American
History: Micro-Fundamentals of an
Excellent Liberal Arts Education
Gary
Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director,
New Salem Educational Initiative
A Note to My Readers >>>>> Introduction to a Series, Micro- Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education
So wretched is curriculum and teacher
quality at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) that I have moved to expose the
deficiencies of the district in my Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect; and via
my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal
Arts Education provide to my students in the New Salem Educational
Initiative with the education of excellence that they are not getting in MPS
schools.
In the cases of students who come to me
post-grade 8, time is of the essence;
thus, I am now at work on a micro-version of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, so that my
students may take ACT or SAT exams and apply for and gain entrance to colleges
and universities upon the essence of the education that they should receive but
do not in MPS schools.
Below, readers will find American History: Micro-Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal
Arts Education, the first of fourteen chapters that condense my larger work
to the most essential information pertinent to the subject areas covered.
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American
History: Micro-Fundamentals of an
Excellent Liberal Arts Education
First Americans, 20,000 BC (BCE)-1492
The term, “America,” could be used to refer
to the northern and southern continents bearing that name but in Canada and the
nations south of the current United States border is generally accepted to
refer to the United States (US) and to US territory before nationhood was
achieved during 1775-1783. Since this
article covers both pre-US and US history, the term “American History” is used
rather than the appellation, “United States History.” In this article the term, BCE (Before the
Common Era) is acknowledged but the term of longer usage, BC, is generally
used. This comment is pertinent, too,
for the terms CE and AD; the latter will
be used as necessary but dropped altogether once ongoing treatment of the
history of the last two thousand years clearly commences.
The first Americans arrived from northern Asia in approximately 15,000 BC, trekking across a land bridge over the Bering Strait. These people became the various Native American peoples: Aleut, Apache, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Comanche, Cree, Creek, Crow, Dakota (Lakota, Sioux) Delaware, Flathead, Hopi, Huron, Inuit, Iroquois (confederation including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca), Kickapoo, Kiowa, Miami, Narragansett, Navaho, Nez Pierce, Ojibway, Osage, Ottawa, Pawnee, Seminole, Shawnee, Utes, and Yaqui. These Native American groups featured certain cultural similarities, particularly within the geographical, topographical, and climatic regions of the Northwest, Southwest, Plains, Midwest Woodlands, Northeast, Southeast, and South. Some were warlike and fought not for highly demarcated territory but for broad regions of hunting, gathering, or agriculture. Others were more typically peaceful and sought long-term stability in communities where they lived in cliff dwellings, adobe houses, or other structures utilizing the materials of nature. Like their Nordic, Greek, Roman, and African contemporaries, their lives depended on Nature and their deities demonstrated their awe and reverence for the natural world.
Columbus and the Arrival of Europeans,
1492-1763 AD
The Italian explorer Christopher Columbus,
sailing with a crew in three ships funded by Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and
Isabella, arrived in the Bahamas in 1492.
Succeeding Viking adventurers by several centuries, he was the first
European explorer to have a permanent impact on Native American
populations. He treated the original
inhabitants of the Bahamas and three other communities in the Caribbean with
great cruelty, presaging the devastation of the Aztecs (in today’s Mexico) by
Hernando Cortez and followers in 1519 and the Incas (in today’s Peru) by
Francisco Pizarro and followers in 1532.
Columbus and his European successors followed a long-established historical
motif in world history whereby victors among territorial rivals exerted
dominance over conquered peoples. In the
course of the 1492-1763 era, French and British became dominant in Canada,
Spaniards exerted power in South America (where Portuguese were also active in
today’s Brazil), Mexico, and in the American Southeast (especially today’s Florida)
and the American Southwest.
By 1763, the British ousted the French from
Canada. Revolutions in South America and
Mexico drove out the Spaniards (and Portuguese) by 1821, and within the new
nation of the United States the French and Spaniards mostly relinquished their
holdings according to the dynamics of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. And by that time, in the American Revolution
of 1775-1783, the British relinquished their colonies in today’s United States
and the latter was born as a new nation.
The first African slaves were taken to
America in 1619. Slave labor became the
chief productive factor on tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton plantations of the
American South. Plantation owners
increasingly developed a racist ideology to justify their use of free
labor. While conditions varied some from
plantation to plantation, and such distinctions as field slave, slave-driver,
and house slave denoted different qualities of existence and exploitation, the
system as a whole was morally reprehensible and the lives of slaves miserable.
