History of the US / USA / in a nutshell - Historia de los EEUU condensada
The Era of Discovery
Juan Ponce de León was the first European to sight what today is Florida. A legend says he discovered it while searching for the Fountain of Youth, but this is a later-day myth. On March 3, 1513, Juan Ponce de León organized and equipped three ships which commenced an expedition departing from "Punta Aguada" Puerto Rico. Although it is often stated that he sighted the peninsula for the first time on March 27, 1513, and thought it was an island, he probably saw one of the Bahama islands.
It was Spanish custom to name a new place after the nearest Roman Catholic feast day. They had just started exploring "new places" for a few decades at most. He arrived on the east coast during the Spanish Easter feast, Pascua Florida, April 7. He named the land La Pascua de la Florida, or "Passion of the Flowers," or "Passion of the Christ".
At the time of first European contact in the early 16th century, Florida was inhabited by an estimated 350,000 people belonging to a number of tribes. The Spanish recorded nearly one hundred names of groups they encountered, ranging from organized political entities such as the Apalachee, with a population of around 50,000, to villages with no known political affiliation. There were an estimated 150,000 speakers of dialects of the Timucua language, but the Timucua were organized as groups of villages and did not share a common culture.
Early Spanish attempts to explore and colonize Florida were disastrously unsuccessful. Ponce de León returned in 1521 with equipment and settlers to start a colony near Charlotte Harbor, but they were driven off by repeated attacks from the native Calusa population, and de León died in Cuba from wounds received in the fighting.
Spanish explorer Álvarez de Pineda in 1519 was the first European to see the coastal areas of western Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, lands he called "Amichel." His map is the first known document of Texas history and was the first map of the Gulf Coast region of the United States.
Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition explored Florida's west coast in 1528, but violent demands for gold and food led to hostile relations with the Tocobaga and other native groups. Facing starvation and unable to find his support ships, Narváez attempted return to Mexico sailing from Florida via five rafts. Depleted of food and water, the men followed the coast westward, until they reached the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca commanded one of these vessels, each of which had room for only 50 men. When the current swept them into the Gulf, the five rafts were separated by a hurricane, some lost forever, including that of Narváez. Only 80 men survived after being swept onto Galveston Island, Texas. Over the next few years, more men died, and only four of the original party survived. Cabeza de Vaca was one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition. As the number of survivors dwindled rapidly, they were enslaved for a few years by various American Indian tribes of the upper Gulf Coast. These included the Hans and the Capoques, and tribes later called the Karankawa and Coahuiltecan. Only four men, Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and an enslaved Moroccan Berber named Esteban (later called Estevanico), survived and escaped to reach Mexico City. Estevanico became the first person from Africa known to have set foot in the present continental United States. Traveling mostly in this small group, Cabeza de Vaca explored what is now the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the northeastern Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila, and possibly smaller portions of New Mexico and Arizona. He traveled on foot through the then-uncolonized territories of Texas and the coast.
During his wanderings, passing from tribe to tribe, Cabeza de Vaca developed sympathies for the indigenous population. He became a trader, which allowed him freedom to travel among the tribes. Cabeza de Vaca claimed that he was guided by God to learn to heal the sick and gained such notoriety as a faith healer that he and his companions gathered a large following of natives who regarded them as "children of the sun", endowed with the power to both heal and destroy. Many natives accompanied the men across what is now the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Aware of his status as an early European explorer, Cabeza de Vaca closely observed the native people and noted their culture. He spent eight years with various groups, including the Capoque, Han, Avavares, and Arbadaos. He describes details of the culture of the Malhado people, the Capoque, and Han American Indians, such as their treatment of offspring, their wedding rites, and their main sources of food. After finally reaching the colonized lands of New Spain, where he encountered fellow Spaniards near modern-day Culiacán, Cabeza de Vaca reached Mexico City. From there he sailed back to Europe in 1537.
After returning to Spain in 1537, Cabeza de Vaca wrote an account about the eight years of traveling across the US Southwest, first published in 1542 as La Relación ("The Relation", or in more modern terms "The Account"), which in later editions was retitled Naufragios ("Shipwrecks"). As he did not begin writing his chronicle until back in Spain, he had to rely on memory. Cabeza de Vaca was uncertain of his route. Aware that his account has numerous errors in chronology and geography, historians have worked to put together pieces of the puzzle to discern his paths. His narratives are now known as “The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca”. The narrative of Cabeza de Vaca is the “first European book devoted completely to North America.” His account is a detailed look into the lives of American Indians of the time. Cabeza de Vaca showed compassion and respect for native peoples, which, together with the great detail he recorded, distinguishes his narrative from others.
In 1540, Cabeza de Vaca was appointed adelantado of the Río de la Plata in present-day Argentina. His mission was to re-establish the settlement of Buenos Aires. En route, he disembarked from his fleet at Santa Catarina Island in modern Brazil. Cabeza de Vaca is thought to have been the first European to see the Iguaçu Falls. The honor probably belongs to his scouts. Cabeza de Vaca is considered to have had an unusually benevolent attitude for his time toward the American Indians. The elite settlers in Argentina, known as encomenderos, generally did not share this attitude; they wanted to use the natives for labor. His loss of the elite support, together with the failure of Buenos Aires as a settlement, prompted the former governor Domingo Martínez de Irala to arrest Cabeza de Vaca for poor administration in 1544. The former explorer was returned to Spain for trial in 1545. Although eventually exonerated, Cabeza de Vaca never returned to the colony. He wrote an extensive report on South America, which was highly critical of Martínez de Irala. The report was bound with his earlier La Relación and published under the title Comentarios (Commentary). He died poor in Seville around the year 1558.
Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 and began a multi-year trek through what is now the southeastern United States in which he found no gold but lost his life. He was a Spanish explorer and conquistador who led the first European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day United States, and the first documented to have crossed the Mississippi River. Hernando de Soto was born to parents who were hidalgos of modest means in Extremadura, a region of poverty and hardship from which many young people looked for ways to seek their fortune elsewhere. In 1530, de Soto became a regidor of León, Nicaragua. He led an expedition up the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula searching for a passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to enable trade with the Orient, the richest market in the world. Failing that, and without means to explore further, de Soto, upon Pedro Arias Dávila's death, left his estates in Nicaragua. Bringing his own men on ships which he hired, de Soto joined Francisco Pizarro at his first base of Tumbes shortly before departure for the interior of present-day Peru. De Soto returned to Spain with an enormous share of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. He was admitted into the prestigious Order of Santiago. His share was awarded to him by the King of Spain, and he received 724 marks of gold, 17,740 pesos.He married Isabel de Bobadilla, daughter of Pedrarias Dávila and a relative of a confidante of Queen Isabella. De Soto petitioned King Charles for the government of Guatemala with "permission to make discovery in the South Sea," but was granted the governorship of Cuba instead. De Soto was expected to colonize the North American continent for Spain within four years, for which his family would be given a sizable piece of land.
In May 1539, de Soto landed nine ships with over 620 men and 220 horses in south Tampa Bay. Near de Soto's port, the party found Juan Ortíz, a Spaniard, living with the Mocoso. Ortíz had been captured by the Uzita while searching for the lost Narváez expedition, and had later escaped to Mocoso. Ortíz knew the Timucua language and served de Soto as an interpreter as he traversed the Timucuan-speaking areas on his way to Apalachee. He established a unique method for guiding the expedition and communicating with various tribal dialects. He recruited guides from each tribe along the route. A chain of communication was established whereby a guide who had lived in close proximity to another tribal area was able to pass his information and language on to a guide from a neighboring area. Because Ortiz refused to dress as an hidalgo Spaniard, other officers questioned his motives. De Soto remained loyal to Ortiz, allowing him the freedom to dress and live among his friends. Another important guide was the seventeen-year-old boy Perico, or Pedro, from modern-day Georgia. He spoke several of the local tribes' languages and could communicate with Ortiz.
The expedition traveled north, exploring Florida's West Coast, encountering native ambushes and conflicts along the way. De Soto's first winter encampment was at Anhaica, the capital of the Apalachee. It is one of the few places on the route where archaeologists have found physical traces of the expedition. It was described as being near the "Bay of Horses". The bay was named for where the starving members of the preceding Narváez expedition killed and ate their horses while building boats for escape. From their winter location in the western panhandle of Florida, having heard of gold being mined "toward the sun's rising," the expedition turned north-east through what is now the modern state of Georgia.
The expedition continued on to present-day South Carolina. The expedition was received by a female chief (Cofitachequi), who turned over her tribe's pearls, food and other goods to the Spanish soldiers. De Soto headed north into the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, where he spent a month resting the horses while his men searched for gold. De Soto next entered eastern Tennessee. At this point, De Soto either continued along the Tennessee River to enter Alabama from the north (according to John R. Swanton), or turned south and entered northern Georgia (according to Charles M. Hudson).
De Soto's expedition spent another month in the Coosa chiefdom before turning south toward the Gulf of Mexico to meet two ships bearing fresh supplies from Havana. Along the way, de Soto was led into Mauvila (or Mabila), a fortified city in southern Alabama. The Mobilian tribe, under Chief Tuskaloosa, ambushed de Soto's army. Other sources suggest de Soto's men were attacked after attempting to force their way into a cabin occupied by Tuskaloosa. The Spaniards fought their way out, and retaliated by burning the town to the ground. During the nine-hour encounter, about 200 Spaniards died, and 150 more were badly wounded, according to the chronicler Elvas. Twenty more died during the next few weeks. They killed an estimated 2,000-6,000 warriors at Mabila, making the battle one of the bloodiest in recorded North American history. The Spaniards won a Pyrrhic victory, as they had lost most of their possessions and nearly one-quarter of their horses. The Spaniards were wounded and sickened, surrounded by enemies and without equipment in an unknown territory. Fearing that word of this would reach Spain if his men reached the ships at Mobile Bay, de Soto led them away from the Gulf Coast, into Mississippi, most likely near present-day Tupelo, where they spent the winter. In the spring of 1541, de Soto demanded 200 men as porters from the Chickasaw. They refused his demand and attacked the Spanish camp during the night. The Spaniards lost about 40 men and the remainder of their limited equipment. According to participating chroniclers, the expedition could have been destroyed at this point, but the Chickasaw let them go.
On May 8, 1541, de Soto's troops reached the Mississippi River (Alonso Álvarez de Pineda was the first European to see it, in 1519, and sailed twenty miles up the river). After about one month, and the construction of several floats, they finally crossed the Mississippi at or near Memphis, Tennessee and continued their travels westward through modern-day Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. They wintered in Autiamique, on the Arkansas River. In 1541, the expedition became the first Europeans to see what Native Americans referred to as the Valley of the Vapors, now called Hot Springs, Arkansas. Members of many tribes had gathered at the valley over many years to enjoy the healing properties of the thermal springs.
After a harsh winter, the Spanish expedition decamped and moved on more erratically. Their interpreter Juan Ortiz had died, making it more difficult for them to get directions and food sources, and generally to communicate with the Natives. The expedition went as far inward as the Caddo River, where they clashed with a Native American tribe called the Tula in October 1541.
De Soto died of a fever on May 21, 1542, in the native village of Guachoya on the western banks of the Mississippi. Before his death, de Soto chose his former maestro de campo (or field commander) Luis de Moscoso Alvarado to assume command of the expedition. De Soto's expedition had explored La Florida for three years without finding the expected treasures or a hospitable site for colonization efforts. They had lost nearly half their men, most of the horses had been killed, the soldiers wore animal skins for clothing, and many were injured and in poor health. The leaders came to a consensus (although not total) to abort the expedition and try to find a way home, either down the Mississippi River, or overland across Texas to the Spanish colony of Mexico City. There were no villages for the soldiers to raid for food and the army was too large to live off the land. They were forced to backtrack to the more developed agricultural regions along the Mississippi. Taking about two weeks to make the journey, the expedition encountered hostile tribes along the whole course. Natives followed the boats in canoes, shooting arrows at the soldiers for days on end as they drifted through their territory. The Spanish had no effective offensive weapons on the water, as their crossbows had long ceased working. They relied on armor and sleeping mats to block the arrows. About 11 Spaniards were killed along this stretch and many more wounded.
On reaching the mouth of the Mississippi, they stayed close to the Gulf shore heading south and west. After about 50 days, they made it to the Pánuco River and the Spanish frontier town of Pánuco. There they rested for about a month. During this time many of the Spaniards, having safely returned and reflecting on their accomplishments, decided they had left La Florida too soon, leading to fights and some deaths. Of the initial 700 participants, between 300 and 350 survived (311 is a commonly accepted figure). Most of the men stayed in the New World, settling in Mexico, Peru, Cuba and other Spanish colonies.
The records of the expedition contributed greatly to European knowledge about the geography, biology, and ethnology of the New World. The de Soto expedition's descriptions of North American natives are the earliest-known source of information about the societies in the Southeast. They are the only European description of North American native habits before the natives encountered other Europeans. De Soto's men were both the first and nearly the last Europeans to witness the Mississippian culture.
Since 1986, two Florida sites have been documented as definitively associated with de Soto's expedition: the Governor Martin Site at the former Apalachee village of Anhaica, located about a mile east of the present Florida Capitol in Tallahassee; and the White Ranch Site in the Potano territory located a few miles north of Ocala. The Governor Martin Site was discovered by the archaeologist B. Calvin Jones in March 1987, and the White Ranch Site was discovered by the archaeologist F. Ashley White in July 2005.
In 1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coronado explored from Arizona to central Kansas. Coronado was the Governor of the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia (New Galicia, a province of New Spain located northwest of Mexico and comprising the contemporary Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa and Nayarit). In 1539, he dispatched Friar Marcos de Niza and Estevanico, more properly known as Estevan, the diminutive form being a Spanish nickname. Estevanico served as the main guide for a return expedition to the Southwest, where he was killed in the Zuni city of Hawikuh in 1539. When Marcos de Niza returned, he told about a city of vast wealth, a golden city called Cíbola, and that Estevan had been killed by the Zuni citizens of Cíbola. Though he did not claim to have entered the city of Cíbola, he claimed that the city stood on a high hill, that it appeared wealthy and as large as Mexico City.
Coronado assembled an expedition with two components. One component carried the bulk of the expedition's supplies, and traveled via the Guadalupe River under the leadership of Hernando de Alarcon. The other component traveled by land, along the trail Friar Marcos de Niza had used. Coronado and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza invested large sums of their own money in the venture. Mendoza, Coronado's friend and fellow investor, appointed him as the commander of the expedition, with the mission to find the seven golden cities.
Coronado set out from Compostela on February 23, 1540, at the head of a large expedition composed of about 400 European men-at-arms (mostly Spaniards), 1,300 to 2,000 Mexican Indian allies and four Franciscan monks. After months of searching, Francisco's men came up empty handed. They split up to find other treasures. In 1541 Part of Francisco's men discovered the Grand Canyon, while others found the Colorado Plateau. In 1542 When they were sure there was no gold to discover, Francisco and his men returned to Mexico. The Vicery was disappointed in Francisco's failure and so he charged Francisco with neglecting his duty. Francisco was eventually cleared from the charges. In 1549 Francisco was given a piece of land as a reward for his service and he spent the rest of his life in Mexico before he died. His legacy as the first European to explore the American west has lived on.
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo was a Spanish maritime navigator, known for exploring the West Coast of North America. Cabrillo was the first European to navigate the coast of present-day California in the United States.
On June 27, 1542, Cabrillo set out from Navidad, Mexico with three ships: the 200-ton galleon and flagship San Salvador, the smaller La Victoria (c. 100 tons), and the lateen-rigged, twenty-six oared "fragata" or "bergantin" San Miguel. On August 1, Cabrillo anchored within sight of Cedros Island. Before the end of the month they had passed Baja Point (named "Cabo del Engaño" by de Ulloa in 1539) and entered "uncharted waters, where no Spanish ships had been before". On September 28, he landed in what is now San Diego Bay and named it "San Miguel".
Cabrillo hoped to find the mythical and rich city of Cíbola that was believed to exist somewhere north of the Pacific coast, in addition to looking for the non-existent Anian pass or strait that was said to link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to the north. In the 16th century, the Spaniards in New Spain (now Mexico) began to hear rumors of "Seven Cities of Gold" called "Cíbola" located across the desert, hundreds of miles to the north. The stories may have their root in an earlier Iberian legend about seven cities founded on the island of Antillia, a phantom island, by a Catholic expedition in the 8th century, or one based on the capture of Merida, Spain by the Moors. The word "Cíbola" comes from Cíbolo, an unusual Spanish name given to the bison, since the territory of the legendary kingdom where the existence of the seven cities was supposed to extend to the prairies where (until the mid-19th century) there were millions of these animals .
The later Spanish tales were largely caused by reports given by the four shipwrecked survivors of the failed Narváez expedition, which included Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a black moorish slave named Esteban Dorantes, or Estevanico. Eventually returning to New Spain, the adventurers said they had heard stories from natives about cities with great and limitless riches.
On August 1, Cabrillo anchored within sight of Cedros Island. Before the end of the month they had passed Baja Point (named "Cabo del Engaño" by de Ulloa in 1539) and entered "uncharted waters, where no Spanish ships had been before". On September 28, he landed in what is now San Diego Bay and named it "San Miguel". A little over a week later he reached Santa Catalina Island (October 7), which he named "San Salvador", after his flagship. On sending a boat to the island "a great crowd of armed Indians appeared" — whom, however, they later "befriended". Nearby San Clemente Island was named "Victoria", in honor of the third ship of the fleet. The next morning, October 8, Cabrillo came to San Pedro Bay, which was named "Baya de los Fumos" (English: Smoke Bay). The following day they anchored overnight in Santa Monica Bay. Going up the coast Cabrillo saw Anacapa Island, which they learned from the Indians was uninhabited. The fleet spent the next week in the islands, mostly anchored in Cuyler Harbor, a bay on the northeastern coast of San Miguel Island. On October 18 the expedition saw Point Conception, which they named "Cabo de Galera".
Cabrillo's expedition recorded the names of numerous Chumash villages on the California coast and adjacent islands in October 1542 — then located in the two warring provinces of Xexo (ruled by an "old woman", now Santa Barbara County, California) and Xucu (now Ventura County, California). On November 13 they sighted and named "Cabo de Piños" (possibly either Point Pinos or Point Reyes), but missed the entrance to San Francisco Bay, a lapse that mariners would repeat for the next two centuries and more. The expedition reached as far north as the Russian River before autumn storms forced them to turn back. Coming back down the coast, Cabrillo entered Monterey Bay, naming it "Bahia de Los Piños". On November 23, 1542, the little fleet arrived back in "San Salvador" (Santa Catalina Island) to overwinter and make repairs. There, around Christmas Eve, Cabrillo stepped out of his boat and splintered his shin when he stumbled onto a jagged rock while trying to rescue some of his men from attacking Tongva warriors. The injury became infected and developed gangrene, and he died on January 3, 1543 and was buried. A possible headstone was later found on San Miguel Island. His second-in-command brought the remainder of the party back to Navidad, where they arrived April 14, 1543.
A notary's official report of Cabrillo's expedition was lost; all that survives is a summary of it made by another investigator, Andrés de Urdaneta, who also had access to ships' logs and charts.His discoveries went largely unnoticed at the time, so none of his place names were permanently adopted. Despite this, Cabrillo is now remembered as the first European to travel the California coast, and many parks, schools, buildings and streets in California bear his name.
The Maritime Museum of San Diego, in partnership with Cabrillo National Monument, has built a full-sized, fully functional, and historically accurate replica of Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo’s flagship, San Salvador. The construction of the replica was based on historical and archeological research into early Spanish and Portuguese shipbuilding techniques.
In 1601, the Spanish Viceroy in Mexico City, the Conde de Monterrey, appointed Sebastián Vizcaíno general-in-charge of a second expedition—-to locate safe harbors in Alta California for Spanish Manila galleons to use on their return voyage to Acapulco from Manila. Vizcaino was one of the sailors of the Santa Ana, a Manila galleon that was captured by Thomas Cavendish in 1587 on the Baja Peninsula (This was the greatest loss ever suffered by the Spanish during the 250
years of the Manila – Acapulco Galleon Trade–reportedly valued at over
120,000 gold doubloons–and it resulted in a marked increase in
protection for such ships during the remainder of the route’s existence). He was also given the mandate to map in detail the California coastline that Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo had first reconnoitered 60 years earlier. He departed Acapulco with three ships on May 5, 1602. His flagship was the San Diego and the other two ships were the San Tomás and the Tres Reyes.
On November 10, 1602, Vizcaíno entered and named San Diego Bay. Sailing up the coast, Vizcaíno named many prominent features such as the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, Point Conception, the Santa Lucia Mountains, Point Lobos, Carmel River and Monterey Bay (thus obliterating some of the names given these same features by Cabrillo in 1542).
The era of colonization
The French subsequently tried to establish several colonies throughout North America that failed, due to weather, disease, or conflict with other European powers. Cartier attempted to create the first permanent European settlement in North America at Cap-Rouge (Quebec City) in 1541 with 400 settlers but the settlement was abandoned the next year after bad weather and first nations attacks. A small group of French troops were left on Parris Island, South Carolina in 1562 to build Charlesfort, but left after a year when they were not resupplied by France. René Goulaine de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline in what is now Jacksonville in 1564 as a haven for the Huguenot Protestant refugees from religious persecution. Later that year some mutineers from Fort Caroline fled the colony and turned pirate, attacking Spanish vessels in the Caribbean. The Spanish used this as a catalyst to locate and destroy Fort Caroline in 1565, fearing it would serve as a base for future piracy, and wanting to dissuade further French colonization. The Spanish quickly dispatched Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to go to Florida and establish a base from which to attack the French. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sighted land on August 28, 1565. As this was the feast day of Augustine of Hippo, the territory was named San Agustín. On September 8, 1565, Saint Augustine, the oldest town in the United States, was founded.
The Saturiwa, one of the two principal chiefdoms in the area, remained openly hostile. In 1566 the Saturiwa burned down St. Augustine and the settlement had to be relocated. Traditionally it was thought to have been moved to its present location, though some documentary evidence suggests it was first moved to a location on Anastasia Island. At any rate, it was certainly in its present location by the end of the 16th century.
In 1593, Antonio Gutiérrez de Humana (also spelled Umana) recruited Jusepe Gutierrez, an Indian, to join him on an entrada (expedition) to what would become New Mexico. At the time, the Viceroy of New Spain was planning to authorize an official expedition and colonization of New Mexico. The expedition of Humana and his partner, Francisco Leyva de Bonilla (also spelled Leyba), was therefore illegal. After recruiting Jusepe, Humana and Leyva found additional Spanish and Indian soldiers and servants in Santa Barbara, Chihuahua and proceeded onward into what is today New Mexico. They remained there, among the Pueblo Indians near the Rio Grande, about one year. At the time there were no Spanish settlers in New Mexico, although there may have been other fortune-seekers and slavers living among the Pueblos. Humana and Leyva and an unknown number of Spanish and Indian soldiers and servants left New Mexico to explore eastwards, presumably in search of rich kingdoms which were rumored to be just over the horizon. Their route led them by the Indian pueblo at Pecos and out onto the Great Plains of Texas where they met the Vaquero (Apache) Indians. They found numerous rancherías, some of them abandoned, and herds of bison, the American buffalo. Jusepe said they found abundant water in many marshes, springs, and arroyos (brooks) as well as great numbers of plum trees and nuts. At some point they turned toward the north. The further they went the more abundant the bison became. After traveling 45 days, they crossed two big rivers and beyond was a very large Indian settlement ten leagues long (about 26 miles) and two leagues wide. One of the two rivers flowed through the settlement.
Jusepe gave a brief description of the "Great Settlement." The houses were built on a frame of stakes with straw roofs. They were built close together, separated by narrow pathways and, in some places, between the houses were fields of maize, pumpkins, and beans. The people of the settlement received the Spanish in peace and provided them with food. They depended upon buffalo hunting and also agriculture. Leaving the Settlement, three days to the north they came upon a "multitude of buffalo," but no more Indian settlements. Discord between the leaders broke out. Humana spent an afternoon and morning in his tent apparently writing up his account of the dispute and then sent a soldier, Miguel Pérez, to summon Leyva. Leyva came to Humana's tent, dressed in shirt and breeches only. Humana "drew a butcher knife which he carried in his pocket, unsheathed it, and stabbed Captain Leyba twice." Leyva died and was quickly buried. Then Humana showed "some papers" to his men. He said that because Leyva had threatened to give him a "beating with a stick" he had killed him.
The expedition continued, reaching a very large river ten days beyond the Great Settlement. The river was one-fourth of a league wide (about two-thirds of a mile, or one kilometer), deep and sluggish. "They did not dare to cross it." It was here that five of the Indians, including Jusepe, deserted. Three became lost on the plains and Indians killed another. Jusepe was taken captive by Apaches and lived with them for a year until he escaped or was set free and made his way back to New Mexico. By this time (1596) Oñate and a large group of settlers had arrived in New Mexico and Jusepe took up residence at the San Juan Bautista Pueblo. On February 16, 1599, Oñate interviewed him concerning the Humana and Leyva expedition and Jusepe told the story of the expedition to Juan de Oñate.
According to later accounts from Indians, Humana and the other members of the expedition were killed by Indians 18 days beyond the Great Settlement. The people of the Great Settlement were almost certainly Wichita Indians whom Oñate later called Rayados. The large river where Jusepe deserted the expedition may have been the Missouri, perhaps near Kansas City. The Missouri is about 500 yards wide at this point, not as wide as Jusepe estimated, but the largest river that could be reached in about 10 days travel from the Great Settlement. This would be the first known visit of Europeans to the Missouri River.
In 1595 the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate was granted permission from King Philip II to colonize Santa Fe de Nuevo México, the present-day New Mexico.
Relations between the Spanish and the Acoma people had been mostly peaceful for several decades after the two groups first came into contact around 1540. In 1598, the Acoma leader, Zutacapan, learned that the Spanish intended to conquer Acoma Pueblo. Initially, the natives planned to defend themselves; however, their belief that the Spanish were immortal and their knowledge of Spanish atrocities committed in the past led the Acoma to try to negotiate a peaceful solution to the conflict. Accordingly, Don Oñate sent his nephew, Captain Juan de Zaldívar, to the pueblo to consult with Zutacapan. When Zaldivar arrived on December 4, 1598, one of the first things he did was to take sixteen of his men up the mesa on which the pueblo was located to demand food from the natives. After being denied the food they had demanded, the Spaniards allegedly attacked some Acoma women. A fight ensued, leaving Zaldivar and eleven of his men dead.
When Oñate learned of the incident, he ordered Juan de Zaldivar's brother, Vicente de Zaldívar, to lead an expedition to punish the Acoma and set an example for other pueblos. Taking about seventy men, Vincente de Zaldivar left San Juan Pueblo in late December or early January and arrived at Acoma Pueblo on January 21, 1599. The battle began the following morning, January 22.Of the 2,000, about 500 were killed in the battle, along with about 300 women and children. Some 500 prisoners were taken and later sentenced to a variety of punishments. Don Oñate ordered that every male above the age of twenty-five would have his right foot cut off and be enslaved for a period of twenty years. However, only twenty-four men actually received amputations.
The Acoma massacre remains a sensitive issue in the United States. In 1998, during the 400-year anniversary of Spain's founding of New Mexico colony, a group of Acomas cut off the right foot of Oñate's twelve-foot statue in Alcalde, New Mexico. They later issued a statement about the incident: "We took the liberty of removing Oñate's right foot on behalf of our brothers and sister of Acoma Pueblo ... We see no glory in celebrating Oñate's fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it."
At the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center, Estevan Arrellano, the director of the site, supervised the attachment of a new foot to the statue. He later said, "Give me a break – it was 400 years ago. It's okay to hold a grudge, but for 400 years?"
In 1601, Jusepe Gutierrez guided Juan de Oñate, the founder of New Mexico and governor of the new colony, on a large expedition to the Great Plains region of central North America. He took Oñate to the same area where he had gone with Humana and Leyva. Oñate journeyed across the plains eastward from New Mexico in a renewed search for Quivira, the fabled "city of gold." As had the earlier Coronado Expedition in the 1540s, Oñate encountered Apaches in the Texas Panhandle region. They found the “Great Settlement,” which was probably located either at the site of present-day Wichita, Kansas or along the Walnut River in Arkansas City, Kansas. Archaeological discoveries favor the Walnut River. Oñate proceeded eastward, following the Canadian River into the modern state of Oklahoma.
They found an encampment of native people that Oñate called the Escanjaques. He estimated the population at more than 5,000 living in 600 houses. The Escanjaques lived in round houses as large as 90 feet (27 m) in diameter and covered with tanned buffalo robes. They were hunters, according to Oñate, depending upon the buffalo for their subsistence and planting no crops. The Escanjaques guided Oñate to a large river a few miles away and he became the first European to describe the tallgrass prairie. Near the river, Oñate's expedition party and their numerous Escanjaque guides saw three or four hundred Rayados on a hill. The Rayados advanced, throwing dirt into the air as a sign that they were ready for war. Oñate quickly indicated that he did not wish to fight and made peace with this group of Rayados, who proved to be friendly and generous. Oñate liked the Rayados more than he did the Escanjaques. They were "united, peaceful, and settled." They showed deference to their chief, named Caratax, whom Oñate detained as a guide and hostage, although "treating him well."
Caratax led Oñate and the Escanjaques across the river to a settlement on the eastern bank, one or two miles from the river. The settlement was deserted, the inhabitants having fled. The next day the Oñate expedition proceeded onward for another eight miles through heavily populated territory, although without seeing many Rayados. At this point, the Spaniards' courage deserted them. There were obviously many Rayados nearby and soon Oñate's men were warned that the Rayados were assembling an army. Discretion seemed the better part of valor. Oñate estimated that three hundred Spanish soldiers would be needed to confront the Rayados, and he turned his soldiers around to return to New Mexico.
Oñate had worried about the Rayados hurting or attacking his expedition party, but it was instead the Escanjaques who repelled his men on their return to New Mexico. Oñate described a pitched battle with 1,500 Escanjaques, probably an exaggeration, but many Spaniards were wounded and many natives killed. After more than two hours of fighting, Oñate himself retired from the battlefield. The hostage Rayado chief Caratax was freed by a raid on Oñate and Oñate freed several women captives.
The path of Oñate's expedition and the identity of the Escanjaques and the Rayados are much debated. Most authorities believe his route led down the Canadian River from Texas to Oklahoma, cross-country to the Salt Fork, where he found the Escanjaque encampment, and then to the Arkansas River and its tributary, the Walnut River at Arkansas City, Kansas where the Rayado settlement was located.
Oñate’s last major expedition went to the west, from New Mexico to the lower valley of the Colorado River. The party of about three dozen men set out from the Rio Grande valley in October 1604. They traveled by way of Zuñi, the Hopi pueblos, and the Bill Williams River to the Colorado River, and descended that river to its mouth in the Gulf of California in January 1605, before returning along the same route to New Mexico. The evident purpose of the expedition was to locate a port by which New Mexico could be supplied, as an alternative to the laborious overland route from New Spain. The expedition to the lower Colorado River was important as the only recorded European incursion into that region between the expeditions of Hernando de Alarcón and Melchior Díaz (the first person of European background that crossed the Colorado River) in 1540 , and the visits of Eusebio Francisco Kino beginning in 1701. The explorers did not see evidence of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, which must have arisen shortly afterwards in the Salton Sink.
In 1606 when King Philip heard the news of the Acoma massacre, Oñate was recalled to Mexico City for a hearing regarding his conduct. After finishing plans for the founding of the town of Santa Fé in 1610, he resigned his post and was tried of cruelty to both natives and colonists. He was found guilty of cruelty, immorality, and false reporting and returned to Spain to live out the remainder of his life. He was banished from New Mexico for life and exiled from Mexico City for 5 years. Eventually Oñate went to Spain, where the king appointed him head of all mining inspectors in Spain. He died in Spain in 1626. He is sometimes referred to as "the Last Conquistador."
Numerous voyages hither were undertaken during the reign of Henry VIII.; but the accounts which remain of them are rare and meager. Some of them resulted in terrible disasters of shipwreck and death. In 1602, the government of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands chartered the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), or VOC with the mission of exploring it for a passage to the Indies and claiming any uncharted areas for the United Provinces.
In 1609, the VOC commissioned English explorer Henry Hudson who, in an attempt to find the so-called northwest passage to the Indies, discovered and claimed for the VOC parts of the present-day United States and Canada. In the belief that it was the best route to explore, Hudson entered the Upper New York Bay sailing up the river which now bears his name. In 1614, Adriaen Block led an expedition to the lower Hudson in the Tyger, and then explored the East River aboard the Onrust, becoming the first known European to navigate the Hellegat enter Long Island Sound. Block Island and its sound were named after him. Upon returning, Block compiled a map, the first to apply the name "New Netherland" to the area between English Virginia and French Canada, where he was later granted exclusive trading rights by the Dutch government.
Although Spain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands all had competing claims to the region, none of these prevented the English from becoming the first European power to colonize successfully the Mid-Atlantic coastline. Earlier attempts had been made by the Spanish in what is now Georgia (San Miguel de Gualdape, 1526–27; several Spanish missions in Georgia between 1568 and 1684), South Carolina (Santa Elena, 1566–87), North Carolina (Joara, 1567–68) and Virginia (Ajacán Mission, 1570–71 - here all priests were massacred by local Native Americans except a youth, Alonso de Olmos); and by French in South Carolina (Charlesfort, 1562–63).
