U.S. History curriculum

The Virginia Company's settlers chose the site in May 1607 because water on three sides made it easy to defend against a Spanish attack. Brackish river water, disease and hunger killed many, and in the Starving Time of 1609–10 most of the colonists died. The survivors had actually abandoned the town when news of an arriving fleet turned them back.

Glass, pitch, tar and soap ashes all failed to turn a profit for the Virginia Company. The English disliked the tobacco local Indians grew, so around 1612 John Rolfe planted Caribbean seed, and his leaf compared well with Spanish tobacco in London. Exports went from 20,000 pounds in 1617 to 1.5 million twelve years later, a cash crop whose appetite for cheap land and labor shaped the colony.

Short of settlers, the Virginia Company offered land instead of shares, and under the headright system a planter got 50 acres for each person whose passage he paid. Most of those newcomers then served him as indentured servants for five to seven years, so the land went to whoever paid the fare, not to the laborer who made the crossing.

In 1619 the Virginia Company ended martial law and let each plantation elect two burgesses; the 22 met with the governor and council in the Jamestown church. Its limits matter as much as its precedent: it was modeled on the company's stockholder meeting, not Parliament, and the company could veto anything it passed.

The Mayflower's passengers had permission to settle in northern Virginia, but rough water turned the ship back to Cape Cod, outside that grant. So aboard ship in November 1620 they agreed to form a civil body politic, make laws for the colony's general good and obey them, creating authority where their charter gave them none.

The Pilgrims were Separatists who wanted to leave the Church of England entirely, unlike Puritans, who meant to purify it from within. After years in tolerant Holland, worried their children were losing their English ways, they sailed with about fifty others they called Strangers, recruited to help pay for the voyage.

Puritans, unlike the Pilgrims, stayed inside the Church of England and meant to reform it, and in 1629 they gained a charter for a colony north of Plymouth. John Winthrop's 1630 sermon hoped it would be a city upon a hill, a model community for the world to watch. In practice, dissenters who challenged the magistrates' authority were banished.

Roger Williams argued that government should not enforce religious belief and that English charters wrongly took Native land. Massachusetts Bay ordered him deported in 1635, and in 1636 he founded Providence on liberty of conscience, a principle that soon made the settlement a refuge for other dissenters who had broken with the colony's ministers.

King Charles II granted Penn his colony to repay a debt owed his father, and Penn, a Quaker convert, advertised religious freedom across Europe to fill it. His frame of government limited the death penalty to treason and murder and required jury trials. Relations with the Lenape stayed good until he granted their Brandywine land to English colonists.

George Calvert, a Catholic convert, won the charter, and his son sent the first settlers in 1634, most of them Protestants under Catholic patronage. The proprietor kept out of his colonists' religious quarrels, a policy one 1890s historian traced to his need for settlers and his enemies at home. The 1649 act, passed under a Protestant governor, wrote that forbearance into law.

King George II chartered Georgia in 1732 as a military buffer for the southern colonies against Spain and as a fresh start for the worthy poor. The debtors'-prison story is largely myth: only eleven families of debtors are known to have settled. The buffer purpose held when Oglethorpe repelled a Spanish invasion in 1742.

The regions earned their living in different ways. Virginia tobacco was labor-hungry and wore out a field in about three years, so planters kept taking more land. New England merchants made their money at sea instead, shipping fish, livestock and lumber to Caribbean sugar plantations and bringing back sugar and molasses, a trade that, like the plantations it fed, rested on enslaved labor.

Mercantile thinking equated a nation's wealth with gold and silver, and treated colonies as captive suppliers and customers. Enumerated colonial goods could go only to the mother country, which held the monopoly of supplying the colonies with European goods. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations attacked the system, arguing the monopoly helped one class of merchants while harming the country.

Laws from the 1660s controlled whom the colonies could trade with and how; Virginia planters, for example, could sell their tobacco only to English merchants. Enforcement stayed lax for a century, and colonists grew used to trading freely and smuggling. When Britain began enforcing them in the 1760s to raise revenue, colonists saw them as unjustly restrictive.

The most common Atlantic routes linked Europe, Africa and the Americas, moving manufactured goods, enslaved Africans and raw materials. New England ports were part of it: Boston exported rum, probably made from Caribbean sugar, that was sometimes traded for enslaved people. Boston leaders later likened taxes on sugar and molasses to slavery even as that trade propped up slavery itself.

The crossing took roughly 80 days, with captives packed on or below deck without room to sit up, little air and too little water; about 15 percent sickened and died. Of the roughly 12 million Africans carried across the Atlantic, most went to Brazil and the Caribbean. North America received at least 388,000, about 4 percent of the survivors.

Poor English workers came as indentured servants, trading four to seven years of labor for passage. When the first Africans reached Virginia in 1619 there were no slave laws, and some later won their freedom. As tobacco demand raised the cost of servants and freed servants demanded land, planters turned to enslaved Africans as a permanent, inherited labor force.

Virginia hardened a labor status into a racial caste law by law. A 1662 statute made slavery hereditary, and a 1667 law said baptism did not bring freedom, closing a door some had used. Later acts barred Black people from owning white servants, gathering in large numbers or leaving a plantation without written permission, and by 1705 the slave laws were codified.

Itinerant revivalists such as George Whitefield drew huge crowds of every denomination, and when settled clergy shut their pulpits to him he preached in the fields. Revivalists entered other ministers' parishes uninvited and attacked an unconverted ministry, splitting Presbyterians into Old Side and New Side. One synod even repealed its rule confining ministers to their own parishes.

Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia shows the movement's practical bent. He organized a club whose members posed questions in morals, politics and natural philosophy, a subscription library that pooled members' money for books, and a philosophical society in 1744. His paper arguing that lightning is electricity was at first laughed at in London's Royal Society.

Zenger printed a New York paper attacking Governor Cosby; after two grand juries refused to indict, he was arrested on the council's warrant for seditious libel. The chief justice told the jury that truth could not justify a libel, but Andrew Hamilton argued that truth is a defense, and in 1735 the jury acquitted. The case is remembered as an early step toward the First Amendment's protection of the press.

Accusers claimed that the specters of accused neighbors appeared to them, and a special court accepted such spectral evidence; between June and September 1692 it sent 20 people to their deaths. When the regular court tried the remaining cases with spectral evidence thrown out, the trials ended mostly in acquittals, and in May 1693 the governor released everyone still held.

It was the North American part of the Seven Years' War, fought over a poorly defined border such as the upper Ohio valley, with France, its colonists and Native allies against Britain, its colonists and the Iroquois Confederacy. Victory left Britain with heavy war debts, and the taxes it then laid on colonists to cover them bred growing colonial resentment.

With war against France looming in 1754, commissioners from seven colonies adopted a plan for a Grand Council chosen by the colonies under a President General appointed by the crown, with power to tax. Every colonial government rejected it or let it die, fearing a loss of its own authority. Its framers sought reform within the empire, not independence.

After Pontiac's War caught British forts by surprise, London barred colonial settlement west of the mountain line to create a western Indian reserve. It was largely ineffective, since settlers and speculators kept moving west, and it angered both the settlers and Virginia elites who had invested heavily in land companies there.

Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War deep in debt. The 1764 Sugar Act actually cut the duty on molasses but enforced it far more strictly, while the 1765 Stamp Act required a revenue stamp on most printed paper, so it touched nearly every colonist. Delegates from nine colonies petitioned against it, a boycott hurt British merchants, and Parliament repealed it rather than enforce it.

Colonists claimed the rights of Englishmen, which included consenting to taxes through their own representatives, and they had no representation in the Parliament that taxed them. The sharpest line was over internal taxes, which, they argued, could come only from legislatures in which they were represented. Virginia's burgesses denied Parliament's authority to tax them at all.

In 1767 Parliament taxed particular goods imported into the colonies and set up an American Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston to collect them. Colonists answered with non-importation, cutting purchases of British goods to force a change. In 1770 Parliament repealed all the duties except the one on tea, kept deliberately to preserve its claimed right to tax the colonies.

Troops had occupied Boston since 1768 to quell street violence over taxes, and on March 5, 1770 soldiers surrounded by a jeering crowd fired, killing five. Patriot leaders staged a mass funeral, and a famous engraving showed the captain behind his men. At trial, witnesses placed him in front of them, and he and six soldiers were acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter.