The American Revolution, 1775-1783
By 1775, some leaders in the 13
original colonies (Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey,
New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia) had decided that time had come to
establish a new nation. This sentiment
was particularly great among leaders in the Boston area of Massachusetts. Taxation policies adopted by the British
Parliament in and after 1763 raised the ire of these leaders and the level of
their revolutionary inclinations.
The first shots in the American Revolution
were fired in Lexington and Concord Massachusetts in 1775. Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of
Independence (issued July 4, 1776).
George Washington took command of troops that with significant French
and some German assistance defeated the British; the last battle of the American Revolution
was at Yorktown in 1781. Ben Franklin
served (along
with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay,
Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Laurens) as American
negotiator that produced the 1783 Treaty of Paris, confirming victory over the
British and assuring the departure of the latter from the 13 colonies. The 13 colonies became the first 13 states of
the United States of America.
Not all of the American colonists had
supported the war. Slaves and free
people of African provenance in America were conflicted as to their views,
attempting to assess which side might bring better conditions of life and
possible freedom. Thus, some Americans
fought on the British side as Loyalists (Tories, Redcoats) and others fought as
rebels or revolutionaries for the cause of independence. Some Loyalists opted to emigrate from the
United States post-1781; anyone who
stayed now lived under the laws of the new nation.
The Establishment of the United States
of America, 1781-1829
An attempt at establishing legal principles
for the United States of America began with the Articles of Confederation,
produced by leaders of the 13 states in 1781.
The resulting confederacy relegated central government to a positon that
proved to be too weak for national governance.
Further deliberations in a Constitutional Convention were synthesized and
systematized by James Madison in the United States Constitution, approved by
the legislatures or other designated bodies of the 13 states in 1789.
The United States Constitution provided a balance of federal and state power and similar balance among the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of the federal government. The Constitution provided for a president rather than a monarch (republic rather than monarchy), two houses of Congress (the Senate, with two members from each state; and the House of Representatives, with members allotted according to population), and a court system, at the apex of which was the Supreme Court. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government were equal in principle, but according to the reasoning in a Supreme Court (led by Chief Justice John Marshall) case (Marbury v. Madison) of 1803, the Supreme Court thenceforth exercised the power of judicial review, emphasizing the status of the United States Constitution as the supreme law of the land and giving the Supreme Court the power to decide cases on the basis of consistency with the principles and provisions of the Constitution.
George Washington was elected first
president of the United States, serving 1789-1797. He was succeeded by John Adams (second
president, term 1797-1801). Thomas
Jefferson (third president, term 1801-1809) founder of the Democrat-Republican
Party, defeated the Federalist Adams in 1801.
Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans envisioned a nation of agrarian
focus and limited federal governance giving much scope for individual and state
initiative. Adams was a Federalist of
similar views to those of Alexander Hamilton, who favored strong centralized
power for the federal government.
Federalists and Democratic-Republicans contended during the early years
of the United States. James Madison
(fourth United States president with term 1809-1817), who synthesized and added
his own views to others at the Constitutional Convention as author of the
United States Constitution, was an author of the Federalist Papers (along with John Jay and prime author Alexander
Hamilton) that with systematic brilliance advocated for adoption of the Constitution; but Madison eventually evolved views
consonant with those of Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans. The presidency of James Monroe (fifth president,
term 1817-1825) is identified with an Era of Good Feelings in which the
Democratic-Republican view was embraced by the majority of politicians.
Vice-President John Quincy Adams took the
lead in formulating the 1823 Monroe Doctrine in the name of this fifth
President; espoused in the aftermath of
the revolutions that mostly ousted the Spaniards and other European powers from
South America and Mexico, this doctrine asserted United States primacy of power
in Latin America (South America, Central America, Mexico, and lands of the
Caribbean) and cautioned European nations from intruding. John Madison was elected as the last of the
Democratic-Republican early nineteenth century presidents of Jeffersonian
political views; he served one term,
1825-1829.
