fitzgerald
-The Great Gatsby

William Faulkner
-"A Rose for Emily"

Eudora Welty
-"A Worn Path"

Robert Frost
-poetry

T. S. Eliot
-The Waste Land
-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

John Steinbeck
-Of Mice and Men
-The Grapes of Wrath

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Women were given more freedom in the 20's through the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

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Flappers: The 'New Woman'

Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said "unladylike" things, in addition to being more sexually "free" than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws.

Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children.

In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.

Did you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend-and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh's KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years later Warren G. Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio -and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.

People also swarmed to see Hollywood movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week, and actors like Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities.

By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers' needs-as did the burgeoning oil industry.

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them "bedrooms on wheels.") What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music's "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism and excitement of the Jazz Age-Fitzgerald once claimed that the 1920s were "the most expensive orgy in history"-while other writers, artists, musicians and designers ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition Era

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any "intoxication beverages" with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

This drove the liquor trade underground-now, instead of ordinary bars, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies, where liquor was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago's police force on his payroll.)

To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation's cities. For instance, to the so-called "Drys," beer was known as "Kaiser brew." Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time

Immigration and Racism in the 1920s

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti- Communist "Red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture-jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance-discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South but across the country, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the middle of the decade, the KKK had two million members, many of whom believed the Klan represented a return to all the "values" that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for Black Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

Early Civil Rights Activism

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation.

In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for Blacks. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the North, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a rise of urban ghettos, where Black Americans-excluded from white neighborhoods-were relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and civil rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a law to make lynching a federal crime, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what one historian called a "cultural Civil War" between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, "New Women" and advocates of old-fashioned family values.

But coming immediately after the hardships of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic, the Roaring Twenties also gave many middle-class Americans an unprecedented taste of freedom, unbridled fun and upward economic mobility unsurpassed in U.S. history.

Sources

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine.
The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience.

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Roaring Twenties: Flappers, Prohibition & Jazz Age ‑ HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Roaring Twenties were a Jazz Age burst of prosperity and freedom for flappers and others during the Prohibition era, until the economy crashed in 1929.

# data[].attributes.body
Hard liquor was banned in the 20's through the Volstead Act, which closed every bar in the U.S..

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Flappers: The 'New Woman'

Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said "unladylike" things, in addition to being more sexually "free" than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws.

Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children.

In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.

Did you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend-and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh's KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years later Warren G. Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio -and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.

People also swarmed to see Hollywood movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week, and actors like Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities.

By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers' needs-as did the burgeoning oil industry.

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them "bedrooms on wheels.") What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music's "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism and excitement of the Jazz Age-Fitzgerald once claimed that the 1920s were "the most expensive orgy in history"-while other writers, artists, musicians and designers ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition Era

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any "intoxication beverages" with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

This drove the liquor trade underground-now, instead of ordinary bars, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies, where liquor was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago's police force on his payroll.)

To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation's cities. For instance, to the so-called "Drys," beer was known as "Kaiser brew." Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time

Immigration and Racism in the 1920s

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti- Communist "Red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture-jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance-discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South but across the country, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the middle of the decade, the KKK had two million members, many of whom believed the Klan represented a return to all the "values" that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for Black Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

Early Civil Rights Activism

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation.

In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for Blacks. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the North, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a rise of urban ghettos, where Black Americans-excluded from white neighborhoods-were relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and civil rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a law to make lynching a federal crime, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what one historian called a "cultural Civil War" between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, "New Women" and advocates of old-fashioned family values.

But coming immediately after the hardships of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic, the Roaring Twenties also gave many middle-class Americans an unprecedented taste of freedom, unbridled fun and upward economic mobility unsurpassed in U.S. history.

Sources

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine.
The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Roaring Twenties: Flappers, Prohibition & Jazz Age ‑ HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Roaring Twenties were a Jazz Age burst of prosperity and freedom for flappers and others during the Prohibition era, until the economy crashed in 1929.

# data[].attributes.body
The Great Depression, which happened on October 29, 1929, caused serious economic hardship for Americans through the 30's and 40's.

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The Great Depression

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (also known as Black Tuesday) provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity.

The disaster had been brewing for years, though different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis: Some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade's agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I.

In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt and an ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.

Dust Bowl

The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops.

By 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this Dust Bowl and headed west to California. The crisis gave the decade an unfortunate nickname: the "Dirty Thirties."

Other natural disasters struck more quickly: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane hit the Florida Keys as the most violent hurricane to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin. The New England Hurricane of 1938, also a Category 5 storm, caused property losses roughly equal to $5 billion in today's money.

Herbert Hoover

President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. Though he believed that the "crazy and dangerous" behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government's job.

As a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public works projects; he asked big companies to keep workers' pay steady and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises. The shantytowns that were popping up as more and more people lost their homes were nicknamed " Hoovervilles " as an insult to the president's hands-off policies.

The crisis worsened, and life for the average American during the Great Depression was challenging. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families.

Roosevelt's New Deal

By 1932, many Americans were fed up with Hoover and what his political opponent Franklin D. Roosevelt called his "hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing government. The New York governor and Democratic presidential challenger, Roosevelt promised a change: "I pledge myself," he said, "to a New Deal for the American people."

This New Deal would use the power of the federal government to try and stop the economy's downward spiral. Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election handily.

The new president acted swiftly during his first hundred days in office to "wage a war against the emergency" just as though "we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." First, he shored up the nation's banks.

Then he began to propose more comprehensive reforms. By June, Roosevelt and Congress had passed 15 major laws-including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Home Owners' Loan Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act-that fundamentally reshaped many aspects of the American economy.

Additionally, the Civilian Conservation Corps gave millions of young men employment on environmental and public works projects. These decisive actions also did much to restore Americans' confidence that, as Roosevelt had declared in his inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

American Culture During the 1930s

During the Depression, most people did not have much money to spare. However, by 1938 about 80 percent of American households had radios-and listening to the radio was free.

The most popular broadcasts were those that distracted listeners from their everyday struggles: comedy programs like "Amos 'n' Andy," soap operas and sporting events. Swing music encouraged people to cast aside their troubles and dance.

