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Women's Suffrage - 19th Amendment - Emma Popkess

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Women's Suffrage - 19th Amendment - Emma Popkess

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Ratifying the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920 was a significant victory for the women's suffrage movement.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Read more...

Primary Sources
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Additional Background Information

In July 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. The Seneca Falls Convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the right of married women to control their wages and property. After this historic gathering, women's voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women's rights in the United States.

Many of the attendees to the convention were also abolitionists whose goals included universal suffrage - the right to vote for all adults. In 1870 this goal was partially realized when the 15th amendment to the Constitution, granting black men the right to vote, was ratified. Woman suffragists' vehement disagreement over supporting the 15th Amendment, however, resulted in a "schism" that split the women's suffrage movement into two new suffrage organizations that focused on different strategies to win women voting rights.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1869 - they opposed the 15th amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the 15th amendment, the NWSA sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.

The second national suffrage organization established in 1869 was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The AWSA supported the 15th Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. The AWSA concentrated on gaining women's access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. While a federal woman suffrage amendment was not their priority, an 1871 petition, asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office, from AWSA leadership to Congress reveals its support for one.

In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). It became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country and led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Stanton became its president; Anthony became its vice president; and Stone became chairman of the executive committee. In 1919, one year before women gained the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th amendment, the NAWSA reorganized into the League of Women Voters.

The tactics used by suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States." She was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress, requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."

Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."

A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. They organized women's clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women - victims of racism as well as sexism - needed the ballot even more.

In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the 1860s and 1870s continued their involvement over 50 years later. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right. I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years."

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest. Frustrated with the suffrage movement's leadership, Alice Paul had broken with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman's Party (NWP). It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote.

Most notably, the NWP organized the first White House picket in U.S. history on January 10, 1917. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. The "Silent Sentinels" let their banners - comparing the President to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany - speak for them. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them.

When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women. There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups.

Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first states to ratify it. On August 18, 1920, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified the amendment - the result of a change of vote by 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn at the insistence of his elderly mother. But those against the amendment managed to delay official ratification. Anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, and their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies and attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. However, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote and delivered the crucial 36th ratification necessary for final adoption. While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.

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Great Depression - Franklin D. Roosevelt - Emma Popkess

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Great Depression - Franklin D. Roosevelt - Emma Popkess

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During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal introduced a series of reforms and programs aimed at providing economic relief, promoting recovery, and implementing long-term reforms, reshaping the role of government in dealing with the crisis.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives

In the summer of 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of New York, was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. In his acceptance speech, Roosevelt addressed the problems of the depression by telling the American people that, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people." In the election that took place in the fall of 1932, Roosevelt won by a landslide.

The New Deal Roosevelt had promised the American people began to take shape immediately after his inauguration in March 1933. Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to get the country out of the depression, the first days of Roosevelt's administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs. Later, a second New Deal was to evolve; it included union protection programs, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. Many of the New Deal acts or agencies came to be known by their acronyms. For example, the Works Progress Administration was known as the WPA, while the Civilian Conservation Corps was known as the CCC. Many people remarked that the New Deal programs reminded them of alphabet soup.

By 1939, the New Deal had run its course. In the short term, New Deal programs helped improve the lives of people suffering from the events of the depression. In the long run, New Deal programs set a precedent for the federal government to play a key role in the economic and social affairs of the nation.

To search for more documents in Loc.gov related to New Deal programs and agencies, use such terms as Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, Farm Security Administration, and the National Recovery Administration.

Documents

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President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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In the summer of 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of New York, was nominated as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party.

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New Deal - Social Security - Emma Popkess

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New Deal - Social Security - Emma Popkess

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Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Social Security Act as part of his New Deal to provide financial assistance to elderly, disabled, and unemployed Americans.

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New Deal - Programs, Social Security & FDR

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The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. A Second New Deal was put in place shortly thereafter as a way to continue the country’s economic recovery.

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A major military and industrial power, the United States contributed significantly to the Allies' victory during World War II by providing vital support to Allied forces.

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The U.S. Homefront During WWII | History

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WWII - Consequences abroad - Emma Popkess

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WWII - Consequences abroad - Emma Popkess

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Many profound consequences of World War II were felt abroad, including the emergence of superpowers like the United States and Soviet Union, the Cold War, the UN, redrawing national boundaries, and decolonizing many territories.

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The Impact of WWII on American Society & Europe - Video | Study.com

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Learn about the impact of World War 2 on American and European society. Consider the social effects of WW2 and how it has had a lasting impact on…

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WW II - Consequences at Home - Emma Popkess

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WW II - Consequences at Home - Emma Popkess

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World War II brought about significant changes, including the end of the Great Depression, the acceleration of civil rights movements, and the rise of a more prominent and interventionist U.S. government.

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Civil rights march on Wash[ington], D.C. / [WKL].

The entry of the United States into World War II caused vast changes in virtually every aspect of American life. Millions of men and women entered military service and saw parts of the world they would likely never have seen otherwise. The labor demands of war industries caused millions more Americans to move--largely to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts where most defense plants located. When World War II ended, the United States was in better economic condition than any other country in the world. Even the 300,000 combat deaths suffered by Americans paled in comparison to any other major belligerent.

Building on the economic base left after the war, American society became more affluent in the postwar years than most Americans could have imagined in their wildest dreams before or during the war. Public policy, like the so-called GI Bill of Rights passed in 1944, provided money for veterans to attend college, to purchase homes, and to buy farms. The overall impact of such public policies was almost incalculable, but it certainly aided returning veterans to better themselves and to begin forming families and having children in unprecedented numbers.

Not all Americans participated equally in these expanding life opportunities and in the growing economic prosperity. The image and reality of overall economic prosperity--and the upward mobility it provided for many white Americans--was not lost on those who had largely been excluded from the full meaning of the American Dream, both before and after the war. As a consequence, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and American women became more aggressive in trying to win their full freedoms and civil rights as guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution during the postwar era.

The postwar world also presented Americans with a number of problems and issues. Flushed with their success against Germany and Japan in 1945, most Americans initially viewed their place in the postwar world with optimism and confidence. But within two years of the end of the war, new challenges and perceived threats had arisen to erode that confidence. By 1948, a new form of international tension had emerged--Cold War--between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. In the next 20 years, the Cold War spawned many tensions between the two superpowers abroad and fears of Communist subversion gripped domestic politics at home.

In the twenty years following 1945, there was a broad political consensus concerning the Cold War and anti-Communism. Usually there was bipartisan support for most US foreign policy initiatives. After the United States intervened militarily in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, however, this political consensus began to break down. By 1968, strident debate among American about the Vietnam War signified that the Cold War consensus had shattered, perhaps beyond repair.

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Overview | The Post War United States, 1945-1968 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The entry of the United States into World War II caused vast changes in virtually every aspect of American life.

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During the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement led to legal and social advancements in racial equality for African Americans, resulting in an end to racial segregation and discrimination.

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The Women's Movement, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, sought to achieve gender equality by challenging traditional roles, advocating for equal rights, and securing legal and social advancements for women.

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After WWII, the establishment of the [no-lexicon]welfare state[/no-lexicon] created new employment opportunities for women. Women workers, including [no-lexicon]migrant workers[/no-lexicon], faced [no-lexicon]discrimination[/no-lexicon] at work. During this period, women workers fought successfully to gain new rights, such as the right to [no-lexicon]equal pay[/no-lexicon].

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A major focus of the Peace Movement during the 1960s and 1970s was to promote global disarmament and nonviolence, especially in the context of the Vietnam War.

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Robert D. Benford, Frank O. TaylorIV, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition) , 2008

Cycles of Peace Movements

Peace movements around the world have experienced cycles of mobilization. Associated with these cycles have been fluctuations in the amount of attention peace movements devote toward negative peace versus positive peace. During times of international tensions and war, peace movements tend to grow. Not surprisingly, wartime yields a disproportionate focus on the task at hand - stopping organized violent responses of the rival nations toward one another. Yet even during wars, some wings of a peace movement's focus extend beyond ending the current hostilities toward building more permanent amicable relations among societies.

Regardless of their focus, wartime peace activists are often vulnerable to accusations on the home-front that, at the very least, they are undermining the war effort by lowering the morale of their nation's soldiers. Sometimes peace activists are accused of aiding and abetting the 'enemy'. Hence, during popular wars the number of regular participants in peace movements may decrease as the amount of peace movement activities paradoxically increases.

Once a war ends, peace activism tends to shift toward prevention. With the horrors of war fresh on people's minds, peace activists advocating working toward positive peace are briefly granted greater legitimacy. However, even during 'peacetime', many peace movements tend to concentrate on the weapons of destruction rather than on the political and economic arrangements that are conducive to war. Whether their goal is terminating a weapon system (negative peace) or eliminating the causes of war (positive peace), opponents often accuse peacetime activists of being idealists, well-meaning but naive.

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Early Peace Efforts

Peace movements are undoubtedly among the major societal forces that have characterized the twentieth century. Their roots, however, can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. The first attempts to create an organized effort to promote peace emerged in the Anglo-Saxon world, in particular in Britain and the U.S. For example, the New York Peace Society and the Massachusetts Peace Society were founded in 1815, while the London Peace Society was created only 1 year later, in 1816. This early peace reformism, however, has little to do with the peace movements of the mid- and late twentieth century. It is more a matter of movements of ideas led by a small number of intellectual elites, rather than popular movements involving thousands of middle-class citizens. We can thus talk of pacifism more than peace movements.

Some prominent pacifist associations were founded in the following decades in most Western countries, both nationally, such as for example, the American Peace Society (1928), and internationally, such as for example, the Ligue internationale et permanente de la paix (Paris, 1863) and the Ligue international de la paix et de la liberté (Geneva, 1867). As their names often suggest, many of these associations worked in the frame of an internationalist approach to peace, that is, based on the assumption that the latter could be reached only through a dialog across national actors and governments. Other transnational associations emerged from wartime pacifism, such as the British and US Quaker service committees (by 1917), the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (1919), and the International War Resister League (1921). Although many efforts by peace movements have later focused on influencing national governments and public opinions, such an internationalist approach remains alive within the movement until nowadays, and has in fact found new vigor with the rise of the global justice movement in the 2000s.