The 1773 Tea Act was not a new tax. To rescue the struggling East India Company, Parliament gave it a monopoly on colonial sales through chosen consignees and tax-free shipping, so colonial tea traders could not compete, while the existing duty kept Parliament's right to tax alive. Elsewhere protests forced consignees to resign; in Boston, on December 16, men disguised as Indians dumped the tea.

Parliament answered the Tea Party in 1774 by closing Boston's port until the tea was paid for, stripping the colony of its charter and limiting its town meetings. The Quebec Act, passed at the same time, deepened suspicion of an imperial plot. Colonial opinion was still divided on boycotts, but most agreed to meet, and the First Continental Congress convened that September.

The First Congress met in 1774 to set the terms of a boycott merchants would honor, and it still petitioned the king while treating Parliament as the aggressor. By the time the Second Congress met in May 1775 fighting had begun, so it created the Continental Army and, as royal authority collapsed, became a national government beyond anything the colonies had granted it.

Published in January and widely distributed, half a year after Congress had petitioned the king for reconciliation, Paine's pamphlet attacked monarchy and hereditary succession themselves. Its arguments were plain and physical: it called it absurd for a continent to be perpetually governed by an island, and declared that the time had come to part.

Its preamble says governments draw their just powers from the consent of the governed and that a people may alter or abolish one that destroys their rights. Most of the text is a list of injuries charged to the king, not Parliament. Congress cut a draft passage blaming the king for the slave trade, and declaring independence made a formal foreign alliance possible.

In this argument people are naturally free and equal, with rights grounded in no particular society's laws. Governments exist by the people's consent to protect those rights, and one that fails can be resisted and replaced. Scholars still debate whether natural law, meaning duties owed to others, or natural rights came first in the theory.

The war began on April 19, 1775, when British troops clashed with colonists at the two towns. Massachusetts law required nearly all men from 16 to 60 to serve in the militia, which trained six days a year. Minute men were different: volunteers raised from late 1774, paid, often better equipped, and drilled twice a week so they could march at a minute's warning.

Britain's 1777 plan sent armies toward Albany to cut New England off from the other colonies, but the support Burgoyne expected never came, and on October 17 he surrendered. France had been aiding the Americans in secret; news of the surrender in December decided its foreign minister on an open alliance, signed in February 1778.

No battle was fought during the 1777–78 winter camp, yet influenza, typhoid and other disease killed nearly 2,000 people there. The hardship was real but not exceptional for an army that was always short of supplies. What made the winter matter was reform: a supply overhaul, and a Prussian officer's drill, taught to a model company and passed down to the whole army.

The siege depended on the sea. Washington had planned to strike New York and turned south only when he learned an allied fleet was bound for Chesapeake Bay. A naval battle off the Virginia Capes on September 5, 1781, fought without any Americans, left the bay out of British hands, so Cornwallis got no reinforcements before he surrendered on October 19.

Franklin rejected British offers of autonomy within the empire and refused to consider a peace separate from America's wartime ally. The preliminary articles of November 1782 recognized independence and boundaries, settled fishing rights and prewar debts, promised restitution to Loyalists and pulled out British forces; the final treaty was signed on September 3, 1783.

A common estimate splits colonists roughly into thirds: for independence, for the king, and for neither, but no one knows the real numbers, since Loyalists often hid their views. Their reasons varied, from protecting property to enslaved people who saw no freedom in American independence. At Kings Mountain nearly every man on both sides was American, and many defeated Loyalists later left for Canada and other British colonies.

The first constitution made a league of sovereign states, each with one vote in Congress and every power not expressly delegated. Congress could not tax or regulate commerce, and ratification required all thirteen states, so a single holdout, Maryland, delayed it until 1781. It also could not enforce the peace treaty, so many states simply ignored its debt clause.

Adopted by the Confederation Congress, it set a three-stage path from congressionally appointed officials to an elected assembly and then statehood, each step triggered by population, and carved the territory into three to five states. It barred slavery there, but with a proviso that people escaping into the territory from another state could be reclaimed. The model guided later expansion.

Massachusetts farmers, many of them Revolutionary War veterans, rose against the state's tax and land policies and marched on the arsenal at Springfield to seize arms. The Confederation's ineffectual response showed how little the national government could do, and that weakness helped persuade leaders that a stronger central government was needed.

Delegates met in Philadelphia in May with a mandate only to revise the existing frame of government, shuttered the windows and swore secrecy so they could speak freely. By mid-June they had decided to draft an entirely new frame instead. The hardest questions were how much power to give the center, how to divide seats among states and who should elect representatives.

Large states wanted seats in both houses tied to population, since they supplied more of the nation's money and defense; small states wanted the equal votes they had under the Articles. Connecticut's delegates proposed the split: population in the House, equal seats in the Senate, with revenue bills starting in the House. It passed on July 16 by a single vote.

When apportioning House seats, the Constitution counted free persons in full, including servants bound for a term of years, left out Indians not taxed, and added three-fifths of all other persons, meaning enslaved people. The convention wrote the ratio into its House plan in June, weeks before it settled how the Senate would be chosen.

The Virginia Plan already proposed three branches with checks to prevent abuse. The Federalist's defense rested on motive, not just structure: give each branch the means and personal interest to resist the others, because ambition must be made to counteract ambition. So the branches overlap on purpose: the president can veto bills, and the Senate must consent to treaties and appointments.

One of the Constitution's defenders called it neither wholly national nor wholly federal but a composition of both: founded on the consent of the states, yet acting directly on individual citizens. The powers delegated to the national government were few and defined, mostly war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce, while those left to the states were numerous and indefinite.

Supporters pointed to the Articles' failures: a Congress that could not tax, regulate trade or enforce a treaty. Opponents charged that the new Constitution would open the way to tyranny by the central government, with British violations of civil rights fresh in their memory. Several state conventions ratified only while asking for amendments, or on the understanding that they would follow.

Writing under the shared pen name Publius in New York newspapers, three authors made the case for ratification to the people of that state. The essays were open advocacy; the first tells readers plainly that adopting the plan is in their interest. No. 10 argued a large union could control faction, and No. 51 argued that rival ambitions inside government would guard liberty.

The First Congress proposed twelve amendments in 1789 to answer the arguments most often raised against the Constitution, and the ten ratified in 1791 became the Bill of Rights. Of the other two, one was never ratified and the other, on congressional pay, was finally ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment.

The Constitution names no cabinet; Congress created the first executive departments in its first session, and their heads became the president's advisers. Washington asked that his pay be limited to the office's actual expenses, as he had renounced pay in the war. In 1796 he announced he would not seek a third term, stepping down after two terms.

Published as a newspaper article in 1796, it warned in the most solemn terms against the spirit of party, which Washington called inseparable from human nature and most dangerous in popular governments. Abroad he urged temporary alliances for emergencies rather than permanent ones, warning that a nation ruled by habitual hatred or fondness for another is in some degree a slave.

As Treasury secretary, Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume the states' war debts and to charter a national bank, defending the bank with the idea of implied powers. Jefferson had long urged strict adherence to the Constitution's letter. The debt plan passed only after a bargain that moved the permanent capital south.

The framers did not anticipate parties, yet by 1800 congressional caucuses were nominating candidates. Federalists favored a strong central government and leaned toward Britain; Democratic-Republicans leaned toward France and drew support from new citizens. After the bitter 1800 contest, the new president insisted every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.

Expecting war with France in 1798, a Federalist Congress raised the residency requirement for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, let the president deport aliens, and made it a crime to publish false, scandalous and malicious writing about the government. Only opposition editors were prosecuted, and the backlash helped defeat the Federalists in 1800.

Electors then cast two undifferentiated votes, so the winning party's presidential and vice-presidential candidates tied and the House had to choose, voting by state. It deadlocked for six days and 36 ballots before enough members cast blank ballots to break the tie. The Federalists thus lost the presidency to the opposing party, and the Twelfth Amendment later separated the two votes.

A justice-of-the-peace commission signed by the outgoing president was never delivered, and its holder sued the new secretary of state. Marshall's opinion held that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void, the first time the Court struck down an act of Congress, though nothing in the text gave it that power. No other federal law fell until 1857.

A state taxed the branch of the Second Bank of the United States inside its borders, and the bank's cashier refused to pay. The Court held that chartering a bank was an implied power of Congress and that a state could not tax the federal government, because the power to tax involves the power to destroy.

The envoys were authorized to pay up to $10 million for New Orleans and the Floridas; when the seller, its army in Saint-Domingue wasting from yellow fever, offered all of Louisiana, they agreed to far more. Jefferson, a strict constructionist who found no clause allowing the purchase, set aside a constitutional amendment rather than lose the deal.