On April 10, 1606, King James I of England issued a charter for each of the Virginia Companies, London and Plymouth. These were privately funded ventures, intended to claim land for England, trade, and return a profit. In 1620, Plymouth in Massachusetts was settled by Pilgrims from the Mayflower, beginning the history of permanent European settlement in New England.
Jamestown was a settlement in the Colony of Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 4, 1607 (O.S., May 14, 1607 N.S.), and considered permanent after brief abandonment in 1610, it followed several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Jamestown served as the capital of the colony for 83 years, from 1616 until 1699. Pocahontas (born Matoaka, known as Amonute, c. 1596 – March 1617) was a Native American woman notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the paramount chief. Pocahontas is most famously linked to the English colonist Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with a hundred other settlers in April 1607, at the behest of the London Company. Pocahontas was captured and held for ransom by the English during Anglo-Indian hostilities in 1613. During her captivity, she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. When the opportunity arose for her to return to her people, she chose to remain with the English. In 1616, the Rolfes travelled to London. Pocahontas was presented to English society as an example of the "civilized savage" in hopes of stimulating investment in the Jamestown settlement. She became something of a celebrity but died at Gravesend of unknown causes, aged 20 or 21.
Plymouth holds a special role in American history. Rather than being entrepreneurs like many of the settlers of Jamestown, a significant proportion of the citizens of Plymouth, the Pilgrim Fathers, were fleeing religious persecution and searching for a place to worship as they saw fit. The social and legal systems of the colony became closely tied to their religious beliefs, as well as English custom. Many of the people and events surrounding Plymouth Colony have become part of American folklore, including the North American tradition known as Thanksgiving and the monument known as Plymouth Rock. The leadership of the Pilgrim Fathers came from the religious congregations of Brownist English Dissenters who had fled the volatile political environment in England for the relative calm and tolerance of 16th–17th century Holland in the Netherlands.
The Plymouth colony, established in 1620, became the second successful English settlement (after the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607) and later the oldest continuously inhabited English settlement in what was to become the United States of America. The Pilgrims' story of seeking religious freedom has become a central theme of the history and culture of the United States: The core group—roughly 40% of the adults and 56% of the family groupings—was part of a congregation of religious separatists (Congregationalists) led by William Bradford. While still in the English village of Scrooby, near East Retford, Nottinghamshire, the congregation began to feel the pressures of religious persecution. In 1607 Tobias Matthew, Archbishop of York, raided homes and imprisoned several members of the congregation.The congregation then left England and emigrated to the Netherlands, first to Amsterdam and then to Leiden, in 1609. In Leiden, the congregation gained the freedom to worship as it chose, but Dutch society was unfamiliar to these immigrants. Scrooby had been an agricultural community, whereas Leiden was a thriving industrial center, and the pace of life was hard on the Separatists. Furthermore, though the community remained close-knit, their children began adopting Dutch language and customs. Using the financing secured from the Merchant Adventurers, the Colonists bought provisions and obtained passage on two ships, the Mayflower and the Speedwell. In June 1619, after declining the opportunity to settle south of Cape Cod in New Netherland, because of their desire to avoid the Dutch influence, the Congregation obtained a land patent from the London Virginia Company, allowing them to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River. About half of the one hundred plus passengers on the Mayflower survived that first winter, mostly because of diseases contracted on the voyage. Unlike the Puritan group who maintained their membership in and allegiance to the Church of England, Separatists held that their differences with the Church of England were irreconcilable and that their worship should be organized independently of the trappings, traditions and organization of a central church.
In the United States, the modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition is commonly, but not universally, traced to a poorly documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts. The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest. Pilgrims and Puritans who began emigrating from England in the 1620s and 1630s carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England. According to historian Jeremy Bangs, director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, the Pilgrims may have been influenced by watching the annual services of Thanksgiving for the relief of the siege of Leiden in 1574, while they were staying in Leiden.
Nieuw-Nederland, or New Netherland, chartered in 1614, was a colonial province of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands in what became New York State and parts of neighboring states. The peak population was less than 10,000. The Dutch were Calvinists who built the Reformed Church in America. The Dutch established a patroon system with feudal-like rights given to a few powerful landholders; they also established religious tolerance and free trade. The colony's capital, New Amsterdam, founded in 1625 and located at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, would grow to become a major world city. The city was captured by the English in 1664; they took complete control of the colony in 1674 and renamed it New York. However the Dutch landholdings remained, and the Hudson River Valley maintained a traditional Dutch character until the 1820s. Traces of Dutch influence, such as homes, family surnames, and the names of roads and whole towns remain in present-day northern New Jersey and southeastern New York State.
A strong believer in the notion of rule by divine right, Charles I, King of England and Scotland, persecuted religious dissenters. Learning from the Pilgrims' harsh experiences of winter in the Plymouth Colony, the Puritans first sent smaller groups in mid-1620s from England to establish colonies, buildings and food supplies. Waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642, where they founded multiple colonies being the first one the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Later in the century, the new Pennsylvania colony was given to William Penn in settlement of a debt the king owed his father. Its government was set up by William Penn in about 1682 to become primarily a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; but others were welcomed. Baptists, Quakers and German and Swiss Protestants flocked to Pennsylvania. The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to improve themselves with their own hand was very attractive.
[The word "Puritan" is applied unevenly to a number of Protestant churches (and religious groups within the Anglican Church) from the late 16th century onwards. Puritans did not originally use the term for themselves. The practitioners knew themselves as members of particular churches or movements, and not by a single term. "Precisemen" and "Precisians" were other early derogatory terms for Puritans, who preferred to call themselves "the godly".
Puritans who were not satisfied with the Reformation of the Church of England, but who remained within the Church of England advocating further reforms, are known as "non-separating Puritans". This group disagreed among themselves about how much further Reformation was necessary. Those who thought that the Church of England was so corrupt that true Christians should separate from it altogether are known as "separating Puritans" or simply "Separatists". "Puritan," in the wider sense, includes both groups. Especially after the English Restoration of 1660, separating Puritans were called "Dissenters". The 1662 Uniformity Act caused almost all Puritan clergy to leave the Church of England. Some became nonconformist ministers. The movement in England changed radically at this time, though this change was not as immediate for Puritans in New England.
The idea of personal Biblical interpretation, while central to Puritan beliefs, was shared with most Protestants in general. Puritans sought both individual and corporate conformity to the teaching of the Bible, with moral purity pursued both down to the smallest detail, as well as ecclesiastical purity to the highest level. They believed that man existed for the glory of God, that his first concern in life was to do God's will and so to receive future happiness. Some strong religious views common to Puritans had direct impacts on culture. Education was essential to the masses, so that they could read the Bible for themselves.
Puritans placed family at the center of their societies, as an organisation to facilitate their devotion to God. Based on Biblical portrayals of Adam and Eve, Puritans believed that marriage represented one of the most fundamental human relationships rooted in procreation, love, and, most importantly, salvation. According to Puritans, husbands were the spiritual head of the household, while women were to demonstrate religious piety and obedience under male authority. Furthermore, marriage represented not only the relationship between husband and wife, but also the relationship between spouses and God. Puritan husbands commanded authority through family direction and prayer. The female relationship to her husband and to God was marked by submissiveness and humility. Puritans believed wives to be spiritual equals to their husbands. For Puritans, motherhood represented the most significant aspect of the female identity. Pious Puritan mothers laboured for their children's righteousness and salvation, connecting women directly to matters of religion and morality.
]
In the years after 1630, Puritans left for New England (see Migration to New England (1620–1640)), supporting the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other settlements. The large-scale Puritan emigration to New England ceased by 1641, with around 21,000 having moved across the Atlantic. The Plymouth Colony Puritans of New England disapproved of Christmas celebrations, as did some other Protestant churches of the time. Celebration was outlawed in Boston from 1659. The ban was revoked in 1681 by the English-appointed governor Sir Edmund Andros, who also revoked a Puritan ban on festivities on Saturday nights. Nevertheless, it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region.
The Indian Massacre of 1622 took place in the English Colony of Virginia on Friday, 22 March 1622. At first, the natives had been more than happy to trade provisions to the colonists for metal tools, but by 1609 the English governor, John Smith, had begun to send in raiding parties to demand food. This earned the colonists a bad reputation among the Native Americans and precipitated conflict. The attack took place on March 22, 1621 as reckoned by the colonists, three days before New Years Day 1622.What is usually referred to as the "Massacre of 1622," the native American attack that resulted in the death of 347 English settlers and almost wiped out Jamestown, gave the colonists the excuse they needed to take even more of what they wanted from the indigenous population of the Chesapeake. In 1624 Virginia was made a royal colony of England. This meant that the Crown took direct authority rather than allowing guidance by the Virginia Company of London. The Crown could exercise its patronage for royal favorites.
Nuestra Señora de Atocha ("Our Lady of Atocha") is the most widely-known vessel of a group of ships that sank in a hurricane in 1622 off the Florida Keys. The Atocha was a Spanish galleon that at the time of her sinking was heavily laden with copper, silver, gold, tobacco, gems, and indigo from Spanish ports at Cartagena and Porto Bello in New Granada (the current countries of Colombia and Panama, respectively) and Havana, bound for Spain. The ship was named for the parish of Atocha in Madrid. The treasure arriving by mule in Panama City was so immense that summer that it took two months to record and load it onto the Atocha. After still more delays in Havana, what was ultimately a 28-ship convoy did not manage to depart for Spain until 4 September 1622, six weeks late. The Atocha lost all of her crew and passengers except for three sailors and two slaves who survived by clinging to the mizzen mast. All of her treasure sank with her.
After the surviving ships brought the news of the disaster back to Havana, Spanish authorities dispatched another five ships to salvage the Atocha and the Santa Margarita, which had run aground near where the Atocha sank. The Atocha had sunk in approximately 55 feet (17 m) of water, making it difficult for divers to retrieve any of the cargo or guns from the ship. A second hurricane in October of that year made attempts at salvage even more difficult by scattering the wreckage of the sunken ship still further. The Spaniards undertook salvage operations for several years with the use of Indian slaves, and recovered nearly half of the registered part of its cargo from the holds of the Margarita. The principal method used by the Spanish for the recovery of this cargo was a large brass diving bell with a glass window on one side: a slave would ride to the bottom, recover an item, and return to the surface by being hauled up by the men on deck. It was often lethal, but more or less effective. Dead slaves were recorded as a business expense by the captains of salvage ships.
The loss of the 1622 fleet was a severe blow to Spain, forcing it to borrow more to finance its role in the Thirty Years' War and to sell several galleons to raise funds. While their efforts over the next ten years to salvage the Margarita were successful, the Spanish never located the Atocha. American treasure hunters Mel Fisher, Finley Ricard and a team of sub-contractors, funded by investors and others in a joint venture, searched the sea bed for the Atocha for sixteen and a half years. Fisher had earlier, in 1980, recovered portions of the wrecked cargo of the sister ship Santa Margarita. He also proposed the idea to several other potential helpers, who were discouraged by the fact that this dangerous professional diving job was at minimum wage unless the ship could be found. The Atocha wreck and its mother lode of silver, gold and emeralds, was finally discovered in July 1985. After the discovery, the State of Florida claimed title to the wreck and forced Fisher into a contract giving 25% of the found treasure to the state. Fisher fought the State of Florida, claiming the find should be his, exclusively. After eight years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of Fisher.
The first known European to enter Wisconsin was a French coureur des bois Jean Nicolet. In 1634, Samuel de Champlain, governor of New France, gave Nicolet the task of searching for a water route to China through North America. Accompanied by seven Huron Indian guides, Nicolet left New France and canoed through Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and then became the first European to enter Lake Michigan.
In 1636 Harvard school was founded in anticipation of the need for training clergy for the new commonwealth, a "church in the wilderness". By that time 17,000 Puritans were migrating to New England. In 1638, the school received a printing press—the only press in what is now the United States until Harvard acquired a second in 1659. The first printing press in North America was brought from Spain to Mexico City, with production beginning in 1539.
In total there thirteen Colonies were the British Colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America founded between 1607 (Virginia) and 1733 (Georgia). Each of the thirteen colonies developed its own system of self-government, based largely on independent farmers who owned their own land, voted for their local and provincial government, and served on local juries. In some of the colonies, especially Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, there were also substantial populations of African slaves. The thirteen colonies were: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island...
The Mystic massacre took place on May 26, 1637 during the Pequot War, when Connecticut colonists under Captain John Mason and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies set fire to a Pequot Fort near the Mystic River. The Pequots were the dominant Indian tribe in the southeastern portion of Connecticut Colony, and they had long competed with the neighboring Mohegan and Narragansett tribes.The English and Dutch Colonists established trade with all three tribes, exchanging European goods for wampum and furs. The Pequots eventually allied with the Dutch Colonists, while the Mohegans and others allied with the English Colonists. A trader named John Oldham was murdered and his trading ship looted by Pequots, and retaliation raids ensued by Colonists and their Indian allies; the Pequots responded in kind, erupting into the Pequot War between 1636 and 1638.
The Connecticut towns raised a militia commanded by Captain John Mason consisting of 90 men, plus 70 Mohegans under sachems Uncas and Wequash. Twenty more men under Captain John Underhill joined him from Fort Saybrook.
John Underhill described the scene and his participation: "Captaine Mason entring into a Wigwam, brought out a fire-brand, after hee had wounded many in the house; many couragious fellowes were unwilling to come out as they were scorched and burnt with the very flame, many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children, others forced out, and came in troopes to the Indians, twentie, and thirtie at a time, which our souldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword; downe fell men, women, and children; it is reported by themselves, that there were about foure hundred soules in this Fort, and not above five of them escaped out of our hands."
Estimates of dead Pequots range from 400 to 700, including women, children, and elderly, as some of the warriors were out on a raiding party. The Pequot numbers were so diminished that they ceased to be a tribe in most senses.
New Sweden was a Swedish colony along the lower reaches of the Delaware River in North America from 1638 to 1655,established during the Thirty Years' War, when Sweden was a great power. New Sweden was part of Swedish colonization efforts in the Americas. Settlements were established on both sides of the Delaware Valley in the present-day American Mid-Atlantic states of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, often in places where Swedish traders had been visiting since about 1610. New Sweden was conquered by the Dutch Republic in 1655, during the Second Northern War, and incorporated into the Dutch colonies of New Netherlands.
The settlers came from all over the Swedish realm. The percentage of Finns in New Sweden grew especially towards the end of the colonization, comprising 22% of the population during Swedish rule, but rising to about 50% after the colony came under Dutch rule.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of New Sweden to the development of the New World is one that is the traditional Finnish forest house building technique. The colonists brought with them the log cabin, which became such an icon of the American frontier that it is thought of as an American structure.
New Amsterdam was captured by the English in 1664; they took complete control of the colony in 1674 and renamed it New York after the Duke of York. However the Dutch landholdings remained, and the Hudson River Valley maintained a traditional Dutch character until the 1820s. Traces of Dutch influence, such as homes, family surnames, and the names of roads and whole towns remain in present-day northern New Jersey and southeastern New York State.
In 1668 English privateer Robert Searle attacked and plundered St.
Augustine. In the aftermath of his raid, the Spanish began in 1672 to
construct a more secure fortification, the Castillo de San Marcos.
It stands today as the oldest fort in the United States. Its
construction took a quarter of a century, with many later additions and
modifications.
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of
people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February
1692 and May 1693. The trials resulted in the executions of twenty
people, most of them women. Despite being generally known as the Salem
witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in several
towns in the Province of Massachusetts Bay: Salem Village (now
Danvers), Ipswich, Andover, and Salem Town. Although the last trial was held in May 1693, public response to the events continued. In the decades following the trials, survivors and family members (and their supporters) sought to establish the innocence of the individuals who were convicted and to gain compensation. In the following centuries, the descendants of those unjustly accused and condemned have sought to honor their memories. Events in Salem and Danvers in 1992 were used to commemorate the trials. In November 2001, years after the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the trials, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act exonerating all who had been convicted and naming each of the innocent. The trials have figured in American culture and been explored in numerous works of art, literature and film.
The first permanent settlement on the Baja California peninsula was not established until 1697, when Jesuit priest Juan María de Salvatierra founded a mission at Loreto, the first of what were to be many in the Californias.
The colonies were characterized by religious diversity, with many Congregationalists in New England, German and Dutch Reformed in the Middle Colonies, Catholics in Maryland, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the frontier. Sephardic Jews were among early settlers in cities of New England and the South. Many immigrants arrived as religious refugees: French Huguenots settled in New York, Virginia and the Carolinas.
The Spanish encouraged slaves from the southern British colonies to come to Florida as a refuge, promising freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism and militia service. Most went to the area around St. Augustine but escaped slaves also reached Pensacola. The Spanish did not import many slaves to Florida for labor, as it was basically a military outpost rather than a plantation economy like those of the English colonies. As the British planted settlements south along the Atlantic coast, the Spanish encouraged their slaves to escape for sanctuary in Florida. If the fugitives converted to Catholicism and swore allegiance to the king of Spain, they were given freedom, arms, and supplies. Moving down the coast, the English established Charleston in 1670 and Savannah in 1733. In response, Spanish Governor Manual de Montiano in 1738 established the first legally recognized free community of ex-slaves, known as Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, to the north of St. Augustine to serve as its defense.
Each of the 13 American colonies had a slightly different governmental structure. Typically a colony was ruled by a governor appointed from London who controlled the executive administration and relied upon a locally elected legislature to vote taxes and make laws. By the 18th century, the American colonies were growing very rapidly because of ample supplies of land and food, and low death rates. They were richer than most parts of Britain, and attracted a steady flow of immigrants, especially teenagers who came as indentured servants. The tobacco and rice plantations imported African slaves for labor from the British colonies in the West Indies, and by the 1770s they comprised a fifth of the American population. The question of independence from Britain did not arise as long as the colonies needed British military support against the French and Spanish powers; those threats were gone by 1765. London regarded the American colonies as existing for the benefit of the mother country, a policy known as mercantilism.
The French and Indian War (1755–1763) is the American name for the North American theater of the major Seven Years' War in Europe and English-speaking Canada. The war was fought primarily between the colonies of British America and New France, with both sides supported by military units from their parent countries of Great Britain and France, who declared war on each other in 1756. The French were greatly outnumbered, so they made heavy use of Indian allies. Between 1758 and 1760, the British military successfully penetrated the heartland of New France, and took control of Montreal in September 1760. The war in North America officially ended with the signing of a Treaty of Paris (1763) on February 10, 1763, and war in the European theater of the Seven Years' War was settled by the Treaty of Hubertusburg on February 15, 1763. The British offered France the choice of surrendering either its continental North American possessions east of the Mississippi or the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which had been occupied by the British. France chose to cede the former, but was able to negotiate the retention of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, two small islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, along with fishing rights in the area. They viewed the economic value of the Caribbean islands' sugar cane to be greater and easier to defend than the furs from the continent. France attached comparatively little value to its North American
possessions, especially in respect to the highly profitable
sugar-producing Antilles islands, which it managed to retain. France ceded French Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to its ally Spain in compensation for Spain's loss to Britain of Florida (which Spain had ceded to Britain in exchange for the return of Havana, Cuba). France's colonial presence north of the Caribbean was reduced to the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, confirming Britain's position as the dominant colonial power in eastern North America. The war changed economic, political, governmental and social relations between three European powers (Britain, France, and Spain), their colonies and colonists, and the natives that inhabited the territories they claimed. Britain gained control of French Canada and Acadia, colonies containing
approximately 80,000 primarily French-speaking Roman Catholic residents.
The deportation of Acadians (descendants of the 17th-century French
colonists who settled in Acadia, many of whom were metis - Aboriginal peoples -) beginning in
1755 resulted in land made available to migrants from Europe and the
colonies further south. After 1764, many exiled Acadians finally settled in Louisiana, which had been transferred by France to Spain at the end of the French and Indian War.
Years late James Fenimore Cooper, a profilic and popular American writer of the early 19th century, will write a historical romance novel of frontier and Indian life "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826) which is set during the French and Indian War (aka Seven Years' War).
France and Britain both suffered financially because of the war, with significant long-term consequences. The Seven Years' War nearly doubled Britain's national debt. The Crown, seeking sources of revenue to pay off the debt, attempted to impose new taxes on its colonies. These attempts were met with increasingly stiff resistance, until troops were called in so that representatives of the Crown could safely perform their duties. These acts ultimately led to the start of the American Revolutionary War. French Minister Choiseul considered he had made a good deal at the Treaty of Paris, and philosopher Voltaire wrote that Louis XV had lost "a few acres of snow". For France however, the military defeat and the financial burden of the war weakened the monarchy and contributed to the advent of the French Revolution in 1789.
Although the Spanish takeover of the Louisiana territory (which was not completed until 1769) had modest repercussions, the British takeover of Spanish Florida resulted in the westward migration of tribes that did not want to do business with the British, and a rise in tensions between the Choctaw and the Creek, historic enemies whose divisions the British at times exploited. The change of control in Florida also prompted most of its Spanish Catholic population to leave. Most went to Cuba, including the entire governmental records from St. Augustine, although some Christianized Yamasee were resettled to the coast of Mexico. Most of the free black inhabitants also migrated to Cuba with the evacuating Spanish colonists.At that time, the black population at St. Augustine and Fort Mose totaled about 3,000, of whom about one-quarter were free.
California was the name given to a mythical island populated only by
beautiful Amazon warriors, as depicted in Greek myths, using gold tools
and weapons in the popular early 16th-century romance novel Las Sergas
de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián) by Spanish author Garci
Rodríguez de Montalvo. In exploring Baja California the earliest
explorers thought the Baja California peninsula was an island and
applied the name California to it.Mapmakers started using the name
"California" to label the unexplored territory on the North American
west coast. The first Spanish permanent mission in Baja California, Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó, was founded on October 15, 1697, by Jesuit Friar Juan Maria Salvatierra (1648–1717) accompanied by one small boat's crew and six soldiers. After the establishment of Missions in Alta California after 1769, the Spanish treated Baja California and Alta California as a single administrative unit, part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with Monterey, California, as its capital. Nearly all the missions in Baja California were established by members of the Jesuit order supported by a few soldiers. After a power dispute between Charles III of Spain and the Jesuits, the Jesuit colleges were closed and the Jesuits were expelled from Mexico and South America in 1767 and deported back to Spain. After the forcible expulsion of the Jesuit order, most of the missions were taken over by Franciscan and later Dominican friars. Both of these groups were under much more direct control of the Spanish monarchy. On September 4, 1781, a group of forty-four settlers known as "Los Pobladores" founded the pueblo called "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula"; in English it is "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the Porciúncula River".
The Great Awakening (called by historians the "First Great Awakening") was an evangelical and revitalization movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American Protestantism. It resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of deep personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ.The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. Participants became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called "new lights", while the preachers who remained unemotional were referred to as "old lights".
Adopting the policy that the colonies should now contribute more to maintain the territories as part of what became known as the Empire, Britain imposed direct taxes. Because the colonies lacked elected representation in the governing British Parliament, many colonists regarded the new laws as illegitimate and a violation of their rights as Englishmen.
The Liberty Bell is an iconic symbol of American independence, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Formerly placed in the steeple of the Pennsylvania State House (now renamed Independence Hall), the bell was commissioned from the London firm of Lester and Pack (today the Whitechapel Bell Foundry) in 1752, and was cast with the lettering (part of Leviticus 25:10) "Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." It originally cracked when first rung after arrival in Philadelphia, and was twice recast by local workmen John Pass and John Stow, whose last names appear on the bell.
The Stamp Act 1765 (short title Duties in American Colonies Act 1765; 5 George III, c. 12) imposed a direct tax by the British Parliament specifically on the colonies of British America, and it required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp. The episode played a major role in defining the grievances and enabling the organized colonial resistance that led to the American Revolution in 1775.
In 1767 the Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which placed a tax on a number of essential goods including paper, glass, and tea. Angered at the tax increases, colonists organized a boycott of British goods. Meanwhile, riots against trade regulations led to the deployment of British troops to Boston in 1768.
On March 5, 1770 a large mob gathered around a group of British soldiers. The mob grew more and more threatening, throwing snowballs, rocks and debris at the soldiers. One soldier was clubbed and fell. All but one of the soldiers fired into the crowd. They hit 11 people; three civilians died at the scene of the shooting, and two died after the incident. The event quickly came to be called the Boston Massacre. Although the soldiers were tried and acquitted (defended by John Adams), the widespread descriptions soon became propaganda to turn colonial sentiment against the British. This in turn began a downward spiral in the relationship between Britain and the Province of Massachusetts.
The Boston Tea Party in 1773 was a direct action by activists in the town of Boston to protest against the new tax on tea. Parliament quickly responded the next year with the Coercive Acts, stripping Massachusetts of its historic right of self-government and putting it under army rule, which sparked outrage and resistance in all thirteen colonies. Patriot leaders from all 13 colonies convened the First Continental Congress to coordinate their resistance to the Coercive Acts. The Congress called for a boycott of British trade, published a list of rights and grievances, and petitioned the king for redress of those grievances.They met briefly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1774 and consisted of fifty-six delegates from twelve of the Thirteen Colonies that would become the United States of America. The delegates, who included George Washington, soon to command the army, Patrick Henry, and John Adams, were elected by their respective colonial assemblies.
The appeal to the Crown had no effect, and so the Second Continental Congress was convened in 1775 to organize the defense of the colonies against the British Army. At this congress the Independence will be declared.
The American Revolution
The American Revolutionary War began at Concord and Lexington in April 1775 when the British tried to seize ammunition supplies and arrest the Patriot leaders. In terms of political values, the Americans were largely united on a concept called Republicanism, that rejected aristocracy and emphasized civic duty and a fear of corruption. For the Founding Fathers, according to one team of historians, "republicanism represented more than a particular form of government. It was a way of life, a core ideology, an uncompromising commitment to liberty, and a total rejection of aristocracy."
The Thirteen Colonies began a rebellion against British rule in 1775 and proclaimed their independence in 1776 as the United States of America. In the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) the American capture of the British invasion army at Saratoga in 1777 secured the Northeast and encouraged the French to make a military alliance with the United States. France brought in Spain and the Netherlands, thus balancing the military and naval forces on each side as Britain had no allies.
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, declared the independence of "the United States of America" in the Declaration of Independence. July 4 is celebrated as the nation's birthday. The new nation was founded on Enlightenment ideals of liberalism in what Thomas Jefferson called the unalienable rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", and dedicated strongly to republican principles. Republicanism emphasized the people are sovereign (not hereditary kings), demanded civic duty, feared corruption, and rejected any aristocracy.
The Declaration justified the independence of the United States by listing colonial grievances against King George III, and by asserting certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were political leaders and statesmen who
participated in the American Revolution by signing the United States Declaration of Independence, taking part in the American Revolutionary War, and establishing the United States Constitution. Within the large group known as the "Founding Fathers", there are two key subsets: the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (who signed the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776) and the Framers of the Constitution (who were delegates to the Constitutional Convention and took part in framing or drafting the proposed Constitution of the United States). A further subset is the group that signed the Articles of Confederation.
The Betsy Ross flag (1777) is an early design of the flag of the United States, popularly—but likely incorrectly—attributed to Betsy Ross, using the common motifs of alternating red-and-white striped field with five-pointed stars in a blue canton. The flag was designed during the American Revolution and features 13 stars to represent the original 13 colonies. The distinctive feature of the Ross flag is the arrangement of the stars in a circle. To add to the mystery surrounding the first American flag, experts can only guess the reason Congress chose stripes, stars, and the colors red, white, and blue for the flag. Historians and experts discredit the common theory that the stripes and five-pointed stars derived from the Washington family coat of arms. Stars were a device representing man's desire to achieve greatness. The common metaphor "reaching for the stars" developed from this idea. Stars of various shapes were also important symbols in European heraldry, and stars appears in colonial flags as early as 1676. The usage of stripes in the flag may be linked to two pre-existing flags. A 1765 Sons of Liberty flag flown in Boston had nine red and white stripes, and a flag used by Captain Abraham Markoe's Philadelphia Light Horse Troop in 1775 had 13 blue and silver stripes. One or both of these flags likely influenced the design of the American flag.
General George Washington (1732–1799) proved an excellent organizer and administrator, who worked successfully with Congress and the state governors, selecting and mentoring his senior officers, supporting and training his troops, and maintaining an idealistic Republican Army. The British sent four invasion armies. Washington's strategy forced the first army out of Boston in 1776, and was responsible for the surrender of the second and third armies at Saratoga (1777) and Yorktown (1781).
The capture of a British army at Saratoga encouraged the French to formally enter the war in support of Congress, as Benjamin Franklin negotiated a permanent military alliance in early 1778, significantly becoming the first country to officially recognize the Declaration of Independence. Later Spain (in 1779) and the Dutch (1780) became allies of the French, leaving the British Empire to fight a global war alone without major allies, and requiring it to slip through a combined blockade of the Atlantic. The American theater thus became only one front in Britain's war. The British were forced to withdraw troops from continental America to reinforce the valuable sugar-producing Caribbean colonies, which were considered more important. Beginning in late December 1778, the British captured Savannah and controlled the Georgia coastline. In 1780 they launched a fresh invasion and took Charleston as well. A significant victory at the Battle of Camden meant that royal forces soon controlled most of Georgia and South Carolina. In Yorktown in October 1781 under a combined siege by the French and Continental armies under Washington, the British surrendered their second invading army of the war. Spain (participating indirectly in the war as an ally of France) captured Pensacola from the British in 1781. The peace treaty with Britain, known as the Treaty of Paris (1783), gave the U.S. all land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes, though not including Florida (On September 3, 1783, Britain entered into a separate agreement with Spain under which Britain ceded Florida back to Spain.) Losing the war and the 13 colonies was a shock to Britain. The war revealed the limitations of Britain's fiscal-military state when it discovered it suddenly faced powerful enemies, with no allies, and dependent on extended and vulnerable transatlantic lines of communication. The defeat heightened dissension and escalated political antagonism to the King's ministers. Historians conclude that loss of the American colonies enabled Britain to deal with the French Revolution with more unity and better organization than would otherwise have been the case.
The delegates from every state wrote in 1787 a new Constitution that created a much more powerful and efficient central government, one with a strong president, and powers of taxation. The new government reflected the prevailing republican ideals of guarantees of individual liberty and of constraining the power of government through a system of separation of powers. John Locke's (1632–1704) ideas on liberty greatly influenced the political thinking behind the revolution, especially through his indirect influence on English writers. He is often referred to as "the philosopher of the American Revolution," and is credited with leading Americans to the critical concepts of social contract, natural rights, and "born free and equal.". The Declaration also referred to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as justification for the Americans' separation from the British monarchy. Most eighteenth-century Americans believed that nature, the entire universe, was God's creation. Therefore he was "Nature's God." Everything, including man, was part of the "universal order of things", which began with God and was pervaded and directed by his providence. Accordingly, the signers of the Declaration professed their "firm reliance on the Protection of divine Providence."
The first US governments
George Washington — a renowned hero of the American Revolutionary War, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and president of the Constitutional Convention—became the first President of the United States under the new Constitution in 1789. The national capital moved from New York to Philadelphia and finally settled in Washington DC in 1800.
In the new government under President George Washington, Alexander Hamilton (1757 – 1804) was appointed the Secretary of the Treasury. He became the leader of the Federalist Party, created largely in support of his views, and was opposed by the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. An admirer of British political systems, Hamilton was a nationalist who emphasized strong central government and successfully argued that the implied powers of the Constitution could be used to fund the national debt, assume state debts, and create the government-owned Bank of the United States. Embarrassed when an extra-marital affair from his past became public, Hamilton resigned from office in 1795 and returned to the practice of law in New York. Hamilton further asserted the truth of Christianity; he proposed a Christian Constitutional Society in 1802, to take hold of "some strong feeling of the mind" to elect "fit men" to office, and he wrote of "Christian welfare societies" for the poor. He was not a member of any denomination. After being shot in a duel, Hamilton spoke of his belief in God's mercy, and of his desire to renounce dueling; Bishop Moore administered communion to Hamilton. Opinions of Hamilton have run into the two traditional views: One, which has been dominant among scholars in recent years, represents him as a "forerunner of the modern liberal capitalist economy," opposed to the agrarianism, or the slave-holding self-interest, of Jefferson and Madison. The other has seen him as a centralizer, to the point sometimes of advocating monarchy. Gordon Wood presented a third view in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815; Hamilton would have set up an essentially European society, with a republican monarchy, and strong institutions such as the Bank of the United States; Wood holds that Jefferson better understood the society around him, individualist, egalitarian, and money-making.