Jazz Age bandleaders like Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and Duke Ellington drew crowds of people to Art Deco ballrooms and dance halls around the country. And when Prohibition ended in 1933-freeing up legal sales of liquor-cocktail lounges and barrooms were happy to quench the national thirst for alcohol.

Even though money was tight, people kept going to see Hollywood movies-now being made in color. Musicals, screwball comedies and hard-boiled gangster pictures from the Golden Age of Hollywood-films like "The Wizard of Oz," "It's a Wonderful Life," "Casablanca," "King Kong," "Gone With the Wind" and the animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" from Walt Disney -offered audiences an escape from some of the grim realities of life in the 1930s.

The Second New Deal

President Roosevelt's early efforts had begun to restore Americans' confidence, but they had not ended the Depression. In the spring of 1935, he launched a second, more aggressive set of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal.

The Works Progress Administration provided jobs for unemployed people and built new public works like bridges, post offices, schools, highways and parks. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for higher wages and fairer treatment.

The Social Security Act of 1935 guaranteed pensions to some older Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled.

Roosevelt's Second Term

In 1936, while campaigning for a second term, President Roosevelt told a roaring crowd at Madison Square Garden that "The forces of 'organized money' are unanimous in their hate for me-and I welcome their hatred."

He went on: "I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match, [and] I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces have met their master."

Roosevelt won the 1936 election by a landslide. Still, the Depression dragged on. Workers grew more militant: In December 1936, for example, the United Auto Workers started a sit-down strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan that lasted for 44 days and spread to some 150,000 autoworkers in 35 cities.

By 1937, to the dismay of most corporate leaders, some 8 million workers had joined unions and were loudly demanding their rights.

The Depression Ends

By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal had come to an end. Growing Congressional opposition made it difficult for President Roosevelt to introduce new programs. At the same time, as the threat of war in Europe loomed on the horizon- Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and invaded Poland in 1939 -the president turned his attention away from domestic politics.

In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and the Great Depression was over.

Sources

Timeline: 1930s. Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society.
Breaking News of the 1930s. PBS: American Experience.
List of 1930's Major News Events in History. The People History.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1930s: Music, Movies & Great Depression - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1930s were the decade of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and other problems, but also the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency and Hollywood's Golden Age.

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In the early 30's, as America was escaping the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler became president in 1933 and threats of war in Europe had begun.

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The Great Depression

The stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (also known as Black Tuesday) provided a dramatic end to an era of unprecedented, and unprecedentedly lopsided, prosperity.

The disaster had been brewing for years, though different historians and economists offer different explanations for the crisis: Some blame the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth and purchasing power in the 1920s, while others blame the decade's agricultural slump or the international instability caused by World War I.

In any case, the nation was woefully unprepared for the crash. For the most part, banks were unregulated and uninsured. The government offered no insurance or compensation for the unemployed, so when people stopped earning, they stopped spending. The consumer economy ground to a halt and an ordinary recession became the Great Depression, the defining event of the 1930s.

Dust Bowl

The 1930s saw natural disasters as well as manmade ones: For most of the decade, people in the Plains states suffered through the worst drought in American history, as well as hundreds of severe dust storms, or "black blizzards," that carried away the soil and made it all but impossible to plant crops.

By 1940, 2.5 million people had abandoned their farms in this Dust Bowl and headed west to California. The crisis gave the decade an unfortunate nickname: the "Dirty Thirties."

Other natural disasters struck more quickly: The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane hit the Florida Keys as the most violent hurricane to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin. The New England Hurricane of 1938, also a Category 5 storm, caused property losses roughly equal to $5 billion in today's money.

Herbert Hoover

President Herbert Hoover was slow to respond to these events. Though he believed that the "crazy and dangerous" behavior of Wall Street speculators had contributed in a significant way to the crisis, he also believed that solving such problems was not really the federal government's job.

As a result, most of the solutions he suggested were voluntary: He asked state governments to undertake public works projects; he asked big companies to keep workers' pay steady and he asked labor unions to stop demanding raises. The shantytowns that were popping up as more and more people lost their homes were nicknamed " Hoovervilles " as an insult to the president's hands-off policies.

The crisis worsened, and life for the average American during the Great Depression was challenging. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks closed in the U.S., taking with them more than $2.5 billion in deposits. Meanwhile, unemployed people did whatever they could, like standing in charity breadlines and selling apples on street corners, to feed their families.

Roosevelt's New Deal

By 1932, many Americans were fed up with Hoover and what his political opponent Franklin D. Roosevelt called his "hear nothing, see nothing, do nothing government. The New York governor and Democratic presidential challenger, Roosevelt promised a change: "I pledge myself," he said, "to a New Deal for the American people."

This New Deal would use the power of the federal government to try and stop the economy's downward spiral. Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election handily.

The new president acted swiftly during his first hundred days in office to "wage a war against the emergency" just as though "we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." First, he shored up the nation's banks.

Then he began to propose more comprehensive reforms. By June, Roosevelt and Congress had passed 15 major laws-including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Home Owners' Loan Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act-that fundamentally reshaped many aspects of the American economy.

Additionally, the Civilian Conservation Corps gave millions of young men employment on environmental and public works projects. These decisive actions also did much to restore Americans' confidence that, as Roosevelt had declared in his inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

American Culture During the 1930s

During the Depression, most people did not have much money to spare. However, by 1938 about 80 percent of American households had radios-and listening to the radio was free.

The most popular broadcasts were those that distracted listeners from their everyday struggles: comedy programs like "Amos 'n' Andy," soap operas and sporting events. Swing music encouraged people to cast aside their troubles and dance.

Jazz Age bandleaders like Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and Duke Ellington drew crowds of people to Art Deco ballrooms and dance halls around the country. And when Prohibition ended in 1933-freeing up legal sales of liquor-cocktail lounges and barrooms were happy to quench the national thirst for alcohol.

Even though money was tight, people kept going to see Hollywood movies-now being made in color. Musicals, screwball comedies and hard-boiled gangster pictures from the Golden Age of Hollywood-films like "The Wizard of Oz," "It's a Wonderful Life," "Casablanca," "King Kong," "Gone With the Wind" and the animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" from Walt Disney -offered audiences an escape from some of the grim realities of life in the 1930s.