The Troubled Quest for Democracy, 1829-1890
Defeating Madison was Andrew Jackson
(seventh president, term 1829-1837), who had led the Battle of New Orleans to
conclude the War of 1812; this conflict,
precipitated by British and American seagoing rivalries, was inconclusive
militarily but effectively ended British claims regarding United States
territory. Jackson also developed a
reputation as a soldier and military leader in opposition to Native American
peoples who fought back against US westward expansion. This expansion proceeded rapidly in the
aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase (1803)and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
which during 1804-1806 traversed regions west of the Mississippi River through
today’s states of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.
Jackson supported the institution of
slavery and ranged himself against Native American people in the westward
expansion; thus, “Jacksonian Democracy”
refers to the broadening of the American electorate to include Jackson’s white
constituencies on the American frontier, at first in the backwoods regions of
today’s West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee, and thence westward to
other regions of the expanding frontier.
Westward expansion continued rapidly throughout the presidencies of Van
Buren (eighth president, term 1837-1841), William Henry Harrison (ninth president
who died just a month into a presidency that began in 1841), John Tyler (tenth
president, term 1841-1845), James Polk, (eleventh president, term 1845-1849),
and Zachary Taylor (twelfth president, who died just sixteen months into a term
that began in 1849). After a period in
which Texas was an independent republic (1836-1845) in the aftermath of victory
over Mexican general Santa Ana, the region was annexed as a US territory in
1845. The Mexican War of 1848 resulted
in cession to the United States of borderlands in today’s California, Utah,
Arizona, and New Mexico wherein the Spanish and then Mexican governments had
exerted control.
By this time, slavery had become a contentious issue that found abolitionists increasingly pressing the case against defenders of this “peculiar institution” of the American South. The international slave trade formally ended in 1808 but the intra-US trade and practice of slavery continued. The language of the United States Constitution connoted a compromise between southern states wherein free slave labor was economically important and northern states in which it was not. Slavery undergirded the economies of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; and was also important in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas. Slave labor continued to produce tobacco, sugar, and rice; but by the early years of the new nation, the primary export product of cotton, key raw material destined for the looms of the increasingly sophisticated factory system of Great Britain, was the centerpiece of the economy of the American South. US President Millard Fillmore signed the Compromise of 1850, which provided that in admitting territories as official states, the United States Congress must ensure that the number of slave and non-slave states be equal. A party known as the Whigs had provided some opposition to the dominant Democratic-Republicans and then the Democrats but faded by the 1850s and were replaced on the America political scene by a party, the Republicans, that sought gradual termination of the institution of slavery.
Tensions between northern and southern
states increased as abolitionist efforts became more fervent and
persistent. While the issue of slavery
did divide northern and southern sentiments, the core contention was economic
rather than moral: the industrial and
more urban North did not depend on slave labor as did the agrarian and more
rural South. The efforts of white
abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and African Americans such as
Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass were dedicated and
courageous, and the metaphorical Underground Railroad that in fact facilitated
the flight of southern slaves mostly overland and along rivers to freedom in
New York, Ohio, Ontario, Quebec and other states and provinces was a marvel of
organization, bravery, and fortitude;
but those involved in the antislavery movement constituted a
minority. Political contention focused
on the balance of slave versus non-slave states for admission to the United
States: A congressional Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state
but included a Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated return of escaped slaves to
their owners; this legislation gained
Supreme Court affirmation via the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
Relative moderation of the Republicans did
little to assuage the fears of proslavery southerners, so that when the party’s
candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidency in 1860, a move to secede from
the Union (United States) gained force.
By the end of 1861, eleven states (Virginia, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee,
Louisiana, and Texas) seceded; Jefferson
Davis became the president of the Confederate States of America with capital at
Montgomery, Alabama.
Abraham Lincoln proceeded to authorize wartime organization on the part of the United States, with paramount goal of preserving the Union rather than ending slavery. But as war ensued, Lincoln placed greater emphasis on the abolition of slavery and in his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation took the partial step of freeing all slaves in states still in rebellion against the United States (excluding those states that had formerly been in rebellion but were now under Union control). The Confederacy had been militarily better led by General Robert E. Lee than had the Union by General Ulysses S. Grant, but the Union was in the course of the war much better endowed with weaponry and infrastructure. In April 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia and the Civil War (War Between the States) came to an end.