Jefferson's secret message of January 1803 asked Congress for $2,500, framed modestly in terms of commerce, to explore land that did not yet belong to the United States. The instructions went well beyond trade: establish relations with western tribes and report on geography, plants, animals and climate. The party never ran out of rifles, powder, ink or paper.

Britain seized American sailors and blockaded neutral trade, but many war supporters also eyed British and Spanish land. British troops burned public buildings in Washington in August 1814. The treaty signed that Christmas Eve restored prewar boundaries, and the Battle of New Orleans was fought after peace had already been signed.

Monroe's presidency from 1817 to 1825 saw the Federalists fade, temporarily ending two-party competition. Underneath, sectional conflict was sharpening: the fight over Missouri's statehood split the House along sectional lines. By 1824 the nominating caucus had collapsed, and the four-way race that year revived two-party politics.

Missouri's request for statehood threatened the even balance of free and slave states, so Congress admitted it with slavery alongside a new free state, and barred slavery north of a fixed latitude line in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. The line lasted 34 years, until the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed it, and the Court later declared the compromise unconstitutional.

Britain proposed a joint declaration against European intervention in Latin America, but the secretary of state insisted the United States speak alone, to keep its own hands free. The 1823 message declared the Americas closed to new colonization, promised to stay out of Europe's affairs and to leave existing colonies alone. The Great Powers barely noticed; it gained force only later.

Canals and railroads turned local economies into national ones. Seneca Falls shows the sequence: once its canal linked to the Erie Canal it reached a much larger market, and after the railroad arrived in 1841 its factories stopped making a variety of goods for local buyers and specialized in products such as pumps and fire engines shipped to distant markets.

Textile corporations recruited young Yankee women from farms, offering monthly cash wages and room in company boardinghouses where keepers enforced curfews and conduct codes. Workdays ran 12 to 14 hours. The women struck twice in the 1830s and campaigned for a ten-hour day; few strikes succeeded, and Irish immigrants increasingly filled the mills from the 1840s.

In 1824 the candidate who led in both popular and electoral votes lost when the House chose another man, and the backlash buried the congressional caucus in favor of party conventions and a new Democratic Party. As president, Jackson fought Congress so fiercely that opponents formed the Whig Party against "King Andrew" and the Senate formally censured him.

Officials rewarded political friends and supporters with government jobs, on the principle that to the victor go the spoils; the practice was in full force by 1828. Washington had based most appointments on merit. As the federal workforce grew from about 20,000 to over 130,000 by 1884, job seekers swarmed each new president and posts demanded more specialized skill.

The 1828 tariff protected northern and western products but raised the cost of living in the South. An anonymous South Carolina protest argued that a state could reject federal laws within its borders. When South Carolina nullified the tariff of 1832 it acted alone, and the crisis eased only when it accepted a compromise tariff in 1833.

Jackson vetoed the bill to recharter the Bank of the United States in 1832 and made it a campaign issue. After winning, he moved federal deposits into state banks, firing a Treasury secretary who refused and installing one who would. The Senate censured him for assuming power the Constitution did not grant, then expunged the censure in 1837.

The 1830 act let the president trade western land for the homelands of tribes that agreed to leave; in practice the government persuaded, bribed and threatened tribes into nearly seventy removal treaties. In one nation, most people rejected the treaty a small faction had signed, yet troops rounded them up in 1838, and about a quarter died on the way west.

Georgia stripped the Cherokees of the right to conduct tribal business, testify against whites or mine gold found on their land. After first calling tribes domestic dependent nations, the Court in 1832 held them sovereign and immune from Georgia's laws. The president refused to heed the ruling, so it did not stop removal.

Western New York became known as the Burned-Over District because revivals and new religious sects spread like wildfire. Many reformers shared a faith in the perfectibility of people and society, and by 1848 temperance and abolition had broad support there, though also stiff opposition. That reform spirit helped draw nearly 300 people to the 1848 women's rights convention.

Abolitionists agreed slavery must end but split on how. Frederick Douglass, paid to speak by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, first worked with William Lloyd Garrison's followers, then moved toward allies who backed antislavery political parties and started his own newspaper. His 1845 narrative named names and places partly to silence audiences who doubted he had ever been enslaved.

About 300 people met at a Seneca Falls chapel in July 1848. Their Declaration of Sentiments borrowed the Declaration of Independence's form, opening with all men and women created equal and listing a man's injuries to woman, from a married woman's loss of her property and wages to colleges closed against her. One hundred people signed, 68 women and 32 men.

The phrase framed expansion as the nation's destiny, and Polk, elected on an expansionist platform, delivered the largest gains yet: Texas, the Oregon settlement and the Mexican Cession. The war with Mexico even led some Democrats to call for annexing all of it, and every new territory reopened the question of whether slavery could spread.

A Senate vote rejected a Texas annexation treaty, so it was done by joint resolution of Congress in 1845. Texas claimed land to a river well south of the one Mexico treated as the border. Polk sent troops into the strip between and used skirmishes there to win a war declaration. The 1848 treaty took 55 percent of Mexico's territory for $15 million.

Offered in August 1846 as a rider to a war appropriations bill, it declared that slavery would never exist in any territory won from Mexico. Southern senators blocked it, but it set off a political firestorm, because it forced the question the war had reopened: whether slavery could expand at all.

California's request to enter as a free state threatened the balance of free and slave states. Clay's single omnibus bill failed in the Senate; Stephen Douglas split it into separate measures that passed one by one. The package ended the slave trade, not slavery, in the capital, left new territories to popular sovereignty, and paid for it with a harsher fugitive slave law.

The 1850 law required officials and citizens in free states as well as slave states to help catch people who had escaped, denied the accused a trial, and paid commissioners more for ruling in the claimant's favor. Free Black northerners could be seized and sold, and northerners who had ignored slavery were now made complicit by law.

Its author wrote in response to the 1850 fugitive slave law, first as a weekly newspaper serial, then as a book that sold 305,000 copies within a year. Its emotional portrait of slavery's cruelties, especially the breaking up of families, drew many northerners toward abolition, while proslavery writers answered by praising slavery as a mutually beneficial system.

Douglas wanted a northern route for a transcontinental railroad, which meant organizing land north of the old Missouri line; to win southern votes he agreed to repeal that line and let settlers decide on slavery. Rival settlers rushed in, guerrilla violence killed more than fifty, and the act broke the Whigs and helped found the Republican Party.

Scott sued for freedom because his owner, an army surgeon, had kept him for years in a free state and a free territory, an argument courts had accepted before. The 1857 majority held that a Black man could not be a citizen and so could not sue, and that Congress had no power to bar slavery from a territory, which made the old Missouri line unconstitutional.

The 1858 contest was for an Illinois Senate seat, held in seven formal debates: an hour-long opening, a 90-minute reply and a half-hour rebuttal. One candidate held that slavery must stop spreading but be left where it existed; the incumbent defended letting each territory's settlers decide. The incumbent kept his seat, yet his position cost him southern support two years later, while the challenger gained national fame.

In October 1859 Brown and 21 followers raided Harpers Ferry, hoping to seize federal guns and arm enslaved people for a war on slavery. Militia and Marines ended the raid within 36 hours, and Brown was hanged for murder, treason and inciting rebellion. Many northern abolitionists hailed him as a martyr, while most white southerners saw their worst fears confirmed.

The Democrats split when southern delegates walked out rather than accept a nominee who backed popular sovereignty, so two Democrats ran, plus a Constitutional Union candidate who avoided the slavery question. The Republican, absent from most southern ballots, won with about 40 percent of the popular vote, carried by northern states alone, and secession began within weeks.

South Carolina's convention, dominated by slaveholders, voted unanimously to leave in December 1860. Its declaration of causes complained that free states had denounced slavery as sinful and had elected a president whose purposes were hostile to slavery. Seven states formed a Confederacy in February, before the new president took office.

The new president chose to resupply the besieged federal fort in Charleston Harbor with food, not weapons, leaving the decision to fire with the Confederates. They opened fire before dawn on April 12, and the garrison surrendered after 34 hours. The president then called for 75,000 volunteers, and within two months four more states seceded.

The Union strategy aimed to squeeze the Confederacy from the sea and the river. A naval blockade, proclaimed days after Fort Sumter, kept out weapons and choked cotton exports, though blockade runners got through until 1865. Taking control of the Mississippi would split the South in two, which is why Vicksburg mattered so much.