The Second New Deal

President Roosevelt's early efforts had begun to restore Americans' confidence, but they had not ended the Depression. In the spring of 1935, he launched a second, more aggressive set of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal.

The Works Progress Administration provided jobs for unemployed people and built new public works like bridges, post offices, schools, highways and parks. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, gave workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively for higher wages and fairer treatment.

The Social Security Act of 1935 guaranteed pensions to some older Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled.

Roosevelt's Second Term

In 1936, while campaigning for a second term, President Roosevelt told a roaring crowd at Madison Square Garden that "The forces of 'organized money' are unanimous in their hate for me-and I welcome their hatred."

He went on: "I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match, [and] I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces have met their master."

Roosevelt won the 1936 election by a landslide. Still, the Depression dragged on. Workers grew more militant: In December 1936, for example, the United Auto Workers started a sit-down strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan that lasted for 44 days and spread to some 150,000 autoworkers in 35 cities.

By 1937, to the dismay of most corporate leaders, some 8 million workers had joined unions and were loudly demanding their rights.

The Depression Ends

By the end of the 1930s, the New Deal had come to an end. Growing Congressional opposition made it difficult for President Roosevelt to introduce new programs. At the same time, as the threat of war in Europe loomed on the horizon- Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and invaded Poland in 1939 -the president turned his attention away from domestic politics.

In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and the Great Depression was over.

Sources

Timeline: 1930s. Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society.
Breaking News of the 1930s. PBS: American Experience.
List of 1930's Major News Events in History. The People History.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1930s: Music, Movies & Great Depression - HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1930s were the decade of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and other problems, but also the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency and Hollywood's Golden Age.

# data[].attributes.body
Suburban American life boomed in the 1950's as around 77 million babies were born by 1964.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Postwar Booms

Historians use the word "boom" to describe a lot of things about the 1950s: the booming economy, the booming suburbs and most of all the so-called "baby boom." This boom began in 1946, when a record number of babies-3.4 million-were born in the United States. About 4 million babies were born each year during the 1950s. In all, by the time the boom finally tapered off in 1964, there were almost 77 million "baby boomers."

After World War II ended, many Americans were eager to have children because they were confident that the future promised peace and prosperity. In many ways, they were right. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product more than doubled, growing from $200 billion to more than $500 billion, kicking off "the Golden Age of American Capitalism." Much of this increase came from government spending: The construction of interstate highways and schools, the distribution of veterans' benefits and most of all the increase in military spending-on goods like airplanes and new technologies like computers-all contributed to the decade's economic growth. Rates of unemployment and inflation were low, and wages were high. Middle-class people had more money to spend than ever-and, because the variety and availability of consumer goods expanded along with the economy, they also had more things to buy.

Moving to the Suburbs

The baby boom and the suburban boom went hand in hand. Almost as soon as World War II ended, developers such as William Levitt (whose "Levittowns" in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania would become the most famous symbols of suburban life in the 1950s) began to buy land on the outskirts of cities and use mass production techniques to build modest, inexpensive tract houses there. The G.I. Bill subsidized low-cost mortgages for many returning soldiers, which meant that it was often cheaper to buy one of these suburban houses than it was to rent an apartment in the city.

These houses were perfect for young families-they had informal "family rooms," open floor plans and backyards-and so suburban developments earned nicknames like "Fertility Valley" and "The Rabbit Hutch."

Though the G.I. Bill helped white Americans prosper and accumulate wealth in the postwar years, it didn't deliver on that promise for veterans of color. In fact, the wide disparity in the bill's implementation ended up driving growing gaps in wealth, education and civil rights between white and Black Americans.

Suburban homes, meanwhile, weren't always so perfect for the (mostly white) women who lived in them. In fact, the booms of the 1950s had a particularly confining effect on many American women. Advice books and magazine articles ("Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young," "Cooking to Me Is Poetry," "Femininity Begins At Home") urged women to leave the workforce and embrace their roles as wives and mothers. The idea that a woman's most important job was to bear and rear children was hardly a new one, but it began to generate a great deal of dissatisfaction among women who yearned for a more fulfilling life. (In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, women's rights advocate Betty Friedan argued that the suburbs were "burying women alive.") This dissatisfaction, in turn, contributed to the rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement

A growing group of Americans spoke out against inequality and injustice during the 1950s. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries; during the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life. For example, in 1954, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Supreme Court declared that "separate educational facilities" for black children were "inherently unequal." This ruling was the first nail in Jim Crow's coffin.

Many Southern whites resisted the Brown ruling. They withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in all-white "segregation academies," and they used violence and intimidation to prevent blacks from asserting their rights. In 1956, more than 100 Southern congressmen even signed a "Southern Manifesto" declaring that they would do all they could to defend segregation.

Despite these efforts, a new movement was born. In December 1955, a Montgomery activist named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white person. Her arrest sparked a 13-month boycott of the city's buses by its black citizens, which only ended when the bus companies stopped discriminating against Black passengers. Acts of "nonviolent resistance" like the boycott helped shape the civil rights movement of the next decade.

Did you know? When Rosa Parks died in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

The Cold War & The Korean War

The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War, was another defining element of the 1950s. After World War II, Western leaders began to worry that the USSR had what one American diplomat called "expansive tendencies"; moreover, they believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened democracy and capitalism everywhere. As a result, communism needed to be "contained"-by diplomacy, by threats or by force.

This policy is what drew American forces into the Korean War in July 1950. A month earlier, some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. As far as American officials were concerned, fighting on behalf of the Republic of Korea was pushback against forces of international communism itself.

The United States never formally declared war on North Korea. Instead, President Harry Truman referred to the addition of ground troops as a "police action." The Korean War armistice, signed on July 27, 1953, drew a new border between North Korea and South Korea, granting South Korea some additional territory and demilitarizing the zone between the two nations.

Cold War tensions shaped domestic policy as well. Many people in the United States worried that communists, or "subversives," could destroy American society from the inside as well as from the outside. Between 1945 and 1952, Congress held 84 hearings designed to put an end to "un-American activities" in the federal government, in universities and public schools and even in Hollywood. These hearings did not uncover many treasonous activities-or even many communists-but it did not matter: Tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs, as well as their families and friends, in the anti-communist "Red Scare" of the 1950s.