Soon (1865-1866) after the war’s conclusion, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the United States Constitution were passed, respectively ending slavery, granting citizenship rights to adult males regardless of race or creed, and similarly assuring voting rights to all adult males. An era of Reconstruction lasted from 1865 until 1877. This was a time when a concerted effort was made by members of the Republican Party (the most enthusiastic of whom were known as the Radical Republicans) to bring African Americans into the life of the United States as full citizens. Efforts were made to increase African American enrollment and quality of education; land grants were given that in time yielded Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), even as African American enrollment in long-established and previously all-white or white-dominant institutions increased. One African American senator and 14 African American members of the House of Representatives took their seats in the United States Congress, and numerous African American politicians were elected to state legislatures and city and county government positions. Federal efforts focused also on the need of African Americans to purchase land on affordable terms and to live in communities with services abetting good health and sanitation.
The Reconstruction effort was promising but
not enough to reach all of those who needed help after decades and even
centuries of economic exploitation, educational deprivation, and political and
social discrimination. And in any case,
by the mid-late 1870s the Republican Party was paying more attention to
powerful urban constituencies in the finance and business sectors of the urban North
than to the mostly impoverished and rural African American population of the
South.
In the 1876 presidential election,
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden ran so closely in
the electoral college that the contest came down to Florida, where the vote
count was in dispute. Months ensued
before the two parties resolved the dispute via the Compromise of 1877, whereby
the Democrats conceded the election to Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of
federal troops from the South. This
meant that protection of the voting rights and equal access to public
facilities could no longer be guaranteed.
A southern white power structure, not identical to that of antebellum
days but just as intent on denying rights of citizenship to African Americans,
quickly gained control of the economic and political institutions of the
South. Black Codes were passed in a
system known as Jim Crow, whereby segregation of the races was enforced in a
way that denied African Americans the rights that should have been clearly
theirs according to the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments. Segregation was judged legal
according to the decision of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), with the proviso that facilities be
“separate but equal.”
In the South, the white power structure
assured that institutions of education, health, and public services were separate
with no heed as to proviso that they be equal.”
Vigilante groups (Ku Klux Klan, Knights of the Golden Circle, Midnight
Raiders) created an atmosphere of terror that abetted the subjugation of
African Americans. A type of violence,
first most pervasive as the nation expanded westward under conditions of
underdeveloped legal and juridical institutions, now made life dangerous for
African Americans in the South. Between
1877 and 1966, there would be over 4,600 lynchings in the United States; one-third of those lynched were white people
living in the Wild West; the remaining
two-thirds were African Americans living in the Jim Crow South.
Beginning in the early 19th
century, treaties signed between the United States government and Native
America groups had the effect of appropriating land previously utilized for economic
and cultural sustenance by the original Americans for the purposes of the
government and the population of European heritage. Farms, ranches, towns, and cities were
established on lands whereon the Native population had roamed for
centuries. Eastern Native American
populations were pushed westward and eventually assigned to reservations mostly
west of the Mississippi River. With
increasing desperation and fervor from the 1860s forward, Native Americans
contested federal action and the encroachment of white populations onto the
land of their forefathers and foremothers, but a defeat at Wounded Knee, South
Dakota, in 1890 signaled Native American defeat.
Fom 1890, democracy for many decades in
the United States would be of an incomplete type, the preserve of white males
only. African and Native Americans would
live under conditions of life that typify the police state, a descriptor that
could also apply to the circumstances of
life for many Hispanic and Asian Americans; white women, too, lacked key rights as
citizens in terms of suffrage, property ownership, and access to political
office, higher education, and preferred vocation.
Economic Expansion and Ethnic Bigotry,
1890-1929
The presidencies of Rutherford B. Hayes
(nineteenth president, term 1877-1881) Rutherford B. Hayes (nineteenth
president, term 1877-1881), James Garfield (twentieth president, served just
four months into 1881 before being assassinated), Chester A. Arthur
(twenty-first president, term 1881-1885), Grover Cleveland (twenty-second and
twenty-fourth president, terms 1885-1889 and 1893-1897), and Benjamin Harrison
(twenty-third president, term 1889-1893) were years of great economic
expansion, abetted by a technological transformation denoted by the invention
of the electric telegraph (Samuel B. Morse, 1835), telephone (1876, Alexander
Graham Bell), and incandescent electric lamp (Thomas Edison, 1877); and the completion of the first
trans-national railroad in 1868. Great
magnates of industry and commerce, including Andrew Carnegie (coal and steel),
Andrew Mellon (banking and finance), John D. Rockefeller (petroleum [Standard
Oil]), and James J. Hill (railroads and lumber) monopolized broad sectors of
the national economy. As had been the
case in Great Britain in the early and middle 19th century, labor
for the rapid industrial and commercial expansion was furnished by an increasingly
urbanized population toiling long hours for low pay in frequently dangerous and
unsanitary factories, mines, and lumber camps.