On September 17, 1862, outnumbered two to one, the Confederate commander fought the Union army to a standstill, and the day's 23,000 casualties made it the bloodiest single day in American history. When the Confederates withdrew across the Potomac, ending their first invasion of the North, Lincoln used the result to issue his preliminary emancipation proclamation.

Issued as a war measure on January 1, 1863, it freed people only in areas still in rebellion, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states and in Confederate areas already under Union control, so its promise depended on Union victory. It also opened the army and navy to Black men and made every federal advance an advance of freedom.

Free Black men tried to enlist when the war began and were turned away under a 1792 law. After emancipation the army recruited in earnest, and about 179,000 served as soldiers, roughly 10 percent of the Union Army, with 19,000 more in the navy. They were paid and treated worse than white troops, and nearly 40,000 died, most of disease.

After a victory in Virginia, the Confederate army invaded the North in June 1863, partly to revive morale and relieve pressure on Vicksburg. On the third day of fighting about 12,000 men crossed open fields against the Union center and lost over 5,000 in an hour. The army retreated on July 4, leaving over 51,000 dead, wounded or missing on the two sides together.

The fortified river city was the key to the lower Mississippi. After failing to cross the river directly, the Union army landed south of the city, struck inland, and drove its defenders back inside. Two assaults failed, so the Union settled into a siege, and after 47 days the garrison surrendered on July 4, 1863, opening the river and splitting the Confederacy.

Lincoln spoke for about two minutes at the dedication of a soldiers' cemetery in November 1863, after a long main oration by another speaker. He tied the war to the founding proposition of the Declaration of Independence, asked the living to finish the unfinished work, and promised a new birth of freedom, recasting the war as one for that idea as well as for Union.

Union armies in 1864 targeted the South's capacity to fight as well as its armies. In Georgia, soldiers on the Atlanta campaign and the March to the Sea destroyed rail lines and laid waste to farms and industry, capturing Atlanta and then Savannah, whose 25,000 bales of cotton were offered to Lincoln as a Christmas gift. The damage was later estimated at $100 million.

Meeting in a house parlor on April 9, the Union commander offered generous terms: Confederate soldiers gave up their weapons and flags but were paroled and sent home rather than to prison camps, and officers kept horses and side arms. Only one army surrendered that day; the remaining armies followed by early June on nearly identical terms, and the war's formal end came in 1866.

Five days after the main Confederate army surrendered, a Confederate sympathizer shot Lincoln at a theater on April 14, 1865, and he died the next morning. The plot also targeted the vice president and the secretary of state, whose home was attacked that night. Lincoln had favored lenient, speedy reunion; his death left a Congress bent on harsher terms with the upper hand.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The Fourteenth made everyone born or naturalized in the country a citizen and barred states from denying due process or equal protection. The Fifteenth forbade denying the vote by race, color or previous servitude, yet from the early 1890s literacy tests and grandfather clauses got around it.

Lincoln's plan readmitted a state once 10 percent of its men swore loyalty; Congress's Wade-Davis bill demanded 50 percent and was pocket-vetoed. Johnson pardoned many Confederates and fought every Radical measure, so Congress passed laws over his vetoes and the Reconstruction Acts. Impeached in 1868, he escaped removal by one vote.

Created inside the War Department as the war ended, the bureau aided formerly enslaved people and poor whites: it supplied food and clothing, ran hospitals, helped found schools, reunite families and legalize marriages, and witnessed labor contracts with planters. Underfunded and resented, it closed in 1872, leaving many freedpeople working as sharecroppers in debt.

In 1865 southern legislatures, rebuilt under presidential pardons and filled with former Confederates, passed laws to restrict freed people's rights. Outraged, Radical Republicans set out to steer Reconstruction in a different direction, and Congress answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which outlawed discrimination and was passed over the president's veto.

Secret white terror groups attacked Black voters, officeholders and their Republican allies to drive them from politics. Congress responded with Enforcement Acts; the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act let federal prosecutors and troops step in. The president suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, and arrests and convictions there broke the Klan, though the wider violence did not end.

Without land of their own, many freedpeople kept working for former owners as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, caught in a cycle of debt peonage. In 1880 a Black former congressman told a Senate committee the system trapped many in poverty; he offered reasonable interest on food and supplies himself, but knew most sharecroppers could not get such terms, and urged them to leave the South.

The 1876 count left no candidate an Electoral College majority, with rival returns from South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida and one disputed Oregon elector. A special commission of members of Congress and justices, with a slim Republican majority, gave every disputed vote to the Republican, who won by one electoral vote and whose term effectively ended Reconstruction.

The 1862 Pacific Railway Act gave two companies government bonds and large land grants. The Union Pacific built west from Omaha with Irish, German and Italian immigrants; the Central Pacific built east from Sacramento with over 10,000 Chinese laborers. When the lines met, they cut a journey of months to about a week, across lands Native nations called their own.

Vertical integration controls each stage of production: at Homestead, a fully integrated steel plant took molten iron straight from its own blast furnaces across the river. Horizontal integration combines competitors: in the Standard Oil Trust, stockholders of many firms handed their shares to nine trustees, who then ran all the companies as one.

A trust let stockholders in several companies transfer their shares to one board of trustees in exchange for certificates entitling them to a share of the combined earnings. Formed in 1882, the Standard Oil Trust was the model, and within years trusts dominated major industries and destroyed competition. Railroads held local monopolies too, charging higher rates where they had no rival.

Passed in 1890 almost unanimously, it outlawed any combination in restraint of interstate or foreign trade, but it never defined trust, combination or monopoly. In 1895 the Court ruled that a company refining about 98 percent of the nation's sugar had not violated it, because control of manufacturing was not control of trade, and in 1894 it was used against a striking union.

Andrew Carnegie wrote that reading Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin taught him to view human life from the standpoint of the evolutionist and gave him a philosophy at last. Critics saw the same thinking in court rulings: dissenting when the Court struck down a ten-hour day for bakers in 1905, Justice Holmes protested that the Fourteenth Amendment did not enact Spencer's Social Statics.

After publishing The Gospel of Wealth, its steelmaker author wrote that he had to live up to its teachings by ceasing to accumulate and turning to the harder task of wise distribution. In 1901 his company passed to the new United States Steel Corporation, and he gave heavily to public libraries, which he ranked among the best gifts because they served young people with ability and ambition.

The Knights tried to unite all trades and grades of workers in one great organization, pressing for an eight-hour day and labor laws while also running strikes. A 1914 history judged that breadth a weakness, with craft unions in a better-organized federation drawing off its base. After the 1886 Haymarket bombing, labor leaders were arrested and union newspapers shut down, and the society fell apart.

Formed in 1886 from a federation of trade unions, it organized skilled workers by craft rather than enrolling everyone in one body. Its first president, a cigarmaker, preferred to work within American institutions rather than against them, and the federation refused to run its own labor party, seeking better wages and conditions instead. It kept growing while the Knights collapsed.

A national push for the eight-hour day began on May 1, 1886, and after Chicago police killed two workers, a protest met at Haymarket Square on May 4. As the crowd thinned, police moved in and someone, still unknown, threw a bomb; seven police and four workers died. Eight men were tried, though one accused bomber had a witness placing him over a mile away.

In 1892 at Carnegie Steel's Homestead Works, the Amalgamated steelworkers' union fought Pinkerton agents hired by the company, who fired from barges on the river, and the union won that battle on July 6. It lost the larger war for unionism when the Pennsylvania National Guard intervened, and the defeat began nearly 50 years without unions in the steel industry.

After talks with the Pullman Company went nowhere, its workers struck in May 1894, and the American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars, crippling rail traffic nationwide. Citing interstate commerce and the Sherman Act, the government won an injunction and sent thousands of marshals and Army troops over the governor's head. Leaders were jailed, and the injunction effectively made national strikes illegal.

By the early 1900s, southern and eastern Europeans made up over half the immigrant flow, and almost 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. Many settled in crowded city tenements. Nativist opposition grew into law in the 1920s, when quota acts based on older census counts were written partly to cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe.

Signed in 1882, it banned Chinese laborers for ten years, defining laborers so broadly that very few Chinese could enter at all, and barred courts from naturalizing Chinese residents. It was the first time federal law shut out an ethnic group of workers. Extended in 1892 and made permanent in 1902, it was repealed only in 1943, when China was a wartime ally.