An important feature of early efforts to fight war and promote peace consists in the strong religious background of peace associations. Often such associations were created that have a strong religious background, in particular of the Christian religion. More generally speaking, often national peace movements divide in two main orientations: a Christian (either Catholic, Protestant, or both) orientation and a leftist (either Socialist, Communist, or both) orientation. The relative strength and importance of each stream depends among other on the cleavage structure in each specific country. Other streams have emerged later on, in particular with the rise of the new social movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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'Peace Movements' may be used in two ways. On the one hand, a peace movement is a specific coalition, or purposeful grouping, of peace organizations that, together with elements of the public, seek to remove a threat of war or to create institutions and cultures that obviate recourse to violence. On the other, it is the organizational infrastructure to do so. Usage is usually clarified by context. Peace organization constituencies (supporting members and friends) are people with shared commitment to common values and traditions, like religious nonresistance (the conscientious, absolute, individual rejection of war), or to a program such as world federalism. Such groups form coalitions in order to enlist public support in response to salient issues. If the issue is war or a specific war threat, peace coalitions take the form of antiwar movements. In nearly 200 years of organized peace effort, specific peace movements have affected national policies, international institutions, and popular attitudes. Taken as a whole, they can be viewed as a single, evolving, and increasingly transnational social movement. Its conceptualization is a result of interaction between its historical experience and the formal analyses of war, peace, and social movements. The conceptualization of peace movements has resulted from the dialectical interaction of movement self-reflection on its own experience and subsequent scholarly analysis. The small peace societies begun in 1815 proselytized for attitudinal changes that would obviate warfare. Their memberships broadened, and American and British peace advocates (active members of peace societies) even solicited support on the European continent. By 1899 there were about 100 linked societies, among which some were well funded. The largely elitist leadership constituted a kind of peace establishment. They defined themselves by programs such as international arbitration and by a common bias for internationalism-the view that the destructiveness of war could be avoided by stressing mutual interests, breaking down barriers, and building up international law. Such generalized peace advocacy was christened 'pacifism' (note shift of meaning, next sentence) at the turn of the century. That conviction was shaken in World War I, as peace advocates were repressed, and 'pacifism' was narrowed to mean individual nonresistance. At the same time, though, some internationalists recognized the importance of constraints on national sovereignty and of professional international problem solvers: this shift may be called 'liberal internationalism.' Moreover, the movement was revitalized by the addition of a reform-minded leadership that was activist, linking peace and social justice, in the modern sense of positive peace (most fully articulated by Johan Galtung, this refers to peace as the positive attribute of just, mutual relationships rather than the mere absence of warfare). Thus redefined, peace movements came to be understood as social change agents. In the next two decades, peace advocates, especially in England and America, organized strong campaigns to influence national policy through the politics of pressure groups. In the 1920s they were divided by conflicting priorities, however, and in the mid-1930s they aligned in rival coalitions for and against collective security-the formation of large-scale military alliances to forestall aggression. By this time, formal analysis of peace movements began among a few historians, and their work defined the movement itself along its own lines of organization and programs-in the political context at the time of writing. During World War II a fresh peace coalition was coalesced around the vision of a United Nations Organization, and it was extended to the control of atomic weapons and even world federalism (a vision of world government in which power is broadly distributed). This incipient peace movement was checked by the Cold War until nuclear testing provided a salient issue for a worldwide coalition that mobilized large numbers of people and affected public policy. Following the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, many peace advocates turned to other issues, most dramatically the US war in Vietnam, until a hardening of the Cold War and another nuclear weapons threat occasioned a massive coalition that crossed national borders but was also divided by national priorities. About the same time, there were international movement campaigns against US intervention in Central America, apartheid in South Africa, and on other issues. Scholarly study of peace movements flowered in the 1970s among historians and sociologists alike, and the literature was extended into the 1990s. Not only were movement stories filled out, they were newly conceptualized in many respects, notably by a common thrust on peace reform as a social movement-a coalitions of organizations, plus significant elements of the general public, for program and policy goals. Beyond their records as organizations, their successes and failures in achieving their goals, peace movements have been integral elements of the policy-forming and social change process in their societies. One new thrust characteristic of both history and sociology was to analyze peace advocacy in terms of resource mobilization-the terms on which organizations could form coalitions and mobilize public support. In the 1990s both historians and sociologists applied resource mobilization analysis to major peace coalitions. Some scholars took the next step, treating international coalition for peace as one of many transnational social movements (international coalitions of social movements in several countries) in a dynamic, global network. Peace movements, tentatively early in the twentieth century but sometimes quite vigorously in the latter half, have become an integral part of the policy-forming and social change process in an increasingly integrated world.

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The history of peace movements started with peace societies in the USA and in England between 1814 and 1816. France and Switzerland followed in 1821 and 1830 respectively with the majority of European countries only after 1850. In the nineteenth century, pacifist motivation sprang either from a Christian position or from a rationalistic impetus thus expressing the emancipatory drive of the bourgeoisie society. Contemporary continental European peace movements regarded those wars fought for national unity to be legitimate. The last two decades of the century saw the uprising of new organizations whose demands for arbitration and disarmament reflected the overall crisis of the international system in the age of imperialism. As World War I rendered pacifist efforts illusionary the balance shifted towards radical demands like conscientious objection. New peace movements evolving in the interwar years were socially less homogenous in structure. Two positions coexisted, i.e., a radical one in favor of conscientious objection and mass strike, and a moderate one opting for the support of the League of Nations and its essential transformation into an instrument to secure peace. Dealing with dictatorial regimes peace movements in their massive support of appeasement policy proved again to be ineffective. After World War II the nuclear threat produced pacifist mass movements embedded in the 'new' social movements.

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Distinctive forms of protest

Women in the peace movement have been inspired in their development of NVDA, perhaps because it is a much easier tool for them to use. The security forces tend to be male and find female protestors both less threatening and more embarrassing than male ones. Thus, the Gandhian image of men lining up to have their skills split open by baton-wielding police, and bandaged up by their attendant women folk, has been replaced by security forces helplessly chasing women dressed up as teddy bears having picnics on bomb silos while their men folk make sandwiches. Women have proved effective not only in poking fun at the apparatus of the state, but also in showing its limits and fragility, entering high-security areas almost at their pleasure. They have partly achieved this through the development of nonhierarchical forms of cooperation and communication, so that, for example, it was impossible for the authorities to disrupt or stop the actions against the nuclear base at Greenham Common by arresting leaders or seizing means of communication. There were no leaders, and communication was done by networking. The women moved in all areas of society and could not be isolated, as was vividly demonstrated by the appearance of cards at one of the Queen's Garden Parties proclaiming "Greenham Women are Everywhere."

Because women were behaving politically in what are usually considered private places (laundromats can be political forums, for example), their activities tended to be unnoticed. This is a pattern of political resistance that has been used in many anticolonial movements, as well as movements in Eastern Europe opposing the hegemony of the Soviet Union, and demonstrates Gandhi's perception that the official organs of the state only survive with the cooperative tolerance of their citizens. Feminists have sought to demonstrate the dependence of the state on women's cooperation, and that regardless of their exclusion from public positions, this dependency gives women power.

Women's Peace Camps founded in the 1980s to protest against the acceleration of the nuclear arms race reflected the richness and ambiguity of both the peace movement and the feminist traditions. There was no single commitment or ideal that all had to subscribe to (as, for example, with the Peace Pledge Union). Rather, they provided a forum where people with a more or less agreed-upon core of values came together to discuss and protest. These values included a rejection of violence, a skeptical attitude toward the state, a rejection of domination, including the dominance of men over women, of class, of race, a rejection of neocolonialism and a sympathy with the oppressed wherever they struggled, and an openness to experimenting with new forms of political action. The camps reflected the range of the peace movement.

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Contemporary Peace Movements

The postwar revitalization of peace movements was shadowed by splits between the one-issue antinuclear movements that were more concerned with political effectiveness than with a way of life, and the older organizations working for social transformation. Strikes, demonstrations and vigils, transcontinental peace walks, protest ships sailing in forbidden waters, all helped lead to the declaration of nuclear weapons-free zones in Latin America and the South Pacific, and a partial test-ban treaty, but weapons production, testing, and deployment by the major powers went steadily on.

As peace movements became more sophisticated in terms of political effectiveness, they became more specialized, and the links between peace movements and peaceful lifeways are harder to find, although the relevance of movement activities for peace culture continues. For example, the interdisciplinary peace research movement that began in the early 1960s soon expanded its work beyond disarmament studies to economic conversion, alternative development, alternative defense, and ecological security, thus linking alternative security policy with grassroots alternative lifeways movements. Zone of Peace studies helped conceptualize specific social spaces for nonviolent lifeways.

Occupationally based peace organizations helped give specific content to general peace movement activity. The 1988-89 Peace Resource Book listed 22 such organizations in the United States, at least half linked to transnational organizations with sections in a number of countries. The list includes associations for architects, business executives, computer professionals, educators, high-tech professionals, physicians, lawyers, media professionals, veterans, nurses, parliamentarians, performing artists, psychologists, social scientists, writers, and publishers. The fruits for peace culture include architects designing peace parks, educators designing conflict resolution curriculae for schools, physicians and nurses reconceptualizing health and illness, and artists offering drama, music, poetry, and art that express the peacemaking dimension of human experience.

Then there are the scientists' organizations addressing basic issues of the health of the planet and the hazards of nuclear and other weapons developments. They include groups such as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, founded in 1965 to focus the world scientific community on possibilities of disarmament; the Union of Concerned Scientists founded in 1969, and the Commission established by the International Council of Scientific Unions in the 1970s to investigate nuclear hazards. These communities have helped develop an international consensus on the need for nonviolent dispute settlement and more attention to the natural environment of an endangered planet - key elements for a macrolevel culture of peace. As powerful voices in the international community, listened to by national governments and the United Nations, they are laying the groundwork for current and future shifts in state security behavior.

Most, if not all, of the 200 international peace organizations listed in the 1997 Housman's Peace Diary have consultative status at the United Nations and work with various United Nations bodies including Regional Disarmament Centers - there is one on each continent - and at times with special programs on regional conflicts, with the UN University based in Tokyo. Many of them will be working with UNESCO's new Culture of Peace Program, helping war victims regain personhood, helping former soldiers and guerillas - many of them children - learn new occupational skills, new habits of caring and cooperation, and community-building skills, as well as skills of rebuilding destroyed soils and forests. Other projects involve creating new school programs for war-traumatized children and new support systems for war-traumatized women, often rape victims. Like all the groups mentioned in this section, they are helping to lay the groundwork for an emerging culture of peace.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123739858001239

Peace Movements

In the nineteenth century, a wide variety of national and international peace movements arose to condemn war either on religious grounds or as an anachronism long overdue for abolition by human progress. In the United States, the work of organizations such as the New England Non-Resistance Society and the League for Universal Brotherhood helped pave the way for the Hague Court in 1899, the first international tribunal and a forerunner to the League of Nations, founded after World War I, and the United Nations, founded after World War II. Many such movements continue their work today around the world, arguing that war, especially given the destructive potential of modern weapons (nuclear, biological and chemical), presents a form of violence which humanity as a whole must learn to overcome in order to survive. Albert Einstein, in an exchange of letters with Sigmund Freud at the inception of the nuclear era, argued that because of such weapons, humanity must evolve to a new level of civilization. Activists such as Dr. Helen Caldicott, the leader of Physicians for Social Responsibility, have pursued this cause.

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Peace Movements and the Critique of the Nuclear Arms Race

Gorbachev's efforts were aided by the emergence in the 1980s of a massive peace movement in Western Europe and the US, which opposed a new generation of highly accurate, so-called 'first strike' nuclear weapons that were being introduced by the MICs of both superpowers as well as new strategic doctrines that claimed nuclear wars could be fought and 'won'. In generating some of the largest political demonstrations of the post-World War II period in the West, the peace movements of the 1980s created an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy for the MIC by calling into question its claim to be the provider of stability and security through nuclear deterrence based on increasingly 'modernized' nuclear weapon systems.

The peace movement developed sophisticated critiques of both the technology and the politics of the nuclear arms race. Widely read works by Thompson and others opposed the technological momentum of the arms race and sought to radically democratize nuclear politics, in part by exposing the gulf that separated the awesome destructive capacities of nuclear technologies or 'hardware' from the comparatively infantile 'science' of deterrence and nuclear strategy that was based on unproven assumptions about human behavior and decision making.

Many peace movement leaders were women, including Helen Caldecott of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Randall Forsberg, author of a 'nuclear freeze' proposal that was passed by voters in many states in the US. In this period a 'gender gap' opened in US voting patterns with significantly fewer women than men voting for candidates who supported the renewed arms race and MIC. Authors such as Enloe and Cohn subjected the masculine character and gender consequences of the MIC and nuclear weapons laboratories to important feminist critiques. Additionally, a number of prominent scientists and military officers, including Freeman Dyson and Lord Zuckerman, 'defected' from the MIC and published widely read critiques of the new nuclear weapon systems and doctrines.

The first Reagan administration responded to this crisis with the announcement of a SDI or Star Wars program in 1983. While the rhetorical shift from 'offensive', horribly destructive nuclear weapons to a 'defensive' system attracted a certain degree of public support, the SDI effort in turn became the subject of bitter controversy, especially in the scientific and technical communities. Critics of SDI pointed to its unprecedented costs and dangers. Many pointed out that such a system would have great offensive capabilities and would violate the US-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Others saw it as a way for nuclear weapons labs and the MIC to develop new projects as the prospects of anything new in offensive weapons were running out. 'Star Wars' represented an increasingly parasitic arms race where now offensive and defensive weapon systems could race each other in a never-ending spiral. Many military officers and strategists were also wary as SDI technology developed by an adversary would threaten the very foundation of US nuclear deterrence.