1950s Pop Culture

In the 1950s, televisions became something the average family could afford, and by 1950 4.4 million U.S. families had one in their home. The Golden Age of Television was marked by family-friendly shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Twilight Zone and Leave It To Beaver. In movie theaters, actors like John Wayne, James Stuart, Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe dominated the box office. The Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning signaled a new age in art, paving the way for the Pop Art of artists like Andy Warhol in the 1960s.

1950s Music

Elvis Presley. Sam Cooke. Chuck Berry. Fats Domino. Buddy Holly. The 1950s saw the emergence of Rock 'n' Roll, and the new sound swept the nation. It helped inspire rockabilly music from Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. People swayed to The Platters and The Drifters. Music marketing, changed, too: For the first time, music began to target youth.

On February 3, 1959, American musicians Buddy Holly. Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson died in a plane crash over Clear Lake, Iowa, in what became known as " The Day The Music Died "-an event immortalized in Don McLean's 1972 song "American Pie."

Shaping the 1960s

The booming prosperity of the 1950s helped to create a widespread sense of stability, contentment and consensus in the United States. However, that consensus was a fragile one, and it splintered for good during the tumultuous 1960s.

Sources

The Elvic Oracle. The New Yorker.
1950s Rock 'n' Roll. Rolling Stone.
The Day The Music Died. Biography.
The Fifties: The Way We Really Were. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Novak.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 1950s - American Culture & Society | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During the 1950s, the United States was the world's strongest military power. Its economy was booming, and the fruits of this prosperity-new cars, suburban houses and other consumer goods-were available to more people than ever before. However, the 1950s also saw great conflict.

# data[].attributes.body
The Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950's as Blacks demanded more freedom and rights as Americans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Postwar Booms

Historians use the word "boom" to describe a lot of things about the 1950s: the booming economy, the booming suburbs and most of all the so-called "baby boom." This boom began in 1946, when a record number of babies-3.4 million-were born in the United States. About 4 million babies were born each year during the 1950s. In all, by the time the boom finally tapered off in 1964, there were almost 77 million "baby boomers."

After World War II ended, many Americans were eager to have children because they were confident that the future promised peace and prosperity. In many ways, they were right. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product more than doubled, growing from $200 billion to more than $500 billion, kicking off "the Golden Age of American Capitalism." Much of this increase came from government spending: The construction of interstate highways and schools, the distribution of veterans' benefits and most of all the increase in military spending-on goods like airplanes and new technologies like computers-all contributed to the decade's economic growth. Rates of unemployment and inflation were low, and wages were high. Middle-class people had more money to spend than ever-and, because the variety and availability of consumer goods expanded along with the economy, they also had more things to buy.

Moving to the Suburbs

The baby boom and the suburban boom went hand in hand. Almost as soon as World War II ended, developers such as William Levitt (whose "Levittowns" in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania would become the most famous symbols of suburban life in the 1950s) began to buy land on the outskirts of cities and use mass production techniques to build modest, inexpensive tract houses there. The G.I. Bill subsidized low-cost mortgages for many returning soldiers, which meant that it was often cheaper to buy one of these suburban houses than it was to rent an apartment in the city.

These houses were perfect for young families-they had informal "family rooms," open floor plans and backyards-and so suburban developments earned nicknames like "Fertility Valley" and "The Rabbit Hutch."

Though the G.I. Bill helped white Americans prosper and accumulate wealth in the postwar years, it didn't deliver on that promise for veterans of color. In fact, the wide disparity in the bill's implementation ended up driving growing gaps in wealth, education and civil rights between white and Black Americans.

Suburban homes, meanwhile, weren't always so perfect for the (mostly white) women who lived in them. In fact, the booms of the 1950s had a particularly confining effect on many American women. Advice books and magazine articles ("Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young," "Cooking to Me Is Poetry," "Femininity Begins At Home") urged women to leave the workforce and embrace their roles as wives and mothers. The idea that a woman's most important job was to bear and rear children was hardly a new one, but it began to generate a great deal of dissatisfaction among women who yearned for a more fulfilling life. (In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, women's rights advocate Betty Friedan argued that the suburbs were "burying women alive.") This dissatisfaction, in turn, contributed to the rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement

A growing group of Americans spoke out against inequality and injustice during the 1950s. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries; during the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life. For example, in 1954, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Supreme Court declared that "separate educational facilities" for black children were "inherently unequal." This ruling was the first nail in Jim Crow's coffin.

Many Southern whites resisted the Brown ruling. They withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in all-white "segregation academies," and they used violence and intimidation to prevent blacks from asserting their rights. In 1956, more than 100 Southern congressmen even signed a "Southern Manifesto" declaring that they would do all they could to defend segregation.

Despite these efforts, a new movement was born. In December 1955, a Montgomery activist named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white person. Her arrest sparked a 13-month boycott of the city's buses by its black citizens, which only ended when the bus companies stopped discriminating against Black passengers. Acts of "nonviolent resistance" like the boycott helped shape the civil rights movement of the next decade.

Did you know? When Rosa Parks died in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

The Cold War & The Korean War

The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War, was another defining element of the 1950s. After World War II, Western leaders began to worry that the USSR had what one American diplomat called "expansive tendencies"; moreover, they believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened democracy and capitalism everywhere. As a result, communism needed to be "contained"-by diplomacy, by threats or by force.

This policy is what drew American forces into the Korean War in July 1950. A month earlier, some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. As far as American officials were concerned, fighting on behalf of the Republic of Korea was pushback against forces of international communism itself.

The United States never formally declared war on North Korea. Instead, President Harry Truman referred to the addition of ground troops as a "police action." The Korean War armistice, signed on July 27, 1953, drew a new border between North Korea and South Korea, granting South Korea some additional territory and demilitarizing the zone between the two nations.

Cold War tensions shaped domestic policy as well. Many people in the United States worried that communists, or "subversives," could destroy American society from the inside as well as from the outside. Between 1945 and 1952, Congress held 84 hearings designed to put an end to "un-American activities" in the federal government, in universities and public schools and even in Hollywood. These hearings did not uncover many treasonous activities-or even many communists-but it did not matter: Tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs, as well as their families and friends, in the anti-communist "Red Scare" of the 1950s.