A Danish immigrant police reporter brought a camera into the poorest tenement districts, and his book How the Other Half Lives spurred the closing of police lodging houses and new housing laws. Reformers also moved into the slums themselves: Jane Addams opened Hull-House in an industrial district of Chicago in 1889, living among the neighbors she aimed to serve.

A machine traded government jobs for party loyalty, the spoils principle that the victor gets the offices. New York's Tammany Hall controlled Democratic nominations, and its boss ran the city's politics in the 1860s and 1870s until he was convicted in 1873 of neglecting his public duties. He later escaped jail and fled abroad before being returned.

After an assassination by a disappointed job seeker, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883. Covered federal jobs went by merit and competitive exams, covered workers could not be fired for politics or made to give political contributions, and a Civil Service Commission enforced it. At first it covered only 10 percent of federal positions, and it widened over time.

Farmers suffered from railroad rates that favored big shippers, and the Farmers' Alliances turned to politics. Their 1892 Omaha convention issued the most radical platform yet, demanding free coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of railways and telegraphs, and popular election of senators. The Populists polled over a million votes and won 22 electors.

Congress had stopped coining the standard silver dollar in 1873, and silver advocates wanted free and unlimited coinage at sixteen to one, while holders of bonds wanted payment in gold, a metal rising in value. At the 1896 Democratic convention a Nebraska speaker told gold-standard men they would not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold, and the hall erupted; he won the nomination.

The Republican manager pledged eastern delegates firm support for the gold standard and raised money on a new scale; his candidate stayed home and greeted trainloads of visitors brought to his front porch. The Democrat, also endorsed by the Populists and Silver Republicans, toured the country speaking for silver and lost to the front-porch candidate on November 3.

Louisiana's 1890 Separate Car Act required separate or partitioned railroad coaches. A New Orleans citizens' committee arranged a test case: in 1892 Homer Plessy sat in a white car and was arrested. The Supreme Court upheld the law, saying separation stamped no badge of inferiority except in the minds of those who read it so; Justice Harlan dissented alone.

After the Court ruled in 1883 that Congress could not bar discrimination by private businesses, states wrote segregation into law, most commonly separate schools and, from an 1887 Florida law, separate railroad cars. In the 1890s literacy tests and grandfather clauses, which excused men whose ancestors had voted in the 1860s, were used to keep Black southerners from voting.

Du Bois summed up Booker T. Washington's program as industrial education, conciliation of the South, and silence on civil and political rights, a bargain voiced in Washington's Atlanta address: in purely social things as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in mutual progress. Du Bois sided with leaders who asked for the vote, civic equality, and education by ability.

An 1868 treaty set aside the Great Sioux Reservation, but prospectors flooded into the Black Hills after gold was found, and the government failed to honor its terms. The resulting war, including the Little Bighorn, ended in 1877. In 1889 Congress cut the remaining reservation by about half, and in late 1890 soldiers at Wounded Knee killed hundreds of largely unarmed Lakota men, women and children.

The 1887 law broke reservation land held in common into individual allotments, such as a quarter section for each head of a family, aiming to turn Native people into farmers and assimilate them. Much of the land was poor for farming, families lacked tools and seed, inheritance split plots too small to work, and allotments of those who refused the terms were sold to non-Native buyers.

Read to historians in 1893, the essay began from the 1890 census report that a frontier line could no longer be traced, and argued that free land, its recession and westward settlement explained American development. What Turner called free land was Native land: the same decades saw the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside by treaty in 1868, cut by about half.

Muckrakers were journalists who exposed the hazards and abuses of the marketplace and of politics in vivid detail for a mass readership. Their weapon was publicity: nearly a hundred food and drug bills had been introduced since 1879 before exposure helped one pass in 1906. Accuracy varied, though. A novelist's 1906 series casting senators as pawns of financiers fed the drive for direct election although much of it was fictionalized.

The 1906 Food and Drugs Act policed labels rather than products. It banned interstate shipment of adulterated or misbranded food and drugs and required that certain dangerous ingredients, such as alcohol, heroin and cocaine, be listed, but nothing needed approval before sale. Enforcement came afterward, by seizing goods or prosecuting sellers, and courts kept narrowing it: in 1911 the Supreme Court ruled it did not reach false therapeutic claims.

The Square Deal was Theodore Roosevelt's name for putting federal power into business affairs that touched most Americans. He moved to break up a railroad trust, regulated food and drug producers, and brought both sides together to settle the 1902 anthracite coal strike. He saw the president as a steward who could do anything the Constitution did not forbid, a view that enlarged the office.

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed combinations restraining interstate trade but never defined a trust, and in 1895 the Court ruled that a firm refining about 98 percent of U.S. sugar had not broken it, since manufacturing was not trade. Roosevelt revived it against Northern Securities, yet in 1902 he urged Congress to regulate patiently, separating good combinations from bad and targeting abuses like fraudulent overcapitalization.

Roosevelt's conservation aimed at lasting use, not locking land away: the Forest Service he created in 1905 managed national forests so they would stay productive. National parks needed an act of Congress, but the 1906 Antiquities Act let a president proclaim a national monument alone, which is how he protected the Grand Canyon when Congress resisted. About 230 million acres came under protection on his watch.

Suffragists worked two routes at once: winning the vote state by state, which nine western states had done by 1912, and amending the Constitution. By 1916 the major organizations had united behind the amendment, and New York's adoption of suffrage in 1917 and Wilson's support in 1918 shifted Congress. Ratification in 1920 did not end the fight, since state laws still kept many women of color from voting.

National Prohibition crowned a temperance movement about a century old, and the First World War gave it an opening: the need to save grain, wider federal war powers and hostility toward German-American brewers all helped. It took effect in January 1920 through the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, passed over Wilson's veto, the most sweeping federal attempt ever to regulate daily habits.

The Sixteenth Amendment exists because the Supreme Court struck down an 1894 income tax by a five-to-four vote. Conservatives proposed the amendment in 1909 expecting three-fourths of the states never to ratify it, and they were wrong. Ratified in 1913, it let Congress tax incomes without dividing the tax among the states by population, though at first fewer than 1 percent of people paid.

Before 1913 state legislatures chose senators, and deadlocks could leave seats empty for long stretches; Delaware's legislature took 217 ballots in 1895 and the state went without representation for two years. Many states worked around the rule by having voters pick a choice that legislators pledged to honor, and by 1912 as many as 29 did so. The amendment made election by the voters the national rule.

Prohibition and woman suffrage both took effect in 1920 after the same pattern: reformers first won state by state, as some states had already gone dry and several western states already let women vote, then sought a national amendment. Their fates split. The Nineteenth endures, while enforcement failures, corruption and the Depression turned opinion against the Eighteenth until the Twenty-first Amendment repealed it in 1933.

The Federal Reserve answered a specific failure. In the panic of 1907, the federal government had no tools to supply money to banks and had to rely on private bankers such as J. P. Morgan. Progressives blocked a plan run by bankers as a surrender to the 'Money Trust,' and the 1913 act that Wilson signed created a government-run system instead, passed on a nearly party-line vote.

Progressive reform often widened democracy for some while narrowing it for others. After 1913 the Wilson administration segregated executive departments, and Congress, which governed Washington, D.C., extended segregation there. House versions of the direct-election amendment even carried a 'race rider' to bar federal protection of Black voters, which the Senate's substitute dropped.

From the 1910s to the 1970s about six million Black southerners moved to northern, midwestern and western cities, pushed by racial violence and Jim Crow and pulled by jobs. The first wave grew when the First World War sent men to Europe and slowed immigration, opening industrial work. Migrants still met segregation and housing discrimination, and white hostility to their arrival fed the violence of 1919.

The fight over annexing the Philippines did not split neatly into idealists and expansionists. Annexationists cited trade in Asia, doubts that Filipinos could govern themselves, and fear that Germany or Japan would take the islands. Opponents ranged from those who thought colonialism wrong, to those who feared non-white Filipinos gaining a voice in American government, to critics simply attacking McKinley.

The war began over Cuba, where rebels had fought Spanish rule since 1895, but its largest results lay elsewhere. Congress disclaimed any plan to annex Cuba, yet the peace treaty gave the United States Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and Hawaii was annexed during the war. The Senate approved the treaty by a margin of one vote, a sign of how divided the country was over empire.

Fighting began in February 1899 between U.S. forces and Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo, who wanted independence rather than new colonial rulers. Aguinaldo's early attempt at conventional battle cost him heavily, and the war became a guerrilla conflict in which both sides committed atrocities. Calling it an 'insurrection' let Americans deny the Filipino claim to be resisting an invader.

Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door notes of 1899 and 1900 asked the powers active in China to let merchants of every nation trade on equal terms and to respect China's territorial integrity. For a country holding no territory there, equal access was the whole point. The notes were not binding, so they bound no one, and they came while the United States was working to shut out Chinese immigrants.

When Colombia's congress rejected the treaty's financial terms, Roosevelt sent warships to support Panama's break from Colombia, and Panama declared independence in November 1903. Its new envoy, a French engineer, quickly signed a treaty giving the United States a ten-mile-wide strip for the canal. Completed in 1914, the canal was hailed as a triumph, though U.S. control later strained relations with Panama.

The Monroe Doctrine asked Europe to stay out of the hemisphere; Roosevelt's 1904 corollary turned it around, claiming a U.S. right to intervene as a last resort when a nation in the region failed to pay its creditors or keep order, so that Europeans would have no excuse to. In practice it justified interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic until the Good Neighbor policy renounced it.

The decisive turn came when Germany gambled in January 1917 that unrestricted submarine warfare could defeat Britain before American troops arrived, breaking the pledge it had given Wilson in 1916 to spare passenger ships. Wilson cut off relations but held back until ships were sunk and a decoded German telegram offering Mexico lost territory became public. Historians still debate exactly why he chose war.

Washington built support at home through persuasion and coercion together. The Committee on Public Information, created in April 1917 under George Creel, released government news, kept up morale and ran voluntary press censorship. Beside it, the Espionage Act of June 1917 punished obstructing recruitment and barred some material from the mails, and Congress amended it in May 1918.

Charles Schenck, a Socialist Party official, mailed drafted men circulars denouncing conscription, and the Court upheld his conviction under the Espionage Act in 1919. Holmes reasoned that words protected in ordinary times can be punished when their circumstances create a clear and present danger of evils Congress may prevent. The test weighs context, not words alone, and Holmes held that war changes what can be tolerated.

Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 1918 mixed eight specific territorial settlements with general principles: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, arms reduction and colonial claims adjusted by self-determination, capped by a league of nations. They also had tactical aims, such as keeping Russia in the war. At Paris they shaped the talks, but the treaty fell well short of them.

The Senate fight turned on Article 10, the League's collective-security pledge, which opponents said handed Congress's war powers to the League Council. Irreconcilables refused any League, while Reservationists under Henry Cabot Lodge would ratify only with conditions, which Wilson would not accept. The treaty failed in November 1919 and again in March 1920, and the United States made a separate peace with Germany in 1921.

The first year of peace brought upheaval at home. Racial violence swept the country in the Red Summer of 1919, much of it aimed at returning Black veterans; at Elaine, Arkansas, over 100 African Americans are thought to have been killed. Bombings and strikes, among them a steel strike across ten states, fed a Red Scare in which Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's raids, using legally questionable tactics, seized thousands of suspected radicals.

Credit for cars and other durable goods, rare before the 1920s, grew with mass production and city life, and the same habit reached Wall Street, where investors used low interest rates to buy stocks with borrowed money. The prosperity was real but uneven, and much of it rested on debt. The decade's culture was contested too, as Prohibition, a courtroom fight over teaching evolution and a flowering of Black art in Harlem all show.

As Black migrants from the South settled in Harlem, the neighborhood went from about 10 percent African American in 1910 to about 70 percent by 1930. Between the world wars it became the center of a flowering of Black writing, music and thought, home to figures such as Langston Hughes and Marcus Garvey, until job losses in the Depression brought a long decline.

Prohibition strained police and courts, spread official corruption, made lawbreakers of ordinary drinkers and fed organized crime and gang violence. Al Capone's syndicate grew rich on bootlegging, yet he was never convicted of a liquor crime and was jailed for tax evasion instead. A federal commission's 1931 report persuaded many that Prohibition was unworkable, and the Twenty-first Amendment ended it in 1933.

In the mid-1920s John Scopes was tried in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in defiance of state law, with William Jennings Bryan prosecuting and Clarence Darrow defending. Scopes was convicted and fined, and the conviction was overturned on a technicality, but the law stayed on the books for decades. Evolution's defenders may have thought they won in public opinion, yet textbook publishers then cut evolution from their books.

The 1924 Immigration Act set quotas at 2 percent of each nationality counted in the 1890 census, a shift back from 1910 that shrank quotas for newer arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. It also based quotas on the origins of the whole population, which enlarged British and western European shares, and barred anyone ineligible for citizenship, which shut out Japanese immigrants.

Low interest rates let investors buy stocks on credit, which pushed prices to record highs through 1929. In October the bubble burst, and in less than a week the market fell by almost half from its recent highs. The crash ruined investors, but the first great wave of bank failures came only in late 1930, so the crash began the slump rather than being all of it.

Historians still debate the causes, but several reinforced one another: a financial system shaken by the First World War, governments clinging to the gold standard, waves of bank failures, and no nation coordinating a response once Britain could no longer lead. High tariffs joined a worldwide slide in which world trade fell by about two-thirds, though scholars disagree on how much the tariffs themselves mattered.

Hoover acted early: he got business leaders to promise to keep wages up, sped federal construction, and in 1932 created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend to banks and railroads. What he refused was direct federal relief for the unemployed, preferring local programs and private charity, so even his 1932 relief money went to states as loans, while unemployment climbed from about 3 million in 1930 to 10 million in 1932.

The Dust Bowl was made by land use as well as weather. Years of deep plowing had removed the grasses that held Plains soil, so when drought came in the 1930s the wind lifted it into storms that brought midday darkness, as on Black Sunday in April 1935. Crop failures and foreclosures sent hundreds of thousands west to California, where many met hostility and lived as squatters in roadside camps.

Roosevelt's first months were triage. A bank holiday and the Emergency Banking Act, nearly identical to a bill Hoover had proposed, stopped the panic; the Banking Act of 1933 then created federal deposit insurance. Relief money reached the states through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority took on flooding, electric power and development for a whole region.

In 1935 the New Deal turned from emergency aid toward lasting institutions. The Social Security Act created old-age insurance funded by taxes on wages and payrolls rather than general revenue, along with unemployment insurance and aid for dependent mothers and children. The Wagner Act guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain, and the Works Progress Administration took over work relief from the earlier emergency agency.

After his 1936 landslide, Roosevelt asked Congress to add a justice for each one over 70, up to six, so the Court would stop striking down New Deal laws. Congress never passed it, and he lost much support for trying. Yet the Court soon upheld laws of the kind it had rejected, including the Wagner Act; whether that shift answered the plan or fit the justices' earlier reasoning is still argued.

The Neutrality Acts grew from a 1930s belief that bankers and arms makers had pulled the country into the First World War, so they banned arms sales and loans to nations at war. Roosevelt bent them toward Britain and France with 'cash-and-carry,' which let buyers who paid at once and shipped goods on non-American vessels buy anything but arms; in 1939 the arms embargo itself was lifted.

By late 1940 Britain was running out of money to pay for supplies, and existing law barred new loans to it. Lend-Lease got around that by lending or leasing supplies to any country whose defense mattered to the United States, with payment deferred and taken mostly as a commitment to an open postwar economy rather than in dollars. It armed the Allies while the country stayed officially neutral.

The attack ended a long squeeze. As Japan pressed its war in China and moved into Indochina, the United States aided China, froze Japanese assets and imposed a full export embargo. Japan's leaders, facing shortages and unwilling to leave China, chose to strike. Congress declared war on Japan the next day, and Germany's declaration of war on the United States brought a war on two fronts.

The Depression did not end until the Second World War's demand revived the economy. War production soared to arm the United States and its allies, and with some sixteen million Americans in uniform, employers recruited women and minorities they had shut out; boom towns such as Richmond, California, grew from under 24,000 people to over 100,000. From Pearl Harbor to D-Day, home-front industrial casualties outnumbered military ones.

About six million women took defense jobs once a shortage of white male workers led government and employers to recruit them; white middle-class women were sought first, then minority men, then minority women. They welded, riveted and broke codes, yet met harassment, and women of color faced racism too. When the war ended, most were let go so returning men could have the jobs, though they had shown they could do the work.

In January 1942 James G. Thompson, stuck in a cafeteria job at a defense plant, asked the Pittsburgh Courier whether he should sacrifice to live as half an American. The paper turned his letter into the Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. It pressed for fair defense jobs and an integrated military, which Truman finally ordered in 1948.