Finally, critics such as Zuckerman pointed to the technological arrogance: the most complex weapon system ever proposed, with command and control relying on execution of trillions of lines of software code and much of its hardware deployed in space - a system and software that could never be operationally tested in advance - would have to perform flawlessly on its first use to defend against nuclear attack. Despite a 15-year, $50 billion research and prototype development effort from 1983 to the late 1990s, the SDI failed to inaugurate a second long wave of MIC-led expansion comparable to the earlier nuclear arms race.

Instead, the legitimation crisis of the 1980s revealed the Cold War technological era coming to an end. The nuclear arms race had become exhausted, both technologically and in its scientific-ideological legitimations, that is, theories of nuclear strategy that tried to justify departures from basic nuclear deterrence. The deconstruction of the scientific and technical aura of the nuclear arms race by the peace movement was a central development here. The peace movement undermined what had previously been a central political and social function of the MIC: to unite publics and blocs behind a symbolic sense of military-provided security and to claim to be the leading edge of scientific-technological, and hence economic, modernity.

By the end of the decade the US and the Soviet Union had concluded or were negotiating a series of historic nuclear arms control treaties, and the Soviet Union had relinquished its military and political claims over the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe, paving the way for a series of relatively peaceful transitions in those societies. In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War was over. What were left were large MICs, with their huge nuclear arsenals, without a purpose.

In the Soviet case, the end of the Cold War and diminution of the arms race represented a systemic crisis; what continued justification was there for a national structure dominated by the MIC in light of the end of the Cold War and deepening economic crisis? Within a few years the Soviet Union had disintegrated into 13 independent republics and its MIC, inherited mostly by Russia, was a hollowed-out shell of its Cold War peak.

In the case of the United States, the end of the Cold War was accompanied by public discussion of the possibility of a historic 'peace dividend', entailing a major demobilization of military forces (as in the aftermath of previous wars) and reorientation of economic and scientific resources to civilian ends. But a full-scale re-evaluation of the MIC dominance of US governmental priorities and resources was diverted by the first major international crisis of the 1990s: the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War.

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4 Social Movements and the Media

A number of scholars have noted that social movements have often successfully brought new issues onto the public agenda. Thomas Rochon's (1998 ) analysis of the peace movement in various Western countries fits in this tradition, as does the work of Douglas McAdam ( 1988), whose study of the Mississippi Freedom Summer documented the success of civil rights activists in putting the issue of racial equality on the national political agenda during the mid-1960s.

Studies of the media agenda have been legion, largely following from the early work of Max McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972); for a review of this literature, see Rogers and Dearing (1988). Bernard Cohen (1963) noted famously that while the media cannot tell the public what to think, they can have a great impact on what the public think about. Within political science, several authors have picked up on the issue of media effects on public opinion (Iyengar 1991, Iyengar and Kinder 1987). James Stimson (1991) noted the changes in a broadly measured national mood based on public opinion surveys; John Kingdon (1984) also put considerable emphasis on the national mood in his study of agenda setting in government. As policymakers consider what issues to spend their time on, Kingdon (1984) noted they often make reference to the idea of a national mood.

Studies of the political agenda have been remarkable in political science for their integrative character: rather than focusing on any particular institution of government, scholars have traced the sources of agenda setting in the public, in the roles of interest groups and social movements, by noting the roles of policy entrepreneurs, and by looking at the government in very broad terms. Of course this does not mean that political leaders play an insignificant role. From the work of Richard Neustadt (1960) onwards students of the US Presidency have noted the need for presidents to focus their energy on a few issues (see Light 1982; for a similar study of congressional leadership see Bader 1996). Studies of the Supreme Court have noted the extremely tight control that the Court maintains over its agenda, as well as the characteristics of the cases that it is most likely to take. The Court, of course, is unusual among political institutions in that its agenda is reactive rather than proactive. Congress or the President can reach out to discuss whatever issues appeal to them; the Court can only choose from the issues that are presented for its decision (see Perry 1984, Caldeira and Wright 1988).

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767010925

Social Movements and the Media

A number of scholars have noted that social movements have often successfully brought new issues onto the public agenda. Thomas Rochon's (1998) analysis of the peace movement in various Western countries fits in this tradition, as does the work of Douglas McAdam (1988), whose study of the Mississippi Freedom Summer documented the success of civil rights activists in putting the issue of racial equality on the national political agenda during the mid-1960s.

Studies of the media agenda have been legion, largely following from the early work of Max McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972); for a review of this literature, see Rogers and Dearing (1988). Bernard Cohen (1963) noted famously that while the media cannot tell the public what to think, they can have a great impact on what the public think about. Within political science, several authors have picked up on the issue of media effects on public opinion (Iyengar, 1991; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987). James Stimson (1991) noted the changes in a broadly measured national mood based on public opinion surveys; John Kingdon (1984) also put considerable emphasis on the national mood in his study of agenda setting in government. As policymakers consider what issues to spend their time on, Kingdon (1984) noted they often make reference to the idea of a national mood.

Studies of the political agenda have been remarkable in political science for their integrative character: rather than focusing on any particular institution of government, scholars have traced the sources of agenda setting in the public, in the roles of interest groups and social movements, by noting the roles of policy entrepreneurs, and by looking at the government in very broad terms. Of course this does not mean that political leaders play an insignificant role. From the work of Richard Neustadt (1960) onwards students of the US Presidency have noted the need for presidents to focus their energy on a few issues (see Light, 1982; for a similar study of congressional leadership see Bader, 1996). Studies of the Supreme Court have noted the extremely tight control that the Court maintains over its agenda, as well as the characteristics of the cases that it is most likely to take. The Court, of course, is unusual among political institutions in that its agenda is reactive rather than proactive. Congress or the President can reach out to discuss whatever issues appeal to them; the Court can only choose from the issues that are presented for its decision (see Perry, 1984; Caldeira and Wright, 1988).

Read full chapter

URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080970868930034

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Robert D. Benford, Frank O. TaylorIV, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition) , 2008 Peace movements around the world have experienced cycles of mobilization. Associated with these cycles have been fluctuations in the amount of attention peace movements devote toward negative peace versus positive peace.

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Development of Computers and Information Systems - Emma Popkess

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Development of Computers and Information Systems - Emma Popkess

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In a variety of industries, computers and information systems have transformed modern life through rapid data processing, advanced communication technology, and digital innovation.

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The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed

After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Professor John Vincent Atanasoff receives funds to build a full-scale machine at Iowa State College (now University). The machine was designed and built by Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry between 1939 and 1942. The ABC was at the center of a patent dispute related to the invention of the computer, which was resolved in 1973 when it was shown that ENIAC co-designer John Mauchly had seen the ABC shortly after it became functional.

The legal result was a landmark: Atanasoff was declared the originator of several basic computer ideas, but the computer as a concept was declared un-patentable and thus freely open to all. A full-scale working replica of the ABC was completed in 1997, proving that the ABC machine functioned as Atanasoff had claimed. The replica is currently on display at the Computer History Museum.

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Computers | Timeline of Computer History | Computer History Museum

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The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Professor John Vincent Atanasoff receives funds to build a full-scale machine at Iowa State College (now University). The machine was designed and built by Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry between 1939 and 1942.

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The 19th-century movement where settlers migrated west across the United States, driven by the desire for land, economic opportunities, and the belief in Manifest Destiny.

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Table of Contents

1. Manifest Destiny

2. Westward Expansion and Slavery

3. Westward Expansion and the Mexican War

4. Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850

5. Bleeding Kansas

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation's health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms. ("Those who labor in the earth," he wrote, "are the chosen people of God.") In order to provide enough land to sustain this ideal population of virtuous yeomen, the United States would have to continue to expand. The westward expansion of the United States is one of the defining themes of 19th-century American history, but it is not just the story of Jefferson's expanding "empire of liberty." On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion "very nearly destroy[ed] the republic."

Manifest Destiny

By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans-40 percent of the nation's population-lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark, most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the " Great Emigration."

Did you know? In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase added about 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and fixed the boundaries of the "lower 48" where they are today.

In 1845, a journalist named John O'Sullivan put a name to the idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier. Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project, he argued, and it was Americans' " manifest destiny " to carry the "great experiment of liberty" to the edge of the continent: to "overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us," O'Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

Westward Expansion and Slavery

Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress. More important, it had stipulated that in the future, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30' parallel) in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.

However, the Missouri Compromise did not apply to new territories that were not part of the Louisiana Purchase, and so the issue of slavery continued to fester as the nation expanded. The Southern economy grew increasingly dependent on "King Cotton" and the system of forced labor that sustained it. Meanwhile, more and more Northerners came to believed that the expansion of slavery impinged upon their own liberty, both as citizens-the pro-slavery majority in Congress did not seem to represent their interests-and as yeoman farmers. They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity.

Westward Expansion and the Mexican War

Despite this sectional conflict, Americans kept on migrating West in the years after the Missouri Compromise was adopted. Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico and Texas. In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state.

This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was elected to the presidency in 1844. Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.

That same month, Polk declared war against Mexico, claiming (falsely) that the Mexican army had "invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil." The Mexican-American War proved to be relatively unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the "slaveocracy." In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attached a proviso to a war-appropriations bill declaring that slavery should not be permitted in any part of the Mexican territory that the U.S. might acquire. Wilmot's measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.

Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

Bleeding Kansas

But the larger question remained unanswered. In 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska, be established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowa and Missouri. According to the terms of the Missouri Compromise, both new states would prohibit slavery because both were north of the 36º30' parallel. However, since no Southern legislator would approve a plan that would give more power to "free-soil" Northerners, Douglas came up with a middle ground that he called "popular sovereignty": letting the settlers of the territories decide for themselves whether their states would be slave or free.

Northerners were outraged: Douglas, in their view, had caved to the demands of the "slaveocracy" at their expense. The battle for Kansas and Nebraska became a battle for the soul of the nation. Emigrants from Northern and Southern states tried to influence the vote. For example, thousands of Missourians flooded into Kansas in 1854 and 1855 to vote (fraudulently) in favor of slavery. "Free-soil" settlers established a rival government, and soon Kansas spiraled into civil war. Hundreds of people died in the fighting that ensued, known as " Bleeding Kansas."

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West-a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom-that proved to be "the knell of the union."
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Westward Expansion - Timeline, Events & Facts | HISTORY

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Westward expansion, the 19th-century movement of settlers into the American West, began with the Louisiana Purchase and was fueled by the Gold Rush, the Oregon Trail and a belief in "manifest destiny."

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Slavery in history refers to the widespread practice where individuals were owned, forced into labor, and deprived of basic rights, deeply influencing societies across different cultures and eras.

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Black slaves played a major, though unwilling and generally unrewarded, role in laying the economic foundations of the United States-especially in the South. Blacks also played a leading role in the development of Southern speech, folklore, music, dancing, and food, blending the cultural traits of their African homelands with those of Europe. During the 17th and 18th centuries, African and African American (those born in the New World) slaves worked mainly on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the Southern seaboard. Eventually slavery became rooted in the South's huge cotton and sugar plantations. Although Northern businessmen made great fortunes from the trade of enslaved peoples and from investments in Southern plantations, slavery was never widespread in the North.

Crispus Attucks, a former slave killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, was the first martyr to the cause of American independence from Great Britain. During the American Revolution, some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side. After the Revolution, some slaves-particularly former soldiers-were freed, and the Northern states abolished slavery. But with the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, in 1788, slavery became more firmly entrenched than ever in the South. The Constitution counted a slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation in Congress (thus increasing the number of representatives from slave states), prohibited Congress from abolishing the African trade of enslaved peoples before 1808, and provided for the return of fugitive slaves to their owners.