1950s Pop Culture

In the 1950s, televisions became something the average family could afford, and by 1950 4.4 million U.S. families had one in their home. The Golden Age of Television was marked by family-friendly shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Twilight Zone and Leave It To Beaver. In movie theaters, actors like John Wayne, James Stuart, Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe dominated the box office. The Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning signaled a new age in art, paving the way for the Pop Art of artists like Andy Warhol in the 1960s.

1950s Music

Elvis Presley. Sam Cooke. Chuck Berry. Fats Domino. Buddy Holly. The 1950s saw the emergence of Rock 'n' Roll, and the new sound swept the nation. It helped inspire rockabilly music from Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. People swayed to The Platters and The Drifters. Music marketing, changed, too: For the first time, music began to target youth.

On February 3, 1959, American musicians Buddy Holly. Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson died in a plane crash over Clear Lake, Iowa, in what became known as " The Day The Music Died "-an event immortalized in Don McLean's 1972 song "American Pie."

Shaping the 1960s

The booming prosperity of the 1950s helped to create a widespread sense of stability, contentment and consensus in the United States. However, that consensus was a fragile one, and it splintered for good during the tumultuous 1960s.

Sources

The Elvic Oracle. The New Yorker.
1950s Rock 'n' Roll. Rolling Stone.
The Day The Music Died. Biography.
The Fifties: The Way We Really Were. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Novak.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 1950s - American Culture & Society | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During the 1950s, the United States was the world's strongest military power. Its economy was booming, and the fruits of this prosperity-new cars, suburban houses and other consumer goods-were available to more people than ever before. However, the 1950s also saw great conflict.

# data[].attributes.body
Harlem Renaissance
"The Jazz Age"
"The Roaring 20s"

1920–1940

# data[].attributes.body
"The New Negro Movement"
1919-1925

Prohibition
1920-1933

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1.Black cultural movement in Harlem, New York
2.Some poetry rhythms based on spirituals and jazz, lyrics on the blues, and diction from the street talk of the ghettos
3. Other poetry used conventional lyrical forms

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James Weldon Johnson

Claude McKay

Countee Cullen

Langston Hughes (poetry)

Zora Neale Hurston

# data[].attributes.body
Lydon B. Johnson became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The 1960s started off as the dawn of a golden age to most Americans. On January 20, 1961, the handsome and charismatic John F. Kennedy became president of the United States. His confidence that, as one historian put it, "the government possessed big answers to big problems" seemed to set the tone for the rest of the decade. However, that golden age never materialized. On the contrary, by the end of the 1960s, it seemed that the nation was falling apart. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" splintered as the Democratic Party split and America became increasingly enmeshed in the Vietnam War.

The Great Society

During his presidential campaign in 1960, John F. Kennedy had promised the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal: the "New Frontier," a package of laws and reforms that sought to eliminate injustice and inequality in the United States. But the New Frontier ran into problems right away: The Democrats' Congressional majority depended on a group of Southerners who loathed the plan's interventionist liberalism and did all they could to block it. The Cuban Missile Crisis and failed Bay of Pigs invasion was another disaster for Kennedy.

Did you know? On June 27, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village. The bar's patrons, sick of being subjected to harassment and discrimination, fought back: For five days, rioters took to the streets in protest. "The word is out," one protester said. "[We] have had it with oppression." Historians believe that this "Stonewall Rebellion" marked the beginning of the gay rights movement.

It was not until 1964, after Kennedy was shot, that President Lyndon B. Johnson could muster the political capital to enact his own expansive program of reforms. That year, Johnson declared that he would make the United States into a " Great Society" in which poverty and racial injustice had no place. He developed a set of programs that would give poor people "a hand up, not a handout." These included Medicare and Medicaid, which helped elderly and low-income people pay for health care; Head Start, which prepared young children for school and a Job Corps that trained unskilled workers for jobs in the deindustrializing economy. Meanwhile, Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity encouraged disadvantaged people to participate in the design and implementation of the government's programs on their behalf, while his Model Cities program offered federal subsidies for urban redevelopment and community projects.

The War in Vietnam

Unfortunately, the War on Poverty was expensive-too expensive, especially as the war in Vietnam became the government's top priority. There was simply not enough money to pay for the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War. Conflict in Southeast Asia had been going on since the 1950s, and President Johnson had inherited a substantial American commitment to anti-communist South Vietnam. Soon after he took office, he escalated that commitment into a full-scale war. In 1964, Congress authorized the president to take "all necessary measures" to protect American soldiers and their allies from the communist Viet Cong. Within days, the draft began.
READ MORE: Who Was Involved in the Vietnam War?
The war dragged on, and it divided the nation. Some young people took to the streets in protest, while others fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Meanwhile, many of their parents and peers formed a "silent majority" in support of the war.

The Fight for Civil Rights

The struggle for civil rights had defined the '60s ever since four black students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 and refused to leave. Their movement spread: Hundreds of demonstrators went back to that lunch counter every day, and tens of thousands clogged segregated restaurants and shops across the upper South. The protesters drew the nation's attention to the injustice, brutality and capriciousness that characterized Jim Crow.

In general, the federal government stayed out of the civil rights struggle until 1964, when President Johnson pushed a Civil Rights Act through Congress that prohibited discrimination in public places, gave the Justice Department permission to sue states that discriminated against women and minorities and promised equal opportunities in the workplace to all. The next year, the Voting Rights Act eliminated poll taxes, literacy requirements and other tools that southern whites had traditionally used to keep blacks from voting.

But these laws did not solve the problems facing African Americans: They did not eliminate racism or poverty and they did not improve the conditions in many black urban neighborhoods. Many black leaders began to rethink their goals, and some embraced a more militant ideology of separatism and self-defense.
READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events
The Radical '60s

Just as black power became the new focus of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, other groups were growing similarly impatient with incremental reforms. Student activists grew more radical. They took over college campuses, organized massive antiwar demonstrations and occupied parks and other public places. Some even made bombs and set campus buildings on fire. At the same time, young women who had read The Feminine Mystique celebrated the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and joined the moderate National Organization for Women were also increasingly annoyed with the slow progress of reform. They too became more militant.