Even with the Constitution many were concerned that a strong national government was a threat to individual rights and that the President would become a king. Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, the father of the Constitution, advocating a Bill of Rights: "Half a loaf is better than no bread. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can." Figures such as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and Richard Henry Lee publicly opposed the Constitution, a position known as "Anti-Federalism". Hamilton opposed a Bill of Rights in Federalist No. 84, stating that "the constitution is itself in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS". Patrick Henry argued, in contrast, that the legislature must be firmly informed "of the extent of the rights retained by the people ... being in a state of uncertainty, they will assume rather than give up powers by implication." On June 8, 1789 Representative James Madison introduced a series of thirty-nine amendments to the constitution in the House of Representatives. Among his recommendations Madison proposed opening up the Constitution and inserting specific rights limiting the power of Congress in Article One, Section 9. Seven of these limitations would became part of the ten ratified Bill of Rights amendments. The Bill of Rights is the collective name for the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. Proposed to assuage the fears of Anti-Federalists who had opposed Constitutional ratification, these amendments guarantee a number of personal freedoms, limit the government's power in judicial and other proceedings, and reserve some powers to the states and the public. The Bill of Rights enumerates freedoms not explicitly indicated in the main body of the Constitution, such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, a free press, and free assembly; the right to keep and bear arms; freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, security in personal effects, and freedom from warrants issued without probable cause; indictment by a grand jury for any capital or "infamous crime"; guarantee of a speedy, public trial with an impartial jury; and prohibition of double jeopardy.
Washington refused to serve more than two terms—setting a precedent—and in his famous farewell address, he extolled the benefits of federal government and importance of ethics and morality while warning against foreign alliances and the formation of political parties. During the Revolutionary and Early Republican periods of American history, many commentators compared Washington with the Roman aristocrat and statesman Cincinnatus. The comparison arose as Washington, like Cincinnatus, remained in command of the Continental Army only until the British had been defeated. Thereafter, instead of seeking great political power, he returned as quickly as possible to cultivating his lands.
John Adams (1735 – July 4, 1826), a Federalist, defeated Jefferson in the 1796 election. He was an American Founding Father, a statesman, diplomat, and a leading advocate of American independence from Great Britain. Well educated, he was an Enlightenment political theorist who promoted republicanism, as well as a strong central government, and wrote prolifically about his often seminal ideas, both in published works and in letters to his wife and key adviser Abigail Adams, as well as to other Founding Fathers. Adams was a lifelong opponent of slavery, having never bought a slave. while Adams shared many perspectives with deists, "Adams clearly was not a deist. Deism rejected any and all supernatural activity and intervention by God; consequently, deists did not believe in miracles or God's providence....Adams, however, did believe in miracles, providence, and, to a certain extent, the Bible as revelation.". In 1796, Adams denounced political opponent Thomas Paine's Deistic criticisms of Christianity in The Age of Reason, saying, "The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity and humanity, let the Blackguard Paine say what he will."
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1823) defeated John Adams for the presidency in the 1800 election. Jefferson's major achievement as president was the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which provided U.S. settlers with vast potential for expansion west of the Mississippi River. Napoleon needed money and armies for his original French empire so he offered the territory for 15 million $ and the US accepted. Napoleon Bonaparte had gained Louisiana for French ownership from Spain in 1800 under the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso , after being a Spanish terrority since 1762. The latter treaty was clearly beneficial for France.
The Republicans under Jefferson worked to form a national republic and were strongly influenced by the 18th-century British opposition writers of the Whig Party, which believed in small and limited government. He had not much liked the Constitution as it stood, regarding it as "a bad edition of a Polish King". He sought to make the central government's authority resemble that which had existed under the Articles of Confederation. Jefferson's political ideals were also greatly influenced by the writings of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton whom he considered the three greatest men that ever lived. A proper government, for Jefferson, is one that not only prohibits individuals in society from infringing on the liberty of other individuals, but also restrains itself from diminishing individual liberty as a protection against tyranny from the majority. Jefferson believed that public education and a free press were essential to a democratic nation: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be....The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe". Jefferson believed deeply in republicanism and argued it should be based on the independent yeoman farmer and planter; he distrusted cities, factories and banks. Jefferson expressed a dislike and distrust for banks and bankers and opposed borrowing from them because he believed it created long-term debt as well as monopolies, and inclined the people to dangerous speculation, as opposed to productive labor on the farm. He once argued that each generation should pay back its debt within 19 years, and not impose a long-term debt on subsequent generations. Jefferson lived in a Virginia planter society economically dependent on slavery. Over the course of his life he owned some 600 slaves, buying and selling them as required, maintaining about 130 at any one time. Of the religion of Christianity he said that it possessed, "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man". Jefferson's legacy as a champion of Enlightenment ideals has been challenged by various modern historians, who find his continued ownership of hundreds of slaves at Monticello to be in conflict with his stated views on freedom and the equality of men.
War of 1812
Americans were increasingly angry at the British violation of American ships' neutral rights in order to hurt France, the impressment (seizure) of 10,000 American sailors needed by the Royal Navy to fight Napoleon, and British support for hostile Indians attacking American settlers in the Midwest. They may also have desired to annex all or part of British North America. Despite strong opposition from the Northeast, especially from Federalists who did not want to disrupt trade with Britain, Congress declared war in June 18, 1812. The war was frustrating for both sides. Both sides tried to invade the other and were repulsed. The American high command remained incompetent until the last year. The American militia proved ineffective because the soldiers were reluctant to leave home and efforts to invade Canada repeatedly failed. The British blockade ruined American commerce, bankrupted the Treasury, and further angered New Englanders, who smuggled supplies to Britain. The British raided and burned Washington, but were repelled at Baltimore in 1814—where the "Star Spangled Banner" was written to celebrate the American success. In upstate New York a major British invasion of New York State was turned back. Finally in early 1815 Andrew Jackson decisively defeated a major British invasion at the Battle of New Orleans, making him the most famous war hero.
"The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United States. The lyrics come from "Defence of Fort M'Henry",a poem written in 1814 by the 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in the Chesapeake Bay during the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. "The Star-Spangled Banner" was recognized for official use by the Navy in 1889, and by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and was made the national anthem by a congressional resolution on March 3, 1931.
The Anthem starts like this:
O say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
With Napoleon (apparently) gone, the causes of the war had evaporated and both sides agreed to a peace that left the prewar boundaries intact. Americans claimed victory in February 18, 1815 as news came almost simultaneously of Jackson's victory of New Orleans and the peace treaty that left the prewar boundaries in place. Americans swelled with pride at success in the "second war of independence". The Indians were the big losers; they never gained the independent nationhood Britain had promised and no longer posed a serious threat as settlers poured into the Midwest.
The Era of Good feelings
With peace finally established, Americans believed they had secured a solid independence from Britain. The Federalist Party, which had called for secession over the war at the Hartford Convention, dissolved and disappeared from politics. The Democratic-Republican Party was nominally dominant, but in practice it was inactive at the national level and in most states.With Europe finally at peace, the Era of Good Feelings described the prosperity and relatively equable political environment. Some political contention continued, for instance, in 1816, two-thirds of the incumbents in Congress were defeated for re-election after having voted to increase their salary. President James Madison (1751 - 1836) approved a Hamiltonian national bank, an effective taxation system based on tariffs, a standing professional military, and the internal improvements championed by Henry Clay under his American System. The finest part of Madison's performance as president was his concern for the preserving of the Constitution.
Spanish presence was minor during that empire's second rule over Florida. The region became a haven for escaped slaves and a base for Indian attacks against the U.S., and the U.S. demanded Spain reform. There were almost no Spanish settlers and only a few soldiers. Seminole Indians based in East Florida began raiding Georgia settlements, and offering havens for runaway slaves. The United States Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory, including the 1817–1818 campaign against the Seminole Indians by Andrew Jackson that became known as the First Seminole War. The United States now effectively controlled East Florida. Florida had become a burden to Spain, which could not afford to send settlers or garrisons. Madrid therefore decided to cede the territory to the United States through the Adams-Onís Treaty, which took effect in 1821.
James Monroe (1758 – 1831) was the fifth President of the United States (1817–1825). Monroe was the last president who was a Founding Father of the United States. Facing little opposition from the fractured Federalist Party, Monroe was easily elected president in 1816. In 1819, by terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty, Spain ceded Florida to the United States in exchange for $5 million and the American renunciation of any claims on Texas that they might have from the Louisiana Purchase. The free blacks and Indian slaves, Black Seminoles, living near St. Augustine, fled to Havana, Cuba to avoid coming under US control. Some Seminole also abandoned their settlements and moved further south. The capital of Liberia was named Monrovia after President Monroe.
The Monroe Doctrine, expressed in 1823, proclaimed the United States' opinion that European powers should no longer colonize or interfere in the Americas. This was a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States. The Monroe Doctrine was adopted in response to American and British fears over Russian and French expansion into the Western Hemisphere.
They split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe led to a split of the former Jeffersonian party into factions: The party faction that supported many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, became the Democratic Party. The Democrats represented a wide range of views but shared a fundamental commitment to the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society. They viewed the central government as the enemy of individual liberty. The 1824 "corrupt bargain" had strengthened their suspicion of Washington politics....Jacksonians feared the concentration of economic and political power. They believed that government intervention in the economy benefited special-interest groups and created corporate monopolies that favored the rich. They sought to restore the independence of the individual--the artisan and the ordinary farmer--by ending federal support of banks and corporations and restricting the use of paper currency, which they distrusted. Democrats tended to oppose programs like educational reform mid the establishment of a public education system. They believed, for instance, that public schools restricted individual liberty by interfering with parental responsibility and undermined freedom of religion by replacing church schools.
John Quincy Adams (1767 – 1848) was an American statesman who served as the sixth President of the United States from 1825 to 1829. He also served as a diplomat, a Senator and member of the House of Representatives. He was a member of the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, and later Anti-Masonic and Whig parties (the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the Presidency and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism). Adams was the son of former President John Adams and Abigail Adams. Adams is best known as a diplomat who shaped America's foreign policy in line with his ardently nationalist commitment to America's republican values. More recently, he has been portrayed as the exemplar and moral leader in an era of modernization. Adams authored what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which was introduced on December 2, 1823. It stated that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention. Though he was always quite hostile to slavery, nearly to be point of being an abolitionist (although he doubted the abolitionists could successfully end slavery), he grew even more hostile to it later in life. Before 1820, Adams was best known as an exponent of American nationalism. Later in life, especially after his election to the House, he was famous as the most prominent national leader opposing slavery. In 1841, Adams had the case of a lifetime, representing the defendants in United States v. The Amistad Africans in the Supreme Court of the United States. He successfully argued that the Africans, who had seized control of a Spanish ship on which they were being transported illegally as slaves, should not be extradited or deported to Cuba but should be considered free. Under President Martin Van Buren, the government argued the Africans should be deported for having mutinied and killed officers on the ship. Adams won their freedom, with the chance to stay in the United States or return to Africa. Adams made the argument because the U.S. had prohibited the international slave trade, although it allowed internal slavery. He never billed for his services in the Amistad case. The speech was directed not only at the justices of this Supreme Court hearing the case, but also to the broad national audience he instructed in the evils of slavery.
In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to negotiate treaties that exchanged Native American tribal lands in the eastern states for lands west of the Mississippi River. Its goal was primarily to remove Native Americans, including the Five Civilized Tribes, from the American Southeast; they occupied land that settlers wanted. Thousands of deaths resulted from the relocations, as seen in the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Many of the Seminole Indians in Florida refused to move west; they fought the Army for years in the Seminole Wars.
The American colonies and the new nation grew very rapidly in population and area, as pioneers pushed the frontier of settlement west. From the early 1830s to 1869, the Oregon Trail and its many offshoots were used by over 300,000 settlers. '49ers (in the California Gold Rush), ranchers, farmers, and entrepreneurs and their families headed to California, Oregon, and other points in the far west. Wagon-trains took five or six months on foot; after 1869, the trip took 6 days by rail.
The Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) severed control that Spain had exercised on its North American territories, and the new country of Mexico was formed from much of the individual territory that had comprised New Spain. On October 4, 1824, Mexico adopted a new constitution which defined the country as a federal republic with nineteen states and four territories. Texas was very sparsely populated.
Long-running political and cultural clashes between the Mexican government and American settlers in Texas intensified when conservative forces took control in Mexico and enacted the Siete Leyes (Seven Laws) of 1835, which replaced the Constitution of 1824 and its federal system with the 1835 Constitution of Mexico and a provisional centralized government. For example the 31 articles of the sixth respective Law replaced the federal republic's "states" with centralized "departments", fashioned after the French model, whose governors and legislators were designated by the President. The immigrants from the United States were accustomed to a federalist government and to extensive individual rights, and they were quite vocal in their displeasure at Mexico's shift towards centralism. On October 9, 1835, in the early days of the Texas Revolution, a group of Texans attacked the presidio "La Bahia" in Goliad in the "Battle of Goliad". The Mexican garrison quickly surrendered, leaving the Texans in control of the fort. The first declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas was signed here on December 20, 1835. Afterwards the Texians systematically defeated the Mexican troops already stationed in Texas. The last group of Mexican soldiers in the region—commanded by Santa Anna's brother-in-law, General Martín Perfecto de Cos—surrendered on December 9 following the siege of Béxar. By this point, the Texian Army was dominated by very recent arrivals to the region, primarily adventurers from the United States. Many Texas settlers, unprepared for a long campaign, had returned home. When Mexican troops departed San Antonio de Béxar (now San Antonio, Texas, USA) Texian soldiers established a garrison at the Alamo Mission, a former Spanish religious outpost which had been converted to a makeshift fort by the recently expelled Mexican Army. The Battle of the Alamo (February 23 – March 6, 1836) was a pivotal event in the Texas Revolution. Following a 13-day siege, Mexican troops under President General Antonio López de Santa Anna launched an assault on the Alamo Mission near San Antonio de Béxar (modern-day San Antonio, Texas, United States). All of the Texian defenders were killed. Santa Anna's cruelty during the battle inspired many Texians—both Texas settlers and adventurers from the United States—to join the Texian Army. Texans held the Goliad area until March 1836, when their garrison under Colonel James Fannin was defeated at the nearby Battle of Coleto. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, then President of Mexico, ordered that all survivors were to be executed. On Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, in what was later called the Goliad Massacre, 303 were marched out of the fort to be executed, 39 were executed inside the presidio (20 prisoners were spared because they were either physicians or medical attendants); 342 men were killed and 28 escaped... Buoyed by a desire for revenge, the Texians defeated the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, on April 21, 1836, ending the revolution. During the fighting, many of the Texian soldiers repeatedly cried "Remember the Alamo!" "Remember the Goliad" . Santa Anna was captured the following day, and reportedly told Houston: "That man may consider himself born to no common destiny who has conquered the Napoleon of the West. And now it remains for him to be generous to the vanquished." Houston replied, "You should have remembered that at the Alamo". Santa Anna was forced to order his troops out of Texas, ending Mexican control of the province and giving some legitimacy to the new republic.
On February 28, 1845, the U.S. Congress passed narrowly a bill that authorized the United States to annex the Republic of Texas if it so voted. The legislation set the date for annexation for December 29 of the same year. On October 13 of the same year, a majority of voters in Texas approved a proposed constitution that specifically endorsed slavery and the slave trade. This constitution was later accepted by the U.S. Congress, making Texas a U.S. state on the same day annexation took effect (therefore bypassing a territorial phase). Texas is nicknamed the Lone Star State to signify Texas as a former independent republic and as a reminder of the state's struggle for independence from Mexico. But the Mexican government had long warned that annexation would mean war with the United States...
The U.S. army, using regulars and large numbers of volunteers, won the Mexican-American War (1846–48). The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made peace; Mexico recognized the annexation of Texas and ceded its claims in the Southwest (especially California and New Mexico). The annexed territories, although comparable in size to Western Europe, were sparsely populated. The lands contained about 14,000 people in Alta California and fewer than 60,000 in Nuevo México. The American settlers surging into the newly conquered Southwest were openly contemptuous of Mexican law (a civil law system based on the law of Spain) as alien and inferior and disposed of it by enacting reception statutes at the first available opportunity. However, they recognized the value of a few aspects of Mexican law and carried them over into their new legal systems. For example, most of the southwestern states adopted community property marital property systems.
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information about gold in California were residents of Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), western Mexico, and Central America. They were the first to go there in late 1848. All told, the news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. California's name became indelibly connected with the Gold Rush, and fast success in a new world became known as the "California Dream." California was perceived as a place of new beginnings, where great wealth could reward hard work and good luck.
The central issue after 1848 was the expansion of slavery, pitting the anti-slavery elements that were a majority in the North, against the pro-slavery elements that overwhelmingly dominated the white South.
Antislavery forces rose in anger and alarm, forming the Republican Party (aka the GOP - "Grand Old Party"). By the late 1850s the young Republican Party dominated nearly all northern states and thus the electoral college, and insisted that slavery would never be allowed to expand (and thus would slowly die out). The southern slave societies had become wealthy based on their cotton and other commodity production, and some particularly profited from the internal slave trade. Northern cities such as Boston and New York, and regional industries, were tied economically to slavery by banking, shipping, and manufacturing, including textile mills. By 1860, there were four million slaves in the South, nearly eight times as many as the total slaves nationwide in 1790.
American civil war
The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States, or a state-based property system protected by the Constitution. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment — to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. To slave holding interests in the South, this strategy was perceived as infringing upon their Constitutional right.
Antislavery Congressmen argued that the language of the Declaration indicated that the Founding Fathers of the United States had been opposed to slavery in principle, and so new slave states should not be added to the country. Proslavery Congressmen, led by Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, argued that since the Declaration was not a part of the Constitution, it had no relevance to the question.
In his October 1854 Peoria speech, Republican congressman Abraham Lincoln said:
Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a "sacred right of self-government. ... Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. ... Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. ... If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union: but we shall have saved it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
The meaning of the Declaration was a recurring topic in the famed debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858. Douglas argued that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration referred to white men only. The purpose of the Declaration, he said, had simply been to justify the independence of the United States, and not to proclaim the equality of any "inferior or degraded race". Lincoln, however, thought that the language of the Declaration was deliberately universal, setting a high moral standard for which the American republic should aspire. "I had thought the Declaration contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere", he said
As early as the 1850s, a time when most political rhetoric focused on the sanctity of the Constitution, Lincoln redirected emphasis to the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of American political values—what he called the "sheet anchor" of republicanism. The Declaration's emphasis on freedom and equality for all, in contrast to the Constitution's tolerance of slavery, shifted the debate. As Diggins concludes regarding the highly influential Cooper Union speech of early 1860, "Lincoln presented Americans a theory of history that offers a profound contribution to the theory and destiny of republicanism itself.
After Republican Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) won the 1860 election, seven Southern states seceded from the union and set up a new nation, the Confederate States of America, on February 8, 1861. It attacked Fort Sumter, a U.S. Army fort in South Carolina, thus igniting the war. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In response to the attack, on April 15, Lincoln called on the states to send detachments totaling 75,000 troops to recapture forts, protect the capital, and "preserve the Union", which in his view still existed intact despite the actions of the seceding states:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that".
After 4 years of bloody combat that left over 1,030,000 casualties (with 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead) and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing civil rights to the freed slaves began. Based on 1860 census figures, about 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% from the North and 18% from the South, establishing the American Civil War as the deadliest war in American history. Its legacy includes ending slavery in the United States, restoring the Union, and strengthening the role of the federal government.
The wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5 million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived; they were nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the border states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied prior to the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on December 18, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.
Many scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable long-term advantage over the Confederacy in terms of industrial strength and population. Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. Civil War historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly: "I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back ... If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that War"
The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the best-known in American history. It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, while attending the play, Our American Cousin, at Ford's Theatre as the American Civil War was drawing to a close. The assassination of Lincoln was planned and carried out by the well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, as part of a larger conspiracy in a bid to revive the Confederate cause. John Wilkes Booth wrote in his diary that he shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" before shooting President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, in part because of the association with the assassination of Caesar. The Latin phrase means "thus always to tyrants". It is sometimes mistranslated as "death to tyrants" or "down with the tyrant". The full quotation is Sic semper evello mortem tyrannis (literally: "Thus always I eradicate tyrants' lives") is often said to have originated with Marcus Junius Brutus during the assassination of Julius Caesar, but according to Plutarch, Brutus either did not have a chance to say anything, or if he did, no one heard what was said. The phrase was recommended by George Mason to the Virginia Convention in 1776, as part of the commonwealth's seal. The Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia shows Virtue, spear in hand, with her foot on the prostrate form of Tyranny, whose crown lies nearby.
It is widely believed that when he was president, Lincoln might have known of his assassination before he died. On the day of the assassination, Lincoln had told his bodyguard, William H. Crook, that he had been having dreams of himself being assassinated for three straight nights. President Lincoln's assassination made him a national martyr and endowed him with a recognition of mythic proportion. Lincoln was viewed by abolitionists as a champion for human liberty. Republicans linked Lincoln's name to their party. Many, though not all, in the South considered Lincoln as a man of outstanding ability.
The Recontruction era
The Reconstruction Amendments are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted between 1865 and 1870, the five years immediately following the Civil War. The amendments were important in implementing the Reconstruction of the American South after the war. Their proponents saw them as transforming the United States from a country that was (in Abraham Lincoln's words) "half slave and half free" to one in which the constitutionally guaranteed "blessings of liberty" would be extended to the entire populace, including the former slaves and their descendants. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified in 1865. The 14th Amendment was proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, guaranteeing United States citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and granting them federal civil rights. The 15th Amendment, proposed in late February 1869 and passed in early February 1870, decreed that the right to vote could not be denied because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". The amendment did not declare the vote an unconditional right; it prohibited these types of discrimination. States would still determine voter registration and electoral laws.From 1890 to 1910, most black voters in the South were effectively disfranchised by new constitutions and laws incorporating such obstacles as poll taxes and discriminatory literacy tests, from which white voters were exempted by grandfather clauses. A system of whites-only primaries and violent intimidation by white groups also suppressed black participation.
In ten states, coalitions of freedmen, recent black and white arrivals from the North (carpetbaggers), and white Southerners who supported Reconstruction (scalawags) cooperated to form Republican biracial state governments. A carpetbagger was a Northerner (Yankee) who moved to the South after the U.S. Civil War, especially during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877), in order to profit from the instability and power vacuum that existed at this time.The term carpetbagger was a pejorative term referring to the carpet bags (a fashionable form of luggage at the time) which many of these newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. The term is still used today to refer to an outsider perceived as using manipulation or fraud to obtain an objective.
A Republican coalition came to power in nearly all the southern states and set out to transform the society by setting up a free labor economy, using the U.S. Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. The Bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen, negotiated labor contracts, and set up schools and even churches for them.
The Lost Cause is a regional American literary movement seeking to reconcile the traditionalist white society of the antebellum South that they admire, to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865. It forms an important minority viewpoint among the ways to commemorate the war. Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South's superior military skill and courage. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life. The Lost Cause view reached tens of millions of Americans in the best-selling 1936 novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and the Oscar-winning 1939 film. Helen Taylor argues that "Gone with the Wind has almost certainly done its ideological work. It has sealed in popular imaginations a fascinated nostalgia for the glamorous southern plantation house and ordered hierarchical society in which slaves are 'family,' and there is a mystical bond between the landowner and the rich soil those slaves work for him. It has spoken eloquently-albeit from an elitist perspective-of the grand themes (war, love, death, conflicts of race, class, gender, and generation) that have crossed continents and cultures".
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) emerged in 1867 as a white-supremacist organization opposed to black civil rights and Republican rule. It was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six veterans of the Confederate Army. The name is probably derived from the Greek word kuklos which means circle, suggesting a circle or band of brothers. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact. In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization". It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina. Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan's costume for anonymity, to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence.
White Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers", regained control state by state, sometimes using fraud and violence to control state elections. A deep national economic depression following the Panic of 1873 led to major Democratic gains in the North, the collapse of many railroad schemes in the South, and a growing sense of frustration in the North.
Reconstruction ended after the disputed 1876 election between Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes and Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden. With a compromise Hayes won the election, the federal government withdrew its troops from the South, and Southern Democrats re-entered the national political scene. After 1890 southern states effectively disfranchised black voters. Blacks were segregated in public places and remained second class citizens in a system known as Jim Crow until the successes of the Civil Rights movement in 1964-65.
The West and the Gilded Age
The latter half of the nineteenth century was marked by the United States' development and settlement of the West, first by wagon trains and then aided by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and frequent wars with Native Americans as settlers encroached on their traditional lands. Gradually the US purchased their lands and extinguished their claims, forcing most tribes onto restricted reservations.
The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871. The fire killed up to 300 people, destroyed roughly 3.3 square miles (9 km2) of Chicago, Illinois, and left more than 100,000 residents homeless.Though the fire was one of the largest U.S. disasters of the 19th century, and destroyed much of the city's central business district, Chicago was rebuilt and continued to grow as one of the most populous and economically important American cities.
By the late 19th century there had been a dramatic expansion of American wealth and prosperity and Financiers and industrialists such as J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller began to amass vast fortunes for which many US observers were concerned that the nation was losing its pioneering egalitarian spirit. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry, and along with other key contemporary industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, defined the structure of modern philanthropy. In 1870, he co-founded Standard Oil Company and actively ran it until he officially retired in 1897. By the time of his death in 1937, Rockefeller's remaining fortune, largely tied up in permanent family trusts, was estimated at $1.4 billion, while the total national GDP was $92 billion. He managed to control 85% of the total petrol barrels of US. According to some methods of wealth calculation, Rockefeller's net worth over the last decades of his life would easily place him as the wealthiest known person in recent history. As a percentage of the United States' GDP, no other American fortune — including those of Bill Gates or Sam Walton — would even come close. Rockefeller, at the age of 86, penned the following words to sum up his life:
I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play—
I dropped the worry on the way—
And God was good to me everyday.
The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that triggered a depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 until 1879, and even longer in some countries. Then the Democrats regained control of the house for first time since the Civil War. By 1877, the Panic of 1873 had turned into full-fledged depression. A quarter of the railroads were out of business, and unemployment was 15%. Many who still had jobs worked half the year or less. Looking for someone to blame, many Americans pointed the finger at the new breed of foreigner. Although Irish and English still flooded in between 1870 and 1890, neither group equaled the 2 million German immigrants during that period. The America's first socialist party, the Workingmen's Party, had 3000 members, mostly Germans.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived. Mark Twain was was an American author and humorist.He was a freemason. Although Twain was a Presbyterian, he was sometimes critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life. Those who knew Twain well late in life recount that he dwelt on the subject of the afterlife, his daughter Clara saying: "Sometimes he believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond".
In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) invented the phonograph. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey. Although Edison obtained a patent for the phonograph in 1878, he did little to develop it until Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter produced a phonograph-like device in the 1880s that used wax-coated cardboard cylinders. Edison was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. Edison was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents was the widespread impact of his inventions: electric light and power utilities, sound recording, and motion pictures all established major new industries world-wide. Edison's inventions contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications Edison was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. In an October 2, 1910, interview in the New York Times Magazine, Edison stated: "Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions". He clarified himself in a private letter: "You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made". He also stated, "I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt."
The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in the middle of New York Harbor, in Manhattan, New York City. The statue, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886, was a gift to the United States from the people of France. The statue is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue is an icon of freedom and of the United States: a welcoming signal to immigrants arriving from abroad.
A majority of the surviving Native American Nez Perce were forced to surrender against the US Army on October 5, 1877, after the Battle of the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana, 40 miles (64 km) from the Canadian border. Chief Joseph surrendered to General Oliver O. Howard of the U.S. Cavalry. During the surrender negotiations, Chief Joseph sent a message, usually described as a speech, to the US soldiers. It has become renowned as one of the greatest American speeches: "...Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." The route of the Nez Perce flight is preserved by the Nez Perce National Historic Trail.
President Hayes signed the Exclusion Treaty with China in 1880. Congress ended Chinese immigrations two years later, the first significant restriction on immigration in America history. The reason is that Chinese Cheap labor was seen as a curse to the country and a menace to our liberties and the institutions of our country and should be restricted and forever abolished. The act was initially intended to last for 10 years, but was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902. It was finally repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943.
On the morning of July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was on his way to his alma mater, Williams College, where he was scheduled to deliver a speech. As the President was walking through the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad in Washington at 9:30 a.m., he was shot twice from behind, once across the arm and once in the back, by an assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, a rejected and disillusioned Federal office seeker. Secretary Blaine had denied Guiteau, having no qualifications, a Federal appointment as the United States consul in Paris and had banned him from the White House for his aggressive behavior in seeking an appointment. Guiteau believed as well that a short speech he had partially presented before a small group of people during the presidential election campaign was in fact the cause of Garfield's election to the presidency and which, therefore, justified his appointment. The president died two months later due to the injuries.
A severe nationwide depression broke out in 1893; it was called the Panic of 1893 and impacted farmers, workers, and businessmen who saw prices, wages, and profits fall. Many railroads went bankrupt. The resultant political reaction fell on the Democratic Party, whose leader President Grover Cleveland shouldered much of the blame. Labor unrest involved numerous strikes, most notably the violent Pullman Strike of 1894, which was shut down by federal troops under Cleveland's orders. The Populist Party gained strength among cotton and wheat farmers, as well as coal miners, but was overtaken by the even more popular Free Silver movement, which demanded using silver to enlarge the money supply, leading to inflation that the silverites promised would end the depression. The financial, railroad, and business communities fought back hard, arguing that only the gold standard would save the economy. In the most intense election in the nation's history, conservative Republican William McKinley defeated silverite William Jennings Bryan, who ran on the Democratic, Populist, and Silver Republican tickets. Bryan swept the South and West, but McKinley ran up landslides among the middle class, industrial workers, cities, and among upscale farmers in the Midwest.
In 1886, after a lengthy pursuit, prominent leader of the Bedonkohe Apache Geronimo (1829 - 1909) surrendered to Texan faux-gubernatorial authorities as a prisoner of war. At an old age, he became a celebrity, appearing at fairs, but he was never allowed to return to the land of his birth. After a Mexican attack on his tribe, where soldiers killed his mother, wife, and his three children in 1858, Geronimo joined a number of revenge attacks against the Mexicans. Thanks to a 1939 movie about Geronimo, US paratroopers traditionally shout "Geronimo" to show they have no fear of jumping out of an airplane
In 1886 when Atlanta and Fulton County passed prohibition legislation John Pemberton responded by developing Coca-Cola, essentially a nonalcoholic version of French Wine Coca. Originally Pemberton had invented in the late 19th century as a patent medicine for five cents a glass at soda fountains, which were popular in the United States at the time due to the belief that carbonated water was good for the health. Coca-Cola once contained an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass. In 1903, it was removed. The exact formula of Coca-Cola's natural flavorings (but not its other ingredients, which are listed on the side of the bottle or can) is a trade secret. The original copy of the formula was held in SunTrust Bank's main vault in Atlanta for 86 years. The company produces concentrate, which is then sold to licensed Coca-Cola bottlers throughout the world.
Pepsi (stylized in lowercase as pepsi, formerly stylized in uppercase as PEPSI) is a carbonated soft drink that is produced and manufactured by PepsiCo. Created and developed in 1893 and introduced as Brad's Drink, it was renamed as Pepsi-Cola on August 28, 1898, then to Pepsi in 1961. On three separate occasions between 1922 and 1933, The Coca-Cola Company was offered the opportunity to purchase the Pepsi-Cola company, and it declined on each occasion.
Starting in the early 1880s, Spain had also suppressed an independence movement in the Philippines, which was intensifying, and Spain was now fighting two wars, which were putting a heavy burden on its economy. But it turned down offers in secret negotiations by the US in 1896, which was closely following the war, to buy Cuba from Spain. The Cuban struggle for independence had captured the American imagination for years, and newspapers had been agitating for intervention with sensational stories of Spanish atrocities against the native Cuban population, intentionally sensationalized and exaggerated. In January 1898, a riot by Cuban Spanish loyalists against the new autonomous government broke out in Havana, leading to the destruction of the printing presses of four local newspapers for publishing articles critical of Spanish Army atrocities. The US Consul-General cabled Washington with fears for the lives of Americans living in Havana. In response, the battleship USS Maine was sent to Havana in the last week of January. On February 15, 1898, the Maine was rocked by an explosion, killing 258 of the crew (there were only 89 survivors) and sinking the ship in the harbour. The New York Journal and New York World, owned respectively by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, gave the Maine intense press coverage, but employed tactics that would later be labeled "yellow journalism." Both papers exaggerated and distorted any information they could attain, sometimes even fabricating "news" when none that fitted their agenda was available. The World, while overall not as lurid or shrill in tone as the Journal, nevertheless indulged in similar theatrics, insisting continually that the Maine had been bombed or mined. Privately, Pulitzer believed that "nobody outside a lunatic asylum" really believed that Spain sanctioned the Maine's destruction. Nevertheless, this did not stop the World from insisting that the only "atonement" Spain could offer the U.S. for the loss of ship and life, was the granting of complete Cuban independence. Nor did it stop the paper from accusing Spain of "treachery, willingness, or laxness" for failing to ensure the safety of Havana Harbor. The American public, already agitated over reported Spanish atrocities in Cuba, was driven to increased hysteria. The cause of the explosion has not been clearly established to this day, but the incident was presented as a casus belli by the American media to promote a war with Spain. The U.S. congress formally declared war on April 25. The Senate and Congress passed the amendment April 19, House Speaker McKinley signed the joint resolution on April 20, and the ultimatum was forwarded to Spain. War was declared on April 20/21, 1898. At the Treaty of Paris peace conference the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Cuba became an independent country, under close American tutelage. Although the war itself was widely popular, the peace terms proved controversial. William Jennings Bryan led his Democratic Party in opposition to control of the Philippines, which he denounced as imperialism unbecoming to American democracy. President William McKinley defended the acquisition and was riding high as the nation had returned to prosperity and felt triumphant in the war. He even affirmed about a long Catholic country as Philippines: "there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died". McKinley easily defeated Bryan in a rematch in the 1900 presidential election. Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis argues that Spanish–American War expansionism was a short-lived imperialistic impulse and "a great aberration in American history", a very different form of territorial growth than that of earlier American history. The territorial expansion of 1898 is often seen by historians as the beginning of American empire.