In 1807 Pres. Thomas Jefferson signed legislation that officially ended the African trade of enslaved peoples beginning in January 1808. However, this act did not presage the end of slavery. Rather, it spurred the growth of the domestic trade of enslaved peoples in the United States, especially as a source of labour for the new cotton lands in the Southern interior. Increasingly, the supply of slaves came to be supplemented by the practice of "slave breeding," in which women slaves were raped as early as age 13 and forced to give birth as often as possible.

Laws known as the slave codes regulated the slave system to promote absolute control by the master and complete submission by the slave. Under these laws the slave was chattel-a piece of property and a source of labour that could be bought and sold like an animal. The slave was allowed no stable family life and little privacy. Slaves were prohibited by law from learning to read or write. The meek slave received tokens of favour from the master, and the rebellious slave provoked brutal punishment. A social hierarchy among the plantation slaves also helped keep them divided. At the top were the house slaves; next in rank were the skilled artisans; at the bottom were the vast majority of field hands, who bore the brunt of the harsh plantation life.

With this tight control there were few successful slave revolts. Slave plots were invariably betrayed. The revolt led by Cato in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739 took the lives of 30 whites. A slave revolt in New York City in 1741 caused heavy property damage. Some slave revolts, such as those of Gabriel Prosser (Richmond, Virginia, in 1800) and Denmark Vesey (Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822), were elaborately planned. The slave revolt that was perhaps most frightening to slave owners was the one led by Nat Turner (Southampton, Virginia, in 1831). Before Turner and his co-conspirators were captured, they had killed about 60 whites.

Individual resistance by slaves took such forms as mothers killing their newborn children to save them from slavery, the poisoning of slave owners, the destruction of machinery and crops, arson, malingering, and running away. Thousands of runaway slaves were led to freedom in the North and in Canada by Black and white abolitionists who organized a network of secret routes and hiding places that came to be known as the Underground Railroad. One of the greatest heroes of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, a former slave who on numerous trips to the South helped hundreds of slaves escape to freedom.

Free Blacks and abolitionism

During the period of slavery, free Blacks made up about one-tenth of the entire African American population. In 1860 there were almost 500,000 free African Americans-half in the South and half in the North. The free Black population originated with former indentured servants and their descendants. It was augmented by free Black immigrants from the West Indies and by Blacks freed by individual slave owners.

But free Blacks were only technically free. In the South, where they posed a threat to the institution of slavery, they suffered both in law and by custom many of the restrictions imposed on slaves. In the North, free Blacks were discriminated against in such rights as voting, property ownership, and freedom of movement, though they had some access to education and could organize. Free Blacks also faced the danger of being kidnapped and enslaved.

The earliest African American leaders emerged among the free Blacks of the North, particularly those of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. Free African Americans in the North established their own institutions-churches, schools, and mutual aid societies. One of the first of these organizations was the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, formed in 1816 and led by Bishop Richard Allen of Philadelphia. Among other noted free African Americans was the astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker.

Free Blacks were among the first abolitionists. They included John B. Russwurm and Samuel E. Cornish, who in 1827 founded Freedom's Journal, the first African American-run newspaper in the United States. Black support also permitted the founding and survival of the , a journal begun in 1831 by the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Probably the most celebrated of all African American journals was the North Star, founded in 1847 by the former slave Frederick Douglass, who argued that the antislavery movement must be led by Black people.

Beginning in 1830, African American leaders began meeting regularly in national and state conventions. But they differed on the best strategies to use in the struggle against slavery and discrimination. Some, such as David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, called on the slaves to revolt and overthrow their masters. Others, such as Russwurm and Paul Cuffe, proposed that a major modern Black country be established in Africa. Supported by the American Colonization Society, whose membership was overwhelmingly white, African Americans founded Liberia in West Africa in 1822. Their ideas foreshadowed the development of Pan-African nationalism under the leadership of AME Bishop Henry M. Turner a half century later. However, most Black leaders then and later regarded themselves as Americans and felt that the problems of their people could be solved only by a continuing struggle at home.

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African Americans - Slavery in the United States

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Black slaves played a major, though unwilling and generally unrewarded, role in laying the economic foundations of the United States-especially in the South. Blacks also played a leading role in the development of Southern speech, folklore, music, dancing, and food, blending the cultural traits of their African homelands with those of Europe.

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industrial Revolution (before American Civil War)-Halle Green

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industrial Revolution (before American Civil War)-Halle Green

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The Industrial Revolution before the American Civil War was a period of rapid technological advancement, marked by the rise of factories, mass production, and significant shifts in agriculture, transportation, and labor, particularly in the Northern United States.

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International Stock Food Factory, between 1900 and 1910
Detroit Publishing Company

In the decades following the Civil War, the United States emerged as an industrial giant. Old industries expanded and many new ones, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing, and electrical power, emerged. Railroads expanded significantly, bringing even remote parts of the country into a national market economy.

Industrial growth transformed American society. It produced a new class of wealthy industrialists and a prosperous middle class. It also produced a vastly expanded blue collar working class. The labor force that made industrialization possible was made up of millions of newly arrived immigrants and even larger numbers of migrants from rural areas. American society became more diverse than ever before.

Not everyone shared in the economic prosperity of this period. Many workers were typically unemployed at least part of the year, and their wages were relatively low when they did work. This situation led many workers to support and join labor unions. Meanwhile, farmers also faced hard times as technology and increasing production led to more competition and falling prices for farm products. Hard times on farms led many young people to move to the city in search of better job opportunities.

Americans who were born in the 1840s and 1850s would experience enormous changes in their lifetimes. Some of these changes resulted from a sweeping technological revolution. Their major source of light, for example, would change from candles, to kerosene lamps, and then to electric light bulbs. They would see their transportation evolve from walking and horse power to steam-powered locomotives, to electric trolley cars, to gasoline-powered automobiles. Born into a society in which the vast majority of people were involved in agriculture, they experienced an industrial revolution that radically changed the ways millions of people worked and where they lived. They would experience the migration of millions of people from rural America to the nation's rapidly growing cities.

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Overview | Rise of Industrial America, 1876-1900 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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In the decades following the Civil War, the United States emerged as an industrial giant. Old industries expanded and many new ones, including petroleum refining, steel manufacturing, and electrical power, emerged. Railroads expanded significantly, bringing even remote parts of the country into a national market economy. Industrial growth transformed American society.

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Immigration involves people moving to new countries for various reasons such as economic opportunities, safety, and family reunification, with consequences including cultural enrichment, economic growth, and potential social challenges.

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The Economics of Immigration: Crash Course Economics #33

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The Gilded Age was a period of rapid industrialization, economic growth, and social change in the United States during the late 19th century, marked by stark contrasts between wealth and poverty, political corruption, and significant advancements in technology and industry.

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The Gilded Age: The ‘High’ Point in America’s History

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Reconstruction was the period following the American Civil War (1865-1877) aimed at rebuilding the South, integrating formerly enslaved people into society, and redefining the nation's laws and policies, but it faced significant resistance and ultimately fell short of achieving lasting racial and social equality.

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Reconstruction of the South, 1857. Library of Congress.

1863
January 1: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that the majority of the nation's slave population "henceforth shall be free."

July: In New York City, opposition to the nation's first military draft triggers a riot, the largest in American history, as poor white Northerners protest being forced to fight to end slavery. Over four days, the insurrection develops into wholesale violence, with an uncounted number of victims.

December 8: President Lincoln announces the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. It offers pardon and restoration of property -- except slaves -- to Confederates who swear allegiance to the Union and agree to accept emancipation. Known as the 10 Percent Plan, it requires only 10% of a former Confederate state's voters to pledge the oath before the state can begin the process of readmission into the Union.

1864
Early 1864: President Lincoln begins Reconstruction in the Union-occupied former Confederate state of Louisiana. Lincoln's lenient 10 percent policy upsets Radical Republicans, who expect the South to do more to gain readmission, and believe Lincoln's approach does not provide enough protection to ex-slaves.

July: In response to Lincoln's plan, Congress passes its own, the Wade-Davis Bill. It ups the allegiance requirement from 10% to a majority of a state's voters, limits many former Confederates from political participation in state reconstruction, demands blacks receive not only their freedom but equality before the law, and imposes a series of other requirements on the states. Lincoln does not sign the Wade-Davis Bill; his pocket veto means the bill does not pass into law.

November 8: Lincoln is reelected.

1865
By 1865, some 180,000 blacks have served in the Union Army, over one-fifth of the adult male black population under 45.

January 16: Marching the Union Army through the South with an ever-growing number of freed slaves in its wake, General William Tecumseh Sherman issues Special Field Order 15, setting aside part of coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida by settlement exclusively by black people. The settlers are to receive "possessory title" to forty-acre plots.

January 31: The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the Union, wins Congressional approval and is sent to the states for ratification. By the end of February, 18 states will ratify the amendment; after significant delay in the South, ratification will be completed by December.

February 18: General Sherman's troops enter Charleston, South Carolina.

March: The temporary Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands is established within the War Department. The Freedman's Bureau works to smooth the transition from slavery, providing former slaves with immediate shelter and medical services, help in negotiating labor contracts with landowners, and more. The bureau is initially authorized for just one year, but will remain in operation until 1868.

April: In Lincoln's last speech, he mentions black suffrage for soldiers and some others. The Civil War ends when Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrenders to Union general Ulysses S. Grant. Six days later, President Lincoln is assassinated, and his vice president, Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson, becomes president.

May: President Johnson announces his plan of Presidential Reconstruction. It calls for general amnesty and restoration of property -- except for slaves -- to all Southerners who will swear loyalty to the Union. No friend to the South's large landowners, Johnson declares that they and the Confederate leadership will be required to petition him individually for pardons. This Reconstruction strategy also requires states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery. The president's plan is implemented during the summer.

August/September: President Johnson shows growing leniency toward the white South: he orders the restoration of land to its former owners, including the land provided to freed slaves by General Sherman's January field order. Freedmen are especially reluctant to leave the land they have started farming in South Carolina and Georgia. The president starts aligning himself with the Southern elite, declaring, "white men alone must manage the South."

Fall: Southern states elect former Confederates to public office at the state and national levels, drag their feet in ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, and refuse to extend the vote to black men. Southern legislatures begin drafting "Black Codes" to re-establish white supremacy. The laws impose restrictions on black citizens, especially in attempts to conrol labor: freedmen are prohibited from work except as field hands, blacks refusing to sign labor contracts can be punished, unemployed black men can be seized and auctioned to planters as laborers, black children can be taken from their families and made to work. The new laws amount to slavery without the chain.

November-December: At the request of President Johnson, victorious Union general Ulysses S. Grant tours the South, and is greeted with surprising friendliness. His report recommends a lenient Reconstruction policy.

December: President Johnson declares the reconstruction process complete. Outraged, Radical Republicans in Congress refuse to recognize new governments in Southern states. More than sixty former Confederates arrive to take their seats in Congress, including four generals, four colonels and six Confederate cabinet officers -- even Alexander H. Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy. The Clerk of the House refuses to include the Southern representatives in his roll call, and they are denied their elected seats.

The Union Army is quickly demobilized. From a troop strength of one million on May 1, only 152,000 Union soldiers remain in the South by the end of 1865.

Southern towns and cities start to experience a large influx of freedmen. Over the next five years, the black populations of the South's ten largest cities will double.

1866
February: President Johnson vetoes a supplemental Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which Republican moderates have designed to extend protection to Southern blacks.

April: Another piece of moderate Republican legislation, the Civil Rights Bill, grants citizenship and the same rights enjoyed by white citizens to all male persons in the United States "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude." It passes both houses of Congress by overwhelming majorities, and when President Johnson vetoes it, Congress overrides the veto, making the bill the first major piece of legislation enacted over a presidential veto. The rift between Congress and the president is complete.

May 1: Racial violence rages in Memphis, Tennessee for three days as whites assault blacks on the streets. In the aftermath, 48 people, nearly all black, are dead, and hundreds of black homes, churches, and schools have been pillaged or burned.