The counterculture also seemed to grow more outlandish as the decade wore on. Some young people "dropped out" of political life altogether. These " hippies " grew their hair long and practiced "free love." Some moved to communes, away from the turbulence that had come to define everyday life in the 1960s.

The Death of the 1960s

The optimistic '60s went sour in 1968. That year, the brutal North Vietnamese Tet Offensive convinced many people that the Vietnam War would be impossible to win. The Democratic Party split, and at the end of March, Johnson went on television to announce that he was ending his reelection campaign. (Richard Nixon, chief spokesman for the silent majority, won the election that fall.) Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the two most visible leftists in American politics, were assassinated. Police used tear gas and billy clubs to break up protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Furious antiwar protestors took over Columbia University in New York as well as the Sorbonne in Paris and the Free University in Berlin. And the urban riots that had erupted across the country every summer since 1964 continued and intensified.

Shreds of the hopeful '60s remained. In the summer of 1969, more than 400,000 young people trooped to the Woodstock music festival in upstate New York, a harmonious three days that seemed to represent the best of the peace-and-love generation.
READ MORE: Woodstock, the Legendary 1969 Festival, Was Also a Miserable Mud Pit
By the end of the decade, however, community and consensus lay in tatters. The era's legacy remains mixed-it brought us empowerment and polarization, resentment and liberation-but it has certainly become a permanent part of our political and cultural lives.

Access hundreds of hours of historical video, commercial free, with HISTORY Vault. Start your free trial today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 1960s History - Events, Timeline & Facts | HISTORY

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The 1960s saw John F. Kennedy elected to the White House and gains in civil rights before America splintered amid cultural divisions and Vietnam War protests.

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The drafting for the war in Vietnam began in 1964.

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The 1960s started off as the dawn of a golden age to most Americans. On January 20, 1961, the handsome and charismatic John F. Kennedy became president of the United States. His confidence that, as one historian put it, "the government possessed big answers to big problems" seemed to set the tone for the rest of the decade. However, that golden age never materialized. On the contrary, by the end of the 1960s, it seemed that the nation was falling apart. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" splintered as the Democratic Party split and America became increasingly enmeshed in the Vietnam War.

The Great Society

During his presidential campaign in 1960, John F. Kennedy had promised the most ambitious domestic agenda since the New Deal: the "New Frontier," a package of laws and reforms that sought to eliminate injustice and inequality in the United States. But the New Frontier ran into problems right away: The Democrats' Congressional majority depended on a group of Southerners who loathed the plan's interventionist liberalism and did all they could to block it. The Cuban Missile Crisis and failed Bay of Pigs invasion was another disaster for Kennedy.

Did you know? On June 27, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village. The bar's patrons, sick of being subjected to harassment and discrimination, fought back: For five days, rioters took to the streets in protest. "The word is out," one protester said. "[We] have had it with oppression." Historians believe that this "Stonewall Rebellion" marked the beginning of the gay rights movement.

It was not until 1964, after Kennedy was shot, that President Lyndon B. Johnson could muster the political capital to enact his own expansive program of reforms. That year, Johnson declared that he would make the United States into a " Great Society" in which poverty and racial injustice had no place. He developed a set of programs that would give poor people "a hand up, not a handout." These included Medicare and Medicaid, which helped elderly and low-income people pay for health care; Head Start, which prepared young children for school and a Job Corps that trained unskilled workers for jobs in the deindustrializing economy. Meanwhile, Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity encouraged disadvantaged people to participate in the design and implementation of the government's programs on their behalf, while his Model Cities program offered federal subsidies for urban redevelopment and community projects.

The War in Vietnam

Unfortunately, the War on Poverty was expensive-too expensive, especially as the war in Vietnam became the government's top priority. There was simply not enough money to pay for the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War. Conflict in Southeast Asia had been going on since the 1950s, and President Johnson had inherited a substantial American commitment to anti-communist South Vietnam. Soon after he took office, he escalated that commitment into a full-scale war. In 1964, Congress authorized the president to take "all necessary measures" to protect American soldiers and their allies from the communist Viet Cong. Within days, the draft began.
READ MORE: Who Was Involved in the Vietnam War?
The war dragged on, and it divided the nation. Some young people took to the streets in protest, while others fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Meanwhile, many of their parents and peers formed a "silent majority" in support of the war.

The Fight for Civil Rights

The struggle for civil rights had defined the '60s ever since four black students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 and refused to leave. Their movement spread: Hundreds of demonstrators went back to that lunch counter every day, and tens of thousands clogged segregated restaurants and shops across the upper South. The protesters drew the nation's attention to the injustice, brutality and capriciousness that characterized Jim Crow.

In general, the federal government stayed out of the civil rights struggle until 1964, when President Johnson pushed a Civil Rights Act through Congress that prohibited discrimination in public places, gave the Justice Department permission to sue states that discriminated against women and minorities and promised equal opportunities in the workplace to all. The next year, the Voting Rights Act eliminated poll taxes, literacy requirements and other tools that southern whites had traditionally used to keep blacks from voting.

But these laws did not solve the problems facing African Americans: They did not eliminate racism or poverty and they did not improve the conditions in many black urban neighborhoods. Many black leaders began to rethink their goals, and some embraced a more militant ideology of separatism and self-defense.
READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events
The Radical '60s

Just as black power became the new focus of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, other groups were growing similarly impatient with incremental reforms. Student activists grew more radical. They took over college campuses, organized massive antiwar demonstrations and occupied parks and other public places. Some even made bombs and set campus buildings on fire. At the same time, young women who had read The Feminine Mystique celebrated the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and joined the moderate National Organization for Women were also increasingly annoyed with the slow progress of reform. They too became more militant.

The counterculture also seemed to grow more outlandish as the decade wore on. Some young people "dropped out" of political life altogether. These " hippies " grew their hair long and practiced "free love." Some moved to communes, away from the turbulence that had come to define everyday life in the 1960s.