The business and industrial magnates, considered by admirers to be
“Titans of Industry” but known to detractors as “Robber Barons” for their
cutthroat business practices, opposed the formation of labor unions with great
vehemence and even violence.
This was a period of imperialistic
competition among the European powers.
During the administration of William McKinley (twenty-fifth president,
term 1897-1901, assassinated in 1901) the United States joined the competition
with declaration of war against Spain in the Spanish-American War (1898) that
resulted in United States control of Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and in the assertion of a sphere of influence
in Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt (twenty-sixth
president, terms spanning 1901-1909) reasserted United States imperialist
interests in Latin America with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Roosevelt
also brought great expanses of scenic land under the control of federal
agencies that evolved into the National Forest Service and the National Park
Service, and he created federal agencies that sought to slow the growth of
monopolies in business, monitor factory conditions, and ensure higher standards
of safety and quality in the food industry.
Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft (twenty-seventh president,
1909-1913), was less enthusiastic about safeguarding national scenic areas or
regulating business, but he caused no great rollback in those effort.
The imperialist ambitions of the European
powers produced tensions and entangling alliances that led to World War I
(1914-1918). In fighting this war,
France, Great Britain, and Russia were the most powerful nations among the
Allied Powers while Germany, Hungary, and Turkey (geopolitical remnant of the
dwindling and fading Ottoman Empire) were their counterparts among the Central
Powers. Italy initially joined the
Central Powers, attempted to switch allegiance to the Allied Powers, but in the
end lost so many battles that its maneuvers produced no benefit for either
side. Before war’s end, Russia underwent
the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and withdrew from the international
conflict. The United States entered the
war in 1915 on the Allied side after seagoing and diplomatic conflicts with
Germany. Predominately British and
French troops fought mostly Germans on the Western Front (mostly stretched across
territory separating France from Germany) in brutal trench warfare, whereby
young bodies were sacrificed for territorial gains measured in inches. American troops, not so bogged down in the
conditions of the trench, led the Allies to victories in the course of 1917-1918
that concluded the war in the latter year.
Woodrow Wilson (twenty-eighth president,
terms spanning 1912-1921) had sought to keep the United States out of the
European conflict and hoped that this war would be one to end all others. Toward that end, Wilson made a great effort
to win congressional approval for joining the League of Nations, which had been
established largely at his behest. In
the end, though, isolationist sentiment dominated in the United States Congress
and the United States did not join the League.
In the Treaty of Versailles (1919), France and Great Britain dominated
the formulation of terms that shackled Germany with a heavy indemnity and
imposed severe restrictions on that nation’s military power.
The decade of the 1920s was an intriguing conglomerate of unleashed emotions and looming societal storms. In the United States, the era from one viewpoint was an intriguing mix of secret flaunting of and celebration of changes in the supreme law of the land: The 18th Amendment (1919) brought Prohibition; the 19th Amendment fulfilled the vision of 19th century feminists and suffragettes (Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth) by at last establishing the right of adult women to vote. The Prohibition against the sale and consumption of alcohol was widely violated, as people gathered in “speak-easies” and at the back rooms of restaurants to consume various banned beverages, often provided by criminal gangs such as that of Al Capone in Chicago; the law was reversed by the 21st Amendment of 1933. The right to vote signaled to women a new sense of freedom that seemed to induce expressions in popular style and habits: Skirt-lines went up, necklines dropped, public smoking became prevalent, and jitterbug and other dances filled the evening and early morning hours.
Investors also engaged in their own form of
hyperbolic enthusiasm, investing in a stock market that seemed to reach no
permanent peak. But industrial
production and actual corporate value could not keep pace with investor
ambitions by the end of the 1920s: On
Black Monday (29 October 1929), the stock market crash turned millionaires into
paupers overnight and fell heavily on humble working folk, many of whom lost
their jobs and eked out some semblance of a living hawking flowers and other
goods on the street.