June 13: Congress sends the Fourteenth Amendment to the states. It writes the Republican vision of how post-Civil War American society should be structured into the U.S. Constitution, out of the reach of partisan politics. The amendment defines citizenship to include all people born or naturalized in the U.S. and increases the federal government's power over the states to protect all Americans' rights. It stops short of guaranteeing blacks the right to vote. The controversial amendment will take over two years to be ratified.

July: Congress re-passes its supplemental Freedmen's Bureau Bill. President Johnson vetoes it again, and Congress again overrides the veto, making the bill a law.

July 24: Tennessee is the first former Confederate state readmitted to the Union.

July 30: Riots break out in New Orleans, Louisiana: a white mob attacks blacks and Radical Republicans attending a black suffrage convention, killing 40 people.

August 28: "The swing around the circle." With Congress demanding that Southern states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to gain re-admittance to the legislature, President Johnson begins a disastrous speaking tour of the North to bolster support for his policies in the mid-term elections. He asks popular Union general Ulysses S. Grant to come along. When crowds heckle the president, Johnson's angry and undignified responses cause Grant -- and many Northerners -- to lose sympathy with the president and his lenient Reconstruction policies.

Fall: Following the president's ruinous campaign, the mid-term elections become a battleground over the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights. Johnson's opponents are victorious, and the Republicans occupy enough seats to guarantee they will be able to override any presidential vetoes in the coming legislative session.

Union troops are further demobilized; only 38,000 remain in the South by the fall.

1867
March 1: The North Carolina legislature holds a whiskey party when it adjourns before the state's first election with black candidates. "We have lost all hope of escaping the vengeance of the Northern people," one state senator writes, "and are preparing for the worst."

March 2: The new session of Congress begins to pass additional reconstruction laws, overriding President Johnson's vetoes and beginning a more hard-line attitude toward the South. Known as Radical Reconstruction, the new policies divide the South into military districts and require the states to adopt new constitutions, introduce black suffrage, and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.

July 31: President Andrew Johnson tells Ulysses S. Grant that he intends to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who has been a consistent opponent of the president and is close to the Radical Republicans who dominate Congress. Stanton has refused to resign and Congress has supported him through the Tenure of Office Act, which requires the consent of Congress to removals. At the same time, Congress has weakened the president's control of the army through the Command of the Army Act, which requires that all military orders of the President have the approval of the general of the army (Grant). Johnson believes the Tenure of Office Act is unconstitutional, and hopes to defeat the effort to force Stanton upon him by employing the popular Grant.

August 11: Johnson orders Grant to take over the War Department temporarily.

1868
January 14: Grant resigns his position as interim Secretary of War after Congress insists upon Stanton's reinstatement. President Johnson believes that Grant has betrayed him; Grant now openly breaks with Johnson.

Winter: Black and white lawmakers begin to work side by side in the Southern states' constitutional conventions, the first political meetings in American history to include substantial numbers of black men.

May 16: Having infuriated the Republicans, Andrew Johnson becomes the first president to be impeached by a house of Congress, but he avoids conviction and retains his office by a single vote. He will not get the Democratic nomination in the upcoming presidential election.

May 21: The Republican National Convention at Chicago nominates Grant for president and Schuyler Colfax of Indiana for vice president; Grant adopts the conciliatory slogan, "Let us have peace."

June 22: Arkansas is readmitted to the Union.

June 25: Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina are readmitted to the Union.

July 14: Alabama is readmitted to the Union.

July 9: The Democrats nominate Horatio Seymour, former Governor of New York, for president, and Francis P. Blair, Jr., formerly one of Grant's commanders, for vice president.

July 28: The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, defining citizenship to include all people born or naturalized in the U.S., is finally ratified.

September: Black elected officials are ousted from the Georgia state legislature; "The Negro is unfit to rule the State," the Atlanta Constitution declares. The black legislators appeal to President Grant to intervene to get them readmitted, which takes a year.

November 3: Grant is elected president, winning an electoral college majority of 214-80 over his Democratic opponent. But the popular majority is only 306,000 in a total vote of 5,715,000. Newly enfranchised black men in the South cast 700,000 votes for the Republican ticket.

1869
The Freedmen's Bureau tallies nearly 3,000 schools, serving over 150,000 students, in the South.

February 26: Congress passes the Fifteenth Amendment, which attempts to address Southern poll violence by stating that the right to vote can not be denied on the basis of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It is sent to the states for ratification.

April: In its 5-3 Texas v. White decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declares Radical Reconstruction constitutional, stating that secession from the Union is illegal.

September 24: Black Friday on the New York gold exchange. Financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk attempt to corner the available gold supply, and try unsuccessfully to involve President Grant in the illegal plan.

Fall: Violence against blacks continues throughout the South; in October, Georgia legislator Abram Colby is kidnapped and whipped.

1870
January 10: Grant proposes a treaty of annexation with Santo Domingo in an attempt to find land for freed slaves to settle. Under Grant's plan, freed slaves will be able to relocate to the Caribbean island (the Dominican Republic today). The treaty is opposed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Charles Sumner, and will never be confirmed.

January 26: Virginia is readmitted to the Union.

February 3: The 15th Amendment is ratified.

February 23: Mississippi is readmitted to the Union.

March 30: Texas is readmitted to the Union.

July 15: Georgia is the last former Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union.

1871
October: Congress hears testimony from victims of Klan violence. Grant cracks down on anti-black violence in South Carolina.

1872
May 1: Meeting of the Liberal Republican Convention at Cincinnati. Leaders of the group include many prominent Republicans unhappy about vindictive Reconstruction policies and corruption in government, which they call Grantism. New York newspaperman Horace Greeley receives their nomination. Greeley's earlier radicalism, high tariff views, and well-known eccentricity repel many who oppose Grant. The Democrats, on July 9, also nominate Greeley.

May 22: Grant signs an amnesty bill he had advocated. Although the final legislation is less generous than Grant had wanted, now only a few hundred former Confederates are excluded from political privileges.

June 5: The Republican Convention meets at Philadelphia. It will renominate Grant on the first ballot.

September 5: The New York Sun charges that Vice President Colfax, Vice-Presidential nominee Henry Wilson, James Garfield, and other prominent politicians are involved in the operations of the Credit Mobilier, a corporation established by the promoters of the Union Pacific railroad to siphon off the profits of transcontinental railroad construction. Ultimately, two congressmen will be censured for their part in the swindle and many other politicians will be damaged in reputation.

November 5: Grant is reelected with an electoral college majority of 286-66, and a popular majority of 763,000.

1873
Winter: Articles begin to appear in the New York Tribune, accusing black lawmakers in South Carolina of corruption.

April 13: The Colfax Massacre. The White League, a paramilitary group intent on securing white rule in Louisiana, clashes with Louisiana's almost all-black state militia. The resulting death toll is staggering: only three members of the White League die, but some one hundred black men are killed. Of those, nearly half are murdered in cold blood after they surrender.

September 18: The panic of 1873 begins with the failure of a Wall Street banking firm, spreads to the stock exchange, and eventually leads to widespread unemployment.

1874
Fall: The political tide has finally turned in the Democrats' favor; they win control of Congress as stories of black political corruption, continued Southern violence, and a terrible economic depression occupy public attention.

1875
March 1: As one of its last acts, the Republican-led Congress passes the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, prohibiting segregation in public facilities. The law will stand only until 1883, when the U.S. Supreme Court will strike it down.

1877
March 4: Following a bitterly disputed presidential contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, in which both candidates claim victory, Hayes is declared president. In a back-room political deal, the Republicans agree to abandon Reconstruction policies in exchange for the presidency.

Reconstruction policies officially end. The South codifies and enforces segregation. Violations of black civil rights will not command national attention again until after World War II.

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Reconstruction Timeline | American Experience | PBS

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1863 January 1: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that the majority of the nation's slave population "henceforth shall be free." July: In New York City, opposition to the nation's first military draft triggers a riot, the largest in American history, as poor white Northerners protest being forced to fight to end slavery.

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Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was a landmark Supreme Court case that upheld racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal," effectively legalizing racial discrimination and segregation for nearly six decades.

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is the Supreme Court case that had originally upheld the constitutionality of " separate, but equal facilities" based on race. It was subsequently since overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Louisiana had adopted a law in 1890 that required railroad companies to provide racially segregated accommodations. In 1892, the state of Louisiana prosecuted Homer Plessy, a man who was 7/8 Caucasian and 1/8 Black, for refusing to leave a passenger car designated for whites.

The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Brown, upheld the Louisiana law, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was designated to enforce the political equality of blacks and whites but not intended to abolish social inequality. Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment did not encompass segregation, and states could permissibly exercise their police power to enforce segregation as a matter of public policy. The Court also held that the state statute itself was not based on an assumption of black inferiority, nor did it stigmatize blacks with second-class status; rather, "the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."

Justice Harlan's sole dissent stated that the law implicated civil, not just political, inequality. He noted that the law was intended not to exclude whites from railroad cars carrying blacks, but to exclude blacks from railroad cars carrying whites. Justice Harlan wrote: "While there may be in Louisiana persons of different races who are not citizens of the United States, the words in the act 'white and colored races' necessarily include all citizens of the United States of both races residing in that State. So that we have before us a state enactment that compels, under penalties, the separation of the two races in railroad passenger coaches, and makes it a crime for a citizen of either race to enter a coach that has been assigned to citizens of the other race.

Thus, the State regulates the use of a public highway by citizens of the United States solely upon the basis of race.

However apparent the injustice of such legislation may be, we have only to consider whether it is consistent with the Constitution of the United States." ... "In view of the Constitution, in the eyes of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a State to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race."

See: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

[Last updated in April of 2023 by the Wex Definitions Team]

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is the Supreme Court case that had originally upheld the constitutionality of " separate, but equal facilities" based on race. It was subsequently since overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Louisiana had adopted a law in 1890 that required railroad companies to provide racially segregated accommodations.

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The Civil War movements involved complex strategies and battles between the Union and Confederate armies, marked by significant campaigns such as Gettysburg and Antietam, which shaped the course of the conflict and its outcome.

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Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, 1965

In the middle of the 20th century, a nationwide movement for equal rights for African Americans and for an end to racial segregation and exclusion arose across the United States. This movement took many forms, and its participants used a wide range of means to make their demands felt, including sit-ins, boycotts, protest marches, freedom rides, and lobbying government officials for legislative action. They faced opposition on many fronts and fell victim to bombings and beatings, arrest and assassination. By the end of the 1960s, the civil rights movement had brought about dramatic changes in the law and in public practice, and had secured legal protection of rights and freedoms for African Americans that would shape American life for decades to come.

A few key moments include:

Brown v. Board of Education The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, spent decades fighting against racial segregation in education. This long campaign culminated when the U.S. Supreme Court heard Brown v. Board of Education, which gathered together five separate cases related to school segregation with Marshall leading the arguments before the Court. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," legally ending racial segregation in public schools and overruling the "separate but equal" principle set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1889.

Rosa Parks arrested On December 1, 1955, civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger. The arrest led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and was a defining moment in Parks' long career as an activist. The Montgomery Bus Boycott also saw the rise to prominence of a young Montgomery minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Little Rock school integration crisis After the Brown v. Board, Supreme Court decision, state and local officials in a number of states resisted school integration. In September of 1957, nine African American students attempted to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The governor ordered the state's National Guard to surround the high school, and the Black students were harassed and kept from entering the building. President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent U.S. troops to protect the students and enforce the desegregation order of the federal courts.

Birmingham campaign In the spring of 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a large-scale campaign of sit-ins and marches in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest the city's brutal segregation policies. Many of the protestors and leaders were jailed, and while behind bars, Dr. King wrote a long public letter that explained his philosophy of non-violent protest. This document, which became known as "The Letter from Birmingham Jail," went on to be widely republished and regarded as a classic defense of the principles of civil disobedience.