The loss of Cuba caused a national trauma because of the affinity of peninsular Spaniards with Cuba, which was seen as another province of Spain rather than as a colony. Culturally, a new wave called the Generation of '98 originated as a response to this trauma, marking a renaissance in Spanish culture. Economically, the war benefited Spain, because after the war large sums of capital held by Spaniards in Cuba and America were returned to the peninsula and invested in Spain. This massive flow of capital (equivalent to 25% of the gross domestic product of one year) helped to develop the large modern firms in Spain in the steel, chemical, financial, mechanical, textile, shipyard, and electrical power industries. However, the political consequences were serious. The defeat in the war began the weakening of the fragile political stability that had been established earlier by the rule of Alfonso XII.
The 25th President of the United States, William McKinley, was shot and fatally wounded on September 6, 1901, inside the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was shaking hands with the public when he was shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. The President died on September 14 from gangrene caused by the bullet wounds.
In 1888, Eastman Kodak perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film.
He made celluloid film commercially available in 1889. In his final two years, Eastman was in intense pain caused by a disorder affecting his spine. He had trouble standing, and his walk became a slow shuffle.
On March 14, 1932, Eastman committed suicide with a single gunshot through the heart, leaving a note which read, "My work is done – Why wait? GE". His funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Rochester; he was buried on the grounds of the company he founded at Kodak Park in Rochester, New York.
By 1890 American industrial production and per capita income exceeded those of all other world nations. In response to heavy debts and decreasing farm prices, wheat and cotton farmers joined the Populist Party. An unprecedented wave of immigration from Europe served to both provide the labor for American industry and create diverse communities in previously undeveloped areas. From 1880 to 1914, peak years of immigration, more than 22 million people migrated to the United States. Most were unskilled workers who quickly found jobs in mines, mills, factories. Many immigrants were craftsmen (especially from Britain and Germany) bringing human skills, and others were farmers (especially from Germany and Scandinavia) who purchased inexpensive land on the Prairies from railroads who sent agents to Europe. Poverty, growing inequality and dangerous working conditions, along with socialist and anarchist ideas diffusing from European immigrants, led to the rise of the labor movement, which often included violent strikes.
20th century
In 1901 America flooded the Philippines with troops, devasted the countryside, and captured rebel Aguinaldo. U.S. forces substantially crushed the rebellion the next year, at the cost of 4380 American lives and by killing over 200.000 Filipinos.
In 1903 Henry Ford founded in Detroit the Ford Motor Company. Ford's manufacturing—and those of automotive pioneers William C. Durant, the Dodge brothers, Packard, and Walter Chrysler—reinforced Detroit's status as the world's automotive capital; it also served to encourage truck manufacturers such as Rapid and Grabowsky. With the factories came high-profile labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor and the United Auto Workers, which initiated strikes and other tactics in support of such things as the 8-hour day/40-hour work week, healthcare benefits, pensions, increased wages and improved working conditions. The labor activism during those years increased influence of union leaders in the city such as Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters and Walter Reuther of the autoworkers.Ford's antisemitic zeal was detailed in a series of writings under his name called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, prompted Hitler to call Ford his “inspiration.” The man responsible for the death of nearly six million Jews kept a life-sized portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 struck San Francisco and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. Devastating fires broke out in the city that lasted for several days. As a result of the quake and fires, about 3,000 people died and over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed. The earthquake and resulting fire are remembered as one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States alongside the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The Progressive Party of 1912 was an American political party formed by President Theodore Roosevelt, after a split in the Republican Party between him and President William Howard Taft.. In every major city and state, and at the national level as well, and in education, medicine, and industry, the progressives called for the modernization and reform of decrepit institutions, the elimination of corruption in politics, and the introduction of efficiency as a criterion for change. Leading politicians from both parties, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, and Robert LaFollette on the Republican side, and William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson on the Democratic side, took up the cause of progressive reform.Significant changes enacted at the national levels included the imposition of an income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment, direct election of Senators with the Seventeenth Amendment, Prohibition with the Eighteenth Amendment, and women's suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However some Progressive also tried to scientifically manage the species, calling for eugenics to cull the "unfit". Between 1907 and 1963, over 60000 Americans were forcibly sterilized under state eugenics laws.
[Theodore "T.R." Roosevelt, Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919) was an American politician, author, naturalist, explorer, and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States.He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the Progressive Party. He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity.Born into a wealthy family in New York City, Roosevelt was a sickly child who suffered from asthma. To overcome his physical weakness, he embraced a strenuous life. He was home-schooled and became an eager student of nature. He attended Harvard University where he studied biology, boxed, and developed an interest in naval affairs.
When his first wife Alice died two days after giving birth in February 1884 (his mother Mittie died of typhoid fever on the same day, at 3:00 am, some eleven hours earlier, in the same house.), he was heartbroken and in despair; he temporarily left politics and became a rancher in the Dakotas. On December 2, 1886, he married his childhood and family friend Edith Kermit Carow.They had five children.
Roosevelt became president of the board of New York City Police Commissioners in 1895 for two years and radically reformed the police force. The New York Police Department (NYPD) was reputed as one of the most corrupt in America. Roosevelt had demonstrated, through his research and writing, a fascination with naval history; President William McKinley, urged by Roosevelt's close friend Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, appointed Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. Roosevelt was instrumental in preparing the Navy for the Spanish–American War. Roosevelt had an analytical mind, even as he was itching for war. He explained his priorities to one of the Navy's planners in late 1897: "I would regard war with Spain from two viewpoints: first, the advisability on the grounds both of humanity and self-interest of interfering on behalf of the Cubans, and of taking one more step toward the complete freeing of America from European dominion; second, the benefit done our people by giving them something to think of which is not material gain, and especially the benefit done our military forces by trying both the Navy and Army in actual practice."
After leaving the Army, Roosevelt discovered New York Republicans needed him because their current governor was tainted by scandal and would probably lose. He campaigned vigorously on his war record winning the 1898 state election by a historical margin of 1%. As Governor, Roosevelt learned much about current economic issues and political techniques that later proved valuable to his presidency. He was exposed to the problems of trusts, monopoly, labor relations, and conservation. Roosevelt anticipated a second term as governor or in the alternative a cabinet post in the War Department; his friends (especially Henry Cabot Lodge) saw that as a dead end. They promoted him for vice president, and no one else of prominence was actively seeking that job. Grass roots opinion in the Party wanted Roosevelt as vice president.
Roosevelt became President after McKinley was assassinated. He was inaugurated at age 42, the youngest person to become president. He attempted to move the GOP toward Progressivism, including trust busting and increased regulation of businesses.His foreign policy focused on the Caribbean, where he built the Panama Canal and guarded its approaches. There were no wars, but his slogan, "speak softly and carry a big stick" was underscored by sending the greatly expanded Navy—the Great White Fleet—on a world tour. He negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1912 He launched the Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party that called for progressive reforms, splitting the Republican vote. Roosevelt then led a major expedition to the Amazon jungles and contracted several illnesses. From 1914 to 1917 he campaigned for American entry into World War I, and reconciled with GOP leadership. He was seen as the front-runner for the GOP nomination in the 1920 election, but his health collapsed and he died in 1919. Historians credit Roosevelt for changing the nation's political system by permanently placing the presidency at center stage and making character as important as the issues. His notable accomplishments include trust busting and conservationism. He is a hero to liberals for his proposals in 1907–12 that presaged the modern welfare state of the New Deal Era, and put the environment on the national agenda (He was the first president to speak out on conservation, and he greatly expanded the system of national parks and national forests). Conservatives admire his "big stick" diplomacy and commitment to military values. However, liberals have criticized him for his interventionist and imperialist approach to nations he considered "uncivilized".
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Prohibition was the outlawing of the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol. Drinking itself was never prohibited. Throughout the Progressive Era, it remained one of the prominent causes associated with Progressivism at the local, state and national level, though support across the full breadth of Progressives was mixed. It pitted the minority urban Catholic population against the larger rural Protestant element. Prohibition remained a major reform movement from the 1840s until the 1920s, when nationwide prohibition went into effect, and was supported by evangelical Protestant churches, especially the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and Congregationalists. Opposition to prohibition was strong in America's urban industrial centers, where a large, immigrant, working-class population generally opposed it, as did Jewish and Catholic religious groups. Liturgical ("high") churches (Catholic, Episcopal, and German Lutheran) opposed prohibition laws because they did not want the government redefining morality to a narrow standard and criminalizing the common liturgical practice of using wine. During the first years of Prohibition, the new federal law was enforced in regions such as the rural South and western states, where it had popular support; however, in large urban cities and in small industrial or mining towns, residents defied or ignored the law. Prohibition became increasingly unpopular during the Great Depression. Some believe that the demand for increased employment and tax revenues during this time brought an end to Prohibition. Others argue it was the result the economic motivations of American businessmen as well as the stress and excesses of the era that kept it from surviving, even under optimal economic conditions. Al Capone was the most notorious gangster of his generation. Born in 1899, Capone settled in Chicago to take over Johnny Torrio's business dealing with outlawed liquor. Within three years, Capone had nearly 700 men at his disposal. As the profits came in, Capone acquired finesse—particularly in the management of politicians. By the middle of the decade, he had gained control of the suburb of Cicero, and had installed his own mayor. Capone's rise to fame did not come without bloodshed. Rival gangs, such as the Gennas and the Aiellos, started wars with Capone, eventually leading to a rash of killings of epic proportions.In 1927, Capone and his gang were pulling in approximately $60 million per year- most of it from beer. Capone not only controlled the sale of liquor to over 10,000 speakeasies, but he also controlled the supply from Canada to Florida. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre became one of the most infamous slaying between rival gangs of the Prohibition era; resulting in the deaths of 7. Capone was imprisoned for tax violations and died January 25, 1947, from a heart attack and pneumonia.
As World War I raged in Europe from 1914, President Woodrow Wilson took full control of foreign policy, declaring neutrality but warning Germany that resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against American ships supplying goods to Allied nations would mean war. Germany decided to take the risk and try to win by cutting off supplies to Britain; the U.S. declared war in April 1917. One of the triggers was the sinking of the British passenger liner RMS Lusitania in 1915 where 128 Americans died. American money, food, and munitions arrived quickly, but troops had to be drafted and trained; by summer 1918 American soldiers under General John J. Pershing arrived at the rate of 10,000 a day, while Germany was unable to replace its losses.
The result was Allied victory in November 1918. The price was the life of 116708 American soldiers. President Wilson demanded Germany depose the Kaiser and accept his terms, the Fourteen Points. Wilson dominated the 1919 Paris Peace Conference but Germany was treated harshly by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) as Wilson put all his hopes in the new League of Nations. The League lasted for 26 years; the United Nations (UN) replaced it after the end of the Second World War on 20 April 1946, and inherited a number of agencies and organisations founded by the League.
The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus. It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population —making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII), creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit — thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu. In US it killed 600000 Americans, the same as the Civil war by 1920.
The 1920s were called the Roaring Twenties due to the great economic prosperity during this period. Jazz became popular among the younger generation, and thus the decade was also called the Jazz Age. During the 1920s, the nation enjoyed widespread prosperity, albeit with a weakness in agriculture. The first decades of the twentieth century also saw the rise of the studio system. MGM, Universal and Warner Brothers all acquired land in Hollywood, which was then a small subdivision known as "Hollywoodland" on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The enormous variety in terrain and the year round sunshine made film making easier and cheaper, as actors, producers, financiers and craftsmen headed to Hollywood. The movies made California even better known, attracting hundreds of thousands of migrants, especially from the Midwest, who loved the mild Mediterranean climate, cheap land, and new jobs. By the 1930s, Hollywood had extended its reach into radio, and by 1950 Southern California had also become a major center of television production, hosting studios for major networks such as NBC and CBS.
In 1924 Congress decided there was not enough prosperity to go around, and sharply restricted immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe. Immigration from China and Japan was banned entirely.
A financial bubble was fueled by an inflated stock market, which later led to the Stock Market Crash on October 29 (the so-called "Black Tuesday"), 1929. This, along with many other economic factors, triggered a worldwide depression known as the Great Depression. During this time, the United States experienced deflation as prices fell, unemployment soared from 3% in 1929 to 25% in 1933, farm prices fell by half, and manufacturing output plunged by one-third. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in 1930 and lasted until the late 1930s or middle 1940s.It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The Great Depression had devastating effects in countries rich and poor. Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%. Unemployment in the U.S. rose to 25%, and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by approximately 60%. Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as cash cropping, mining and logging suffered the most. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. In many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until after the end of World War II.
Mount Rushmore: Doane Robinson, a state historian of South Dakota, wanted in 1923 a monument to be built in South Dakota in order to help the economy of the state by attracting tourism. Robinson asked Danish-American architect and sculptor Gutzon Borglum to sculpt and design the monument. Borglum decided to use Mount Rushmore for the sculpture, since it seemed to be the easiest of the cliffs to work on. Gutzon Borglum, having decided on the location of the sculpture, he decided to make this monument of four Presidents of the United States. He chose the two most famous Presidents in American history, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He chose Thomas Jefferson because Jefferson nearly doubled the size of the United States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase (which included the land that became South Dakota). The last President Borglum chose was Theodore Roosevelt, suggested by President Calvin Coolidge (who insisted that at least there be two Republicans and at least one Democrat represented.) because of Theodore Roosevelt's introduction of the National Park Service. Borglum's original design was a sculpture of the four presidents intended to go down to their waists, but time and money only provided for their heads. Construction began on October 4, 1927 and finished in 1941.
President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964): Before he was forty, Hoover was already a multi-millionaire as an engineer and mining executive. As president (1929-1933) he actively intervened in the economy, advocating and implementing polices that were quite similar to those which his successor Franklin Roosevelt later implemented. There is a myth that persists in spite of the widespread recognition by modern historians that the Hoover presidency was anything but an era of laissez-faire. Among those economic measures that Hoover implemented were new and expanded public works projects which would help curtail unemployment. Also in an attempt to clear out jobs for workers, Hoover ordered Mexican repatriation. The federal government rounded up 500,000 Mexicans and deported them. He tried tax cuts and however He also increased taxes: Hoover raised tariffs, income taxes, estate taxes, corporate taxes, and even slapped a tax on all bank checks.
The Empire State Building is a 103-story skyscraper located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet (380 m), and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 feet (443 m) high. Its name is derived from the nickname for New York, the Empire State. It stood as the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years, from its completion in early 1931 until late 1970.
In 1932, Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt promised "a New Deal for the American people", coining the enduring label for his domestic policies. The desperate economic situation, along with the substantial Democratic victories in the 1932 elections, gave Roosevelt unusual influence over Congress in the "First Hundred Days" of his administration. He used his leverage to win rapid passage of a series of measures to create welfare programs and regulate the banking system, stock market, industry, and agriculture, along with many other government efforts to end the Great Depression and reform the American economy. The New Deal regulated much of the economy, especially the financial sector. It provided relief to the unemployed through numerous programs, such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and (for young men) the Civilian Conservation Corps. Large scale spending projects designed to provide high paying jobs and rebuild the infrastructure were under the purview of the Public Works Administration. Roosevelt turned left in 1935–36, building up labor unions through the Wagner Act. Unions became a powerful element of the merging New Deal Coalition, which won reelection for Roosevelt in 1936, 1940, and 1944 by mobilizing union members, blue collar workers, relief recipients, big city machines, ethnic, and religious groups (especially Catholics and Jews) and the white South, along with blacks in the North (where they could vote). Some of the programs were dropped in the 1940s when the conservatives regained power in Congress through the Conservative Coalition.
Duly chastened by the painful effects of his attempt at balancing the budget, FDR was persuaded to embrace the theories of John Maynard Keynes and called for more deficit spending beginning in 1938 and continuing throughout World War II. His change of heart culminated in his famous speech calling for an Economic Bill of Rights in 1944, in which he said, "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made".
John Maynard Keynes was a British economist whose ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one for him. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments (World War I reparations) being set so high it would traumatise innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit her ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's own economy but that of the wider world. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. Keynes' basic idea was simple: to keep people fully employed, governments have to run deficits when the economy is slowing, as the private sector would not invest enough to keep production at the normal level and bring the economy out of recession. Keynesian economists called on governments during times of economic crisis to pick up the slack by increasing government spending and/or cutting taxes. By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. For the Anglo-American economies, Keynesian economics typically was not officially rejected until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Formal rejection was generally preceded by several years of the adoption of monetarist policies aiming to reduce inflation, which tended to counteract any expansionary fiscal policies that continued to be employed until Keynesianism was formally discarded. In 2008, a rapid shift of opinion took place among many prominent economists in favour of Keynesian stimulus, and, from October onward, policy makers began announcing major stimulus packages, in hopes of heading off the possibility of a global depression. By early 2009 there was widespread acceptance among the world's economic policy makers about the need for fiscal stimulus. Yet by late 2009 the consensus among economists began to break down, and in 2010 with a depression averted but unemployment in many countries still high, policy makers generally decided against further fiscal stimulus. With the end of the brief consensus for Keynesian policies, but with the neoliberal policies that characterised the Washington Consensus era still viewed by many as discredited, several commentators have predicted that the Macroeconomic domain will see a return to ideological struggles. In 2009 more than 300 professional economists, led by three Nobel Laureates in economics, James M. Buchanan, Edward C. Prescott, and Vernon L. Smith, signed a statement against more government spending, arguing that "Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth."
The Warner animation division was founded in 1933 as Leon Schlesinger Productions, an independent company which produced the popular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated short. Warner Bros was one of the most successful animation studios in American media history. The Characters featured in these cartoons, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner, are among the most famous and recognizable characters in the world.
The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located adjacent to the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers and 61 crewmen), there were 35 fatalities. There was also one death of a ground crewman.
In the Depression years, the United States remained focused on domestic concerns while democracy declined across the world and many countries fell under the control of dictators. Imperial Japan asserted dominance in East Asia and in the Pacific. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy militarized to and threatened conquests, while Britain and France attempted appeasement to avert another war in Europe. US legislation in the Neutrality Acts sought to avoid foreign conflicts; however, policy clashed with increasing anti-Nazi feelings following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 that started World War II. Roosevelt positioned the US as the "Arsenal of Democracy", pledging full-scale financial and munitions support for the Allies—but no military personnel. Japan tried to neutralize America's power in the Pacific by attacking Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which catalyzed American support to enter the war and seek revenge. The Allies—the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union, as well as China, Canada and other countries—fought the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Allies saw Germany as the main threat and gave highest priority to Europe. The US dominated the war against Japan and stopped Japanese expansion in the Pacific in 1942. After losing Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines to the Japanese, and drawing the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 1942), the American Navy inflicted a decisive blow at Midway (June 1942). American ground forces assisted in the North African Campaign that eventually concluded with the collapse of Mussolini's fascist government in 1943, as Italy switched to the Allied side. A more significant European front was opened on D-Day, June 6, 1944, in which American and Allied forces invaded Nazi-occupied France from Britain. The main contributions of the US to the Allied war effort comprised money, industrial output, food, petroleum, technological innovation, and (especially 1944–45), military personnel.
On the home front, mobilization of the US economy was managed by Roosevelt's War Production Board. The wartime production boom led to full employment, wiping out this vestige of the Great Depression. Indeed, labor shortages encouraged industry to look for new sources of workers, finding new roles for women and blacks. Research and development took flight as well, best seen in the Manhattan Project, a secret effort to harness nuclear fission to produce highly destructive atomic bombs.
Harry S.Truman had been vice president for 82 days when President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Shortly after taking the oath of office, Truman said to reporters:
"Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me"
The Allied pushed the Germans out of France but faced an unexpected counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge in December. The final German effort failed, and, as Allied armies in East and West were converging on Berlin, the Nazis hurriedly tried to kill the last remaining Jews. The western front stopped short, leaving Berlin to the Soviets as the Nazi regime formally capitulated in May 1945, ending the war in Europe.Over in the Pacific, the US implemented an island hopping strategy toward Tokyo, establishing airfields for bombing runs against mainland Japan from the Mariana Islands and achieving hard-fought victories at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945. Bloodied at Okinawa, the U.S. prepared to invade Japan's home islands when B-29s dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the empire's surrender in a matter of days and thus ending World War II. The US occupied Japan (and part of Germany), sending Douglas MacArthur to restructure the Japanese economy and political system along American lines. Though the nation lost more than 400,000 military personnel, the mainland prospered untouched by the devastation of war that inflicted a heavy toll on Europe and Asia.
Following World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two dominant superpowers, the USSR being the other. The U.S. Senate on a bipartisan vote approved U.S. participation in the United Nations (UN), which marked a turn away from the traditional isolationism of the U.S. and toward increased international involvement.
The primary American goal of 1945–48 was to rescue Europe from the devastation of World War II and to contain the expansion of Communism, represented by the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 provided military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey to counteract the threat of Communist expansion in the Balkans. In 1948, the United States replaced piecemeal financial aid programs with a comprehensive Marshall Plan, which pumped money into the economy of Western Europe, and removed trade barriers, while modernizing the managerial practices of businesses and governments. In 1949, the United States, rejecting the long-standing policy of no military alliances in peacetime, formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, which continues into the 21st century. In response the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact of communist states.
On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union blocked access to the three Western-held sectors of Berlin. The Allies had never negotiated a deal to guarantee supply of the sectors deep within the Soviet-occupied zone. The commander of the American occupation zone in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, proposed sending a large armored column across the Soviet zone to West Berlin with instructions to defend itself if it were stopped or attacked. Truman believed this would entail an unacceptable risk of war. He approved a plan to supply the blockaded city by air. On June 25, the Allies initiated the Berlin Airlift, a campaign that delivered food and other supplies, such as coal, using military aircraft on a massive scale. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, and no single nation had the capability, either logistically or materially, to have accomplished it. The airlift worked; ground access was again granted on May 11, 1949. Nevertheless, the airlift continued for several months after that. Altogether, a total of 692 aircraft were engaged in the Berlin Airlift, more than 100 of which belonged to civilian operators. A total of 101 fatalities were recorded as a result of the operation, including 40 Britons and 31 Americans, mostly due to non-flying accidents. Seventeen American and eight British aircraft crashed during the operation. The cost of the Airlift was shared between the USA, UK, and Germany. Estimated costs range from approximately US$224 million to over US$500 million (equivalent to approximately $2.22 billion to $4.96 billion now).The Berlin Airlift was one of Truman's great foreign policy successes; it significantly aided his election campaign in 1948 .
In August 1949 the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon, thereby escalating the risk of warfare. Indeed, the threat of mutually assured destruction prevented both powers from going too far, and resulted in proxy wars, especially in Korea and Vietnam, in which the two sides did not directly confront each other. The unexpected leapfrogging of American technology by the Soviets in 1957 with Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, began the Space Race, won by the Americans as Apollo 11 landed astronauts on the moon in 1969. The angst about the weaknesses of American education led to large-scale federal support for science education and research.
On November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate Truman at Blair House. The attack, which could easily have taken the president's life, drew new attention to security concerns surrounding Truman's residence at Blair House. Acknowledging the importance of the question of Puerto Rican independence, Truman allowed a plebiscite in Puerto Rico in 1952 to determine the status of its relationship to the U.S. Nearly 82% of the people voted in favor of a new constitution for the Estado Libre Associado.
In the decades after World War II, the United States became a global influence in economic, political, military, cultural, and technological affairs. Beginning in the 1950s, middle-class culture became obsessed with consumer goods. White Americans made up nearly 90% of the population in 1950.
The Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was a war between South Korea and North Korea, in which a United Nations force led by the United States of America fought for the South, and China fought for the North. Korea was ruled by Japan from 1910 until the closing days of the war. In August 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and, by agreement with the United States, occupied Korea north of the 38th parallel. U.S. forces subsequently occupied the south. By 1948 two separate governments had been set up: a Communist government in North Korea and a right-wing government in South Korea. Both governments claimed to be the legitimate government of Korea and neither side accepted the border as permanent. The conflict escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces, supported by the Soviet Union and China, invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. On that day, the United Nations Security Council recognized this North Korean act as invasion and called for an immediate ceasefire. Truman promptly urged the United Nations to intervene; it did, authorizing troops under the UN flag led by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur.
By August 1950, U.S. troops pouring into South Korea under UN auspices were able to stabilize the situation. Responding to criticism over readiness, Truman fired his Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, replacing him with the retired General Marshall. With UN approval, Truman decided on a "rollback" policy—conquest of North Korea. UN forces led by General MacArthur led the counterattack, scoring a stunning surprise victory with an amphibious landing at the Battle of Inchon that nearly trapped the invaders. UN forces then marched north, towards the Yalu River boundary with China, with the goal of reuniting Korea under UN auspices. However, China surprised the UN forces with a large-scale invasion in November. The UN forces were forced back to below the 38th parallel, then recovered. By early 1951 the war became a fierce stalemate at about the 38th parallel where it had begun. Truman rejected MacArthur's request to attack Chinese supply bases north of the Yalu, but MacArthur nonetheless promoted his plan to Republican House leader Joseph Martin, who leaked it to the press. Truman was gravely concerned that further escalation of the war might lead to open conflict with the Soviet Union, which was already supplying weapons and providing warplanes (with Korean markings and Soviet fliers). Therefore, on April 11, 1951, Truman fired MacArthur from his commands. The dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur was among the least politically popular decisions in presidential history. Truman's approval ratings plummeted.The war remained a frustrating stalemate for two years, with over 30,000 Americans killed, until an armistice ended the fighting in 1953. In February 1952, Truman's approval mark stood at 22% according to Gallup polls, which was, until George W. Bush in 2008, the all-time lowest approval mark for an active American president. The fighting ended on 27 July 1953, when the armistice agreement was signed. The agreement established a new border between the Koreas close to the previous one and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 2.5-mile (4.0 km)-wide fortified buffer zone between them. Border incidents have continued to the present.
The Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) or the revolution on Cuba was an armed revolt conducted by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and its allies against the government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The revolution began in July 1953, and finally ousted Batista on 1 January 1959, replacing his government with a revolutionary socialist state. The United States imposed trade restrictions on the Batista administration and sent an envoy who attempted to persuade Batista to leave the country voluntarily.With the military situation becoming untenable, Batista fled on 1 January 1959, and Castro took over. Within months of taking control, Castro moved to consolidate his power by brutally marginalizing other resistance groups and figures and imprisoning and executing opponents and dissident former supporters. As the revolution became more radical and continued its persecution of those who did not agree with its direction, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled the island, eventually forming a large exile community in the United States. The United States embargo against Cuba (known in Cuba as el bloqueo) is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo imposed on Cuba by the United States. It began on 19 October 1960.
In 1957, Jewish Jonas Salk' vaccine was introduced when polio was considered the most frightening public health problem of the post-war United States. Annual epidemics were increasingly devastating. The 1952 epidemic was the worst outbreak in the nation's history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis, with most of its victims being children. Polio was the worst disease of the postwar era. According to a 2009 PBS documentary, "Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio." By 1962, polio had become almost extinct, with only 910 cases reported that year—down from 37,476 in 1954. By the end of 1990, it was estimated that 500,000 annual cases worldwide of paralysis resulting from polio had been prevented due to immunization programs carried out by WHO, UNICEF, and many other organizations, and in 1991, transmission of polio was declared as "interrupted" in the Western hemisphere. Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute, viral, infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route. Roosevelt was one of the affected by Polio. Roosevelt was totally and permanently paralyzed from the waist down after becoming paralytic at age of 39 while vacationing at Campobello Island in Canada (Roosevelt fell into the cold waters of the Bay of Fundy while boating).
Jack St. Clair Kilby was an American electrical engineer who took part in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on December 10, 2000. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.
Jewish Theodore Maiman, an American physicist, designed and operated the first laser in 1960. A laser is a device that produces a very narrow, powerful beam of light. Although there seemed to be no particular use for the laser when Maiman first created it, lasers soon became one of the most useful inventions of the 1900's. Lasers are used in communications, industry, medicine, and scientific research.
In 1961 American writer Ernest Hemingway committed suicide.
[Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.In his junior year, he took a journalism class.
Early in 1918, Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and signed on to become an ambulance driver in Italy. On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line. While recuperating, he fell in love, for the first time, with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. By the time of his release and return to the United States in January 1919, Agnes and Hemingway had decided to marry within a few months in America. However, in March, she wrote that she had become engaged to an Italian officer.
Hemingway returned home early in 1919. In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth. When St. Louis native Hadley Richardson came to Chicago to visit the sister of Hemingway's roommate, he became infatuated and later claimed, "I knew she was the girl I was going to marry". Hadley was red-haired, with a "nurturing instinct", and eight years older than Hemingway.The two corresponded for a few months and then decided to marry and travel to Europe. They were married on September 3, 1921; two months later, Hemingway was hired as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and the couple left for Paris.
The following September, the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. Hemingway, Hadley and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924.With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting.
In December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began revising the manuscript "Sun Also Rises" extensively. The Sun Also Rises is about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation, received good reviews, and is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work".
In the spring of 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who came to Pamplona with them that July. On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation; in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway's offer of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises. The couple were divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer in May. Pfeiffer, who was from a wealthy Catholic Arkansas family, had moved to Paris to work for Vogue magazine. Before their marriage Hemingway converted to Catholicism.
They left Paris in March 1928 for Key West. In the late spring, Hemingway and Pauline traveled to Kansas City, where their son Patrick was born on June 28, 1928. Pauline had a difficult delivery, which Hemingway fictionalized in A Farewell to Arms. In the winter, he was in New York with Bumby, about to board a train to Florida, when he received a cable telling him that his father had committed suicide. Hemingway was devastated, having earlier written his father telling him not to worry about financial difficulties; the letter arrived minutes after the suicide.
In 1933, Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to East Africa.In 1937, Hemingway agreed to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), arriving in Spain in March with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.Ivens, who was filming The Spanish Earth, wanted Hemingway to replace John Dos Passos as screenwriter, since Dos Passos had left the project when his friend José Robles was arrested and later executed. The incident changed Dos Passos' opinion of the leftist republicans, creating a rift between him and Hemingway, who later spread a rumor that Dos Passos left Spain out of cowardice. Journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, whom Hemingway had met in Key West the previous Christmas (1936), joined him in Spain.
In the spring of 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they almost immediately rented "Finca Vigia". Pauline and the children left Hemingway that summer, after the family was reunited during a visit to Wyoming. After Hemingway's divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba, Key West, and Sun Valley, Idaho in 1939.It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. The novel graphically describes the brutality of civil war.
From May 1944 to March 1945, Hemingway was in London and Europe. When Hemingway first arrived in London he met TIME magazine correspondent, Mary Welsh, with whom he became infatuated. On August 25, he was present at the liberation of Paris, although contrary to the Hemingway legend, he was not the first into the city, nor did he liberate the Ritz
In 1947 Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery during World War II. He was recognized for his valor, having been "under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions". In 1946 he married Mary Welsh, who had an ectopic pregnancy five months later.
In 1951 he wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, saying that it was "the best I can write ever for all of my life". The Old Man and the Sea became a book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1952, a month before he left for his second trip to Africa.
In 1954, while in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two successive plane crashes.The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow. After the plane crashes, Hemingway, who had been "a thinly controlled alcoholic throughout much of his life, drank more heavily than usual to combat the pain of his injuries. In October 1954 Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature.Because he was suffering pain from the African accidents, he decided against traveling to Stockholm.
The Finca Vigia became crowded with guests and tourists, as Hemingway, beginning to become unhappy with life there, considered a permanent move to Idaho. In July 1960 the Hemingways left Cuba for the last time, leaving art and manuscripts in a bank vault in Havana. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Finca Vigia was expropriated by the Cuban government, complete with Hemingway's collection of "four to six thousand books". Hemingway continued to rework the material that would be published as A Moveable Feast through the end of the 1950s. In the summer of 1959 he visited Spain to research a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by Life magazine, returning to Cuba in January 1960 to work on the manuscript.
Hemingway "quite deliberately" shot himself on July 2,1961.His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also committed suicide. Hemingway's family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral which was officiated by the local Catholic priest, who believed the death accidental.
Hemingway never came out and expressed his personal religious views and wrongly attributed autobiographical quote 'All thinking men are atheists' comes actuallly from one of his novel characters in 'A Farewell to Arms' (Chapter 2 page 7).
]
In 1960, the charismatic politician John F. Kennedy was elected as the first and—thus far—only Roman Catholic President of the United States. The Kennedy family brought a new life and vigor to the atmosphere of the White House. His time in office was marked by such notable events as the acceleration of the United States' role in the Space Race, escalation of the American role in the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the jailing of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Birmingham campaign, and the appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy to his Cabinet as Attorney General. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, leaving the nation in profound shock.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) commonly known as Jack Kennedy, or by his initials JFK, was an American politician. After military service as commander of Motor Torpedo Boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in the South Pacific, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960.