For African
Americans, the stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression induced even
more disappointment with circumstances of life in the northern urban centers,
to which so many had fled in the Great Northern Migration that was especially
vigorous during the years from 1915 forward.
The North was hardly the Promised Land that many had expected; jobs were more varied and plentiful and wages
were better, but the jobs were on the whole menial and discrimination in
restricted housing covenants and other forms was demeaning and disillusioning.
Works of African American poets, novelists, musicians, and visual artists of the
Harlem Renaissance produced such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
Countee Cullen, Hallie Q. Brown, Jessie Redmon Faust, Zora Neal Hurston, and
Georgia Douglass Johnson, who protested discriminatory practices and insisted
that changes must fulfill their vision of racial parity in the years
ahead.
Foundations of Contemporary Life in the
United States, 1929-1972The presidencies of Warren Harding (twenty-ninth president, term 1921-1923), Calvin Coolidge (thirtieth president, term 1923-1929), and Herbert Hoover (thirty-first president, 1929-1933) featured conservative policies that favored big business and for the time spurred economic growth but also contributed to the overly sanguine investor spirit that induced the Great Depression. The victory of Franklin Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1932 forever changed the role of government, as he utilized the principles of Keynesian economics in constructing his New Deal, which brought an array of federal programs to address the immediate economic needs of people and legislation such as the Social Security Act and the Wagner (Fair Labor) Act, both enacted by the United States Congress in 1935.
Life continued hard for the bulk of the
populace throughout the 1930s, but Roosevelt’s policies did bring relief and
uplifted citizen spirits; the latter
were raised, too as people listened to the president’s masterful use of the new
mass medium of radio in his “Fireside Chats.”
During this time, Adolf Hitler mesmerized enough Germans, chafing under
the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and discontented with the hyper-inflated
economy and decadent society of the Weimar Republic, to rise to power as
Chancellor; he gained the popular
appellation of “The Leader”; allying
himself eventually with Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Tojo’s Japan to form the Axis Powers, Hitler’s
military in the late 1930s launched attacks that brought Czechoslovakia,
Austria, and Hungary under German control.
When German armies invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Allied forces
of Great Britain, France, and Russia abandoned their policy of appeasement and
declared war. In World War II
(1939-1945), the Allied Powers waged battles in Europe (mostly against the
Germans) and in the Asia-Pacific (mostly against the Japanese); early on,
German forces overran the Scandinavian nations, the
Netherlands, and France, so that fighting
fell mostly to the troops of Great Britain and Russia until the United States
entered the war in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (7
December 1941).
On the home front of Germany during the
years of World War II, the particular form of fascism that took shape in the
policies of the Nazis (National Socialists) was described by chauvinism and a
cruel assertion of Aryan national purity that resulted in the extermination of
six million Jews, along with others (Roman Catholics, “gypsies,” homosexuals)
who were considered to sully the German populace. The Germans and Japanese were generally
ascendant in their respective theaters during 1939-1942, but the years
1943-1945 exposed weakness, overextended lines, and overwrought ambitions, so
that the Allies prevailed: Victory in
Europe Day came on 8 May 1945; the
Japanese effectively terminated their military efforts in the aftermath of the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945) and
then officially surrendered on 2 September 1945.
The United States and the Soviet Union (Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR]) had been Allies in World War II, but in the aftermath of the war began a contest for world influence known as the Cold War. They became rivals in the United Nations (established 1949) and eventually grouped themselves by the mid-1950s with their respective allies in defense pacts known as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the Warsaw Pact. This rivalry, spurred by the launching of the satellite Sputnik in 1959, induced an American response that landed astronauts on the moon by 1969; and took Soviet and American military forces and diplomats into areas across the globe in the quest for influence. This rivalry would not end until the events of 1989 (collapse of the eastern European communist governments) and 1991 (collapse of the Soviet Union, replaced by the Commonwealth of Nations in Russia).