The March on Washington On August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people arrived in Washington, D.C., for the largest non-violent civil rights demonstration that the nation had ever seen: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march was organized in a few months, coordinated by veteran strategist Bayard Rustin, and was meant to demonstrate an urgent need for substantive change. The demands in the event program began with "Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation from the present Congress" and included the end of discrimination in education, housing, employment, and more. Leaders and organizers met with members of Congress and with President John F. Kennedy, while the march ended at the Lincoln Memorial with music and speeches, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

The Selma civil rights marches On March 7, 1965, a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, led by 25-year-old activist leader John Lewis, was attacked by state troopers and sheriff's deputies as the marchers attempted to cross the city's Edmund Pettus Bridge. Coverage of the marchers being beaten, tear-gassed, and trampled by police horses prompted outrage across the nation, and activists, religious leaders, and everyday citizens flooded into Selma to lend their support. On March 9, a second group of marchers, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., approached the bridge, prayed there, and returned to church. On March 21, thousands of marchers crossed the bridge, this time protected by federalized National Guard troops, and headed to Montgomery.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 The two most significant pieces of civil rights legislation since Reconstruction were passed within two years of each other. Between the two, these Acts outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. They banned discrimination in public accommodations, public education, and employment, and prohibited race-based restrictions on voting. Such sweeping legislation had been a longtime goal of the civil rights movement, and it brought many of the laws and practices of the Jim Crow Era to an end.

Documents

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The Civil Rights Movement | The Post War United States, 1945-1968 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The United States was rocked by a nationwide movement for equal rights for African Americans.

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The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declared that all enslaved people in Confederate-held territory were to be set free, aiming to weaken the Confederacy and shift the focus of the Civil War toward ending slavery.

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The Gettysburg Address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln, emphasizes the principles of human equality, the importance of preserving the Union, and the need for a new birth of freedom in order to uphold the nation's ideals and honor those who fought in the Civil War.

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Delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln

November 19, 1863.

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Read Full Text and Annotations on Gettysburg Address Text of Lincoln's Speech at Owl Eyes

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The Revolutionary War 1775‑1783 came about from tensions between the 13 North American colonies and the colonial government in Great Britain.

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Featured

The Revolutionary War (1775-1783) arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government. The American colonists, led by General George Washington, won political independence and eventually formed the United States of America.
Read more Read more about Revolutionary War

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American Revolution: Causes and Timeline | HISTORY

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The Revolutionary War waged by the American colonies against Britain influenced political ideas around the globe, as a small fledgling nation won its freedom from the greatest military force of its time.

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Commander and chief of the constitutional army who was later elected as the first President of the United States.

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George Washington's Early Years

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, at his family's plantation on Pope's Creek in Westmoreland County, in the British colony of Virginia, to Augustine Washington (1694-1743) and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington (1708-89). George, the eldest of Augustine and Mary Washington's six children, spent much of his childhood at Ferry Farm, a plantation near Fredericksburg, Virginia. After Washington's father died when he was 11, it's likely he helped his mother manage the plantation.

Did you know? At the time of his death in 1799, George Washington owned some 300 enslaved people. However, before his passing, he had become opposed to slavery, and in his will, he ordered that his enslaved workers be freed after his wife's death.

Few details about Washington's early education are known, although children of prosperous families like his typically were taught at home by private tutors or attended private schools. It's believed he finished his formal schooling at around age 15.

As a teenager, Washington, who had shown an aptitude for mathematics, became a successful surveyor. His surveying expeditions into the Virginia wilderness earned him enough money to begin acquiring land of his own.

In 1751, Washington made his only trip outside of America, when he traveled to Barbados with his older half-brother Lawrence Washington (1718-52), who was suffering from tuberculosis and hoped the warm climate would help him recuperate. Shortly after their arrival, George contracted smallpox. He survived, although the illness left him with permanent facial scars. In 1752, Lawrence, who had been educated in England and served as Washington's mentor, died. Washington eventually inherited Lawrence's estate, Mount Vernon, on the Potomac River near Alexandria, Virginia.

An Officer and Gentleman Farmer

In December 1752, Washington, who had no previous military experience, was made a commander of the Virginia militia. He saw action in the French and Indian War and was eventually put in charge of all of Virginia's militia forces. By 1759, Washington had resigned his commission, returned to Mount Vernon and was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he served until 1774. In January 1759, he married Martha Dandridge Custis (1731-1802), a wealthy widow with two children. Washington became a devoted stepfather to her children; he and Martha Washington never had any offspring of their own.

In the ensuing years, Washington expanded Mount Vernon from 2,000 acres into an 8,000-acre property with five farms. He grew a variety of crops, including wheat and corn, bred mules and maintained fruit orchards and a successful fishery. He was deeply interested in farming and continually experimented with new crops and methods of land conservation.

George Washington During the American Revolution

Washington proved to be a better general than military strategist. His strength lay not in his genius on the battlefield but in his ability to keep the struggling colonial army together. His troops were poorly trained and lacked food, ammunition and other supplies (soldiers sometimes even went without shoes in winter). However, Washington was able to give them direction and motivation. His leadership during the winter of 1777-1778 at Valley Forge was a testament to his power to inspire his men to keep going.

By the late 1760s, Washington had experienced firsthand the effects of rising taxes imposed on American colonists by the British and came to believe that it was in the best interests of the colonists to declare independence from England. Washington served as a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774 in Philadelphia. By the time the Second Continental Congress convened a year later, the American Revolution had begun in earnest, and Washington was named commander in chief of the Continental Army.

Over the course of the grueling eight-year war, the colonial forces won few battles but consistently held their own against the British. In October 1781, with the aid of the French (who allied themselves with the colonists over their rivals the British), the Continental forces were able to capture British troops under General Charles Cornwallis (1738-1805) in the Battle of Yorktown. This action effectively ended the Revolutionary War and Washington was declared a national hero.

America's First President

In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris between Great Britain and the U.S., Washington, believing he had done his duty, gave up his command of the army and returned to Mount Vernon, intent on resuming his life as a gentleman farmer and family man. However, in 1787, he was asked to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and head the committee to draft the new constitution. His impressive leadership there convinced the delegates that he was by far the most qualified man to become the nation's first president.

At first, Washington balked. He wanted to, at last, return to a quiet life at home and leave governing the new nation to others. But public opinion was so strong that eventually he gave in. The first presidential election was held on January 7, 1789, and Washington won handily. John Adams (1735-1826), who received the second-largest number of votes, became the nation's first vice president. The 57-year-old Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789, in New York City. Because Washington, D.C., America's future capital city wasn't yet built, he lived in New York and Philadelphia. While in office, he signed a bill establishing a future, permanent U.S. capital along the Potomac River-the city later named Washington, D.C., in his honor.

George Washington's Accomplishments

The United States was a small nation when Washington took office, consisting of 11 states and approximately 4 million people, and there was no precedent for how the new president should conduct domestic or foreign business. Mindful that his actions would likely determine how future presidents were expected to govern, Washington worked hard to set an example of fairness, prudence and integrity. In foreign matters, he supported cordial relations with other countries but also favored a position of neutrality in foreign conflicts. Domestically, he nominated the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay (1745-1829), signed a bill establishing the first national bank, the Bank of the United States, and set up his own presidential cabinet.

His two most prominent cabinet appointees were Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), two men who disagreed strongly on the role of the federal government. Hamilton favored a strong central government and was part of the Federalist Party, while Jefferson favored stronger states' rights as part of the Democratic-Republican Party, the forerunner to the Democratic Party. Washington believed that divergent views were critical for the health of the new government, but he was distressed at what he saw as an emerging partisanship.

George Washington's presidency was marked by a series of firsts. He signed the first United States copyright law, protecting the copyrights of authors. He also signed the first Thanksgiving proclamation, making November 26 a national day of Thanksgiving for the end of the war for American independence and the successful ratification of the Constitution.

During Washington's presidency, Congress passed the first federal revenue law, a tax on distilled spirits. In July 1794, farmers in Western Pennsylvania rebelled over the so-called "whiskey tax." Washington called in over 12,000 militiamen to Pennsylvania to dissolve the Whiskey Rebellion in one of the first major tests of the authority of the national government.

Under Washington's leadership, the states ratified the Bill of Rights, and five new states entered the union: North Carolina (1789), Rhode Island (1790), Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796).

In his second term, Washington issued the proclamation of neutrality to avoid entering the 1793 war between Great Britain and France. But when French minister to the United States Edmond Charles Genet-known to history as "Citizen Genet"-toured the United States, he boldly flaunted the proclamation, attempting to set up American ports as French military bases and gain support for his cause in the Western United States. His meddling caused a stir between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, widening the rift between parties and making consensus-building more difficult.

In 1795, Washington signed the "Treaty of Amity Commerce and Navigation, between His Britannic Majesty; and The United States of America," or Jay's Treaty, so-named for John Jay, who had negotiated it with the government of King George III. It helped the U.S. avoid war with Great Britain, but also rankled certain members of Congress back home and was fiercely opposed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Internationally, it caused a stir among the French, who believed it violated previous treaties between the United States and France.

Washington's administration signed two other influential international treaties. Pinckney's Treaty of 1795, also known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo, established friendly relations between the United States and Spain, firming up borders between the U.S. and Spanish territories in North America and opening up the Mississippi to American traders. The Treaty of Tripoli, signed the following year, gave American ships access to Mediterranean shipping lanes in exchange for a yearly tribute to the Pasha of Tripoli.

George Washington's Retirement to Mount Vernon and Death

In 1796, after two terms as president and declining to serve a third term, Washington finally retired. In Washington's farewell address, he urged the new nation to maintain the highest standards domestically and to keep involvement with foreign powers to a minimum. The address is still read each February in the U.S. Senate to commemorate Washington's birthday.

Washington returned to Mount Vernon and devoted his attentions to making the plantation as productive as it had been before he became president. More than four decades of public service had aged him, but he was still a commanding figure. In December 1799, he caught a cold after inspecting his properties in the rain. The cold developed into a throat infection and Washington died on the night of December 14, 1799, at the age of 67. He was entombed at Mount Vernon, which in 1960 was designated a national historic landmark.

Washington left one of the most enduring legacies of any American in history. Known as the "Father of His Country," his face appears on the U.S. dollar bill and quarter, and dozens of U.S. schools, towns and counties, as well as the state of Washington and the nation's capital city, are named for him.

George Washington: An Interactive Timeline of His Life

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George Washington: Facts, Revolution & Presidency

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George Washington (1732-99) was commander in chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War (1775-83) and served two terms as the first U.S. president, from 1789 to 1797.

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Second longest reigning monarch who led Britain through a victory in the Seven Years Wars, and resistance during the Napoleonic France as well as ruled during the loss of the American Revolution

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Table of Contents

1. George III: Birth and Education

2. George III: Early Reign

3. George III: The American Revolution

4. George III: Mental Illness

England's longest-ruling monarch before Queen Victoria, King George III (1738-1820) ascended the British throne in 1760. During his 59-year reign, he pushed through a British victory in the Seven Years' War, led England's successful resistance to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and presided over the loss of the American Revolution. After suffering intermittent bouts of acute mental illness, he spent his last decade in a fog of insanity and blindness.

George III: Birth and Education

The Georgian era (1714-1830) spanned the combined reigns of the five British monarchs from the Electorate of Hanover, a member state of the Holy Roman Empire. George III was the first Hanoverian king born in England rather than Germany. His parents were Frederick, Prince of Wales and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha.

Did you know? The planet Uranus was originally named "Georgium sidus," the Georgian Star, after King George III of England, who had funded the 40-foot telescope William Herschel used in its discovery.

On his father's death in 1751, the 12-year-old George became Prince of Wales. He was cared for in relative isolation by his mother and tutored by the Scottish nobleman Lord Bute.

George III: Early Reign

George III became king of Great Britain and Ireland in 1760 following his grandfather George II's death. In his accession speech to Parliament, the 22-year-old monarch played down his Hanoverian connections. "Born and educated in this country," he said, "I glory in the name of Britain."

A year after his coronation, George was married to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the daughter of a German duke. It was a political union-the two met for the first time on their wedding day-but a fruitful one; Queen Charlotte gave birth to 15 children.