In 1960 he ran for US president. Kennedy appeared with Republican candidate Richard Nixon, then vice president, in the first televised U.S. presidential debates in U.S. history. During these programs, Nixon, with a sore injured leg and his "five o'clock shadow", was perspiring and looked tense and uncomfortable, while Kennedy, choosing to avail himself of makeup services, appeared relaxed, leading the huge television audience to favor Kennedy as the winner. Radio listeners either thought Nixon had won or that the debates were a draw. The debates are now considered a milestone in American political history—the point at which the medium of television began to play a dominant role in politics Kennedy was a Catholic but he didnt intend to mix his religion with the politics: He famously told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me."
On November 8, Kennedy defeated Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the 20th century. In the national popular vote Kennedy led Nixon by just two-tenths of one percent (49.7% to 49.5%), while in the Electoral College he won 303 votes to Nixon's 219 (269 were needed to win).John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president at noon on January 20, 1961. In his inaugural address he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens, famously saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." He asked the nations of the world to join together to fight what he called the "common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself".
President Kennedy's foreign policy was dominated by American confrontations with the Soviet Union, manifested by proxy contests in the early stage of the Cold War. On April 17, 1961, Kennedy ordered what became known as the "Bay of Pigs Invasion": 1,500 U.S.-trained Cubans, called "Brigade 2506", landed on the island. No U.S. air support was provided. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, later stated that they thought the president would authorize any action required for success once the troops were on the ground. By April 19, 1961, the Cuban government had captured or killed the invading exiles, and Kennedy was forced to negotiate for the release of the 1,189 survivors. After twenty months, Cuba released the captured exiles in exchange for $53 million worth of food and medicine.
On October 14, 1962, CIA U-2 spy planes took photographs of intermediate-range ballistic missile sites being built in Cuba by the Soviets. On October 28 Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites, subject to UN inspections.The U.S. publicly promised never to invade Cuba and privately agreed to remove its missiles in Turkey. This crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point before or since. In the end, "the humanity" of the two men prevailed. The crisis improved the image of American willpower and the president's credibility. Kennedy's approval rating increased from 66% to 77% immediately thereafter.
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space, reinforcing American fears about being left behind in a technological competition with the Soviet Union. Kennedy was eager for the U.S. to take the lead in the Space Race for reasons of strategy and prestige. He first announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon in the speech to a Joint Session of Congress on May 25, 1961, stating: "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish".Kennedy made a speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, in which he said: "No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. ... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 pm Central Standard Time on Friday November 22, 1963. Only 46, President Kennedy died younger than any U.S. president to date. Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository from which the shots were suspected to have been fired, was arrested for the murder of a local police officer, and was subsequently charged with the assassination of Kennedy. A Gallup Poll in mid-November 2013, showed 61% believed in a conspiracy, and only 30% thought Oswald did it alone. Kennedy and his wife were younger in comparison to the presidents and first ladies who preceded them, and both were popular in the media culture. The charisma of Kennedy and his family led to the figurative designation of "Camelot" for his administration, credited by his wife, who coined the term for the first time in print during a post-assassination interview with Theodore White, to his affection for the then contemporary Broadway musical of the same name.Kennedy's assassination had been compared to the fall of King Arthur. Jacqueline his wife said "There'll be great Presidents again," she added, "but there'll never be another Camelot again … it will never be that way again".
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.In January 1950, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union recognized Viet Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam, based in Hanoi, as the legitimate government of Vietnam.The following month the United States and Great Britain recognized the French-backed State of Vietnam in Saigon, led by former Emperor Bao Dai, as the legitimate Vietnamese government. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 convinced many Washington policymakers that the war in Indochina was an example of communist expansionism directed by the Soviet Union. The Viet Cong (also known as the National Liberation Front, or NLF), a lightly armed South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The People's Army of Vietnam (aka the North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units into battle.
As the war wore on, the part of the Viet Cong in the fighting decreased as the role of the NVA grew. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. At the start of 1955, French Indochina was dissolved, leaving Ngo Dinh Diem in temporary control of the south. A referendum was scheduled for 23 October 1955 to determine the future direction of the south. It was contested by Ba?o ?a.i, the Emperor, advocating the restoration of the monarchy, while Die^.m ran on a republican platform. Die^.m recorded 98.2 percent of the vote—an implausibly high result that could have only been obtained through fraud. The total announced number of votes for a republic exceeded the number of registered voters by over 380,000—further evidence that the referendum was heavily rigged. In the course of the war, the U.S. conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and over time the North Vietnamese airspace became the most heavily defended airspace of any in the world. The U.S. government viewed American involvement in the war as a way to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was part of a wider containment strategy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism. According to the U.S. domino theory, if one state went Communist, other states in the region would follow, and U.S. policy thus held that accommodation to the spread of Communist rule across all of Vietnam was unacceptable. The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam under communist rule. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war, fought initially against forces from France and then America, as France was backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state.
Die^.m was passionately anti-Communist. According to Gabriel Kolko about 12,000 suspected opponents of Die^.m were killed between 1955 and 1957 and by the end of 1958 an estimated 40,000 political prisoners had been jailed. However, Guenter Lewy argues that such figures were exaggerated and that there were never more than 35,000 prisoners of all kinds in the whole country. In a country where surveys of the religious composition estimated the Buddhist majority to be between 70 and 90 percent, Die^.m's policies generated claims of religious bias. As a member of the Vietnamese Catholic minority, he is widely regarded by historians as having pursued pro-Catholic policies that antagonized many Buddhists, since the Catholic community is anti-Communist. Specifically, the government was regarded as being biased towards Catholics in public service and military promotions, as well as the allocation of land, business favors and tax concessions. The government was overthrown on 1 November 1963 (21 days before Kennedy was killed) in a swift coup with the help of the CIA. With only the palace guard remaining to defend Die^.m and his younger brother, Nhu, the generals called the palace offering Die^.m exile if he surrendered. But the brothers were assassinated together in the back of an M113 armoured personnel carrier with a bayonet and revolver by Captain Nguye^~n Va(n Nhung, under orders from Du+o+ng Va(n Minh, while en route to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters. Die^.m was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery next to the house of the U.S. ambassador. Upon learning of Die^.m's ouster and assassination, Ho^` Chí Minh reportedly stated: "I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid." The North Vietnamese Politburo was more explicit: "The consequences of the 1 November coup d'état will be contrary to the calculations of the U.S. imperialists ... Die^.m was one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism. Everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution was carried out by Die^.m. Die^.m was one of the most competent lackeys of the U.S. imperialists ... Among the anti-Communists in South Vietnam or exiled in other countries, no one has sufficient political assets and abilities to cause others to obey. Therefore, the lackey administration cannot be stabilized. The coup d'état on 1 November 1963 will not be the last." After Die^.m's assassination, South Vietnam was unable to establish a stable government and several coups took place after his death. While the U.S. continued to influence South Vietnam's government, the assassination bolstered North Vietnamese attempts to characterize the South Vietnamese as supporters of colonialism. When Kennedy learned of the deaths during a White House meeting, he appeared shaken and left the room. Kennedy later penned a memo, lamenting that the assassination was "particularly abhorrent" and blaming himself for approving Cable 243, which authorised Lodge to explore coup options in the wake of Nhu's attacks on the Buddhist pagodas.
During the course of the Vietnam War a large segment of the American population came to be opposed to U.S. involvement in South Vietnam. Public opinion steadily turned against the war following 1967 and by 1970 only a third of Americans believed that the U.S. had not made a mistake by sending troops to fight in Vietnam. The fatal shooting of four students at Kent State University in 1970 led to nation-wide university protests. Under the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, between North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Lê ?u+'c Tho. and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and reluctantly signed by South Vietnamese president Thie^.u, U.S. military forces withdrew from South Vietnam and prisoners were exchanged. North Vietnam was allowed to continue supplying communist troops in the South, but only to the extent of replacing expended materiel. Later that year the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kissinger and Tho., but the Vietnamese negotiator declined it saying that a true peace did not yet exist. The capture of Saigon at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese service members and civilians killed vary from 800,000 to 3.1 million. On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Following the communist takeover, 1–2.5 million South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps, with an estimated 165,000 prisoners dying. Between 100,000 and 200,000 South Vietnamese were executed. R. J. Rummel, an analyst of political killings, estimated that about 50,000 South Vietnamese deported to "New Economic Zones" died performing hard labor, out of the 1 million that were sent. 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to the communist Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge would eventually kill 1–3 million Cambodians in the Killing Fields, out of a population of around 8 million.
Starting in the late 1950s, institutionalized racism across the United States, but especially in the South, was increasingly challenged by the growing Civil Rights movement. The activism of African-American leaders Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which launched the movement. In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give her seat on the bus to a white man. Found guilty on December 5, Parks was fined $10 plus a court cost of $4, but she appealed. This resulted in the Montgomery Busy Boycott where blacks in Montgomery refused to ride the buses, crippling the bus company. Pressure increased across the country. The related civil suit was heard in federal district court and, on June 4, 1956, the court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. As the state appealed the decision, the boycott continued. The case moved on to the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling, issuing its decision in December, followed quickly by a court order to the state to desegregate the buses. For years African Americans would struggle with violence against them but would achieve great steps toward equality with Supreme Court decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation between whites and blacks. The Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation. As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968) was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs. He was born Michael King, but his father changed his name in honor of the German reformer Martin Luther. A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
King then began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Ph.D. degree on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation on "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman". An academic inquiry concluded in October 1991 that portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was twenty-five years old, in 1954.As a Christian minister, his main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses.
Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's success with non-violent activism, King had "for a long time...wanted to take a trip to India". With assistance from the Quaker group the American Friends Service Committee, he was able to make the journey in April 1959. The trip to India affected King, deepening his understanding of non-violent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity".
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by E.D. Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. On December 20, 1956, a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional.
Veteran African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin served as King's main advisor and mentor in the late 1950s. Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of democratic socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin, which King agreed to do. However, King agreed that Rustin should be one of the main organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began tapping King's telephone in the fall of 1963. Concerned that allegations of communists in the SCLC, if made public, would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives, Kennedy warned King to discontinue the suspect associations, and later felt compelled to issue the written directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders.
In April 1963 a campaign began against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics, developed in part by Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust. King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign—his 13th arrest out of 29. From his cell, he composed the now-famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" which responds to calls on the movement to pursue legal channels for social change.
King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. King delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as "I Have a Dream". In the speech's most famous passage—in which he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, "Tell them about the dream!" —King said:
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
"I Have a Dream" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the agenda of reformers in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
In 1965 King began to publicly express doubts about the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". He spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"
The "Beyond Vietnam" speech reflected King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with which he was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism.
King supported the ideals of democratic socialism, although he was reluctant to speak directly of this support due to the anti-communist sentiment being projected throughout America at the time, and the association of socialism with communism. King believed that capitalism could not adequately provide the basic necessities of many American people, particularly the African American community. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism", he also rejected communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism", and its "political totalitarianism"
In April 4, 1968, a shot rang out as King stood on the motel's second-floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998) was the American criminal convicted of the assassination. Ray harbored a strong prejudice against African Americans and was quickly drawn to Wallace's segregationist platform. He spent much of his time in Los Angeles volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters in North Hollywood. He also considered emigrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where a white minority regime had unilaterally assumed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. The notion of residing in Rhodesia continued appealing to Ray for several years afterward, and would be his intended destination after King's assassination.
The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and urging them to continue King's ideal of non-violence. James Farmer, Jr. and other civil rights leaders also called for non-violent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response.
Martin Luther King Jr. followed the Christian faith. Malcolm X, another civil right black activist, was a Muslim, and believed in Muslim principles. His most famous line was “By any Means Necessary”. He believed in fighting back physically. Malcolm X felt that American blacks should be more concerned with helping each other. He felt blacks should start by giving the same race self-respect first. He did not agree with what King had to say, he felt that kings dream was not a dream but a nightmare.
Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little , was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans; detractors accused him of preaching racism and violence. In 1946, he was arrested while picking up a stolen watch he had left at a shop for repairs, and in February began serving an eight-to-ten year sentence at Charlestown State Prison for larceny and breaking and entering. At this time, several of his siblings wrote to him about the Nation of Islam, a relatively new religious movement preaching black self-reliance and, ultimately, the return of the African diaspora to Africa, where they would be free from white American and European domination.
In late 1948, Little wrote to Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Muhammad advised him to renounce his past, humbly bow in prayer to Allah, and promise never to engage in destructive behavior again. Though he later recalled the inner struggle he experienced in bending his knees to pray, he soon became a member of the Nation of Islam. In 1950, the FBI opened a file on him after he wrote a letter from prison to President Truman expressing opposition to the Korean War and declaring himself a communist. That year, Little also began signing his name "Malcolm X". He explained in his autobiography that the Muslim's "X" symbolized the true African family name that he could never know.
Beside his skill as a speaker, Malcolm X had an impressive physical presence. He stood 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m) tall and weighed about 180 pounds (82 kg). One writer described him as "powerfully built", and another as "mesmerizingly handsome ... and always spotlessly well-groomed". In 1955, Betty Sanders met Malcolm X and they married two days later. They had six daughters.
Malcolm X first came to the notice of the American public in 1957, after Johnson Hinton, a Nation of Islam member, was beaten by two New York City police officers. Alerted by a witness, Malcolm X and a small group of Muslims went to the police station and demanded to see Hinton. Police initially denied that any Muslims were being held, but when the crowd grew to about five hundred they allowed Malcolm X to speak with Hinton, after which, at Malcolm X's insistence, an ambulance took Hinton to Harlem Hospital. A grand jury declined to indict the officers who beat Hinton, and in October, Malcolm X sent an angry telegram to the police commissioner. Soon undercover officers were assigned to infiltrate the Nation of Islam.
From his adoption of the Nation of Islam in 1952 until he broke with it in 1964, Malcolm X promoted the Nation's teachings. These included the beliefs:
that black people are the original people of the world
that white people are "devils"
that blacks are superior to whites, and
that the demise of the white race is imminent.
Malcolm X said "history proves the white man is a devil", "Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and drops hell bombs on people... anybody who does these things is nothing but a devil." Malcolm X said that Islam was the "true religion of black mankind" and that Christianity was "the white man's religion" that had been imposed upon African Americans by their slave-masters
Malcolm X was equally critical of the civil rights movement. He labeled Martin Luther King, Jr. a "chump" and other civil rights leaders "stooges" of the white establishment. He called the 1963 March on Washington "the farce on Washington", and said he did not know why so many black people were excited about a demonstration "run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn't like us when he was alive".
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X publicly announced his break from the Nation of Islam. He was still a Muslim, he said, but felt that the Nation had "gone as far as it can" because of its rigid teachings. He planned to organize a black nationalist organization to "heighten the political consciousness" of African Americans.
Throughout 1964, as conflict with the Nation of Islam intensified, Malcolm X was repeatedly threatened. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom when someone in the 400-person audience rushed forward and shot him once in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun; two other men charged the stage firing semi-automatic handguns. Malcolm X was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm
Up until one week before his death, Malcolm X continued to publicly advocate that black people should achieve advancement "by any means necessary". In a famous letter from Mecca, he wrote that his experiences with white people during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem convinced him to "rearrange" his thinking about race and "toss aside some of [his] previous conclusions". In a conversation with Gordon Parks, two days before his assassination, Malcolm said:
[L]istening to leaders like Nasser, Ben Bella, and Nkrumah awakened me to the dangers of racism. I realized racism isn't just a black and white problem. It's brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another.
Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn't a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I'm glad to be free of them".
Amid the Cold War, the United States entered the Vietnam War, whose growing unpopularity fed already existing social movements, including those among women, minorities, and young people. President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society social programs and numerous rulings by the Warren Court added to the wide range of social reform during the 1960s and 1970s. Feminism and the environmental movement became political forces, and progress continued toward civil rights for all Americans. The Counterculture Revolution swept through the nation and much of the western world in the late sixties and early seventies, further dividing Americans in a "culture war" but also bringing forth more liberated social views.
President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society social programs and numerous rulings by the Warren Court added to the wide range of social reform during the 1960s and 1970s. Feminism and the environmental movement became political forces, and progress continued toward civil rights for all Americans. The Counterculture Revolution swept through the nation and much of the western world in the late sixties and early seventies, further dividing Americans in a "culture war" but also bringing forth more liberated social views. Johnson was often seen as a wildly ambitious, tireless, and imposing figure who was ruthlessly effective at getting legislation passed. He worked 18–20-hour days without break and was apparently absent of any leisure activities At 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) tall, Johnson had his own particular brand of persuasion, known as "The Johnson Treatment". Johnson's cowboy hat and boots reflected his Texas roots and genuine love of the rural hill country.
In 1962 James Watson (b. 1928), Francis Crick (1916–2004), and Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004) jointly received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their 1953 determination of the DNA. Wilkins was the first to produce the first clear X-ray images of DNA and his belief from beginning was that DNA was helical. In 1953 Wilkins showed Watson a high quality image of "B" form DNA and using additional data from Wilkins, Watson and Crick proposed a double-helix model for DNA. After this Wilkins led a major project at King's College London to test, verify and make significant corrections to the DNA model proposed by Watson and Crick and to study the structure of RNA. Watson is an Atheist stating: "Take love. At the end of it, love doesn't come from God, so it's not the greatest gift of God but the greatest gift of our genes. You see evidence of maternal care in birds, and they feel seemingly pretty strong about it. So it's an emotion that has an enormous selective advantage. You've probably met someone who you think is just not capable of love. I suspect that they lack a gene that is necessary for the emotion. The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls. I see ourselves as products of evolution, which itself is a great mystery". Crick defined himself an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism". He critised the concept of soul: "At what point during biological evolution did the first organism have a soul? At what moment does a baby get a soul? Crick stated his view that the idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that, an imagined idea. For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years". Crick suggested that it might be possible to find chemical changes in the brain that were molecular correlates of the act of prayer: "I speculated that there might be a detectable change in the level of some neurotransmitter or neurohormone when people pray". He might have been imagining substances such as dopamine that are released by the brain under certain conditions and produce rewarding sensations. Crick's suggestion that there might someday be a new science of "biochemical theology" seems to have been realized under an alternative name: there is now the new field of neurotheology Neurotheology, also known as spiritual neuroscience, attempts to explain religious experience and behaviour in neuroscientific terms. Proponents of neurotheology say there is a neurological and evolutionary basis for subjective experiences traditionally categorized as spiritual or religious. On the other hand, Wilkins however towards universalism, focusing on core beliefs found in many religions:
I have been exploring ways to emphasize certain similarities between religion and science. As I see it, the main point is that the open-minded inquiry of the scientist is not something peculiar to science itself, but is a characteristic of the good way of living for human beings in general. It is equivalent to the religious concept of love, where you are always giving attention to new developments and new possibilities. To say that the essence of science is that you are always inquiring and open-minded is to say that you are in fact living a virtuous life.This, of course, refers to how the scientist ideally works; in practice, you find that it is very different. Most science is done by established procedures in a more or less routine manner. In my opinion, the degree of open-mindedness in most scientific work is really very little. It is a very limited open-mindedness within established ideas or in a paradigm. So in the work of most scientists today, the equivalent of religious love or the truly noble, in the sense of the morally admirable, does not exist very much.
Most scientists today are being led increasingly away from the fundamental aim of science to achieve unity into rather limited ways of thinking without much open-mindedness and are doing things merely to meet limited material needs. In particular, about half the world's scientists and engineers are now engaged in war programs. This shocking fact does not receive enough attention.Scientists behave as though the intellect and analytical processes were the whole basis of the human being. Therefore their approach to questions like national security is largely from the point of view of counting the weapons, the way the weapons work, the military strategy, and all such technical things. Most scientists shy away from political, psychological, spiritual, and other dimensions. They don't consider these dimensions in their work, so they behave as though they don't exist. This is one of the troubles with science, although, of course, the analytical and rational approach has been very productive in some respects. When you talk about politics or religion, scientists often get quite upset. "We are scientists," they say. "We don't want to get involved in politics. It would be a terrible waste of time, pure stupidity," etc. Some of them get very annoyed about religion, too. In fact, many scientists behave like very narrow-minded people, I am sorry to say. The whole question of moral, spiritual, and other dimensions is normally pushed out of science. So something in the nature of science often does lead people towards destruction. Abstraction can be regarded as a form of violence and, as various poets have remarked, science often does violence to nature. Leading scientists who do really important pioneering work are often not so bad, but the ordinary, average scientist is rather like that. the narrow-minded attitudes of many of today's scientists on social, political, psychological, and other issues are also deplorable. They really are anti-scientific.Molecular biology brings the demarcation between the living and the nonliving becomes more and more difficult to make. The very complicated properties of nonliving matter begin to overlap with the properties of the simplest type of living material. But I don't agree with the molecular biologists who think that the whole nature of life can be comprehended in terms of molecular biology alone. I think that is a very simple-minded, mechanistic way of thinking. It is yet another example of hubris. In their work, scientists are very successful in a limited way, and as a result, because of hubris, they think, "This is all that matters, doing science like this"---even to the extent that they will go on doing science that may blow up the whole world and, of course, all science too. That is the dreadful thing about it. I agree with Einstein that the sort of scientific education we have now has produced a narrow-minded way of thinking amongst scientists, so that they give no proper attention to the moral and psychological dimensions. "
The Hart-Celler Act or Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the restrictive national qouota system and allowed unlimited "family reunification". Within 20 years annual immigration totals more than doubled. Immigrants increasingly came from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean rather than Europe.
In 1966 Walt Disney died. As a prominent figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, he is regarded as a cultural icon, known for his influence and contributions to entertainment during the 20th century. As a Hollywood business mogul, he and his brother Roy O. Disney co-founded The Walt Disney Company. He and his staff created various fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. Disney himself was the original voice for Mickey. During his lifetime, he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations. Walt Disney was a strongly religious man who truly believed that good would triumph over evil and that it was important to accept and help everyone even if they were very different from yourself:
"Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance, and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not as a plea for special favors nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God".
"I have a strong personal belief and reliance on the power of prayer for divine inspiration. Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not as a plea for special favors or as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request.
All prayer, by the humble or the highly placed has one thing in common, as I see it: a supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best human impulses which should bind us all together for a better world. Without such inspiration, we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish".
"In these days of world tensions, when the faith of men is being tested as never before, I am personally thankful that my parents taught me at a very early age to have a strong personal belief and reliance in the power of prayer for Divine inspiration. My people were members of the Congregational Church in our home town of Marceline, Missouri. It was there where I was first taught the efficacy of religion ... how it helps us immeasurably to meet the trial and stress of life and keeps us attuned to the Divine inspiration. Both my study of Scripture and my career in entertaining children have taught me to cherish them. But I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do".
"I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things. Lecturing to children is no answer to delinquency. Preaching won't keep youngsters out of trouble, but keeping their minds occupied will".
"Thus, whatever success I have had in bringing clean, informative entertainment to people of all ages, I attribute in great part to my Congregational upbringing and my lifelong habit of prayer. To me, today, at age sixty-one, all prayer, by the humble or highly placed, has one thing in common: supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best human impulses which should bind us together for a better world. Without such inspiration, we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish. But in our troubled time, the right of men to think and worship as their conscience dictates is being sorely pressed. We can retain these privileges only by being constantly on guard and fighting off any encroachment on these precepts. To retreat from any of the principles handed down by our forefathers, who shed their blood for the ideals we still embrace, would be a complete victory for those who would destroy liberty and justice for the individual".
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Supreme Court's unanimous decision held this prohibition was unconstitutional, overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. The plaintiffs in the case were Mildred Delores Loving, née Jeter (July 22, 1939 – May 2, 2008), a woman of African-American descent, and Richard Perry Loving (October 29, 1933 – June 1975), a white man. At the time that the decision was handed down, 17 States, all Southern States, had such laws.
Amid the tragedy of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King on Thursday, April 4th, 1968, an extraordinary moment in American political history occurred as Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, broke the news of King's death to a large gathering of African Americans that evening in Indianapolis, Indiana. The gathering was actually a planned campaign rally for Robert Kennedy in his bid to get the 1968 Democratic nomination for president. Just after he arrived by plane at Indianapolis, Kennedy was told of King's death. He was advised by local police against making the campaign stop which was in a part of the city considered to be a dangerous ghetto. But Kennedy insisted on going:
"I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings.
He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
(Interrupted by applause)
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
(Interrupted by applause)
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. (Applause)"
The assassination of Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy, a United States Senator and brother of assassinated President John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy, took place shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles, California, during the campaign season for the United States Presidential election, 1968. After winning the California and South Dakota primary elections for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, Kennedy was shot as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and died in the Good Samaritan Hospital twenty-six hours later.
On July 18, 1969 Senator Edward M. Kennedy drove off a bridge on his way home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.According to his own testimony, Kennedy accidentally drove his car off a bridge and into the channel, before swimming free and leaving the scene, and not reporting about the accident within nine hours. Meanwhile, Kopechne had died in the car through drowning or suffocation. The next day, Kopechne's body and the car were finally recovered. Kennedy pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury and later received a two-month suspended jail sentence. The incident became a national scandal. One of the fundamental aspects of the Kennedy family is a tragic strain which has run through the family, due to the violent and untimely deaths of many of its members. Kennedy eldest brother Joe Jr. died in World War II at the age of 29. It was Joe Jr. who was originally to carry the family's hopes for the Presidency. Then both Jack himself, and his brother Bobby died due to assassinations. Ted had brushes with death, the first in a plane crash in 1964 and the second due to a car accident in 1969 known as the Chappaquiddick incident. Ted died at age 77, on August 25, 2009, from the effects of a malignant brain tumor. John Fitzgerald "John-John" Kennedy, Jr., was born in late November 1960, 17 days after his father was elected. John-John died from a plane crash in July 1999, when the small plane he was piloting crashed en route to Martha's Vineyard. His wife Carolyn Jeanne Bessette and her sister Lauren were also killed. The Kennedy family originally came from Dunganstown, County Wexford, Ireland. In 1848, Patrick Kennedy (1823–1858) left his farm and boarded a ship in New Ross bound for Liverpool on his way to Boston. Kennedy departed at the height of Ireland's Great Famine. It was in Boston he met the woman he was to marry, Bridget Murphy (c.1824–1888). Patrick came to Boston and took a job as a migrant worker. He died several years later from cholera. They had three daughters and two sons (the elder son died young from cholera). He left behind a widow and four children to carry on, the youngest child being Joe Sr.'s father Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy.
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans on the Moon, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC. Armstrong became the first to step onto the lunar surface six hours later on July 21 at 02:56 UTC. Armstrong spent about two and a half hours outside the spacecraft, Aldrin slightly less, and together they collected 47.5 pounds (21.5 kg) of lunar material for return to Earth. Broadcast on live TV to a world-wide audience, Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface and described the event as "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." Apollo 11 effectively ended the Space Race and fulfilled a national goal proposed in 1961 by the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy in a speech before the U.S. Congress: "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."Amstrong labeled himself as a deist. His mother later said that Armstrong's religious views caused her grief and distress in later life as she was more religious. His official biography also describes him as a deist. Michael Collins was Episcopalian and Aldrin a Presbyterian who even took communion on the surface of the Moon: "Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind – be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God."
In 1969, when the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started developing the idea of an inter-networked set of terminals to share computing resources, the reference materials which they considered included Baran and the RAND Corporation's "On Distributed Communications" volumes.
Paul Baran a Jewish Polish-American engineer was one of the two independent inventors of packet switched computer networking, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of modern digital communication.
Johnson was succeeded in 1969 by Republican Richard Nixon, who attempted to gradually turn the war over to the South Vietnamese forces.; He negotiated the peace treaty in 1973 which secured the release of POWs and lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The war had cost the lives of 58,000 American troops. Nixon manipulated the fierce distrust between the Soviet Union and China to the advantage of the United States, achieving détente (relaxation; ease of tension) with both parties.
On August 9, 1969, while at home with friends, Actress Sharon Tate was murdered by the followers of Charles Manson's gang in Los Angeles. At trial, the prosecution stated Manson's desire to start "Helter Skelter" (an apocalyptic race war) was the motive for the crimes. Initially, Manson told the group that during this war, they would hide in a hole in the desert and emerge when the war was over. He said the blacks would win the war, but would be unable to govern and would turn to Manson. In the weeks prior to the murders, Manson began to say that the war wasn't starting fast enough, and the group would have to start it by murdering wealthy white people.
Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module (CM) depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17. Roman Catholic "Gene" Kranz (born August 17, 1933) is a retired NASA Flight Director and manager who served as a Flight Director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and is best known for his role in directing the successful Mission Control team efforts to save the crew of Apollo 13.
The OPEC oil embargo marked a long-term economic transition since, for the first time, energy prices skyrocketed, and American factories faced serious competition from foreign automobiles, clothing, electronics, and consumer goods. By the late 1970s the economy suffered an energy crisis, slow economic growth, high unemployment, and very high inflation coupled with high interest rates (the term stagflation was coined). Since economists agreed on the wisdom of deregulation, many of the New Deal era regulations were ended, such as in transportation, banking, and telecommunications. OAPEC initiated the embargo in response to US involvement in the Oct 6, 1973 Yom Kippur War. Six days after Egypt and Syria launched the surprise military campaign against Israel in order to regain Arab territories lost to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, the United States chose to re-supply Israel with arms. OAPEC decided to retaliate, announcing an oil embargo against Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. In March 1970, Sarah Weddington filed suit against Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney and the person responsible for enforcing the anti-abortion statute. Norma McCorvey, a pregnant woman seeking abortion, became the landmark plaintiff and was referred in the legal documents as "Jane Roe" to protect her identity. She signed the papers, and thus began Roe v. Wade. The case took three years of trials to reach the United States Supreme Court, and Norma never attended even one trial. In the meantime, McCorvey had given birth to the baby in question, who was eventually adopted. The Court issued its decision on January 22, 1973, with a 7-to-2 majority vote in favor of Roe on January 22, 1973 and the Supreme Court ruled that a Texas statute forbidding abortion except when necessary to save the life of the mother was unconstitutional. The Court arrived at its decision by concluding that the issue of abortion and abortion rights falls under the right to privacy. In its opinion it listed several landmark cases where the court had previously found a right to privacy implied by the Constitution. The Court held that a right to privacy existed and included the right to have an abortion. The court found that a mother had a right to abortion until viability, a point to be determined by the abortion doctor. After viability a woman can obtain an abortion for health reasons, which the Court defined broadly to include psychological well-being. A central issue in the Roe case (and in the wider abortion debate in general) is whether human life or personhood begins at conception, birth, or at some point in between. The Court declined to make an attempt at resolving this issue, noting: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." Instead, it chose to point out that historically, under English and American common law and statutes, "the unborn have never been recognized ...as persons in the whole sense" and thus the fetuses are not legally entitled to the protection afforded by the right to life specifically enumerated in the Fourteenth Amendment. So rather than asserting that human life begins at any specific point, the court simply declared that the State has a "compelling interest" in protecting "potential life" at the point of viability. The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks." .The Court stated that during the first trimester, when the procedure is more safe than childbirth, the decision to abort must be left to the mother and her physician. The State has the right to intervene prior to fetal viability only to protect the health of the mother, and may regulate the procedure after viability so long as there is always an exception for preserving maternal health. Justices Byron R. White and William H. Rehnquist wrote emphatic dissenting opinions in this case. White wrote:
I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.
Rehnquist elaborated upon several of White's points, by asserting that the Court's historical analysis was flawed:
To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. As early as 1821, the first state law dealing directly with abortion was enacted by the Connecticut Legislature. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, there were at least 36 laws enacted by state or territorial legislatures limiting abortion. While many States have amended or updated their laws, 21 of the laws on the books in 1868 remain in effect today
In response to Roe v. Wade, most states enacted or attempted to enact laws limiting or regulating abortion, such as laws requiring parental consent for minors to obtain abortions, parental notification laws, spousal mutual consent laws,etc. Perhaps the most notable opposition to Roe comes from Roe herself; in 1995, Norma L. McCorvey revealed that she became pro-life and is now a vocal opponent of abortion. Norma McCorvey became a member of the pro-life movement in 1995; she now supports making abortion illegal. In 1998, she testified to Congress:
It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the "right" to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, "Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible." Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.
McCorvey's second book, Won by Love, was published in 1998. She explained her change on the stance of abortion with the following comments:
I was sitting in O.R.'s offices when I noticed a fetal development poster. The progression was so obvious, the eyes were so sweet. It hurt my heart, just looking at them. I ran outside and finally, it dawned on me. 'Norma', I said to myself, 'They're right'. I had worked with pregnant women for years. I had been through three pregnancies and deliveries myself. I should have known. Yet something in that poster made me lose my breath. I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, 10-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, that's a baby! It's as if blinders just fell off my eyes and I suddenly understood the truth — that's a baby! I felt crushed under the truth of this realization. I had to face up to the awful reality. Abortion wasn't about 'products of conception'. It wasn't about 'missed periods'. It was about children being killed in their mother's wombs. All those years I was wrong. Signing that affidavit, I was wrong. Working in an abortion clinic, I was wrong. No more of this first trimester, second trimester, third trimester stuff. Abortion — at any point — was wrong. It was so clear. Painfully clear.
Shortly thereafter, McCorvey released a statement that affirmed her entrance into the Roman Catholic Church, and she has been confirmed into the church as a full member.
The Watergate scandal, involving Nixon's cover-up of his operatives' break-in into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex destroyed his political base, sent many aides to prison, and forced Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974. He was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford. The Fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War and resulted in North and South Vietnam being reunited. Communist victories in neighboring Cambodia and Laos occurred in the same year.