Within the United States, courageous
actions of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael
(Kwame Toure), and a bevy of lunch-counter occupiers and Freedom Riders resulted
in success for the Civil Rights Movement during the years 1954-1965. Key events were the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court (1854),
the Emmett Till murder (1955), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), the
Little Rock Nine incident (1957), and the March on Washington (1963). Key civil rights organizations included the
SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). President Lyndon Johnson prevailed upon the
United States Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting
Rights Act (1965), which gave legislative force to laws that had already been established
in constitutional form via the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments to the United States Constitution.
Johnson launched his Great Society programs for fair housing and better
educational and economic opportunities for those who had been relegated to the
margins of American life. The late 1960s
also brought activity from Latino leaders such as Cesar Chavez and feminists
such as Gloria Steinhem, who respectively campaigned for Latino and women’s
rights and inspired the arrival of the Migrant Farm Workers Union and the
National Organization for Women (NOW) on the American political and cultural
scene.
This was a time of great social ferment, much of the energy of opposing forces engendered by the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War during 1965-1973, upon the decisions of President Johnson. This war sapped a great amount of the funding that Johnson would have preferred to invest in his Great Society programs and created protests that led Johnson to announce his intention not to run for the presidency in 1968. Republican Richard Nixon (thirty-seventh president, term 1969-1974) defeated Democrats Hubert Humphrey (1968) and George McGovern (1972). The failure of the McGovern campaign to greatly extend the legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society signaled a shift to a more conservative era of American politics and government in the years ahead.
The period encompassing the presidencies of
Harry Truman (thirty-third president, terms 1945-1953), Dwight Eisenhower
(thirty-fourth president, terms 1953-1960), John Kennedy (thirty-fifth
president (term 1960-1963). and Lyndon Johnson (thirty-sixth president, terms
1963-1969) were generally prosperous for the American economy. Republican Gerald Ford (thirty-eighth
president, term 1974-1977) and Democrat Jimmy Carter (thirty-ninth president,
term 1974-1977) served during times when the Watergate scandal that ended the
Richard Nixon presidency undermined citizen faith in government and when
unprecedented conditions of stagflation led to dissatisfaction with the
American economy. When the new theocratic
Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini (took power 1979) captured and held
Americans hostage in Iran, economic woes and the perception of international
disgrace swayed voters in the 1980 election more than did Carter’s successes in
negotiating a landmark deal between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israel
President Menachem Begin: Ronald Reagan
(fortieth president, terms 1980-1989) defeated Carter and in the course of the
1980s featured conservative economic and social policies that slowed further development
of federal government programs of the New Deal and Great Society type but
increased military spending.
George H. W. Bush (forty-first president,
term 1989-1993) generally followed the policies of Reagan and used the might of
the American military in the First Persian Gulf War (1991) to counter the
incursion of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces into Kuwait. But a souring American economy abetted the
victory of Bill Clinton (forty-second president, 1993-2001), who brought a
moderate version of Democratic policies back to government and politics during
economically prosperous times that buoyed Clinton’s popularity.
Republican George W. Bush (forty-third president, terms 2001-2009) served as the catastrophe of the 9-11 incident dramatically changed the way Americans thought about their security at home and in the world. Bush and his advisers ordered forces into Iraq and Afghanistan to counter the actions of Al-Qaida and the Taliban respectively, committing Americans to involvements that continued into the middle of the first decade of the new millennium in the case of Iraq and unto this day in the case of Afghanistan.
The administration of Barack Obama
(forty-fourth president, 2009-2017) withdrew troops from Iraq but heightened
American involvement in Afghanistan.
Just as the Bush administration had pursued and captured Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein, the Obama administration discovered the hideout of Al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden On the domestic front, the Obama
administration continued an effort that had begun but failed during the Clinton
administration to bring universal health care to the American people,
succeeding in persuading the United States Congress to pass the Affordable
Health Care Act (2009).
Hopes ran high that election of the first African American president (Obama) had signaled a post-racial society in which the nation could distance itself from the brutalities of the slavery and Jim Crow eras. But with the victory of Republican Donald J. Trump (forty-fifth president, term 2016-2019 [to date of this article]) over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, the white nationalist stance of one of his key constituencies conveyed to Americans that racial division and resentments were lamentably still a definite part of the fabric of American life. The Trump administration has thus far been characterized by policies running counter to Obama-era environmental and international initiatives, and by policies seeking to limit immigration, particularly the flow of those who have entered and are entering the United States illegally.
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