George III worked for an expedited end to the The Seven Years' War (1756-63), taking a position that forced his influential war minister William Pitt the Elder (who wanted to broaden the conflict) to resign in 1761. The next year George appointed Lord Bute as his prime minister, the first in a quick succession of five ineffective ministers.

In 1764 Prime Minister George Grenville introduced the Stamp Act as a way of raising revenue in the American colonies. The act was fervently opposed in America, especially by the pamphleteers whose paper would be taxed. Parliament would repeal the act two years later, but mistrust persisted in the colonies.

George III: The American Revolution

In 1770 Lord North became prime minister, beginning a 12-year period of parliamentary stability. In 1773 he passed an act taxing tea in the colonies. The Americans complained of taxation without representation (and staged the Boston Tea Party), but North held firm with George's backing.

The American Revolution began on April 19, 1775, with the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The next year, the Declaration of Independence laid out the Americans' case for freedom, portraying George III as an inflexible tyrant who had squandered his right to govern the colonies. In reality the situation was more complex: Parliamentary ministers, not the crown, were responsible for colonial policies, though George still had means of direct and indirect influence.

The king was reluctant to come to terms with his army's defeat in the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. He drafted an abdication speech but in the end decided to defer to Parliament's peace negotiations. The 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized the United States and ceded Florida to Spain.

George III: Mental Illness

At the end of 1783, Lord North's coalition was forced out by William Pitt the Younger, who would be prime minister for more than 17 years. In 1778 George lapsed into a months-long period of violent insanity. He was restrained with a straitjacket and suffered various treatments as crisis of rule unfolded around him. He recovered the next year and reigned for the next 12 as a newly beloved monarch and symbol of stability in the era of France's revolutionary chaos. George's support of England's role in the French Revolutionary Wars of the late 1790s offered early resistance against the Napoleonic juggernaut.

George suffered a second major bout of insanity in 1804 and recovered, but in 1810 he slipped into his final illness. A year later his son, the future George IV, became prince regent, giving him effective rule for the War of 1812 and Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. George III died blind, deaf and mad on January 29, 1820. His illnesses may have been caused by porphyria, an inherited metabolic disorder, though a 2005 analysis of hair samples suggested arsenic poisoning (from medicines and cosmetics) as a possible cause. He is buried in St. George's Chapel.

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George III - Children, Facts & The American Revolution

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During his 59-year reign, King George III led Britain to victory in the Seven Years' War, successfully resisted Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and presided over the loss of the American Revolution. He spent his last decade in a fog of insanity and blindness.

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The second President of the United States, before becoming President and leader in the Revolutionary war he was a Harvard educated lawyer.

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Early Years

Born in Braintree (present-day Quincy), Massachusetts, on October 30, 1735, to the descendants of Mayflower Pilgrims, John Adams was the oldest of John and Susanna Boylston Adams' three sons. The elder Adams was a farmer and shoemaker who also served as a Congregationalist deacon and an official in local government.

Did you know? In November 1800, John Adams became the first president to reside in the White House. Construction of the presidential home, which was designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban, began in 1792. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) officially named it the White House in 1901.

A strong student, Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1755. He then taught school for several years and studied law with an attorney in Worcester, Massachusetts. Adams began his law career in 1758 and eventually became one of Boston's most prominent attorneys.

In 1764, he married Abigail Smith (1744-1818), a minister's daughter from Weymouth, Massachusetts, with whom he went on to have six children, four of whom survived into adulthood: Abigail Amelia Adams, known as "Nabby"; Charles Adams; Thomas Boylston Adams and future president John Quincy Adams.

Abigail Adams would prove to be her husband's trusted confidant. Well-read and possessed of her own intellectual gifts, she corresponded regularly with Adams, especially when he was away in Europe for long periods of time. Surviving letters show her to be a pragmatic thinker and influential in her husband's career.

John Adams and The American Revolution

During the 1760s, Adams began challenging Great Britain's authority in colonial America. He came to view the British imposition of high taxes and tariffs as a tool of oppression, and he no longer believed that the government in England had the colonists' best interests in mind. He was a critic of the Stamp Act of 1765, in which the British levied a tax on legal documents, newspapers and playing cards in the North American colonies. Adams also spoke out against the Townshend Acts of 1767, which levied tariffs on goods such as paper, glass and tea that were imported to America.

Despite his objection to what he thought was unfair taxation by the British, Adams, a principled man, represented the British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre of March 1770. Adams wanted to ensure that the soldiers-who were charged with firing into an unruly crowd of civilians in Boston and killing five people-received a fair trial.

In 1774, Adams attended the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia as a Massachusetts delegate. (The Continental Congress served as the government of the 13 American colonies and later the United States, from 1774 to 1789.) In 1775, as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, Adams nominated George Washington (1732-99) to serve as commander of the colonial forces in the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), which had just begun. As a congressional delegate, Adams would later nominate Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence (which Adams went on to sign alongside his second cousin, Samuel Adams).

Diplomatic Missions to Europe

In 1778, Adams was sent to Paris, France, to secure aid for the colonists' cause. The following year, he returned to America and worked as the principal framer of the Massachusetts Constitution (the world's oldest surviving written constitution). By the early 1780s, Adams was in Europe again, serving in a diplomatic capacity.

In 1783, he, along with John Jay (1745-1829) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended hostilities between America and Britain. Franklin had served as the American minister to France since 1776, and while Adams often felt that he worked harder than Franklin, it was the older man's charm that opened diplomatic doors for his blunter, more combative colleague.

Adams remained in Europe after the war and served as the United States' first ambassador to Britain from 1785 to 1788. After returning to America, he was a participant in the Constitutional Convention that nominated Washington to serve as the nation's first president. Adams lobbied for the vice presidency and won. (In early elections, the president and vice president were elected separately.)

John Adams: America's First Vice President

Although Washington and Adams shared many political views, the vice president's role seemed primarily ceremonial, and Adams spent the next eight years, from 1789 to 1797, in frustration. Adams once remarked: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." When Washington retired in 1796, Adams ran for the presidency and won over Thomas Jefferson, who became vice president.

John Adams, Second President of the United States

Adams took office in March 1797, and his presidency was quickly taken up with foreign affairs. Britain and France were at war, which directly affected American trade. During his tenure, Washington had managed to maintain neutrality, but tensions had escalated by the time Adams became president.

In 1797, he sent a delegation to France to negotiate a treaty but the French refused to meet with the delegates, and the French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838), demanded a large bribe. Adams refused to deal with the French on these terms, and the bribery scandal, which became known as the XYZ Affair, boosted Adams' popularity immensely. An undeclared naval war broke out between the U.S. and France in 1798 and lasted until 1800 when a peace treaty was signed.

Adams squandered his popularity by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts into law in 1798. Ostensibly written to protect American interests, the acts gave the government broad powers to deport "enemy" aliens and arrest anyone who strongly disagreed with the government. Jefferson and his allies, who called themselves the Democratic-Republicans, assailed these laws, declaring them unconstitutional. Many Americans, having shed one oppressive government, feared that their new government might resort to similar tactics. Although the laws were never abused and, in fact, had built-in expirations, they hurt Adams and helped cost him the election in 1800.

John Adam's Writing

After his presidency, Adams had a long and productive retirement. He and his wife lived in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the former president spent the next quarter-century writing columns, books and letters. In 1812, he was encouraged to begin exchanging letters with his old rival Thomas Jefferson, and their voluminous correspondence lasted the rest of their lives.

Abigail Adams died in 1818 but John Adams lived long enough to see his son John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) become America's sixth president in 1824. By that point, the elder Adams and Jefferson were among the last living signers of the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 1826 (the Declaration's 50th anniversary), the 90-year-old Founding Father uttered his last words: "Thomas Jefferson still survives." He died later that day. What he did not know was that earlier that morning Jefferson, too, had passed away.

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John Adams - Presidency, Facts & Children

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John Adams (1735-1826) was a leader of the American Revolution, and served as the second U.S. president from 1797 to 1801. Read facts about his diplomacy and leadership as well as about his wife, Abigail, and their son who became the nation's sixth president.

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Author of the Declaration of Independence, leader in Americas early development and the third President of the United States.

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Thomas Jefferson's Early Years

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

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

In 1762, Jefferson graduated from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he reportedly enjoyed studying for 15 hours, then practicing violin for several more hours on a daily basis. He went on to study law under the tutelage of respected Virginia attorney George Wythe (there were no official law schools in America at the time, and Wythe's other pupils included future Chief Justice John Marshall and statesman Henry Clay).

Jefferson began working as a lawyer in 1767. As a member of colonial Virginia's House of Burgesses from 1769 to 1775, Jefferson, who was known for his reserved manner, gained recognition for penning a pamphlet, "A Summary View of the Rights of British America" (1774), which declared that the British Parliament had no right to exercise authority over the American colonies.

Marriage and Monticello

After his father died when Jefferson was a teen, the future president inherited the Shadwell property. In 1768, Jefferson began clearing a mountaintop on the land in preparation for the elegant brick mansion he would construct there called Monticello ("little mountain" in Italian). Jefferson, who had a keen interest in architecture and gardening, designed the home and its elaborate gardens himself.

Over the course of his life, he remodeled and expanded Monticello and filled it with art, fine furnishings and interesting gadgets and architectural details. He kept records of everything that happened at the 5,000-acre plantation, including daily weather reports, a gardening journal and notes about his slaves and animals.

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

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

Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution

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

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

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

Jefferson's Path to the Presidency

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

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

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

Jefferson Becomes Third U.S. President

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

One of the most significant achievements of Jefferson's first administration was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million in 1803. At more than 820,000 square miles, the Louisiana Purchase (which included lands extending between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Canada) effectively doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson then commissioned explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the uncharted land, plus the area beyond, out to the Pacific Ocean. (At the time, most Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean.) Lewis and Clark's expedition, known today as the Corps of Discovery, lasted from 1804 to 1806 and provided valuable information about the geography, American Indian tribes and animal and plant life of the western part of the continent.

In 1804, Jefferson ran for re-election and defeated Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney (1746-1825) of South Carolina with more than 70 percent of the popular vote and an electoral count of 162-14. During his second term, Jefferson focused on trying to keep America out of Europe's Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). However, after Great Britain and France, who were at war, both began harassing American merchant ships, Jefferson implemented the Embargo Act of 1807.

The act, which closed U.S. ports to foreign trade, proved unpopular with Americans and hurt the U.S. economy. It was repealed in 1809 and, despite the president's attempts to maintain neutrality, the U.S. ended up going to war against Britain in the War of 1812. Jefferson chose not to run for a third term in 1808 and was succeeded in office by James Madison (1751-1836), a fellow Virginian and former U.S. secretary of state.

Thomas Jefferson's Later Years and Death

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

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

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

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Thomas Jefferson - Facts, Presidency & Children

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

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A crucial part of Americas early history, he helped draft the Declaration of Independence and negotiated the Treaty of Paris which ended the revolutionary war.

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Benjamin Franklin ‑ Biography, Inventions & Facts | HISTORY

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Benjamin Franklin (1706‑1790) was a statesman, author, publisher, scientist, inventor, diplomat, a Founding Father and a leading figure of early American history.

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Establish America’s government and granted rights to white male citizens of the United States.

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The bill of rights lays out the protection of citizens rights with in the United States these were later ratified in 1791 and are now known as the first 10 Amendments.

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Influence of Magna Carta

The roots of the Bill of Rights lie deep in Anglo-American history. In 1215 England's King John, under pressure from rebellious barons, put his seal to Magna Carta, which protected subjects against royal abuses of power. Among Magna Carta's more important provisions are its requirement that proceedings and prosecutions be according to "the law of the land"-the forerunner of "due process of law"-and a ban on the sale, denial, or delay of justice.