Bill Gates established Microsoft on April 4, 1975. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows. Microsoft is the world's largest software maker measured by revenues. Gates has stated regarding his faith: "The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief".
On September 5, 1975, Charles Manson Family cult member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to kill U.S. President Gerald Ford in California. Although Fromme stood a little more than an arm's length from Ford that Friday morning and pointed a M1911 pistol at him in the public grounds of the California State Capitol building, her gun failed to fire and no one was injured.
Jimmy Carter, running as someone who was not a part of the Washington political establishment, was elected president in 1976. On the world stage, Carter brokered the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. In 1979, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage, resulting in the Iran hostage crisis. With the hostage crisis and continuing stagflation, Carter lost the 1980 election to the Republican Ronald Reagan. On January 20, 1981, minutes after Carter's term in office ended, the remaining U.S. captives held at the U.S. embassy in Iran were released, ending the 444-day hostage crisis. Carter's ability to use the hostage crisis to regain public acceptance eroded when his attempt to rescue the hostages ended in disaster and drew further skepticism towards his leadership skills. Following the failed rescue attempt, Jimmy Carter was overwhelmingly blamed for the Iran hostage crisis, in which the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans, paraded the captured American hostages in public, and burned effigies of Carter. Carter's critics saw him as an inept leader who had failed to solve the worsening economic problems at home.
The mass-suicide of 909 American citizens in November 1978 who were members of the religious cult the Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, occurred in Guyana. With the addition murders of nine others, including Congressman Leo Ryan, the 918 deaths were the largest loss of American life in a single incident and in a non-natural disaster at the time.
On July 15, 1979, President Carter gave a nationally-televised address in which he identified what he believed to be a "crisis of confidence" among the American people. This came to be known as his "malaise" speech, although Carter never used the word in the speech. Carter’s use of rhetoric was one of the main reasons that his speech was memorable. Specifically his use of juxtaposition in the line “It is a crisis of confidence”, which is the main line of the speech. Carter juxtaposed “crisis” and “confidence” to explain how overconsumption in the United States was leading to an energy crisis. Although at first this resonated with the public and he went up in the polls, there was a boomerang effect and the speech prompted the public to backlash against him. The "malaise" speech was criticized later on; many perceived Carter as too reliant on the American people, and as having announced little effort to fix the oil crisis himself. Carter mentioned energy so much that he may have overwhelmed the American public with it.
I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.... I have seen the strength of America in the inexhaustible resources of our people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for an energy-secure nation. . . .
His later election loss may have discouraged future politicians from asking Americans to conserve energy in a similar way.
In 1980, a major volcanic eruption occurred at Mount St. Helens, a volcano located in state of Washington, in the United States. The eruption (which was a level 5 event) was the only significant one to occur in the contiguous 48 U.S. states since the 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak in California.The eruption was preceded by a two-month series of earthquakes and steam-venting episodes, caused by an injection of magma at shallow depth below the volcano that created a huge bulge and a fracture system on the mountain's north slope.
Ted Kennedy did challenge Carter in the 1980 primaries. But after being unable to clearly answer the question "Why do you want to be president?" in a TV interview, and losing a rules battle at the Democratic National Convention, he laid aside those ambitions.
Ronald Reagan produced a major realignment with his 1980 and 1984 landslide elections. Reagan's economic policies (dubbed "Reaganomics") and the implementation of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 lowered income taxes from 70% to 28% over the course of seven years. Reagan continued to downsize government taxation and regulation. The US experienced a recession in 1982, but the negative indicators reversed, with the inflation rate decreasing from 11% to 2%, the unemployment rate decreasing from 10.8% in December 1982 to 7.5% in November 1984, and the economic growth rate increasing from 4.5% to 7.2%. Reagan ordered a buildup of the US military, incurring additional budget deficits. Reagan introduced a complicated missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) (dubbed "Star Wars" by opponents) in which, theoretically, the U.S. could shoot down missiles with laser systems in space. The Soviets reacted harshly because they thought it violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and would upset the balance of power by giving the U.S. a major military advantage. For years Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev argued vehemently against SDI. However, by the late 1980s he decided the system would never work and should not be used to block disarmament deals with the U.S. Reagan's Invasion of Grenada and bombing of Libya were popular in the US, though his backing of the Contras rebels was mired in the controversy over the Iran–Contra affair that revealed Reagan's poor management style.
A U.S.–Caribbean force invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983, in an action called Operation Urgent Fury, swiftly defeated the Grenadan forces and their Cuban allies. During the fighting 45 Grenadians, 25 Cubans, and 19 Americans were killed. This action was taken in response to an appeal obtained from the governor general and to a request for assistance from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean State. The island had been previously taken over by the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement which suspended the constitution. The United States government military strategists feared that Soviet use of the island would enable the Soviet Union to project tactical power over the entire Caribbean region. U.S. citizens were evacuated, and constitutional government was resumed.
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger (mission STS-51-L) broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. Approximately 17 percent of Americans witnessed the launch live because of the presence of crew member Christa McAuliffe, the first member of the Teacher in Space Project, who would have been the first teacher in space.
The Soviet Union collapsed on Christmas Day 1991, ending the US–Soviet Cold War.
The United States emerged as the world's sole remaining superpower and continued to intervene in international affairs during the 1990s, including the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Following his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton oversaw one of the longest periods of economic expansion and unprecedented gains in securities values, a side effect of the digital revolution and new business opportunities created by the Internet. The Gulf War was a war waged by coalition forces from 34 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.The U.S. and the U.N. gave several public justifications for involvement in the conflict, the most prominent being the Iraqi violation of Kuwaiti territorial integrity. In addition, the U.S. moved to support its ally Saudi Arabia, whose importance in the region, and as a key supplier of oil, made it of considerable geopolitical importance. Other justifications for foreign involvement included Iraq’s history of human rights abuses under Saddam. Iraq was also known to possess biological weapons and chemical weapons, which Saddam had used against Iranian troops during the Iran–Iraq War and against his own country's Kurdish population in the Al-Anfal Campaign.
Following his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton oversaw one of the longest periods of economic expansion and unprecedented gains in securities values, a side effect of the digital revolution and new business opportunities created by the Internet. He also worked with the Republican Congress to pass the first balanced federal budget in 30 years. In 1998, Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors" for lying about a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky but was later acquitted by the Senate.
The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. Timothy McVeigh , an American militia movement sympathizer who was a Gulf War veteran, had detonated an explosive-filled Ryder rental truck parked in front of the building. McVeigh's co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had assisted in the bomb preparation. Motivated by his hatred of the federal government since the Gulf War (He said he was shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners) and angered by its handling of the 1993 Waco siege and the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992, McVeigh timed his attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the deadly fire that ended the siege at Waco.
The Columbine High School massacre was a school shooting which occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County in the State of Colorado. In addition to the shootings, the complex and highly planned attack involved a fire bomb to divert firefighters, propane tanks converted to bombs placed in the cafeteria, 99 explosive devices, and bombs rigged in cars. The perpetrators, two senior students, murdered a total of 12 students and one teacher. Although their motives remain unclear, the personal journals of the perpetrators document that they wished their actions to rival the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as other deadly attacks that occurred in the United States in the 1990s. The youths placed the duffel bags containing propane bombs inside the cafeteria. Had the bombs exploded with full power, they would have killed or severely wounded all 488 students in the cafeteria and possibly collapsed the ceiling, dropping part of the library into the cafeteria. The bombs failed to explode. Highly influential, the incident is noted as one of the first and most serious of a series of high profile spree shootings which have occurred ever since.
The presidential election in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore was one of the closest in US history and helped lay the seeds for political polarization to come. The vote in the decisive state of Florida was extremely close and produced a dramatic dispute over the counting of votes. The US Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore ended the recount with a 5–4 vote. That meant Bush, then in the lead, carried Florida and the election.
On September 11, 2001 ("9/11"), the United States was struck by a terrorist attack when 19 al-Qaeda hijackers commandeered four airliners and intentionally crashed into both twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people, mostly civilians. Four passenger airliners were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists so they could be flown into buildings in suicide attacks. Two of those planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within two hours, both towers collapsed with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the WTC complex, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense), leading to a partial collapse in its western side. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was targeted at Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers tried to overcome the hijackers.
In response on September 20, President George W. Bush announced a "War on Terror". On October 7, 2001, the United States and NATO then invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, which had provided safe haven to al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.
In 2003, from March 19 to May 1, the United States launched an invasion of Iraq, which led to the collapse of the Iraq government and the eventual capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, with whom the US had long-standing tense relations. The reasons for the invasion cited by the Bush administration included the spreading of democracy, the elimination of weapons of mass destruction (a key demand of the UN as well, though later investigations found parts of the intelligence reports to be inaccurate), and the liberation of the Iraqi people. Despite some initial successes early in the invasion, the continued Iraq War fueled international protests and gradually saw domestic support decline as many people began to question whether or not the invasion was worth the cost.
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster occurred on February 1, 2003, when Columbia disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana as it reentered Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.
During the launch of STS-107, Columbia's 28th mission, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the left wing. Most previous shuttle launches had seen minor damage from foam shedding, but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more serious. NASA managers limited the investigation, reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem if it had been confirmed.
Dr Francis S. Collins (April 14, 1950) is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993-2008. By graduate school Collins considered himself an atheist but currently He has described himself as a "serious Christian". His own belief, he wrote, was theistic evolution or evolutionary creation, which he preferred to call BioLogos. He wrote that one can "think of DNA as an instructional script, a software program, sitting in the nucleus of the cell" In a 1998 interview with Scientific American, Collins stated that he is "intensely uncomfortable with abortion as a solution to anything" and does not "perceive a precise moment at which life begins other than the moment of conception". However, in the same interview it was said that Collins also "does not advocate changing the law". He is also quoted saying:
- "The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful".
- "There are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist"
- "Evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things".
- "I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers".
-"I would not expect religion to be the right tool for sequencing the human genome and by the same token would not expect science to be the means to approaching the supernatural. But on the really interesting larger questions, such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘Why do human beings long for spirituality?,’ I find science unsatisfactory. Many superstitions have come into existence and then faded away. Faith has not, which suggests it has reality".
In August 2005, hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coastlines killing at least 1,836 people and causing $81 billion in damage.
The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. A senior student at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, before committing suicide (another six people were injured escaping from classroom windows).The massacre is the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history and one of the deadliest by a single gunman worldwide. The incident reignited the gun politics debate in the United States, with proponents of gun control legislation arguing that guns are too accessible, citing that the perpetrator, a mentally unsound individual, was able to purchase two semi-automatic pistols despite state laws which should have prevented such purchase
In 2008, the unpopularity of President Bush and the Iraq war, along with the 2008 financial crisis, led to the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the United States. After his election, Obama reluctantly continued the war effort in Iraq until August 31, 2010, when he declared that combat operations had ended.
In September 2008, the United States, and most of Europe, entered the longest post–World War II recession, often called the "Great Recession." Multiple overlapping crises were involved, especially the housing market crisis, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, an automotive industry crisis, rising unemployment, and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The financial crisis threatened the stability of the entire economy in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers failed and other giant banks were in grave danger.
The recession officially ended in June 2009, and the economy slowly began to expand once again. The unemployment rate peaked at 10.1% in October 2009 after surging from 4.7% in November 2007, and gradually fell to 6.7% as of March 2014. However, overall economic growth has remained weaker in the 2010s compared to expansions in previous decades.
The Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 was signed into law, ending the Don't ask, don't tell policy regarding homosexuals in the United States Armed Forces. The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.
In May 2011, after nearly a decade in hiding, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was killed in Pakistan in a raid conducted by US naval special forces acting under President Obama's direct orders.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut when a 20-year-old guy fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members. The incident was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school or grade school in U.S. history and the second-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in U.S. history, after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The shooting prompted renewed debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals for making the background-check system universal, and for new federal and state legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition.
....
[Benjamin Franklin
A world-famous polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity.
Benjamin Franklin was born on Milk Street, in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1706. Benjamin Franklin's mother, Abiah Folger, was born into a Puritan family among those that fled to Massachusetts to establish a purified Congregationalist Christianity in New England, when King Charles I of England began persecuting Puritans.
In 1727, Benjamin Franklin, then 21, created the Junto, a group of "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community." The Junto was a discussion group for issues of the day; it subsequently gave rise to many organizations in Philadelphia.
In 1728, Franklin had set up a printing house in partnership with Hugh Meredith; the following year he became the publisher of a newspaper called The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum for agitation about a variety of local reforms and initiatives through printed essays and observations. Over time, his commentary, and his adroit cultivation of a positive image as an industrious and intellectual young man, earned him a great deal of social respect
Franklin saw the printing press as a device to instruct colonial Americans in moral virtue. Franklin thereby invented the first newspaper chain. It was more than a business venture, for like many publishers since, he believed that the press had a public-service duty.
Franklin established a common-law marriage with Deborah Read on September 1, 1730. They took in Franklin's young, recently acknowledged illegitimate son, William, and raised him in their household. In addition, they had two children together. The first, Francis Folger Franklin, born October 1732, died of smallpox in 1736. Their second child, Sarah Franklin, familiarly called Sally, was born in 1743.
In 1730, at the age of 24, Franklin publicly acknowledged an illegitimate son named William, and raised him in his household. His mother's identity is not known. He was educated in Philadelphia.
In 1731, Franklin was initiated into the local Masonic Lodge. He became Grand Master in 1734, indicating his rapid rise to prominence in Pennsylvania. That same year, he edited and published the first Masonic book in the Americas, a reprint of James Anderson's Constitutions of the Free-Masons. Franklin remained a Freemason for the rest of his life.
A Loyalist, William and his father eventually broke relations over their differences about the American Revolutionary War. The elder Franklin could never accept William's position. Deposed in 1776 by the revolutionary government of New Jersey and imprisoned for a time, the younger Franklin went to New York in 1782, which was still occupied by British troops.
In 1733, Franklin began to publish the famous Poor Richard's Almanack (with content both original and borrowed) under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on which much of his popular reputation is based. Franklin frequently wrote under pseudonyms. Although it was no secret that Franklin was the author, his Richard Saunders character repeatedly denied it.
Franklin was an avid chess player. He was playing chess by around 1733, making him the first chess player known by name in the American colonies
In 1743, Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society to help scientific men discuss their discoveries and theories. He began the electrical research that, along with other scientific inquiries, would occupy him for the rest of his life, in between bouts of politics and moneymaking
In 1747, he retired from printing and went into other businesses. He created a partnership with his foreman, David Hall, which provided Franklin with half of the shop's profits for 18 years. This lucrative business arrangement provided leisure time for study, and in a few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation with educated persons throughout Europe and especially in France.
In 1750 he published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm that appeared capable of becoming a lightning storm. On May 10, 1752, Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot-tall (12 m) iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. On June 15 Franklin may possibly have conducted his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia, successfully extracting sparks from a cloud. Franklin's experiment was not written up with credit
In recognition of his work with electricity, Franklin received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753, and in 1756 he became one of the few 18th-century Americans elected as a Fellow of the Society. The cgs unit of electric charge has been named after him: one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb.
Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his many creations were the lightning rod, glass armonica (a glass instrument, not to be confused with the metal harmonica), Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and the flexible urinary catheter. Franklin never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote, "... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
His discoveries resulted from his investigations of electricity. Franklin proposed that "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity were not different types of "electrical fluid" (as electricity was called then), but the same electrical fluid under different pressures. He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively, and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge.
Franklin became involved in Philadelphia politics and rapidly progressed. In October 1748, he was selected as a councilman, in June 1749 he became a Justice of the Peace for Philadelphia, and in 1751 he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly. On August 10, 1753, Franklin was appointed joint deputy postmaster-general of North America. His most notable service in domestic politics was his reform of the postal system, with mail sent out every week.
In 1758, the year he ceased writing for the Almanack, he printed Father Abraham's Sermon, also known as The Way to Wealth. Franklin's autobiography, begun in 1771 but published after his death, has become one of the classics of the genre.
He was elected Speaker of the Pennsylvania House in May 1764. In London, Franklin opposed the 1765 Stamp Act. Unable to prevent its passage, he made another political miscalculation and recommended a friend to the post of stamp distributor for Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians were outraged, believing that he had supported the measure all along, and threatened to destroy his home in Philadelphia.
While touring Ireland, he was moved by the level of poverty he saw. Ireland's economy was affected by the same trade regulations and laws of Britain that governed America. Franklin feared that America could suffer the same effects should Britain's "colonial exploitation" continued.
In 1763, soon after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania from England for the first time, the western frontier was engulfed in a bitter war known as Pontiac's Rebellion. The Paxton Boys, a group of settlers convinced that the Pennsylvania government was not doing enough to protect them from American Indian raids, murdered a group of peaceful Susquehannock Indians and marched on Philadelphia. Franklin helped to organize a local militia to defend the capital against the mob. He met with the Paxton leaders and persuaded them to disperse.
By the time Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, after his second mission to Great Britain, the American Revolution had begun – with fighting between colonials and British at Lexington and Concord. The New England militia had trapped the main British army in Boston.
On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Post Office and named Benjamin Franklin as the first United States Postmaster General. Franklin had been a postmaster for decades and was a natural choice for the position.
In December 1776, Franklin was dispatched to France as commissioner for the United States. Franklin remained in France until 1785. He conducted the affairs of his country toward the French nation with great success, which included securing a critical military alliance in 1778 and negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1783). During his stay in France, Benjamin Franklin was active as a freemason, serving as Grand Master of the Lodge Les Neuf Sœurs from 1779 until 1781. His lodge number was 24. He was a Past Grand Master of Pennsylvania.
Franklin also served as American minister to Sweden, although he never visited that country. He negotiated a treaty that was signed in April 1783. On August 27, 1783, in Paris, Franklin witnessed the world's first hydrogen balloon flight.
When he returned home in 1785, Franklin occupied a position only second to that of George Washington as the champion of American independence.
Between 1771 and 1788, he finished his autobiography. While it was at first addressed to his son, it was later completed for the benefit of mankind at the request of a friend.
Franklin strongly supported the right to freedom of speech:
"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech ...
"Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man ..." (1722)
Like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous. All his life he explored the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in Poor Richard's aphorisms. Franklin felt that organized religion was necessary to keep men good to their fellow men, but rarely attended religious services himself. When Franklin met Voltaire in Paris and asked this great apostle of the Enlightenment to bless his grandson, Voltaire said in English, "God and Liberty," and added, "this is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of Monsieur Franklin."
Franklin formulated a presentation of his beliefs and published it in 1728. It did not mention many of the Puritan ideas as regards belief in salvation, the divinity of Jesus, and indeed most religious dogma. He clarified himself as a deist in his 1771 autobiography, although he still considered himself a Christian. He retained a strong faith in a God as the wellspring of morality and goodness in man, and as a Providential actor in history responsible for American independence.
When he stopped attending church, Franklin wrote in his autobiography:
... Sunday being my studying day, I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that He made the world, and governed it by His providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter.
Franklin retained a lifelong commitment to the Puritan virtues and political values he had grown up with, and through his civic work and publishing, he succeeded in passing these values into the American culture permanently. He had a "passion for virtue". These Puritan values included his devotion to egalitarianism, education, industry, thrift, honesty, temperance, charity and community spirit.
"Puritanism ... and the epidemic evangelism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification" by preaching that the Bible taught all men are equal, that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class, and that all men can be saved. Franklin, steeped in Puritanism and an enthusiastic supporter of the evangelical movement, rejected the salvation dogma, but embraced the radical notion of egalitarian democracy.
These Puritan values and the desire to pass them on, were one of Franklin's quintessentially American characteristics, and helped shape the character of the nation. Franklin's writings on virtue were derided by some European authors, such as Jackob Fugger in his critical work Portrait of American Culture.
Although Franklin's parents had intended for him to have a career in the Church, Franklin as a young man adopted the Enlightenment religious belief in deism, that God's truths can be found entirely through nature and reason. "I soon became a thorough Deist."
After the disillusioning experience of seeing the decay in his own moral standards, and those of two friends in London whom he had converted to Deism, Franklin turned back to a belief in the importance of organized religion, on the pragmatic grounds that without God and organized churches, man will not be good.
At one point, he wrote to Thomas Paine, criticizing his manuscript, The Age of Reason:
"For without the Belief of a Providence that takes Cognizance of, guards and guides and may favour particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its Protection ... think how great a Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc'd and inconsiderate Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great Point for its Security; And perhaps you are indebted to her originally that is to your Religious Education, for the Habits of Virtue upon which you now justly value yourself. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it."
Franklin was a proponent of religion in general. He prayed to "Powerful Goodness" and referred to God as "the infinite". John Adams noted that Franklin was a mirror in which people saw their own religion: "The Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker." Whatever else Franklin was, concludes Morgan, "he was a true champion of generic religion." In a letter to Richard Price, Franklin stated that he believed that religion should support itself without help from the government, claiming, "When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
On July 4, 1776, Congress appointed a three-member committee composed of Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design the Great Seal of the United States. Franklin's proposal (which was not adopted) featured the motto: "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God" and a scene from the Book of Exodus, with Moses, the Israelites, the pillar of fire, and George III depicted as pharaoh.
His autobiography lists his 13 virtues as:
"Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation."
"Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation."
"Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time."
"Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."
"Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing."
"Industry. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."
"Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly."
"Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty."
"Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve."
"Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation."
"Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable."
"Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation."
"Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates."
During Franklin's lifetime slaves were numerous in Philadelphia. In 1750, half the persons in Philadelphia who had established probate estates owned slaves. Dock workers in the city consisted of 15% slaves. Franklin owned as many as seven slaves, two males of whom worked in his household and his shop. Franklin, however, later became a "cautious abolitionist" and became an outspoken critic of landed gentry slavery. In 1758, Franklin advocated the opening of a school for the education of black slaves in Philadelphia. After returning from England in 1762, Franklin became more anti-slavery, in his view believing that the institution promoted black degradation rather than the idea blacks were inherently inferior.
By 1770, Franklin had freed his slaves and attacked the system of slavery and the international slave trade. Franklin, however, refused to publicly debate the issue of slavery at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Similar to Thomas Jefferson, Franklin tended to take both sides of the issue of slavery, never fully divesting himself from the institution.
Benjamin Franklin died from pleuritic attack at his home in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at age 84. Approximately 20,000 people attended his funeral. He was interred in Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia.
Some quotes by Franklin:
"Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy".
"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail".
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing".
"Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants".
"Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late".
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do".
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes".
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself".
"Energy and persistence conquer all things".
"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment".
“There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self.”
"Marriage is the most natural state of man, and... the state in which you will find solid happiness".
"Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75".
"Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God".
"Genius without education is like silver in the mine".
How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!”
"Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them".
"Work as if you were to live a hundred years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow".
"All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones".
]
Juan Ponce de León was the first European to sight what today is Florida. A legend says he discovered it while searching for the Fountain of Youth, but this is a later-day myth. On March 3, 1513, Juan Ponce de León organized and equipped three ships which commenced an expedition departing from "Punta Aguada" Puerto Rico. Although it is often stated that he sighted the peninsula for the first time on March 27, 1513, and thought it was an island, he probably saw one of the Bahama islands.
It was Spanish custom to name a new place after the nearest Roman Catholic feast day. They had just started exploring "new places" for a few decades at most. He arrived on the east coast during the Spanish Easter feast, Pascua Florida, April 7. He named the land La Pascua de la Florida, or "Passion of the Flowers," or "Passion of the Christ".
At the time of first European contact in the early 16th century, Florida was inhabited by an estimated 350,000 people belonging to a number of tribes. The Spanish recorded nearly one hundred names of groups they encountered, ranging from organized political entities such as the Apalachee, with a population of around 50,000, to villages with no known political affiliation. There were an estimated 150,000 speakers of dialects of the Timucua language, but the Timucua were organized as groups of villages and did not share a common culture.
Early Spanish attempts to explore and colonize Florida were disastrously unsuccessful. Ponce de León returned in 1521 with equipment and settlers to start a colony near Charlotte Harbor, but they were driven off by repeated attacks from the native Calusa population, and de León died in Cuba from wounds received in the fighting.
Spanish explorer Álvarez de Pineda in 1519 was the first European to see the coastal areas of western Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, lands he called "Amichel." His map is the first known document of Texas history and was the first map of the Gulf Coast region of the United States.
Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition explored Florida's west coast in 1528, but violent demands for gold and food led to hostile relations with the Tocobaga and other native groups. Facing starvation and unable to find his support ships, Narváez attempted return to Mexico sailing from Florida via five rafts. Depleted of food and water, the men followed the coast westward, until they reached the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca commanded one of these vessels, each of which had room for only 50 men. When the current swept them into the Gulf, the five rafts were separated by a hurricane, some lost forever, including that of Narváez. Only 80 men survived after being swept onto Galveston Island, Texas. Over the next few years, more men died, and only four of the original party survived. Cabeza de Vaca was one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition. As the number of survivors dwindled rapidly, they were enslaved for a few years by various American Indian tribes of the upper Gulf Coast. These included the Hans and the Capoques, and tribes later called the Karankawa and Coahuiltecan. Only four men, Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, and an enslaved Moroccan Berber named Esteban (later called Estevanico), survived and escaped to reach Mexico City. Estevanico became the first person from Africa known to have set foot in the present continental United States. Traveling mostly in this small group, Cabeza de Vaca explored what is now the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the northeastern Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila, and possibly smaller portions of New Mexico and Arizona. He traveled on foot through the then-uncolonized territories of Texas and the coast.
During his wanderings, passing from tribe to tribe, Cabeza de Vaca developed sympathies for the indigenous population. He became a trader, which allowed him freedom to travel among the tribes. Cabeza de Vaca claimed that he was guided by God to learn to heal the sick and gained such notoriety as a faith healer that he and his companions gathered a large following of natives who regarded them as "children of the sun", endowed with the power to both heal and destroy. Many natives accompanied the men across what is now the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Aware of his status as an early European explorer, Cabeza de Vaca closely observed the native people and noted their culture. He spent eight years with various groups, including the Capoque, Han, Avavares, and Arbadaos. He describes details of the culture of the Malhado people, the Capoque, and Han American Indians, such as their treatment of offspring, their wedding rites, and their main sources of food. After finally reaching the colonized lands of New Spain, where he encountered fellow Spaniards near modern-day Culiacán, Cabeza de Vaca reached Mexico City. From there he sailed back to Europe in 1537.
After returning to Spain in 1537, Cabeza de Vaca wrote an account about the eight years of traveling across the US Southwest, first published in 1542 as La Relación ("The Relation", or in more modern terms "The Account"), which in later editions was retitled Naufragios ("Shipwrecks"). As he did not begin writing his chronicle until back in Spain, he had to rely on memory. Cabeza de Vaca was uncertain of his route. Aware that his account has numerous errors in chronology and geography, historians have worked to put together pieces of the puzzle to discern his paths. His narratives are now known as “The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca”. The narrative of Cabeza de Vaca is the “first European book devoted completely to North America.” His account is a detailed look into the lives of American Indians of the time. Cabeza de Vaca showed compassion and respect for native peoples, which, together with the great detail he recorded, distinguishes his narrative from others.
In 1540, Cabeza de Vaca was appointed adelantado of the Río de la Plata in present-day Argentina. His mission was to re-establish the settlement of Buenos Aires. En route, he disembarked from his fleet at Santa Catarina Island in modern Brazil. Cabeza de Vaca is thought to have been the first European to see the Iguaçu Falls. The honor probably belongs to his scouts. Cabeza de Vaca is considered to have had an unusually benevolent attitude for his time toward the American Indians. The elite settlers in Argentina, known as encomenderos, generally did not share this attitude; they wanted to use the natives for labor. His loss of the elite support, together with the failure of Buenos Aires as a settlement, prompted the former governor Domingo Martínez de Irala to arrest Cabeza de Vaca for poor administration in 1544. The former explorer was returned to Spain for trial in 1545. Although eventually exonerated, Cabeza de Vaca never returned to the colony. He wrote an extensive report on South America, which was highly critical of Martínez de Irala. The report was bound with his earlier La Relación and published under the title Comentarios (Commentary). He died poor in Seville around the year 1558.
Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 and began a multi-year trek through what is now the southeastern United States in which he found no gold but lost his life. He was a Spanish explorer and conquistador who led the first European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day United States, and the first documented to have crossed the Mississippi River. Hernando de Soto was born to parents who were hidalgos of modest means in Extremadura, a region of poverty and hardship from which many young people looked for ways to seek their fortune elsewhere. In 1530, de Soto became a regidor of León, Nicaragua. He led an expedition up the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula searching for a passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to enable trade with the Orient, the richest market in the world. Failing that, and without means to explore further, de Soto, upon Pedro Arias Dávila's death, left his estates in Nicaragua. Bringing his own men on ships which he hired, de Soto joined Francisco Pizarro at his first base of Tumbes shortly before departure for the interior of present-day Peru. De Soto returned to Spain with an enormous share of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. He was admitted into the prestigious Order of Santiago. His share was awarded to him by the King of Spain, and he received 724 marks of gold, 17,740 pesos.He married Isabel de Bobadilla, daughter of Pedrarias Dávila and a relative of a confidante of Queen Isabella. De Soto petitioned King Charles for the government of Guatemala with "permission to make discovery in the South Sea," but was granted the governorship of Cuba instead. De Soto was expected to colonize the North American continent for Spain within four years, for which his family would be given a sizable piece of land.
In May 1539, de Soto landed nine ships with over 620 men and 220 horses in south Tampa Bay. Near de Soto's port, the party found Juan Ortíz, a Spaniard, living with the Mocoso. Ortíz had been captured by the Uzita while searching for the lost Narváez expedition, and had later escaped to Mocoso. Ortíz knew the Timucua language and served de Soto as an interpreter as he traversed the Timucuan-speaking areas on his way to Apalachee. He established a unique method for guiding the expedition and communicating with various tribal dialects. He recruited guides from each tribe along the route. A chain of communication was established whereby a guide who had lived in close proximity to another tribal area was able to pass his information and language on to a guide from a neighboring area. Because Ortiz refused to dress as an hidalgo Spaniard, other officers questioned his motives. De Soto remained loyal to Ortiz, allowing him the freedom to dress and live among his friends. Another important guide was the seventeen-year-old boy Perico, or Pedro, from modern-day Georgia. He spoke several of the local tribes' languages and could communicate with Ortiz.
The expedition traveled north, exploring Florida's West Coast, encountering native ambushes and conflicts along the way. De Soto's first winter encampment was at Anhaica, the capital of the Apalachee. It is one of the few places on the route where archaeologists have found physical traces of the expedition. It was described as being near the "Bay of Horses". The bay was named for where the starving members of the preceding Narváez expedition killed and ate their horses while building boats for escape. From their winter location in the western panhandle of Florida, having heard of gold being mined "toward the sun's rising," the expedition turned north-east through what is now the modern state of Georgia.
The expedition continued on to present-day South Carolina. The expedition was received by a female chief (Cofitachequi), who turned over her tribe's pearls, food and other goods to the Spanish soldiers. De Soto headed north into the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, where he spent a month resting the horses while his men searched for gold. De Soto next entered eastern Tennessee. At this point, De Soto either continued along the Tennessee River to enter Alabama from the north (according to John R. Swanton), or turned south and entered northern Georgia (according to Charles M. Hudson).
De Soto's expedition spent another month in the Coosa chiefdom before turning south toward the Gulf of Mexico to meet two ships bearing fresh supplies from Havana. Along the way, de Soto was led into Mauvila (or Mabila), a fortified city in southern Alabama. The Mobilian tribe, under Chief Tuskaloosa, ambushed de Soto's army. Other sources suggest de Soto's men were attacked after attempting to force their way into a cabin occupied by Tuskaloosa. The Spaniards fought their way out, and retaliated by burning the town to the ground. During the nine-hour encounter, about 200 Spaniards died, and 150 more were badly wounded, according to the chronicler Elvas. Twenty more died during the next few weeks. They killed an estimated 2,000-6,000 warriors at Mabila, making the battle one of the bloodiest in recorded North American history. The Spaniards won a Pyrrhic victory, as they had lost most of their possessions and nearly one-quarter of their horses. The Spaniards were wounded and sickened, surrounded by enemies and without equipment in an unknown territory. Fearing that word of this would reach Spain if his men reached the ships at Mobile Bay, de Soto led them away from the Gulf Coast, into Mississippi, most likely near present-day Tupelo, where they spent the winter. In the spring of 1541, de Soto demanded 200 men as porters from the Chickasaw. They refused his demand and attacked the Spanish camp during the night. The Spaniards lost about 40 men and the remainder of their limited equipment. According to participating chroniclers, the expedition could have been destroyed at this point, but the Chickasaw let them go.
On May 8, 1541, de Soto's troops reached the Mississippi River (Alonso Álvarez de Pineda was the first European to see it, in 1519, and sailed twenty miles up the river). After about one month, and the construction of several floats, they finally crossed the Mississippi at or near Memphis, Tennessee and continued their travels westward through modern-day Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. They wintered in Autiamique, on the Arkansas River. In 1541, the expedition became the first Europeans to see what Native Americans referred to as the Valley of the Vapors, now called Hot Springs, Arkansas. Members of many tribes had gathered at the valley over many years to enjoy the healing properties of the thermal springs.