Executive Order 9066 named no ethnic group, but the Army used it to remove about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, two-thirds of them citizens, with no charges and no way to appeal. In Korematsu the Court upheld the exclusion as military necessity in 1944. In 1983 a federal court vacated his conviction after lawyers showed the government had suppressed evidence that Japanese Americans posed no threat.

After landing in French North Africa in November 1942, the Americans and British agreed at Casablanca in January 1943 that, while building forces in England for an eventual landing in northern France, they would first invade Italy and try to knock it out of the war. The same meeting announced the demand for unconditional surrender, meant to rule out any separate peace.

The Normandy landings of June 1944 put about 133,000 Allied troops ashore from some 7,000 ships and landing craft, at a cost of about 10,300 casualties, the largest amphibious invasion in history. By the end of June more than 850,000 men had landed. The western front this opened, together with the Soviet advance in the east, crushed Germany, which surrendered unconditionally in May 1945.

Midway in June 1942, won partly because codebreakers read Japanese plans, cost Japan four carriers and many pilots and put it on the defensive for good. U.S. forces then seized islands to serve as forward bases for air strikes and, in the end, an invasion. Okinawa in 1945, the last barrier before Japan itself, was among the fiercest battles, with more than 49,000 American casualties.

The Manhattan Project began as a secret race to build an atomic bomb before Germany did, and its first milestone was the controlled chain reaction Enrico Fermi's team achieved in Chicago in December 1942. By the July 1945 test Germany had surrendered. Truman used two bombs against Japanese cities that August, and the Soviet test in 1949 began the nuclear arms race.

Nazi Germany systematically murdered millions of European Jews. In January 1944 Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board to take all measures to rescue victims in imminent danger of death, consistent with winning the war. After U.S. troops liberated the Ohrdruf camp in April 1945, Eisenhower toured it, ordered it photographed and urged members of Congress and the press to see the camps, so the evidence could not be dismissed as propaganda.

At Yalta in February 1945 Roosevelt and Churchill secured Stalin's promise to join the war against Japan in exchange for a sphere of influence in Manchuria, agreed to give France a role in governing postwar Germany, settled United Nations voting, and accepted Stalin's pledge of free elections in liberated territories. At Potsdam that summer, with Truman in Roosevelt's place, the leaders struggled over German reparations and Poland's new borders.

Containment came from George Kennan's 1947 argument that Soviet expansion should be met by patient, firm counter-pressure wherever it pushed, until Soviet power broke up or mellowed. Kennan meant mostly political and economic pressure to protect the great industrial centers, but NSC-68 in 1950 recast it as a military commitment, and administrations followed some version of containment until communism collapsed in 1989.

When Britain said it could no longer fund Greece's fight against communist insurgents, Truman asked Congress in March 1947 for aid to Greece and Turkey and pledged to support free peoples resisting armed minorities or outside pressure. The general promise was the break: it ended the habit of avoiding peacetime commitments far from home, even though Stalin had in fact withheld support from the Greek communists.

Announced in June 1947 and funded at over $12 billion, the Marshall Plan rebuilt Western European economies on the theory that prosperity would blunt communism, while also opening markets for American goods. The Soviets refused to join or let their satellites take part, so the aid deepened the division of Europe. Economic historians still debate how much of the recovery it caused.

When Soviet forces blocked every road, rail and canal link to West Berlin in June 1948, partly in response to a new Western currency, the United States and Britain flew in food and fuel instead of forcing the blockade. The logic was deliberate: attacking an unarmed humanitarian airlift would make the Soviets the aggressors. The blockade was lifted in May 1949.

NATO, formed in 1949, was the first U.S. peacetime military alliance outside the Western Hemisphere, with members agreeing to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. Its wording stopped short of committing the country to war automatically, to fit the constitutional process for declaring war. When West Germany joined in 1955, the Soviets answered with the Warsaw Pact, which they also used to contain dissent among their satellites.

Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel to oversee the removal of Japanese forces, and when the North invaded in June 1950 a U.S.-led, UN-authorized force drove it back past the line. China's entry late in 1950 turned the war into a costly struggle that ended in an uneasy truce in 1953, not a peace, fixing a division that still stands.

Senator Joseph McCarthy's 1950 charges that hundreds of communists had infiltrated the government struck a nerve in an anxious country, and as a subcommittee chairman from 1953 he ran hearings that bullied witnesses. The collapse came on live television in 1954, when army counsel Joseph Welch rebuked him during the Army-McCarthy hearings; the Senate censured him, and his popularity vanished.

After the Soviet atomic test in 1949, each side's build-up drove the other's. NATO's early doctrine of massive retaliation threatened a nuclear answer to any attack, and missile defenses alarmed planners because they might let one side strike first and then block the reply. The 1972 ABM Treaty capped defenses on the theory that limiting both offensive and defensive arms would stabilize the standoff.

Sputnik in October 1957, followed that year by a Soviet intercontinental missile test, fed fears that the United States had fallen behind in technology, and the first U.S. satellite attempt exploded on the pad. Kennedy answered in May 1961, after a Soviet cosmonaut became the first human in space and the Bay of Pigs failed, by setting a goal of a Moon landing within the decade, a contest he judged winnable; Apollo 11 met it in 1969.

In October 1962 spy-plane photos showed Soviet missile sites going up in Cuba. Kennedy rejected an air strike and chose a naval 'quarantine,' a word that avoided the act of war a blockade implied. The crisis ended with Soviet removal of the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba, plus a private assurance that U.S. missiles in Turkey would go, kept out of any public deal.

U.S. involvement grew in steps: backing South Vietnam's refusal to hold reunification elections, then a growing advisory presence under Kennedy. In August 1964 two destroyers reported attacks, one of which was later doubted, and Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, assuming the president would return before escalating further. It became the legal basis for the bombing and ground troops that followed in 1965.

In late January 1968, during the Tet truce, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces struck cities across South Vietnam, even breaching the outer walls of the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon. Militarily the attack failed, and the southern guerrilla forces were nearly destroyed, but it showed Americans that victory was not close. By the end of March Johnson had limited the bombing and declined to seek reelection.

Opposition grew as casualties mounted and the draft's fairness was widely questioned; by 1970 even Nixon conceded the system was unfair. Protest shaped events: police beat antiwar demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic convention, and the 1970 incursion into Cambodia set off campus protests in which four students were killed at Kent State. Muhammad Ali's long refusal of induction arguably made him a symbol of resistance.

Nixon paired steady troop withdrawals with 'Vietnamization,' building up South Vietnam's forces to fight alone, while Henry Kissinger negotiated in secret with Hanoi. The January 1973 Paris agreement let U.S. forces leave and prisoners come home, but neither Vietnamese side honored it, and Nixon's promise to react strongly to violations was never kept. North Vietnamese tanks reached Saigon's presidential palace in April 1975.

In 1954 a unanimous Court held that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment, ending the 'separate but equal' rule of Plessy. A second ruling the next year ordered desegregation 'with all deliberate speed,' wording vague enough to invite delay, and critics attacked its reliance on social-science findings. Resistance was fierce, but the decision became a catalyst for the wider movement.

Rosa Parks's December 1955 arrest was not the first challenge to Montgomery's bus rules; Claudette Colvin had been removed from a bus months earlier. Local leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, chose Martin Luther King Jr. to lead it, and ran a carpool so Black riders could stay off the buses for about a year. The boycott applied economic pressure while a federal lawsuit attacked the law itself.

In 1957 Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Little Rock's Central High School, then withdrew it and left them to a mob. Eisenhower, who had hoped to avoid a confrontation, federalized the Guard and sent 1,000 paratroopers. The crisis showed how much desegregation depended on a president's willingness to enforce court orders against a state.

Direct action put protesters where segregation operated. In February 1960 four students sat at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter and set off a wave of sit-ins, and in 1961 interracial Freedom Riders rode buses to test segregated terminals. Mobs attacked them, and the publicized violence pressed the federal government to act; the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered interstate terminals integrated by November 1961.

The August 1963 march drew about 250,000 people to demand jobs and freedom: an end to employment discrimination and rights abuses, and passage of the civil rights bill then before Congress. Its idea went back to A. Philip Randolph's threatened marches of the 1940s, which won orders against discrimination in defense work and the military. Bayard Rustin organized it, and it stayed peaceful despite official fears.

The 1964 Act outlawed segregation in businesses serving the public, such as restaurants, theaters and hotels, and made job discrimination illegal, creating the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce that part. Southern opponents tried to talk it to death, and the filibuster fell only when Everett Dirksen brought Republican votes for cloture, the first time debate on a civil rights bill had ever been cut off that way.