The Death of the 1960s

The optimistic '60s went sour in 1968. That year, the brutal North Vietnamese Tet Offensive convinced many people that the Vietnam War would be impossible to win. The Democratic Party split, and at the end of March, Johnson went on television to announce that he was ending his reelection campaign. (Richard Nixon, chief spokesman for the silent majority, won the election that fall.) Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the two most visible leftists in American politics, were assassinated. Police used tear gas and billy clubs to break up protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Furious antiwar protestors took over Columbia University in New York as well as the Sorbonne in Paris and the Free University in Berlin. And the urban riots that had erupted across the country every summer since 1964 continued and intensified.

Shreds of the hopeful '60s remained. In the summer of 1969, more than 400,000 young people trooped to the Woodstock music festival in upstate New York, a harmonious three days that seemed to represent the best of the peace-and-love generation.
READ MORE: Woodstock, the Legendary 1969 Festival, Was Also a Miserable Mud Pit
By the end of the decade, however, community and consensus lay in tatters. The era's legacy remains mixed-it brought us empowerment and polarization, resentment and liberation-but it has certainly become a permanent part of our political and cultural lives.

Access hundreds of hours of historical video, commercial free, with HISTORY Vault. Start your free trial today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 1960s History - Events, Timeline & Facts | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1960s saw John F. Kennedy elected to the White House and gains in civil rights before America splintered amid cultural divisions and Vietnam War protests.

# data[].attributes.body
The Ronald Reagan revolution in America was supported by majority of Americans. Reagan supported small government with heavy spending on military.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
While Reagan and Thatcher trumpeted the march of conservative politics and capitalism, the foundations of communism grew increasingly shaky. In Poland, former electrician Lech Walesa led striking workers to form Solidarity, the first labor union to develop in a Soviet bloc nation. In 1980, representatives of the communist government of Poland agreed to the demands of the strikers.

In communist China, the Tiananmen Square protests-student-led demonstrations calling for democracy, free speech and a free press-began in the spring of 1989. In June of that year, the protests were ended by the Chinese government in a bloody crackdown known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

In some respects, the popular culture of the 1980s reflected the era's political conservatism. For many people, the embodiment of the decade was the young, urban professional, or "yuppie," a baby boomer with a college education, a good-paying job and expensive taste.

Many people derided yuppies for being self-centered and materialistic, and surveys of young urban professionals across the country showed that they were, indeed, more concerned with making money and buying consumer goods than their parents and grandparents had been.

Unlike the 1970s, when hard-hitting movies addressed controversial subjects, lighthearted fare seemed to reign supreme in the 1980s. Films like "Ghostbusters," "Die Hard," "The Breakfast Club" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" kept audiences enthralled and box office receipts high.

The decade was also the era when blockbusters dominated: Movies like "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "Beverly Hills Cop" and mammoth franchises like the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Star Wars series appealed to moviegoers of all ages, making hundreds of millions of dollars in domestic and international releases.

But not everything was superficial escapism: Many now-famous directors honed their craft with dark, serious movies like David Lynch in "Blue Velvet" and "The Elephant Man," Martin Scorsese in "Raging Bull" and Gus Van Sant in "Drugstore Cowboy."

At home, millions watched family sitcoms like "The Cosby Show," "The Simpsons," "thirtysomething" "Family Ties," "Roseanne" and "Married...with Children." They also skipped broadcast network fare and watched rented movies on their new VCRs.

By the end of the 1980s, broadcast networks realized they were in serious trouble as 60 percent of American television owners had cable service. Soon, cable companies like HBO, Cinemax, TBS and Nickelodeon were household names.

The music videos MTV played made stars out of bands like Duran Duran, R.E.M. and Culture Club and megastars out of artists like Madonna, Prince, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, whose elaborate "Thriller" video helped sell 600,000 albums in the five days after its first broadcast.

Later, MTV became a forum for those who went against the grain or were left out of predominantly white, yuppie culture. Rap and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy channeled the frustration of urban Blacks into their powerful album "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back."

But because of the consistent promotion of white musicians and bands on MTV, other venues soon opened up for emerging artists. BET, or Black Entertainment Television, premiered in 1980 as a challenger to MTV by promoting Black bands and musicians.

In addition to serving as a platform for music, MTV also influenced fashion: People across the country (and around the world) did their best to copy the hairstyles and fashions they saw in music videos. Soon, musicians like Madonna, MC Hammer and Boy George also became style icons.

But behind the gloss of MTV, another influence grew in both music and fashion: Punk culture and new-wave fashion, especially in London, grew from a late-1970s trend into a potent 1980s fashion force worldwide, with designers like Vivienne Westwood leading the charge. Ripped jeans and jackets-replete with safety pins and other metallic adornments-Doc Martens boots, spiked hair and heavy makeup were all the rage.

Other fashion trends from the 1980s included athletic wear-running shoes or basketball shoes, track suits and leg warmers-worn as everyday clothing. The preppy look, which mimicked the clothing worn by Ivy League students and buttoned-up professionals, invaded college campuses and nightclubs alike, following the success of " The Official Preppy Handbook," published by Lisa Birnbach in 1980.

Within a few years, an alarmed public learned about the spread of a deadly infectious disease now known as AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, transmitted by direct contact with bodily fluids. Because it was initially dismissed by many-including the political and medical establishments-as occurring only among gay men, the disease spread rapidly, with at least 100,000 U.S. cases and an estimated 400,000 AIDS cases worldwide by the end of the 1980s.

Red ribbons supporting AIDS awareness soon adorned clothes, books, cars and public buildings, including the White House. The first antiviral treatment for AIDS, azidothymidine (AZT), was made available in 1987 and was followed by other, more advanced treatments, but the disease remains a health threat to this day.

Expanding on the hard-won rights that women earned in previous decades, women were leaders in many arenas in the 1980s, from politics to science and the arts. Maggie Thatcher was elected as the first woman prime minister of Great Britain, and Corazon Aquino -following the assassination of her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr.-was ushered into office as the first women president of the Philippines.

U.S. astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983. On the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed by President Reagan as the first woman to serve as associate justice.

In Bhopal, India, an explosion at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984 led to the worst industrial accident in history. At least 2,000 people died and another 200,000 were injured when poisonous gas enveloped the city.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1980s: Fashion, Movies & Politics | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1980s were a decade of political conservatism, such as President Ronald Reagan's Reaganomics, and of blockbuster ...