After a harsh winter, the Spanish expedition decamped and moved on more erratically. Their interpreter Juan Ortiz had died, making it more difficult for them to get directions and food sources, and generally to communicate with the Natives. The expedition went as far inward as the Caddo River, where they clashed with a Native American tribe called the Tula in October 1541.
De Soto died of a fever on May 21, 1542, in the native village of Guachoya on the western banks of the Mississippi. Before his death, de Soto chose his former maestro de campo (or field commander) Luis de Moscoso Alvarado to assume command of the expedition. De Soto's expedition had explored La Florida for three years without finding the expected treasures or a hospitable site for colonization efforts. They had lost nearly half their men, most of the horses had been killed, the soldiers wore animal skins for clothing, and many were injured and in poor health. The leaders came to a consensus (although not total) to abort the expedition and try to find a way home, either down the Mississippi River, or overland across Texas to the Spanish colony of Mexico City. There were no villages for the soldiers to raid for food and the army was too large to live off the land. They were forced to backtrack to the more developed agricultural regions along the Mississippi. Taking about two weeks to make the journey, the expedition encountered hostile tribes along the whole course. Natives followed the boats in canoes, shooting arrows at the soldiers for days on end as they drifted through their territory. The Spanish had no effective offensive weapons on the water, as their crossbows had long ceased working. They relied on armor and sleeping mats to block the arrows. About 11 Spaniards were killed along this stretch and many more wounded.
On reaching the mouth of the Mississippi, they stayed close to the Gulf shore heading south and west. After about 50 days, they made it to the Pánuco River and the Spanish frontier town of Pánuco. There they rested for about a month. During this time many of the Spaniards, having safely returned and reflecting on their accomplishments, decided they had left La Florida too soon, leading to fights and some deaths. Of the initial 700 participants, between 300 and 350 survived (311 is a commonly accepted figure). Most of the men stayed in the New World, settling in Mexico, Peru, Cuba and other Spanish colonies.
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| De Soto expedition |
Since 1986, two Florida sites have been documented as definitively associated with de Soto's expedition: the Governor Martin Site at the former Apalachee village of Anhaica, located about a mile east of the present Florida Capitol in Tallahassee; and the White Ranch Site in the Potano territory located a few miles north of Ocala. The Governor Martin Site was discovered by the archaeologist B. Calvin Jones in March 1987, and the White Ranch Site was discovered by the archaeologist F. Ashley White in July 2005.
In 1540 Francisco Vásquez de Coronado explored from Arizona to central Kansas. Coronado was the Governor of the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia (New Galicia, a province of New Spain located northwest of Mexico and comprising the contemporary Mexican states of Jalisco, Sinaloa and Nayarit). In 1539, he dispatched Friar Marcos de Niza and Estevanico, more properly known as Estevan, the diminutive form being a Spanish nickname. Estevanico served as the main guide for a return expedition to the Southwest, where he was killed in the Zuni city of Hawikuh in 1539. When Marcos de Niza returned, he told about a city of vast wealth, a golden city called Cíbola, and that Estevan had been killed by the Zuni citizens of Cíbola. Though he did not claim to have entered the city of Cíbola, he claimed that the city stood on a high hill, that it appeared wealthy and as large as Mexico City.
Coronado assembled an expedition with two components. One component carried the bulk of the expedition's supplies, and traveled via the Guadalupe River under the leadership of Hernando de Alarcon. The other component traveled by land, along the trail Friar Marcos de Niza had used. Coronado and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza invested large sums of their own money in the venture. Mendoza, Coronado's friend and fellow investor, appointed him as the commander of the expedition, with the mission to find the seven golden cities.
Coronado set out from Compostela on February 23, 1540, at the head of a large expedition composed of about 400 European men-at-arms (mostly Spaniards), 1,300 to 2,000 Mexican Indian allies and four Franciscan monks. After months of searching, Francisco's men came up empty handed. They split up to find other treasures. In 1541 Part of Francisco's men discovered the Grand Canyon, while others found the Colorado Plateau. In 1542 When they were sure there was no gold to discover, Francisco and his men returned to Mexico. The Vicery was disappointed in Francisco's failure and so he charged Francisco with neglecting his duty. Francisco was eventually cleared from the charges. In 1549 Francisco was given a piece of land as a reward for his service and he spent the rest of his life in Mexico before he died. His legacy as the first European to explore the American west has lived on.
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| The Coronado Expedition |
On June 27, 1542, Cabrillo set out from Navidad, Mexico with three ships: the 200-ton galleon and flagship San Salvador, the smaller La Victoria (c. 100 tons), and the lateen-rigged, twenty-six oared "fragata" or "bergantin" San Miguel. On August 1, Cabrillo anchored within sight of Cedros Island. Before the end of the month they had passed Baja Point (named "Cabo del Engaño" by de Ulloa in 1539) and entered "uncharted waters, where no Spanish ships had been before". On September 28, he landed in what is now San Diego Bay and named it "San Miguel".
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| Cabrillo expedition |
Cabrillo hoped to find the mythical and rich city of Cíbola that was believed to exist somewhere north of the Pacific coast, in addition to looking for the non-existent Anian pass or strait that was said to link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to the north. In the 16th century, the Spaniards in New Spain (now Mexico) began to hear rumors of "Seven Cities of Gold" called "Cíbola" located across the desert, hundreds of miles to the north. The stories may have their root in an earlier Iberian legend about seven cities founded on the island of Antillia, a phantom island, by a Catholic expedition in the 8th century, or one based on the capture of Merida, Spain by the Moors. The word "Cíbola" comes from Cíbolo, an unusual Spanish name given to the bison, since the territory of the legendary kingdom where the existence of the seven cities was supposed to extend to the prairies where (until the mid-19th century) there were millions of these animals .
The later Spanish tales were largely caused by reports given by the four shipwrecked survivors of the failed Narváez expedition, which included Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a black moorish slave named Esteban Dorantes, or Estevanico. Eventually returning to New Spain, the adventurers said they had heard stories from natives about cities with great and limitless riches.
On August 1, Cabrillo anchored within sight of Cedros Island. Before the end of the month they had passed Baja Point (named "Cabo del Engaño" by de Ulloa in 1539) and entered "uncharted waters, where no Spanish ships had been before". On September 28, he landed in what is now San Diego Bay and named it "San Miguel". A little over a week later he reached Santa Catalina Island (October 7), which he named "San Salvador", after his flagship. On sending a boat to the island "a great crowd of armed Indians appeared" — whom, however, they later "befriended". Nearby San Clemente Island was named "Victoria", in honor of the third ship of the fleet. The next morning, October 8, Cabrillo came to San Pedro Bay, which was named "Baya de los Fumos" (English: Smoke Bay). The following day they anchored overnight in Santa Monica Bay. Going up the coast Cabrillo saw Anacapa Island, which they learned from the Indians was uninhabited. The fleet spent the next week in the islands, mostly anchored in Cuyler Harbor, a bay on the northeastern coast of San Miguel Island. On October 18 the expedition saw Point Conception, which they named "Cabo de Galera".
Cabrillo's expedition recorded the names of numerous Chumash villages on the California coast and adjacent islands in October 1542 — then located in the two warring provinces of Xexo (ruled by an "old woman", now Santa Barbara County, California) and Xucu (now Ventura County, California). On November 13 they sighted and named "Cabo de Piños" (possibly either Point Pinos or Point Reyes), but missed the entrance to San Francisco Bay, a lapse that mariners would repeat for the next two centuries and more. The expedition reached as far north as the Russian River before autumn storms forced them to turn back. Coming back down the coast, Cabrillo entered Monterey Bay, naming it "Bahia de Los Piños". On November 23, 1542, the little fleet arrived back in "San Salvador" (Santa Catalina Island) to overwinter and make repairs. There, around Christmas Eve, Cabrillo stepped out of his boat and splintered his shin when he stumbled onto a jagged rock while trying to rescue some of his men from attacking Tongva warriors. The injury became infected and developed gangrene, and he died on January 3, 1543 and was buried. A possible headstone was later found on San Miguel Island. His second-in-command brought the remainder of the party back to Navidad, where they arrived April 14, 1543.
A notary's official report of Cabrillo's expedition was lost; all that survives is a summary of it made by another investigator, Andrés de Urdaneta, who also had access to ships' logs and charts.His discoveries went largely unnoticed at the time, so none of his place names were permanently adopted. Despite this, Cabrillo is now remembered as the first European to travel the California coast, and many parks, schools, buildings and streets in California bear his name.
The Maritime Museum of San Diego, in partnership with Cabrillo National Monument, has built a full-sized, fully functional, and historically accurate replica of Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo’s flagship, San Salvador. The construction of the replica was based on historical and archeological research into early Spanish and Portuguese shipbuilding techniques.
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| San Salvador replica ship |
On November 10, 1602, Vizcaíno entered and named San Diego Bay. Sailing up the coast, Vizcaíno named many prominent features such as the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, Point Conception, the Santa Lucia Mountains, Point Lobos, Carmel River and Monterey Bay (thus obliterating some of the names given these same features by Cabrillo in 1542).
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| The Landing of Sebastian Vizcaino at Monterey in 1602 |
The era of colonization
The French subsequently tried to establish several colonies throughout North America that failed, due to weather, disease, or conflict with other European powers. Cartier attempted to create the first permanent European settlement in North America at Cap-Rouge (Quebec City) in 1541 with 400 settlers but the settlement was abandoned the next year after bad weather and first nations attacks. A small group of French troops were left on Parris Island, South Carolina in 1562 to build Charlesfort, but left after a year when they were not resupplied by France. René Goulaine de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline in what is now Jacksonville in 1564 as a haven for the Huguenot Protestant refugees from religious persecution. Later that year some mutineers from Fort Caroline fled the colony and turned pirate, attacking Spanish vessels in the Caribbean. The Spanish used this as a catalyst to locate and destroy Fort Caroline in 1565, fearing it would serve as a base for future piracy, and wanting to dissuade further French colonization. The Spanish quickly dispatched Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to go to Florida and establish a base from which to attack the French. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sighted land on August 28, 1565. As this was the feast day of Augustine of Hippo, the territory was named San Agustín. On September 8, 1565, Saint Augustine, the oldest town in the United States, was founded.
The Saturiwa, one of the two principal chiefdoms in the area, remained openly hostile. In 1566 the Saturiwa burned down St. Augustine and the settlement had to be relocated. Traditionally it was thought to have been moved to its present location, though some documentary evidence suggests it was first moved to a location on Anastasia Island. At any rate, it was certainly in its present location by the end of the 16th century.
In 1593, Antonio Gutiérrez de Humana (also spelled Umana) recruited Jusepe Gutierrez, an Indian, to join him on an entrada (expedition) to what would become New Mexico. At the time, the Viceroy of New Spain was planning to authorize an official expedition and colonization of New Mexico. The expedition of Humana and his partner, Francisco Leyva de Bonilla (also spelled Leyba), was therefore illegal. After recruiting Jusepe, Humana and Leyva found additional Spanish and Indian soldiers and servants in Santa Barbara, Chihuahua and proceeded onward into what is today New Mexico. They remained there, among the Pueblo Indians near the Rio Grande, about one year. At the time there were no Spanish settlers in New Mexico, although there may have been other fortune-seekers and slavers living among the Pueblos. Humana and Leyva and an unknown number of Spanish and Indian soldiers and servants left New Mexico to explore eastwards, presumably in search of rich kingdoms which were rumored to be just over the horizon. Their route led them by the Indian pueblo at Pecos and out onto the Great Plains of Texas where they met the Vaquero (Apache) Indians. They found numerous rancherías, some of them abandoned, and herds of bison, the American buffalo. Jusepe said they found abundant water in many marshes, springs, and arroyos (brooks) as well as great numbers of plum trees and nuts. At some point they turned toward the north. The further they went the more abundant the bison became. After traveling 45 days, they crossed two big rivers and beyond was a very large Indian settlement ten leagues long (about 26 miles) and two leagues wide. One of the two rivers flowed through the settlement.
Jusepe gave a brief description of the "Great Settlement." The houses were built on a frame of stakes with straw roofs. They were built close together, separated by narrow pathways and, in some places, between the houses were fields of maize, pumpkins, and beans. The people of the settlement received the Spanish in peace and provided them with food. They depended upon buffalo hunting and also agriculture. Leaving the Settlement, three days to the north they came upon a "multitude of buffalo," but no more Indian settlements. Discord between the leaders broke out. Humana spent an afternoon and morning in his tent apparently writing up his account of the dispute and then sent a soldier, Miguel Pérez, to summon Leyva. Leyva came to Humana's tent, dressed in shirt and breeches only. Humana "drew a butcher knife which he carried in his pocket, unsheathed it, and stabbed Captain Leyba twice." Leyva died and was quickly buried. Then Humana showed "some papers" to his men. He said that because Leyva had threatened to give him a "beating with a stick" he had killed him.
The expedition continued, reaching a very large river ten days beyond the Great Settlement. The river was one-fourth of a league wide (about two-thirds of a mile, or one kilometer), deep and sluggish. "They did not dare to cross it." It was here that five of the Indians, including Jusepe, deserted. Three became lost on the plains and Indians killed another. Jusepe was taken captive by Apaches and lived with them for a year until he escaped or was set free and made his way back to New Mexico. By this time (1596) Oñate and a large group of settlers had arrived in New Mexico and Jusepe took up residence at the San Juan Bautista Pueblo. On February 16, 1599, Oñate interviewed him concerning the Humana and Leyva expedition and Jusepe told the story of the expedition to Juan de Oñate.
According to later accounts from Indians, Humana and the other members of the expedition were killed by Indians 18 days beyond the Great Settlement. The people of the Great Settlement were almost certainly Wichita Indians whom Oñate later called Rayados. The large river where Jusepe deserted the expedition may have been the Missouri, perhaps near Kansas City. The Missouri is about 500 yards wide at this point, not as wide as Jusepe estimated, but the largest river that could be reached in about 10 days travel from the Great Settlement. This would be the first known visit of Europeans to the Missouri River.
In 1595 the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate was granted permission from King Philip II to colonize Santa Fe de Nuevo México, the present-day New Mexico.
Relations between the Spanish and the Acoma people had been mostly peaceful for several decades after the two groups first came into contact around 1540. In 1598, the Acoma leader, Zutacapan, learned that the Spanish intended to conquer Acoma Pueblo. Initially, the natives planned to defend themselves; however, their belief that the Spanish were immortal and their knowledge of Spanish atrocities committed in the past led the Acoma to try to negotiate a peaceful solution to the conflict. Accordingly, Don Oñate sent his nephew, Captain Juan de Zaldívar, to the pueblo to consult with Zutacapan. When Zaldivar arrived on December 4, 1598, one of the first things he did was to take sixteen of his men up the mesa on which the pueblo was located to demand food from the natives. After being denied the food they had demanded, the Spaniards allegedly attacked some Acoma women. A fight ensued, leaving Zaldivar and eleven of his men dead.
When Oñate learned of the incident, he ordered Juan de Zaldivar's brother, Vicente de Zaldívar, to lead an expedition to punish the Acoma and set an example for other pueblos. Taking about seventy men, Vincente de Zaldivar left San Juan Pueblo in late December or early January and arrived at Acoma Pueblo on January 21, 1599. The battle began the following morning, January 22.Of the 2,000, about 500 were killed in the battle, along with about 300 women and children. Some 500 prisoners were taken and later sentenced to a variety of punishments. Don Oñate ordered that every male above the age of twenty-five would have his right foot cut off and be enslaved for a period of twenty years. However, only twenty-four men actually received amputations.
The Acoma massacre remains a sensitive issue in the United States. In 1998, during the 400-year anniversary of Spain's founding of New Mexico colony, a group of Acomas cut off the right foot of Oñate's twelve-foot statue in Alcalde, New Mexico. They later issued a statement about the incident: "We took the liberty of removing Oñate's right foot on behalf of our brothers and sister of Acoma Pueblo ... We see no glory in celebrating Oñate's fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it."
At the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center, Estevan Arrellano, the director of the site, supervised the attachment of a new foot to the statue. He later said, "Give me a break – it was 400 years ago. It's okay to hold a grudge, but for 400 years?"
In 1601, Jusepe Gutierrez guided Juan de Oñate, the founder of New Mexico and governor of the new colony, on a large expedition to the Great Plains region of central North America. He took Oñate to the same area where he had gone with Humana and Leyva. Oñate journeyed across the plains eastward from New Mexico in a renewed search for Quivira, the fabled "city of gold." As had the earlier Coronado Expedition in the 1540s, Oñate encountered Apaches in the Texas Panhandle region. They found the “Great Settlement,” which was probably located either at the site of present-day Wichita, Kansas or along the Walnut River in Arkansas City, Kansas. Archaeological discoveries favor the Walnut River. Oñate proceeded eastward, following the Canadian River into the modern state of Oklahoma.
They found an encampment of native people that Oñate called the Escanjaques. He estimated the population at more than 5,000 living in 600 houses. The Escanjaques lived in round houses as large as 90 feet (27 m) in diameter and covered with tanned buffalo robes. They were hunters, according to Oñate, depending upon the buffalo for their subsistence and planting no crops. The Escanjaques guided Oñate to a large river a few miles away and he became the first European to describe the tallgrass prairie. Near the river, Oñate's expedition party and their numerous Escanjaque guides saw three or four hundred Rayados on a hill. The Rayados advanced, throwing dirt into the air as a sign that they were ready for war. Oñate quickly indicated that he did not wish to fight and made peace with this group of Rayados, who proved to be friendly and generous. Oñate liked the Rayados more than he did the Escanjaques. They were "united, peaceful, and settled." They showed deference to their chief, named Caratax, whom Oñate detained as a guide and hostage, although "treating him well."
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| First Oñate expedition in blue arrow and second expedition in dashed blue arrows |
Caratax led Oñate and the Escanjaques across the river to a settlement on the eastern bank, one or two miles from the river. The settlement was deserted, the inhabitants having fled. The next day the Oñate expedition proceeded onward for another eight miles through heavily populated territory, although without seeing many Rayados. At this point, the Spaniards' courage deserted them. There were obviously many Rayados nearby and soon Oñate's men were warned that the Rayados were assembling an army. Discretion seemed the better part of valor. Oñate estimated that three hundred Spanish soldiers would be needed to confront the Rayados, and he turned his soldiers around to return to New Mexico.
Oñate had worried about the Rayados hurting or attacking his expedition party, but it was instead the Escanjaques who repelled his men on their return to New Mexico. Oñate described a pitched battle with 1,500 Escanjaques, probably an exaggeration, but many Spaniards were wounded and many natives killed. After more than two hours of fighting, Oñate himself retired from the battlefield. The hostage Rayado chief Caratax was freed by a raid on Oñate and Oñate freed several women captives.
The path of Oñate's expedition and the identity of the Escanjaques and the Rayados are much debated. Most authorities believe his route led down the Canadian River from Texas to Oklahoma, cross-country to the Salt Fork, where he found the Escanjaque encampment, and then to the Arkansas River and its tributary, the Walnut River at Arkansas City, Kansas where the Rayado settlement was located.
Oñate’s last major expedition went to the west, from New Mexico to the lower valley of the Colorado River. The party of about three dozen men set out from the Rio Grande valley in October 1604. They traveled by way of Zuñi, the Hopi pueblos, and the Bill Williams River to the Colorado River, and descended that river to its mouth in the Gulf of California in January 1605, before returning along the same route to New Mexico. The evident purpose of the expedition was to locate a port by which New Mexico could be supplied, as an alternative to the laborious overland route from New Spain. The expedition to the lower Colorado River was important as the only recorded European incursion into that region between the expeditions of Hernando de Alarcón and Melchior Díaz (the first person of European background that crossed the Colorado River) in 1540 , and the visits of Eusebio Francisco Kino beginning in 1701. The explorers did not see evidence of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, which must have arisen shortly afterwards in the Salton Sink.
In 1606 when King Philip heard the news of the Acoma massacre, Oñate was recalled to Mexico City for a hearing regarding his conduct. After finishing plans for the founding of the town of Santa Fé in 1610, he resigned his post and was tried of cruelty to both natives and colonists. He was found guilty of cruelty, immorality, and false reporting and returned to Spain to live out the remainder of his life. He was banished from New Mexico for life and exiled from Mexico City for 5 years. Eventually Oñate went to Spain, where the king appointed him head of all mining inspectors in Spain. He died in Spain in 1626. He is sometimes referred to as "the Last Conquistador."
Numerous voyages hither were undertaken during the reign of Henry VIII.; but the accounts which remain of them are rare and meager. Some of them resulted in terrible disasters of shipwreck and death. In 1602, the government of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands chartered the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), or VOC with the mission of exploring it for a passage to the Indies and claiming any uncharted areas for the United Provinces.
In 1609, the VOC commissioned English explorer Henry Hudson who, in an attempt to find the so-called northwest passage to the Indies, discovered and claimed for the VOC parts of the present-day United States and Canada. In the belief that it was the best route to explore, Hudson entered the Upper New York Bay sailing up the river which now bears his name. In 1614, Adriaen Block led an expedition to the lower Hudson in the Tyger, and then explored the East River aboard the Onrust, becoming the first known European to navigate the Hellegat enter Long Island Sound. Block Island and its sound were named after him. Upon returning, Block compiled a map, the first to apply the name "New Netherland" to the area between English Virginia and French Canada, where he was later granted exclusive trading rights by the Dutch government.
Although Spain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands all had competing claims to the region, none of these prevented the English from becoming the first European power to colonize successfully the Mid-Atlantic coastline. Earlier attempts had been made by the Spanish in what is now Georgia (San Miguel de Gualdape, 1526–27; several Spanish missions in Georgia between 1568 and 1684), South Carolina (Santa Elena, 1566–87), North Carolina (Joara, 1567–68) and Virginia (Ajacán Mission, 1570–71 - here all priests were massacred by local Native Americans except a youth, Alonso de Olmos); and by French in South Carolina (Charlesfort, 1562–63).
On April 10, 1606, King James I of England issued a charter for each of the Virginia Companies, London and Plymouth. These were privately funded ventures, intended to claim land for England, trade, and return a profit. In 1620, Plymouth in Massachusetts was settled by Pilgrims from the Mayflower, beginning the history of permanent European settlement in New England.
Jamestown was a settlement in the Colony of Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 4, 1607 (O.S., May 14, 1607 N.S.), and considered permanent after brief abandonment in 1610, it followed several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Jamestown served as the capital of the colony for 83 years, from 1616 until 1699. Pocahontas (born Matoaka, known as Amonute, c. 1596 – March 1617) was a Native American woman notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the paramount chief. Pocahontas is most famously linked to the English colonist Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with a hundred other settlers in April 1607, at the behest of the London Company. Pocahontas was captured and held for ransom by the English during Anglo-Indian hostilities in 1613. During her captivity, she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. When the opportunity arose for her to return to her people, she chose to remain with the English. In 1616, the Rolfes travelled to London. Pocahontas was presented to English society as an example of the "civilized savage" in hopes of stimulating investment in the Jamestown settlement. She became something of a celebrity but died at Gravesend of unknown causes, aged 20 or 21.
Plymouth holds a special role in American history. Rather than being entrepreneurs like many of the settlers of Jamestown, a significant proportion of the citizens of Plymouth, the Pilgrim Fathers, were fleeing religious persecution and searching for a place to worship as they saw fit. The social and legal systems of the colony became closely tied to their religious beliefs, as well as English custom. Many of the people and events surrounding Plymouth Colony have become part of American folklore, including the North American tradition known as Thanksgiving and the monument known as Plymouth Rock. The leadership of the Pilgrim Fathers came from the religious congregations of Brownist English Dissenters who had fled the volatile political environment in England for the relative calm and tolerance of 16th–17th century Holland in the Netherlands.
The Plymouth colony, established in 1620, became the second successful English settlement (after the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607) and later the oldest continuously inhabited English settlement in what was to become the United States of America. The Pilgrims' story of seeking religious freedom has become a central theme of the history and culture of the United States: The core group—roughly 40% of the adults and 56% of the family groupings—was part of a congregation of religious separatists (Congregationalists) led by William Bradford. While still in the English village of Scrooby, near East Retford, Nottinghamshire, the congregation began to feel the pressures of religious persecution. In 1607 Tobias Matthew, Archbishop of York, raided homes and imprisoned several members of the congregation.The congregation then left England and emigrated to the Netherlands, first to Amsterdam and then to Leiden, in 1609. In Leiden, the congregation gained the freedom to worship as it chose, but Dutch society was unfamiliar to these immigrants. Scrooby had been an agricultural community, whereas Leiden was a thriving industrial center, and the pace of life was hard on the Separatists. Furthermore, though the community remained close-knit, their children began adopting Dutch language and customs. Using the financing secured from the Merchant Adventurers, the Colonists bought provisions and obtained passage on two ships, the Mayflower and the Speedwell. In June 1619, after declining the opportunity to settle south of Cape Cod in New Netherland, because of their desire to avoid the Dutch influence, the Congregation obtained a land patent from the London Virginia Company, allowing them to settle at the mouth of the Hudson River. About half of the one hundred plus passengers on the Mayflower survived that first winter, mostly because of diseases contracted on the voyage. Unlike the Puritan group who maintained their membership in and allegiance to the Church of England, Separatists held that their differences with the Church of England were irreconcilable and that their worship should be organized independently of the trappings, traditions and organization of a central church.
In the United States, the modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition is commonly, but not universally, traced to a poorly documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts. The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving was prompted by a good harvest. Pilgrims and Puritans who began emigrating from England in the 1620s and 1630s carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England. According to historian Jeremy Bangs, director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, the Pilgrims may have been influenced by watching the annual services of Thanksgiving for the relief of the siege of Leiden in 1574, while they were staying in Leiden.
Nieuw-Nederland, or New Netherland, chartered in 1614, was a colonial province of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands in what became New York State and parts of neighboring states. The peak population was less than 10,000. The Dutch were Calvinists who built the Reformed Church in America. The Dutch established a patroon system with feudal-like rights given to a few powerful landholders; they also established religious tolerance and free trade. The colony's capital, New Amsterdam, founded in 1625 and located at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan, would grow to become a major world city. The city was captured by the English in 1664; they took complete control of the colony in 1674 and renamed it New York. However the Dutch landholdings remained, and the Hudson River Valley maintained a traditional Dutch character until the 1820s. Traces of Dutch influence, such as homes, family surnames, and the names of roads and whole towns remain in present-day northern New Jersey and southeastern New York State.
A strong believer in the notion of rule by divine right, Charles I, King of England and Scotland, persecuted religious dissenters. Learning from the Pilgrims' harsh experiences of winter in the Plymouth Colony, the Puritans first sent smaller groups in mid-1620s from England to establish colonies, buildings and food supplies. Waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642, where they founded multiple colonies being the first one the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Later in the century, the new Pennsylvania colony was given to William Penn in settlement of a debt the king owed his father. Its government was set up by William Penn in about 1682 to become primarily a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; but others were welcomed. Baptists, Quakers and German and Swiss Protestants flocked to Pennsylvania. The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to improve themselves with their own hand was very attractive.
[The word "Puritan" is applied unevenly to a number of Protestant churches (and religious groups within the Anglican Church) from the late 16th century onwards. Puritans did not originally use the term for themselves. The practitioners knew themselves as members of particular churches or movements, and not by a single term. "Precisemen" and "Precisians" were other early derogatory terms for Puritans, who preferred to call themselves "the godly".
Puritans who were not satisfied with the Reformation of the Church of England, but who remained within the Church of England advocating further reforms, are known as "non-separating Puritans". This group disagreed among themselves about how much further Reformation was necessary. Those who thought that the Church of England was so corrupt that true Christians should separate from it altogether are known as "separating Puritans" or simply "Separatists". "Puritan," in the wider sense, includes both groups. Especially after the English Restoration of 1660, separating Puritans were called "Dissenters". The 1662 Uniformity Act caused almost all Puritan clergy to leave the Church of England. Some became nonconformist ministers. The movement in England changed radically at this time, though this change was not as immediate for Puritans in New England.
The idea of personal Biblical interpretation, while central to Puritan beliefs, was shared with most Protestants in general. Puritans sought both individual and corporate conformity to the teaching of the Bible, with moral purity pursued both down to the smallest detail, as well as ecclesiastical purity to the highest level. They believed that man existed for the glory of God, that his first concern in life was to do God's will and so to receive future happiness. Some strong religious views common to Puritans had direct impacts on culture. Education was essential to the masses, so that they could read the Bible for themselves.
Puritans placed family at the center of their societies, as an organisation to facilitate their devotion to God. Based on Biblical portrayals of Adam and Eve, Puritans believed that marriage represented one of the most fundamental human relationships rooted in procreation, love, and, most importantly, salvation. According to Puritans, husbands were the spiritual head of the household, while women were to demonstrate religious piety and obedience under male authority. Furthermore, marriage represented not only the relationship between husband and wife, but also the relationship between spouses and God. Puritan husbands commanded authority through family direction and prayer. The female relationship to her husband and to God was marked by submissiveness and humility. Puritans believed wives to be spiritual equals to their husbands. For Puritans, motherhood represented the most significant aspect of the female identity. Pious Puritan mothers laboured for their children's righteousness and salvation, connecting women directly to matters of religion and morality.
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In the years after 1630, Puritans left for New England (see Migration to New England (1620–1640)), supporting the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other settlements. The large-scale Puritan emigration to New England ceased by 1641, with around 21,000 having moved across the Atlantic. The Plymouth Colony Puritans of New England disapproved of Christmas celebrations, as did some other Protestant churches of the time. Celebration was outlawed in Boston from 1659. The ban was revoked in 1681 by the English-appointed governor Sir Edmund Andros, who also revoked a Puritan ban on festivities on Saturday nights. Nevertheless, it was not until the mid-19th century that celebrating Christmas became fashionable in the Boston region.
The Indian Massacre of 1622 took place in the English Colony of Virginia on Friday, 22 March 1622. At first, the natives had been more than happy to trade provisions to the colonists for metal tools, but by 1609 the English governor, John Smith, had begun to send in raiding parties to demand food. This earned the colonists a bad reputation among the Native Americans and precipitated conflict. The attack took place on March 22, 1621 as reckoned by the colonists, three days before New Years Day 1622.What is usually referred to as the "Massacre of 1622," the native American attack that resulted in the death of 347 English settlers and almost wiped out Jamestown, gave the colonists the excuse they needed to take even more of what they wanted from the indigenous population of the Chesapeake. In 1624 Virginia was made a royal colony of England. This meant that the Crown took direct authority rather than allowing guidance by the Virginia Company of London. The Crown could exercise its patronage for royal favorites.
Nuestra Señora de Atocha ("Our Lady of Atocha") is the most widely-known vessel of a group of ships that sank in a hurricane in 1622 off the Florida Keys. The Atocha was a Spanish galleon that at the time of her sinking was heavily laden with copper, silver, gold, tobacco, gems, and indigo from Spanish ports at Cartagena and Porto Bello in New Granada (the current countries of Colombia and Panama, respectively) and Havana, bound for Spain. The ship was named for the parish of Atocha in Madrid. The treasure arriving by mule in Panama City was so immense that summer that it took two months to record and load it onto the Atocha. After still more delays in Havana, what was ultimately a 28-ship convoy did not manage to depart for Spain until 4 September 1622, six weeks late. The Atocha lost all of her crew and passengers except for three sailors and two slaves who survived by clinging to the mizzen mast. All of her treasure sank with her.
After the surviving ships brought the news of the disaster back to Havana, Spanish authorities dispatched another five ships to salvage the Atocha and the Santa Margarita, which had run aground near where the Atocha sank. The Atocha had sunk in approximately 55 feet (17 m) of water, making it difficult for divers to retrieve any of the cargo or guns from the ship. A second hurricane in October of that year made attempts at salvage even more difficult by scattering the wreckage of the sunken ship still further. The Spaniards undertook salvage operations for several years with the use of Indian slaves, and recovered nearly half of the registered part of its cargo from the holds of the Margarita. The principal method used by the Spanish for the recovery of this cargo was a large brass diving bell with a glass window on one side: a slave would ride to the bottom, recover an item, and return to the surface by being hauled up by the men on deck. It was often lethal, but more or less effective. Dead slaves were recorded as a business expense by the captains of salvage ships.
The loss of the 1622 fleet was a severe blow to Spain, forcing it to borrow more to finance its role in the Thirty Years' War and to sell several galleons to raise funds. While their efforts over the next ten years to salvage the Margarita were successful, the Spanish never located the Atocha. American treasure hunters Mel Fisher, Finley Ricard and a team of sub-contractors, funded by investors and others in a joint venture, searched the sea bed for the Atocha for sixteen and a half years. Fisher had earlier, in 1980, recovered portions of the wrecked cargo of the sister ship Santa Margarita. He also proposed the idea to several other potential helpers, who were discouraged by the fact that this dangerous professional diving job was at minimum wage unless the ship could be found. The Atocha wreck and its mother lode of silver, gold and emeralds, was finally discovered in July 1985. After the discovery, the State of Florida claimed title to the wreck and forced Fisher into a contract giving 25% of the found treasure to the state. Fisher fought the State of Florida, claiming the find should be his, exclusively. After eight years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of Fisher.