In response to arbitrary actions of Charles I, Parliament in 1628 adopted the Petition of Right, condemning unlawful imprisonments and also providing that there should be no tax "without common consent of parliament." In 1689, capping the Glorious Revolution (which placed William and Mary on the throne), Parliament adopted the Bill of Rights. Not only does its name anticipate the American document of a century later, the English Bill of Rights anticipates some of the American bill's specific provisions-for example, the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive bail and fines and on cruel and unusual punishment.

The idea of written documents protecting individual liberties took early root in England's American colonies. Colonial charters (such as the 1606 Charter for Virginia) declared that those who migrated to the New World should enjoy the same "privileges, franchises, and immunities" as if they lived in England. In the years leading up to the break with the mother country (especially after the Stamp Act of 1765), Americans wrote tracts and adopted resolutions resting their claim of rights on Magna Carta, on the colonial charters, and on the teachings of natural law.

Constitutional Convention

Once independence had been declared in 1776, the American states turned immediately to the writing of state constitutions and state bills of rights. In Williamsburg, George Mason was the principal architect of Virginia's Declaration of Rights. That document, which wove Lockean notions of natural rights with concrete protections against specific abuses, was the model for bills of rights in other states and, ultimately, for the federal Bill of Rights. (Mason's declaration was also influential in the framing, in 1789, of France's Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen).

In 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Mason remarked that he "wished the plan had been prefaced by a Bill of Rights." Elbridge Gerry moved for the appointment of a committee to prepare such a bill, but the delegates, without debate, defeated the motion. They did not oppose the principle of a bill of rights; they simply thought it unnecessary, in light of the theory that the new federal government would be one of enumerated powers only. Some of the Framers were also skeptical of the utility of what James Madison called "parchment barriers" against majorities; they looked, for protection, to structural arrangements such as separation of powers and checks and balances.

Opponents of ratification quickly seized upon the absence of a bill of rights and Federalists, especially Madison, soon realized that they must offer to add amendments to the Constitution after its ratification. Only by making such a pledge were the Constitution's supporters able to achieve ratification in such closely divided states as New York and Virginia.

James Madison Drafts Amendments

In the First Congress, Madison undertook to fulfill his promise. Carefully sifting amendments from proposals made in the state ratifying conventions, Madison steered his project through the shoals of indifference on the part of some members (who thought the House had more important work to do) and outright hostility on the part of others (Antifederalists who hoped for a second convention to hobble the powers of the federal government). In September 1789 the House and Senate accepted a conference report laying out the language of proposed amendments to the Constitution.

Within six months of the time the amendments-the Bill of Rights-had been submitted to the states, nine had ratified them. Two more states were needed; Virginia's ratification, on December 15, 1791, made the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution. (Ten amendments were ratified; two others, dealing with the number of representatives and with the compensation of senators and representatives, were not.)

On their face, it is obvious that the amendments apply to actions by the federal government, not to actions by the states. In 1833, in Barron v. Baltimore, Chief Justice John Marshall confirmed that understanding. Barron had sued the city for damage to a wharf, resting his claim on the Fifth Amendment's requirement that private property not be taken for public use "without just compensation." Marshall ruled that the Fifth Amendment was intended "solely as a limitation on the exercise of power by the government of the United States, and is not applicable to the legislation of the states."

Post-Bill of Rights Amendments

The Civil War and Reconstruction brought, in their wake, the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares, among other things, that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." In those few words lay the seed of a revolution in American constitutional law. That revolution began to take form in 1947, in Justice Hugo Black's dissent in Adamson v. California. Reviewing the history of the Fourteenth Amendment's adoption, Black concluded that history "conclusively demonstrates" that the amendment was meant to ensure that "no state could deprive its citizens of the privileges and protections of the Bill of Rights."

Justice Black's "wholesale incorporation" theory has never been adopted by the Supreme Court. During the heyday of the Warren Court, in the 1960s, however, the justices embarked on a process of "selective incorporation." In each case, the Court asked whether a specific provision of the Bill of Rights was essential to "fundamental fairness"; if it was, then it must apply to the states as it does to the federal government.

Through this process, nearly all the important provisions of the Bill of Rights now apply to the states. A partial list would include the First Amendment's rights of speech, press, and religion; the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures; the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination; and the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel, to a speedy and public trial, and to trial by jury.

The original Constitution has been amended a number of times-for example, to provide for direct election of senators and to give the vote to eighteen-year-olds. The Bill of Rights, however, has never been amended. There is, of course, sharp debate over Supreme Court interpretation of specific provisions, especially where social interests (such as the control of traffic in drugs) seem to come into tension with provisions of the Bill of Rights (such as the Fourth Amendment). Such debate notwithstanding, there is no doubt that the Bill of Rights, as symbol and substance, lies at the heart of American conceptions of individual liberty, limited government and the rule of law.

The Bill of Rights

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

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The Bill of Rights - Drafting, Constitutional Convention & Amendments

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The Bill of Rights-the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution protecting the rights of U.S. citizens-were ratified on December 15, 1791.

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Boston Tea party was an action that shows the colonial breaking point in how they were being represented.

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Most Americans can tell you that the first unofficial "Declaration of Independence" happened in Boston, when a band of tax-hating renegades dumped King George's beloved tea into the harbor, a spirited act of defiance that united the colonies in revolution.

But as with most well-trod origin stories, the true history of the Boston Tea Party is far more complicated than the grammar-school version, and the real facts of what happened on that fateful night in 1773 might surprise you.

1. Colonists weren't protesting a higher tax on tea.

Easily the biggest surprise about the Boston Tea Party is that the uprising wasn't a protest against a new tax hike on tea. Although taxes stoked colonist anger, the Tea Act itself didn't raise the price of tea in the colonies by one red cent (or shilling, as it were).

The confusion is partly timing and partly semantics. Boston's Sons of Liberty were absolutely responding to the British Parliament's passage of the Tea Act of 1773 when they planned the Boston Tea Party. And with a name like the Tea Act, it's fair to think that the law was all about raising taxes on tea.

The truth is that tea imports to the American Colonies had been taxed by the Crown since the passing of the 1767 Townshend Revenue Act, along with taxes on other commodities like paper, paint, oil and glass. The difference is that all of those other import taxes were lifted in 1770, except for tea, a pointed reminder of the King's control over his far-off subjects.

Benjamin Carp, a history professor at Brooklyn College and author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, says that the Tea Act of 1773 was onerous in a different way. It was essentially a British government bailout of the British East India Company, which was hemorrhaging money and weighed down with unsold tea. The Tea Act allowed the East India Company to unload 544,000 pounds of old tea, commission-free, on the American Colonies at a bargain price.

Cheaper tea sounds good, says Carp, but for the Sons of Liberty -many of whom were merchants and even tea smugglers-the Tea Act smelled like a ploy to get the masses comfortable with paying a tax to the Crown.

"You're going to seduce Americans into being 'obedient colonists' by making the price lower," says Carp. "If we accept the principle of allowing parliament to tax us, they'll eventually make the taxes heavier on us. It's the slippery slope argument."

2. The attacked ships were American and the tea wasn't the King's.

The popular notion of the Boston Tea Party is that angry colonists "stuck it to King George" by boarding British ships and dumping crate loads of the King's precious tea into the Boston Harbor. But that story is not true on two accounts.

First, the ships that were boarded by the Sons of Liberty, the Beaver, the Dartmouth and the Eleanor, were built and owned by Americans. Two of the ships were primarily whaling vessels. After delivering valuable shipments of sperm whale oil and brain matter to London in 1773, the ships were loaded with tea en route to the American Colonies. Although not British, some of the ship's American owners were indeed Tory sympathizers.

Second, the tea destroyed by the night raiders was not the King's. It was private property owned by the East India Company and transported on privately contracted shipping vessels. The value of the 340 chests of squandered tea would total nearly $2 million in today's money.

3. The tea was Chinese, not Indian, and lots of it was green.

This is another naming problem. The East India Company exported a lot of goods from India in the 18th century, including spices and cotton, but it obtained almost all of its tea from China. Trading ships traveled from Canton to London loaded down with Chinese tea, which was then exported to British colonies the world over.

East India didn't install its first tea plantations in India until the 1830s.

Another surprising tidbit is that 22 percent of the tea that the patriots sent to the bottom of Boston Harbor was green tea. According to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were fans of a particular Chinese green tea variety called "hyson."

4. The Tea Party, itself, didn't incite revolution.

There's this idea that the Boston Tea Party was the rallying cry that galvanized the colonies for revolution, but Carp says that many strong opponents of British rule, George Washington among them, denounced acts of lawlessness and violence, especially against private property.

While the Tea Party itself didn't mobilize Americans en masse, it was Parliament's reaction to it that did. In 1774, the UK passed what are known as the Intolerable Acts or the Coercive Acts, a series of punitive measures meant to teach the rebellious colonists who was boss.

Many of these sanctions were levied on the Massachusetts Colony and Boston itself, including the closing of Boston Harbor, replacing Boston's elected leaders with those appointed by the Crown, and forcing the quartering of British troops in private homes.

"Taxation without representation was a dangerous precedent in and of itself, but now they were messing with the Massachusetts charter," says Carp, "taking away rights that Massachusetts had previously enjoyed. As uncomfortable as some colonists might have been with the Tea Party action itself, they were way more uncomfortable with the authoritarian reaction by Parliament."

In response to the Coercive Acts, the First Continental Congress met in 1774 and Jefferson wrote " A Summary View of the Rights of British America." Revolution was officially in the air.

5. Tea Party protestors dressed as 'Indians,' but not convincingly.

The Sons of Liberty famous masqueraded in Native American dress on the night of the Tea Party raid, complete with tomahawks and faces darkened with coal soot. But were they really trying to pass themselves off as local Mohawk or Narragansett tribesmen?

Not likely, says Carp. For starters, it was customary in 18th-century England for protestors to "crossdress" in one way or another-blackening their faces, dressing as women, or even Catholic priests-to create an atmosphere of misrule.

Secondly, the Sons of Liberty were cashing in on the image of the Native American as an independent spirit, the epitome of anti-colonialism. "By adopting that identity, they're saying, 'We are defiant. We are unbowed. We won't be defeated,'" says Carp.

And third, there was the practical reason for masking their identities. They were committing a crime! Even if they knew that no one would believe they were actual Native Americans, the disguise sent a clear message to anyone who would dare to snitch: don't you dare!

6. No one called it the 'Boston Tea Party.'

The Boston Tea Party occurred in 1773, but the very first time that the words "Boston Tea Party" appeared in print was in 1825, and in most of those early mentions, the word "party" didn't refer to a celebratory event with cakes and balloons, but to a party of men. An 1829 obituary of Nicholas Campbell notes that he was "one of the ever-memorable Boston Tea Party."

Soon after the rebellious act was committed, Carp says, it was simply referred to as "the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, or something similarly cumbersome."

There's some question if the society known as a "tea party" even existed in the 1770s. The British practice of high tea didn't take hold until the Victorian Era in the mid-19th century, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, with its famous "Mad Hatter's Tea Party," wasn't published until 1865.

7. After Boston, there were other 'tea parties.'

According to a 2012 book by Joseph Cummins, there were at least 10 "tea parties" up and down the Eastern seaboard that were inspired by the original and most famous.

During the Philadelphia Tea Party, which took place just nine days after Boston's, no tea was destroyed, but the captain of a ship carrying the largest delivery of East India Company tea was threatened with being tarred and feathered if he didn't return the "wretched weed" to England. Which he did.

In Charleston, South Carolina, a ship arrived in November 1774 carrying tea, but the captain swore that he was unaware of the controversial cargo. Angry residents blamed local merchants who had ordered the tea and forced them to dump it in the harbor themselves.

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7 Surprising Facts About the Boston Tea Party | HISTORY

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The true history of the Boston Tea Party is far more complicated than the grammar-school version, and the real facts of what happened on that fateful night in 1773 might surprise you.

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About the Revolutionary War Battle of Yorktown

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About the Revolutionary War Battle of Yorktown

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The Battle of Yorktown was the battle in which the British surrender thus giving the colonist the “victory”