# data[].attributes.body
Nine million people were unemployed in 1982, during Reagan's administration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
While Reagan and Thatcher trumpeted the march of conservative politics and capitalism, the foundations of communism grew increasingly shaky. In Poland, former electrician Lech Walesa led striking workers to form Solidarity, the first labor union to develop in a Soviet bloc nation. In 1980, representatives of the communist government of Poland agreed to the demands of the strikers.

In communist China, the Tiananmen Square protests-student-led demonstrations calling for democracy, free speech and a free press-began in the spring of 1989. In June of that year, the protests were ended by the Chinese government in a bloody crackdown known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

In some respects, the popular culture of the 1980s reflected the era's political conservatism. For many people, the embodiment of the decade was the young, urban professional, or "yuppie," a baby boomer with a college education, a good-paying job and expensive taste.

Many people derided yuppies for being self-centered and materialistic, and surveys of young urban professionals across the country showed that they were, indeed, more concerned with making money and buying consumer goods than their parents and grandparents had been.

Unlike the 1970s, when hard-hitting movies addressed controversial subjects, lighthearted fare seemed to reign supreme in the 1980s. Films like "Ghostbusters," "Die Hard," "The Breakfast Club" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" kept audiences enthralled and box office receipts high.

The decade was also the era when blockbusters dominated: Movies like "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "Beverly Hills Cop" and mammoth franchises like the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Star Wars series appealed to moviegoers of all ages, making hundreds of millions of dollars in domestic and international releases.

But not everything was superficial escapism: Many now-famous directors honed their craft with dark, serious movies like David Lynch in "Blue Velvet" and "The Elephant Man," Martin Scorsese in "Raging Bull" and Gus Van Sant in "Drugstore Cowboy."

At home, millions watched family sitcoms like "The Cosby Show," "The Simpsons," "thirtysomething" "Family Ties," "Roseanne" and "Married...with Children." They also skipped broadcast network fare and watched rented movies on their new VCRs.

By the end of the 1980s, broadcast networks realized they were in serious trouble as 60 percent of American television owners had cable service. Soon, cable companies like HBO, Cinemax, TBS and Nickelodeon were household names.

The music videos MTV played made stars out of bands like Duran Duran, R.E.M. and Culture Club and megastars out of artists like Madonna, Prince, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, whose elaborate "Thriller" video helped sell 600,000 albums in the five days after its first broadcast.

Later, MTV became a forum for those who went against the grain or were left out of predominantly white, yuppie culture. Rap and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy channeled the frustration of urban Blacks into their powerful album "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back."

But because of the consistent promotion of white musicians and bands on MTV, other venues soon opened up for emerging artists. BET, or Black Entertainment Television, premiered in 1980 as a challenger to MTV by promoting Black bands and musicians.

In addition to serving as a platform for music, MTV also influenced fashion: People across the country (and around the world) did their best to copy the hairstyles and fashions they saw in music videos. Soon, musicians like Madonna, MC Hammer and Boy George also became style icons.

But behind the gloss of MTV, another influence grew in both music and fashion: Punk culture and new-wave fashion, especially in London, grew from a late-1970s trend into a potent 1980s fashion force worldwide, with designers like Vivienne Westwood leading the charge. Ripped jeans and jackets-replete with safety pins and other metallic adornments-Doc Martens boots, spiked hair and heavy makeup were all the rage.

Other fashion trends from the 1980s included athletic wear-running shoes or basketball shoes, track suits and leg warmers-worn as everyday clothing. The preppy look, which mimicked the clothing worn by Ivy League students and buttoned-up professionals, invaded college campuses and nightclubs alike, following the success of " The Official Preppy Handbook," published by Lisa Birnbach in 1980.

Within a few years, an alarmed public learned about the spread of a deadly infectious disease now known as AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, transmitted by direct contact with bodily fluids. Because it was initially dismissed by many-including the political and medical establishments-as occurring only among gay men, the disease spread rapidly, with at least 100,000 U.S. cases and an estimated 400,000 AIDS cases worldwide by the end of the 1980s.

Red ribbons supporting AIDS awareness soon adorned clothes, books, cars and public buildings, including the White House. The first antiviral treatment for AIDS, azidothymidine (AZT), was made available in 1987 and was followed by other, more advanced treatments, but the disease remains a health threat to this day.

Expanding on the hard-won rights that women earned in previous decades, women were leaders in many arenas in the 1980s, from politics to science and the arts. Maggie Thatcher was elected as the first woman prime minister of Great Britain, and Corazon Aquino -following the assassination of her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr.-was ushered into office as the first women president of the Philippines.

U.S. astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983. On the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed by President Reagan as the first woman to serve as associate justice.

In Bhopal, India, an explosion at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984 led to the worst industrial accident in history. At least 2,000 people died and another 200,000 were injured when poisonous gas enveloped the city.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1980s: Fashion, Movies & Politics | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The 1980s were a decade of political conservatism, such as President Ronald Reagan's Reaganomics, and of blockbuster ...

# data[].attributes.headline
The American Dream: The 90's and early 2000's

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The American Dream: The 90's and early 2000's

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.alternative_text
The American Dream: The 90's and early 2000's

# data[].attributes.body
People began living wealthier, building bigger houses, buying expensive cars, etc.

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The 1990s Lifestyles and Social Trends: Overview | Encyclopedia.com

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The 1990s Lifestyles and Social Trends: OverviewThe 1990s was a decade of extremes and contradictions. Americans built bigger and more elaborate homes and drove more expensive automobiles, then worked longer hours to pay for them. Americans spent more, borrowed more, and went more deeply into debt.…

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More Americans began owning guns and NRA memberships became popular in the 90's and early 2000's.

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Contemporary "Postmodernism"
1950–present

# data[].attributes.body
Korean War
1950-1953

Vietnam War
1954-1975

# data[].attributes.body
1. Influenced by studies of media, language, and information technology.
2. Sense that little is unique; culture endlessly duplicates itself.
3. New literary forms and techniques: works composed of only dialogue, or combining fiction and nonfiction, experimenting with physical appearance of their work.