The 1965 Act went after the machinery of disfranchisement: it banned literacy tests, sent federal examiners to register voters, and required covered jurisdictions to get federal preclearance before changing voting rules. By the end of 1965 a quarter of a million new Black voters had registered, a third of them through federal examiners. In 2013 the Court struck down a key provision of that federal oversight.

Black Power entered the mainstream in 1966, when SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael rallied marchers with it during the March Against Fear in Mississippi. It stressed racial pride, economic power and Black-run political and cultural institutions, and it divided the movement: King kept urging nonviolence and integration, CORE adopted Black Power as its goal, and the NAACP disassociated itself from it.

Johnson's Great Society pushed federal responsibility into poverty and health care. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 set up the Office of Economic Opportunity to run the education, job and training programs of the war on poverty, and 1965 amendments to Social Security created Medicare for people 65 and older and Medicaid for people with low incomes, covering older Americans, whom private insurers had long treated as a bad risk.

Legal equality advanced on several fronts. The 1964 Civil Rights Act's ban on job discrimination covered sex, and the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923, finally passed Congress in 1972, nearly half a century later. Ratification then stalled at 35 states, three short of the 38 required, even after Congress extended the deadline to 1982.

Concern built through the 1960s from Rachel Carson's 1962 attack on pesticides in Silent Spring and from disasters such as a California oil spill and a burning river near Cleveland. In 1970 Nixon proposed gathering scattered federal programs into one Environmental Protection Agency that could study pollution across air, water and land and set standards with the states; Congress approved it that year.

The scandal turned less on the June 1972 break-in than on the cover-up. Televised Senate hearings brought testimony that Nixon had approved hiding White House links and revealed that he taped his conversations, which he refused to release, citing executive privilege. In July 1974 the Supreme Court ordered the tapes surrendered; they showed his part in the cover-up, the House Judiciary Committee adopted articles of impeachment, and he resigned.

Detente rested on shared incentives: the arms race was enormously expensive, the split between China and the Soviet Union made each open to Washington, and Washington hoped better relations would help it with Vietnam. Nixon's 1972 trip to Beijing produced the Shanghai Communique on Taiwan, and that year's SALT agreements limited missile defenses and offensive missiles. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 ended the thaw.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo, imposed over U.S. support for Israel, hit an economy grown dependent on imports just as domestic spare capacity was eroding and the dollar had begun to float. Oil prices doubled and then quadrupled, bringing high inflation together with stagnation. Responses included a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit and fuel economy standards.

Reagan's program rested on supply-side theory, the belief that lower tax rates would spur enough growth to raise revenue, plus fewer restrictions on business. In 1981 Congress passed a 25 percent individual tax cut over three years and $39 billion in budget cuts while defense spending rose. After a severe 1982 recession he sought selected tax increases, and years of growth followed at the cost of record deficits and a ballooning debt.

Gorbachev's reforms, and his decision to stop using military force to prop up allied communist regimes, let Eastern Europe's governments fall one after another in 1989, the Berlin Wall among them. A failed hard-line coup in August 1991 crippled him and lifted Boris Yeltsin, the republics declared independence, and on December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the Soviet flag came down.

From the 1980s the United States lowered trade barriers through regional agreements. A U.S.-Canada free trade agreement took effect in 1989, Mexico joined the talks in 1991, and NAFTA entered into force in 1994, phasing out most tariffs and quotas among the three by 2008. The Reagan years that launched the Canada pact also brought a large trade deficit, as Americans bought more foreign goods than they sold.

Nine days after the September 11 attacks, the president announced an Office of Homeland Security, and an early draft of the USA PATRIOT Act was already taking shape, aimed largely at removing the wall that kept intelligence and law enforcement from sharing information. Hundreds of noncitizens were detained on immigration violations, and the Justice Department's inspector general later found significant problems in their treatment.

The 1956 highway act, the largest public works project in the nation's history, authorized $25 billion toward a 41,000-mile interstate network, an idea Eisenhower valued after seeing how roads served armies. Its effects reached well beyond travel: urban superhighways cut through and destroyed housing, often in poorer neighborhoods, while bypassed small towns lost trade and suburbs grew around the automobile.

The 1965 Hart-Celler Act ended the national-origins quotas that had long limited immigration from outside western Europe, replacing them with preferences for skilled workers and for relatives of people already in the country. Its authors underestimated family reunification: immigration rose to nearly half a million a year, only about a fifth from Europe, with new openings for Asian immigrants in particular.

The internet grew out of defense research. ARPANET, begun in 1969 with four nodes, relied on packet switching so that the loss of one node could not cut off the whole network, and common protocols later let separate networks link up. The National Science Foundation's NSFNET, launched in 1986 for academic researchers, became the backbone until NSF shut it down in 1995 as commercial services took over.

Amendments tend to cluster around crises and reform waves: the Thirteenth through Fifteenth after the Civil War, the Sixteenth through Nineteenth in the Progressive Era, and two that widened voting, in 1964 and 1971. Many answer a specific problem: the Sixteenth reversed a Court ruling against an income tax, and the Twenty-first undid the Eighteenth after Prohibition failed. Each needed ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Marbury v. Madison in 1803 first struck down an act of Congress, claiming for courts the power to judge laws against the Constitution, a power the text never spells out. That power could cut either way. The Court used it to defend racial hierarchy in the nineteenth century, then in Brown in 1954 to strike down school segregation, opening an era of rights decisions.

Dred Scott in 1857 held that enslaved people were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in a territory. After Reconstruction amendments overturned it, the Court narrowed them: in 1883 it struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment did not reach private discrimination, and in Plessy in 1896 it upheld segregated railroad cars as 'separate but equal.'

Laws from antitrust to child labor rested on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, and the Court long read that power narrowly. It held in 1895 that controlling sugar manufacturing was not trade, and in 1918 struck down a child labor law as reaching production. From 1937 it reversed course, upholding the Wagner Act and, in 1941, a federal wage-and-hour law, overruling the 1918 child labor decision.

The Fourteenth Amendment's due process and equal protection guarantees bound the states, and the main author of its first section meant it to make the Bill of Rights bind them as well. For many years the Court refused that reading. Later it began applying particular rights through the Due Process Clause; in Gideon in 1963 it held that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel binds state courts.

Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963 unanimously overruled an earlier decision and held that a state must provide a lawyer to a defendant too poor to hire one, because a fair trial depends on it. Miranda v. Arizona in 1966, decided five to four, held that prosecutors cannot use statements from custodial interrogation unless safeguards, such as warnings of the right to silence, protected the privilege against self-incrimination.

The line between federal and state power has moved with each era. After 1883 the Court told victims of discrimination to seek relief from the states, and opponents of a child labor amendment in the 1920s invoked states' rights. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the largest shift toward federal power over voting since Reconstruction, while Reagan's New Federalism sought to hand programs back to the states.

Each voting amendment is worded as a ban on one ground for denying the vote, not as a grant of it. The Fifteenth barred denial by race in 1870, the Nineteenth by sex in 1920, the Twenty-fourth barred poll taxes in federal elections in 1964, and the Twenty-sixth set eighteen as the voting age in 1971. Each left room for other barriers, which is why the Voting Rights Act still mattered.

Presidential power has grown most in war and emergency, often through tools other than legislation. Wilson armed merchant ships by executive order in 1917 when a filibuster blocked the bill, and Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 authorized mass removal. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution served as the legal basis for a long undeclared war, and Congress answered with the 1973 War Powers Resolution over Nixon's veto.

Immigration law has swung between openness and restriction. The Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone shut out most Asians, and the 1924 quotas cut southern and eastern Europeans. The 1952 act ended Asian exclusion but kept national-origins quotas and added preferences for skills and family, and the 1965 act abolished the quotas, which led to large new migration from Asia.

Major financial crises have repeatedly produced new federal institutions. The panic of 1907, when Washington had to rely on private bankers, led to the Federal Reserve in 1913. The bank failures of the early 1930s, about 9,000 suspensions, led to federal deposit insurance in 1933, after which widespread bank runs largely disappeared. The 1973 oil shock likewise produced a strategic petroleum reserve.

Historians write from surviving sources and must choose themes, places and scales, so every account is selective, and the stories a society tells about itself can shape events in turn. Even well-documented episodes stay contested: why Wilson chose war in 1917, how much the Marshall Plan caused Europe's recovery, and whether Roosevelt gave away too much at Yalta are all still argued.