The first known European to enter Wisconsin was a French coureur des bois Jean Nicolet. In 1634, Samuel de Champlain, governor of New France, gave Nicolet the task of searching for a water route to China through North America. Accompanied by seven Huron Indian guides, Nicolet left New France and canoed through Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and then became the first European to enter Lake Michigan.
In 1636 Harvard school was founded in anticipation of the need for training clergy for the new commonwealth, a "church in the wilderness". By that time 17,000 Puritans were migrating to New England. In 1638, the school received a printing press—the only press in what is now the United States until Harvard acquired a second in 1659. The first printing press in North America was brought from Spain to Mexico City, with production beginning in 1539.
In total there thirteen Colonies were the British Colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America founded between 1607 (Virginia) and 1733 (Georgia). Each of the thirteen colonies developed its own system of self-government, based largely on independent farmers who owned their own land, voted for their local and provincial government, and served on local juries. In some of the colonies, especially Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, there were also substantial populations of African slaves. The thirteen colonies were: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island...
The Mystic massacre took place on May 26, 1637 during the Pequot War, when Connecticut colonists under Captain John Mason and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies set fire to a Pequot Fort near the Mystic River. The Pequots were the dominant Indian tribe in the southeastern portion of Connecticut Colony, and they had long competed with the neighboring Mohegan and Narragansett tribes.The English and Dutch Colonists established trade with all three tribes, exchanging European goods for wampum and furs. The Pequots eventually allied with the Dutch Colonists, while the Mohegans and others allied with the English Colonists. A trader named John Oldham was murdered and his trading ship looted by Pequots, and retaliation raids ensued by Colonists and their Indian allies; the Pequots responded in kind, erupting into the Pequot War between 1636 and 1638.
The Connecticut towns raised a militia commanded by Captain John Mason consisting of 90 men, plus 70 Mohegans under sachems Uncas and Wequash. Twenty more men under Captain John Underhill joined him from Fort Saybrook.
John Underhill described the scene and his participation: "Captaine Mason entring into a Wigwam, brought out a fire-brand, after hee had wounded many in the house; many couragious fellowes were unwilling to come out as they were scorched and burnt with the very flame, many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children, others forced out, and came in troopes to the Indians, twentie, and thirtie at a time, which our souldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword; downe fell men, women, and children; it is reported by themselves, that there were about foure hundred soules in this Fort, and not above five of them escaped out of our hands."
Estimates of dead Pequots range from 400 to 700, including women, children, and elderly, as some of the warriors were out on a raiding party. The Pequot numbers were so diminished that they ceased to be a tribe in most senses.
New Sweden was a Swedish colony along the lower reaches of the Delaware River in North America from 1638 to 1655,established during the Thirty Years' War, when Sweden was a great power. New Sweden was part of Swedish colonization efforts in the Americas. Settlements were established on both sides of the Delaware Valley in the present-day American Mid-Atlantic states of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, often in places where Swedish traders had been visiting since about 1610. New Sweden was conquered by the Dutch Republic in 1655, during the Second Northern War, and incorporated into the Dutch colonies of New Netherlands.
The settlers came from all over the Swedish realm. The percentage of Finns in New Sweden grew especially towards the end of the colonization, comprising 22% of the population during Swedish rule, but rising to about 50% after the colony came under Dutch rule.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of New Sweden to the development of the New World is one that is the traditional Finnish forest house building technique. The colonists brought with them the log cabin, which became such an icon of the American frontier that it is thought of as an American structure.
New Amsterdam was captured by the English in 1664; they took complete control of the colony in 1674 and renamed it New York after the Duke of York. However the Dutch landholdings remained, and the Hudson River Valley maintained a traditional Dutch character until the 1820s. Traces of Dutch influence, such as homes, family surnames, and the names of roads and whole towns remain in present-day northern New Jersey and southeastern New York State.
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| Gezicht op Nieuw Amsterdam by Johannes Vingboons (1664), an early picture of Nieuw Amsterdam made in the year when it was conquered by the English under Richard Nicolls. |
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| The Castello Plan is an early city map of Lower Manhattan from an original of 1660. It was created by Jacques Cortelyou (ca. 1625–1693), a surveyor in what was then called New Amsterdam — later renamed by Province of New York settlement as New York City. Fort Amsterdam was located at the most southern tip of the island of Manhattan, which today is surrounded by Bowling Green. Broadway was the main street that led out of town north towards Harlem. The town was surrounded to the north by a wall leading from the eastern to the western shore. The course of this city wall is today Wall Street. A canal led from the harbor inland and was filled in 1676, which today is Broad Street. The original 17th-century architecture of New Amsterdam has completely vanished (affected by the fires of 1776 and 1835), leaving only archaeological remnants. The original street plan of New Amsterdam has stayed largely intact. Although no architectural monuments or buildings have survived, the legacy lived on in the form Dutch Colonial Revival architecture. A number of structures in New York city were constructed in the 19th and 20th century in this style, such as Wallabout Market in Brooklyn, South William Street in Manhattan, West End Collegiate Church at West 77th Street, and others. |
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| Castillo de San Marcos |
The first permanent settlement on the Baja California peninsula was not established until 1697, when Jesuit priest Juan María de Salvatierra founded a mission at Loreto, the first of what were to be many in the Californias.
The colonies were characterized by religious diversity, with many Congregationalists in New England, German and Dutch Reformed in the Middle Colonies, Catholics in Maryland, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the frontier. Sephardic Jews were among early settlers in cities of New England and the South. Many immigrants arrived as religious refugees: French Huguenots settled in New York, Virginia and the Carolinas.
The Spanish encouraged slaves from the southern British colonies to come to Florida as a refuge, promising freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism and militia service. Most went to the area around St. Augustine but escaped slaves also reached Pensacola. The Spanish did not import many slaves to Florida for labor, as it was basically a military outpost rather than a plantation economy like those of the English colonies. As the British planted settlements south along the Atlantic coast, the Spanish encouraged their slaves to escape for sanctuary in Florida. If the fugitives converted to Catholicism and swore allegiance to the king of Spain, they were given freedom, arms, and supplies. Moving down the coast, the English established Charleston in 1670 and Savannah in 1733. In response, Spanish Governor Manual de Montiano in 1738 established the first legally recognized free community of ex-slaves, known as Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, to the north of St. Augustine to serve as its defense.
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| Pueblo de Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose |
Each of the 13 American colonies had a slightly different governmental structure. Typically a colony was ruled by a governor appointed from London who controlled the executive administration and relied upon a locally elected legislature to vote taxes and make laws. By the 18th century, the American colonies were growing very rapidly because of ample supplies of land and food, and low death rates. They were richer than most parts of Britain, and attracted a steady flow of immigrants, especially teenagers who came as indentured servants. The tobacco and rice plantations imported African slaves for labor from the British colonies in the West Indies, and by the 1770s they comprised a fifth of the American population. The question of independence from Britain did not arise as long as the colonies needed British military support against the French and Spanish powers; those threats were gone by 1765. London regarded the American colonies as existing for the benefit of the mother country, a policy known as mercantilism.
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| North America 1750 |
Years late James Fenimore Cooper, a profilic and popular American writer of the early 19th century, will write a historical romance novel of frontier and Indian life "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826) which is set during the French and Indian War (aka Seven Years' War).
France and Britain both suffered financially because of the war, with significant long-term consequences. The Seven Years' War nearly doubled Britain's national debt. The Crown, seeking sources of revenue to pay off the debt, attempted to impose new taxes on its colonies. These attempts were met with increasingly stiff resistance, until troops were called in so that representatives of the Crown could safely perform their duties. These acts ultimately led to the start of the American Revolutionary War. French Minister Choiseul considered he had made a good deal at the Treaty of Paris, and philosopher Voltaire wrote that Louis XV had lost "a few acres of snow". For France however, the military defeat and the financial burden of the war weakened the monarchy and contributed to the advent of the French Revolution in 1789.
Although the Spanish takeover of the Louisiana territory (which was not completed until 1769) had modest repercussions, the British takeover of Spanish Florida resulted in the westward migration of tribes that did not want to do business with the British, and a rise in tensions between the Choctaw and the Creek, historic enemies whose divisions the British at times exploited. The change of control in Florida also prompted most of its Spanish Catholic population to leave. Most went to Cuba, including the entire governmental records from St. Augustine, although some Christianized Yamasee were resettled to the coast of Mexico. Most of the free black inhabitants also migrated to Cuba with the evacuating Spanish colonists.At that time, the black population at St. Augustine and Fort Mose totaled about 3,000, of whom about one-quarter were free.
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| North-America 1763 |
The Great Awakening (called by historians the "First Great Awakening") was an evangelical and revitalization movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American Protestantism. It resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of deep personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ.The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. Participants became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called "new lights", while the preachers who remained unemotional were referred to as "old lights".
Adopting the policy that the colonies should now contribute more to maintain the territories as part of what became known as the Empire, Britain imposed direct taxes. Because the colonies lacked elected representation in the governing British Parliament, many colonists regarded the new laws as illegitimate and a violation of their rights as Englishmen.
The Liberty Bell is an iconic symbol of American independence, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Formerly placed in the steeple of the Pennsylvania State House (now renamed Independence Hall), the bell was commissioned from the London firm of Lester and Pack (today the Whitechapel Bell Foundry) in 1752, and was cast with the lettering (part of Leviticus 25:10) "Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." It originally cracked when first rung after arrival in Philadelphia, and was twice recast by local workmen John Pass and John Stow, whose last names appear on the bell.
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| Liberty Bell |
In 1767 the Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which placed a tax on a number of essential goods including paper, glass, and tea. Angered at the tax increases, colonists organized a boycott of British goods. Meanwhile, riots against trade regulations led to the deployment of British troops to Boston in 1768.
On March 5, 1770 a large mob gathered around a group of British soldiers. The mob grew more and more threatening, throwing snowballs, rocks and debris at the soldiers. One soldier was clubbed and fell. All but one of the soldiers fired into the crowd. They hit 11 people; three civilians died at the scene of the shooting, and two died after the incident. The event quickly came to be called the Boston Massacre. Although the soldiers were tried and acquitted (defended by John Adams), the widespread descriptions soon became propaganda to turn colonial sentiment against the British. This in turn began a downward spiral in the relationship between Britain and the Province of Massachusetts.
The Boston Tea Party in 1773 was a direct action by activists in the town of Boston to protest against the new tax on tea. Parliament quickly responded the next year with the Coercive Acts, stripping Massachusetts of its historic right of self-government and putting it under army rule, which sparked outrage and resistance in all thirteen colonies. Patriot leaders from all 13 colonies convened the First Continental Congress to coordinate their resistance to the Coercive Acts. The Congress called for a boycott of British trade, published a list of rights and grievances, and petitioned the king for redress of those grievances.They met briefly in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1774 and consisted of fifty-six delegates from twelve of the Thirteen Colonies that would become the United States of America. The delegates, who included George Washington, soon to command the army, Patrick Henry, and John Adams, were elected by their respective colonial assemblies.
The appeal to the Crown had no effect, and so the Second Continental Congress was convened in 1775 to organize the defense of the colonies against the British Army. At this congress the Independence will be declared.
The American Revolution
The American Revolutionary War began at Concord and Lexington in April 1775 when the British tried to seize ammunition supplies and arrest the Patriot leaders. In terms of political values, the Americans were largely united on a concept called Republicanism, that rejected aristocracy and emphasized civic duty and a fear of corruption. For the Founding Fathers, according to one team of historians, "republicanism represented more than a particular form of government. It was a way of life, a core ideology, an uncompromising commitment to liberty, and a total rejection of aristocracy."
The Thirteen Colonies began a rebellion against British rule in 1775 and proclaimed their independence in 1776 as the United States of America. In the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) the American capture of the British invasion army at Saratoga in 1777 secured the Northeast and encouraged the French to make a military alliance with the United States. France brought in Spain and the Netherlands, thus balancing the military and naval forces on each side as Britain had no allies.
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, declared the independence of "the United States of America" in the Declaration of Independence. July 4 is celebrated as the nation's birthday. The new nation was founded on Enlightenment ideals of liberalism in what Thomas Jefferson called the unalienable rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", and dedicated strongly to republican principles. Republicanism emphasized the people are sovereign (not hereditary kings), demanded civic duty, feared corruption, and rejected any aristocracy.
The Declaration justified the independence of the United States by listing colonial grievances against King George III, and by asserting certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were political leaders and statesmen who
participated in the American Revolution by signing the United States Declaration of Independence, taking part in the American Revolutionary War, and establishing the United States Constitution. Within the large group known as the "Founding Fathers", there are two key subsets: the Signers of the Declaration of Independence (who signed the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776) and the Framers of the Constitution (who were delegates to the Constitutional Convention and took part in framing or drafting the proposed Constitution of the United States). A further subset is the group that signed the Articles of Confederation.
The Betsy Ross flag (1777) is an early design of the flag of the United States, popularly—but likely incorrectly—attributed to Betsy Ross, using the common motifs of alternating red-and-white striped field with five-pointed stars in a blue canton. The flag was designed during the American Revolution and features 13 stars to represent the original 13 colonies. The distinctive feature of the Ross flag is the arrangement of the stars in a circle. To add to the mystery surrounding the first American flag, experts can only guess the reason Congress chose stripes, stars, and the colors red, white, and blue for the flag. Historians and experts discredit the common theory that the stripes and five-pointed stars derived from the Washington family coat of arms. Stars were a device representing man's desire to achieve greatness. The common metaphor "reaching for the stars" developed from this idea. Stars of various shapes were also important symbols in European heraldry, and stars appears in colonial flags as early as 1676. The usage of stripes in the flag may be linked to two pre-existing flags. A 1765 Sons of Liberty flag flown in Boston had nine red and white stripes, and a flag used by Captain Abraham Markoe's Philadelphia Light Horse Troop in 1775 had 13 blue and silver stripes. One or both of these flags likely influenced the design of the American flag.
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| Betsy Ross Flag |
The capture of a British army at Saratoga encouraged the French to formally enter the war in support of Congress, as Benjamin Franklin negotiated a permanent military alliance in early 1778, significantly becoming the first country to officially recognize the Declaration of Independence. Later Spain (in 1779) and the Dutch (1780) became allies of the French, leaving the British Empire to fight a global war alone without major allies, and requiring it to slip through a combined blockade of the Atlantic. The American theater thus became only one front in Britain's war. The British were forced to withdraw troops from continental America to reinforce the valuable sugar-producing Caribbean colonies, which were considered more important. Beginning in late December 1778, the British captured Savannah and controlled the Georgia coastline. In 1780 they launched a fresh invasion and took Charleston as well. A significant victory at the Battle of Camden meant that royal forces soon controlled most of Georgia and South Carolina. In Yorktown in October 1781 under a combined siege by the French and Continental armies under Washington, the British surrendered their second invading army of the war. Spain (participating indirectly in the war as an ally of France) captured Pensacola from the British in 1781. The peace treaty with Britain, known as the Treaty of Paris (1783), gave the U.S. all land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes, though not including Florida (On September 3, 1783, Britain entered into a separate agreement with Spain under which Britain ceded Florida back to Spain.) Losing the war and the 13 colonies was a shock to Britain. The war revealed the limitations of Britain's fiscal-military state when it discovered it suddenly faced powerful enemies, with no allies, and dependent on extended and vulnerable transatlantic lines of communication. The defeat heightened dissension and escalated political antagonism to the King's ministers. Historians conclude that loss of the American colonies enabled Britain to deal with the French Revolution with more unity and better organization than would otherwise have been the case.
The delegates from every state wrote in 1787 a new Constitution that created a much more powerful and efficient central government, one with a strong president, and powers of taxation. The new government reflected the prevailing republican ideals of guarantees of individual liberty and of constraining the power of government through a system of separation of powers. John Locke's (1632–1704) ideas on liberty greatly influenced the political thinking behind the revolution, especially through his indirect influence on English writers. He is often referred to as "the philosopher of the American Revolution," and is credited with leading Americans to the critical concepts of social contract, natural rights, and "born free and equal.". The Declaration also referred to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as justification for the Americans' separation from the British monarchy. Most eighteenth-century Americans believed that nature, the entire universe, was God's creation. Therefore he was "Nature's God." Everything, including man, was part of the "universal order of things", which began with God and was pervaded and directed by his providence. Accordingly, the signers of the Declaration professed their "firm reliance on the Protection of divine Providence."
The first US governments
George Washington — a renowned hero of the American Revolutionary War, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and president of the Constitutional Convention—became the first President of the United States under the new Constitution in 1789. The national capital moved from New York to Philadelphia and finally settled in Washington DC in 1800.
In the new government under President George Washington, Alexander Hamilton (1757 – 1804) was appointed the Secretary of the Treasury. He became the leader of the Federalist Party, created largely in support of his views, and was opposed by the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. An admirer of British political systems, Hamilton was a nationalist who emphasized strong central government and successfully argued that the implied powers of the Constitution could be used to fund the national debt, assume state debts, and create the government-owned Bank of the United States. Embarrassed when an extra-marital affair from his past became public, Hamilton resigned from office in 1795 and returned to the practice of law in New York. Hamilton further asserted the truth of Christianity; he proposed a Christian Constitutional Society in 1802, to take hold of "some strong feeling of the mind" to elect "fit men" to office, and he wrote of "Christian welfare societies" for the poor. He was not a member of any denomination. After being shot in a duel, Hamilton spoke of his belief in God's mercy, and of his desire to renounce dueling; Bishop Moore administered communion to Hamilton. Opinions of Hamilton have run into the two traditional views: One, which has been dominant among scholars in recent years, represents him as a "forerunner of the modern liberal capitalist economy," opposed to the agrarianism, or the slave-holding self-interest, of Jefferson and Madison. The other has seen him as a centralizer, to the point sometimes of advocating monarchy. Gordon Wood presented a third view in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815; Hamilton would have set up an essentially European society, with a republican monarchy, and strong institutions such as the Bank of the United States; Wood holds that Jefferson better understood the society around him, individualist, egalitarian, and money-making.
Even with the Constitution many were concerned that a strong national government was a threat to individual rights and that the President would become a king. Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, the father of the Constitution, advocating a Bill of Rights: "Half a loaf is better than no bread. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can." Figures such as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and Richard Henry Lee publicly opposed the Constitution, a position known as "Anti-Federalism". Hamilton opposed a Bill of Rights in Federalist No. 84, stating that "the constitution is itself in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS". Patrick Henry argued, in contrast, that the legislature must be firmly informed "of the extent of the rights retained by the people ... being in a state of uncertainty, they will assume rather than give up powers by implication." On June 8, 1789 Representative James Madison introduced a series of thirty-nine amendments to the constitution in the House of Representatives. Among his recommendations Madison proposed opening up the Constitution and inserting specific rights limiting the power of Congress in Article One, Section 9. Seven of these limitations would became part of the ten ratified Bill of Rights amendments. The Bill of Rights is the collective name for the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. Proposed to assuage the fears of Anti-Federalists who had opposed Constitutional ratification, these amendments guarantee a number of personal freedoms, limit the government's power in judicial and other proceedings, and reserve some powers to the states and the public. The Bill of Rights enumerates freedoms not explicitly indicated in the main body of the Constitution, such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, a free press, and free assembly; the right to keep and bear arms; freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, security in personal effects, and freedom from warrants issued without probable cause; indictment by a grand jury for any capital or "infamous crime"; guarantee of a speedy, public trial with an impartial jury; and prohibition of double jeopardy.
Washington refused to serve more than two terms—setting a precedent—and in his famous farewell address, he extolled the benefits of federal government and importance of ethics and morality while warning against foreign alliances and the formation of political parties. During the Revolutionary and Early Republican periods of American history, many commentators compared Washington with the Roman aristocrat and statesman Cincinnatus. The comparison arose as Washington, like Cincinnatus, remained in command of the Continental Army only until the British had been defeated. Thereafter, instead of seeking great political power, he returned as quickly as possible to cultivating his lands.
John Adams (1735 – July 4, 1826), a Federalist, defeated Jefferson in the 1796 election. He was an American Founding Father, a statesman, diplomat, and a leading advocate of American independence from Great Britain. Well educated, he was an Enlightenment political theorist who promoted republicanism, as well as a strong central government, and wrote prolifically about his often seminal ideas, both in published works and in letters to his wife and key adviser Abigail Adams, as well as to other Founding Fathers. Adams was a lifelong opponent of slavery, having never bought a slave. while Adams shared many perspectives with deists, "Adams clearly was not a deist. Deism rejected any and all supernatural activity and intervention by God; consequently, deists did not believe in miracles or God's providence....Adams, however, did believe in miracles, providence, and, to a certain extent, the Bible as revelation.". In 1796, Adams denounced political opponent Thomas Paine's Deistic criticisms of Christianity in The Age of Reason, saying, "The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity and humanity, let the Blackguard Paine say what he will."
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1823) defeated John Adams for the presidency in the 1800 election. Jefferson's major achievement as president was the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which provided U.S. settlers with vast potential for expansion west of the Mississippi River. Napoleon needed money and armies for his original French empire so he offered the territory for 15 million $ and the US accepted. Napoleon Bonaparte had gained Louisiana for French ownership from Spain in 1800 under the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso , after being a Spanish terrority since 1762. The latter treaty was clearly beneficial for France.
The Republicans under Jefferson worked to form a national republic and were strongly influenced by the 18th-century British opposition writers of the Whig Party, which believed in small and limited government. He had not much liked the Constitution as it stood, regarding it as "a bad edition of a Polish King". He sought to make the central government's authority resemble that which had existed under the Articles of Confederation. Jefferson's political ideals were also greatly influenced by the writings of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton whom he considered the three greatest men that ever lived. A proper government, for Jefferson, is one that not only prohibits individuals in society from infringing on the liberty of other individuals, but also restrains itself from diminishing individual liberty as a protection against tyranny from the majority. Jefferson believed that public education and a free press were essential to a democratic nation: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be....The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe". Jefferson believed deeply in republicanism and argued it should be based on the independent yeoman farmer and planter; he distrusted cities, factories and banks. Jefferson expressed a dislike and distrust for banks and bankers and opposed borrowing from them because he believed it created long-term debt as well as monopolies, and inclined the people to dangerous speculation, as opposed to productive labor on the farm. He once argued that each generation should pay back its debt within 19 years, and not impose a long-term debt on subsequent generations. Jefferson lived in a Virginia planter society economically dependent on slavery. Over the course of his life he owned some 600 slaves, buying and selling them as required, maintaining about 130 at any one time. Of the religion of Christianity he said that it possessed, "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man". Jefferson's legacy as a champion of Enlightenment ideals has been challenged by various modern historians, who find his continued ownership of hundreds of slaves at Monticello to be in conflict with his stated views on freedom and the equality of men.
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| Thomas-Jefferson-Memorial |
War of 1812
Americans were increasingly angry at the British violation of American ships' neutral rights in order to hurt France, the impressment (seizure) of 10,000 American sailors needed by the Royal Navy to fight Napoleon, and British support for hostile Indians attacking American settlers in the Midwest. They may also have desired to annex all or part of British North America. Despite strong opposition from the Northeast, especially from Federalists who did not want to disrupt trade with Britain, Congress declared war in June 18, 1812. The war was frustrating for both sides. Both sides tried to invade the other and were repulsed. The American high command remained incompetent until the last year. The American militia proved ineffective because the soldiers were reluctant to leave home and efforts to invade Canada repeatedly failed. The British blockade ruined American commerce, bankrupted the Treasury, and further angered New Englanders, who smuggled supplies to Britain. The British raided and burned Washington, but were repelled at Baltimore in 1814—where the "Star Spangled Banner" was written to celebrate the American success. In upstate New York a major British invasion of New York State was turned back. Finally in early 1815 Andrew Jackson decisively defeated a major British invasion at the Battle of New Orleans, making him the most famous war hero.
"The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United States. The lyrics come from "Defence of Fort M'Henry",a poem written in 1814 by the 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in the Chesapeake Bay during the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. "The Star-Spangled Banner" was recognized for official use by the Navy in 1889, and by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and was made the national anthem by a congressional resolution on March 3, 1931.
The Anthem starts like this:
O say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
With Napoleon (apparently) gone, the causes of the war had evaporated and both sides agreed to a peace that left the prewar boundaries intact. Americans claimed victory in February 18, 1815 as news came almost simultaneously of Jackson's victory of New Orleans and the peace treaty that left the prewar boundaries in place. Americans swelled with pride at success in the "second war of independence". The Indians were the big losers; they never gained the independent nationhood Britain had promised and no longer posed a serious threat as settlers poured into the Midwest.
The Era of Good feelings
With peace finally established, Americans believed they had secured a solid independence from Britain. The Federalist Party, which had called for secession over the war at the Hartford Convention, dissolved and disappeared from politics. The Democratic-Republican Party was nominally dominant, but in practice it was inactive at the national level and in most states.With Europe finally at peace, the Era of Good Feelings described the prosperity and relatively equable political environment. Some political contention continued, for instance, in 1816, two-thirds of the incumbents in Congress were defeated for re-election after having voted to increase their salary. President James Madison (1751 - 1836) approved a Hamiltonian national bank, an effective taxation system based on tariffs, a standing professional military, and the internal improvements championed by Henry Clay under his American System. The finest part of Madison's performance as president was his concern for the preserving of the Constitution.
Spanish presence was minor during that empire's second rule over Florida. The region became a haven for escaped slaves and a base for Indian attacks against the U.S., and the U.S. demanded Spain reform. There were almost no Spanish settlers and only a few soldiers. Seminole Indians based in East Florida began raiding Georgia settlements, and offering havens for runaway slaves. The United States Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory, including the 1817–1818 campaign against the Seminole Indians by Andrew Jackson that became known as the First Seminole War. The United States now effectively controlled East Florida. Florida had become a burden to Spain, which could not afford to send settlers or garrisons. Madrid therefore decided to cede the territory to the United States through the Adams-Onís Treaty, which took effect in 1821.
James Monroe (1758 – 1831) was the fifth President of the United States (1817–1825). Monroe was the last president who was a Founding Father of the United States. Facing little opposition from the fractured Federalist Party, Monroe was easily elected president in 1816. In 1819, by terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty, Spain ceded Florida to the United States in exchange for $5 million and the American renunciation of any claims on Texas that they might have from the Louisiana Purchase. The free blacks and Indian slaves, Black Seminoles, living near St. Augustine, fled to Havana, Cuba to avoid coming under US control. Some Seminole also abandoned their settlements and moved further south. The capital of Liberia was named Monrovia after President Monroe.
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| An 1833 map of the United States in the shape of an eagle |
The Monroe Doctrine, expressed in 1823, proclaimed the United States' opinion that European powers should no longer colonize or interfere in the Americas. This was a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States. The Monroe Doctrine was adopted in response to American and British fears over Russian and French expansion into the Western Hemisphere.
They split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe led to a split of the former Jeffersonian party into factions: The party faction that supported many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, became the Democratic Party. The Democrats represented a wide range of views but shared a fundamental commitment to the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society. They viewed the central government as the enemy of individual liberty. The 1824 "corrupt bargain" had strengthened their suspicion of Washington politics....Jacksonians feared the concentration of economic and political power. They believed that government intervention in the economy benefited special-interest groups and created corporate monopolies that favored the rich. They sought to restore the independence of the individual--the artisan and the ordinary farmer--by ending federal support of banks and corporations and restricting the use of paper currency, which they distrusted. Democrats tended to oppose programs like educational reform mid the establishment of a public education system. They believed, for instance, that public schools restricted individual liberty by interfering with parental responsibility and undermined freedom of religion by replacing church schools.
John Quincy Adams (1767 – 1848) was an American statesman who served as the sixth President of the United States from 1825 to 1829. He also served as a diplomat, a Senator and member of the House of Representatives. He was a member of the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, and later Anti-Masonic and Whig parties (the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the Presidency and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism). Adams was the son of former President John Adams and Abigail Adams. Adams is best known as a diplomat who shaped America's foreign policy in line with his ardently nationalist commitment to America's republican values. More recently, he has been portrayed as the exemplar and moral leader in an era of modernization. Adams authored what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which was introduced on December 2, 1823. It stated that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention. Though he was always quite hostile to slavery, nearly to be point of being an abolitionist (although he doubted the abolitionists could successfully end slavery), he grew even more hostile to it later in life. Before 1820, Adams was best known as an exponent of American nationalism. Later in life, especially after his election to the House, he was famous as the most prominent national leader opposing slavery. In 1841, Adams had the case of a lifetime, representing the defendants in United States v. The Amistad Africans in the Supreme Court of the United States. He successfully argued that the Africans, who had seized control of a Spanish ship on which they were being transported illegally as slaves, should not be extradited or deported to Cuba but should be considered free. Under President Martin Van Buren, the government argued the Africans should be deported for having mutinied and killed officers on the ship. Adams won their freedom, with the chance to stay in the United States or return to Africa. Adams made the argument because the U.S. had prohibited the international slave trade, although it allowed internal slavery. He never billed for his services in the Amistad case. The speech was directed not only at the justices of this Supreme Court hearing the case, but also to the broad national audience he instructed in the evils of slavery.
In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to negotiate treaties that exchanged Native American tribal lands in the eastern states for lands west of the Mississippi River. Its goal was primarily to remove Native Americans, including the Five Civilized Tribes, from the American Southeast; they occupied land that settlers wanted. Thousands of deaths resulted from the relocations, as seen in the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Many of the Seminole Indians in Florida refused to move west; they fought the Army for years in the Seminole Wars.
The American colonies and the new nation grew very rapidly in population and area, as pioneers pushed the frontier of settlement west. From the early 1830s to 1869, the Oregon Trail and its many offshoots were used by over 300,000 settlers. '49ers (in the California Gold Rush), ranchers, farmers, and entrepreneurs and their families headed to California, Oregon, and other points in the far west. Wagon-trains took five or six months on foot; after 1869, the trip took 6 days by rail.
The Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821) severed control that Spain had exercised on its North American territories, and the new country of Mexico was formed from much of the individual territory that had comprised New Spain. On October 4, 1824, Mexico adopted a new constitution which defined the country as a federal republic with nineteen states and four territories. Texas was very sparsely populated.
Long-running political and cultural clashes between the Mexican government and American settlers in Texas intensified when conservative forces took control in Mexico and enacted the Siete Leyes (Seven Laws) of 1835, which replaced the Constitution of 1824 and its federal system with the 1835 Constitution of Mexico and a provisional centralized government. For example the 31 articles of the sixth respective Law replaced the federal republic's "states" with centralized "departments", fashioned after the French model, whose governors and legislators were designated by the President. The immigrants from the United States were accustomed to a federalist government and to extensive individual rights, and they were quite vocal in their displeasure at Mexico's shift towards centralism. On October 9, 1835, in the early days of the Texas Revolution, a group of Texans attacked the presidio "La Bahia" in Goliad in the "Battle of Goliad". The Mexican garrison quickly surrendered, leaving the Texans in control of the fort. The first declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas was signed here on December 20, 1835. Afterwards the Texians systematically defeated the Mexican troops already stationed in Texas. The last group of Mexican soldiers in the region—commanded by Santa Anna's brother-in-law, General Martín Perfecto de Cos—surrendered on December 9 following the siege of Béxar. By this point, the Texian Army was dominated by very recent arrivals to the region, primarily adventurers from the United States. Many Texas settlers, unprepared for a long campaign, had returned home. When Mexican troops departed San Antonio de Béxar (now San Antonio, Texas, USA) Texian soldiers established a garrison at the Alamo Mission, a former Spanish religious outpost which had been converted to a makeshift fort by the recently expelled Mexican Army. The Battle of the Alamo (February 23 – March 6, 1836) was a pivotal event in the Texas Revolution. Following a 13-day siege, Mexican troops under President General Antonio López de Santa Anna launched an assault on the Alamo Mission near San Antonio de Béxar (modern-day San Antonio, Texas, United States). All of the Texian defenders were killed. Santa Anna's cruelty during the battle inspired many Texians—both Texas settlers and adventurers from the United States—to join the Texian Army. Texans held the Goliad area until March 1836, when their garrison under Colonel James Fannin was defeated at the nearby Battle of Coleto. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, then President of Mexico, ordered that all survivors were to be executed. On Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, in what was later called the Goliad Massacre, 303 were marched out of the fort to be executed, 39 were executed inside the presidio (20 prisoners were spared because they were either physicians or medical attendants); 342 men were killed and 28 escaped... Buoyed by a desire for revenge, the Texians defeated the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, on April 21, 1836, ending the revolution. During the fighting, many of the Texian soldiers repeatedly cried "Remember the Alamo!" "Remember the Goliad" . Santa Anna was captured the following day, and reportedly told Houston: "That man may consider himself born to no common destiny who has conquered the Napoleon of the West. And now it remains for him to be generous to the vanquished." Houston replied, "You should have remembered that at the Alamo". Santa Anna was forced to order his troops out of Texas, ending Mexican control of the province and giving some legitimacy to the new republic.
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| The Alamo, as drawn in 1854 |
The U.S. army, using regulars and large numbers of volunteers, won the Mexican-American War (1846–48). The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made peace; Mexico recognized the annexation of Texas and ceded its claims in the Southwest (especially California and New Mexico). The annexed territories, although comparable in size to Western Europe, were sparsely populated. The lands contained about 14,000 people in Alta California and fewer than 60,000 in Nuevo México. The American settlers surging into the newly conquered Southwest were openly contemptuous of Mexican law (a civil law system based on the law of Spain) as alien and inferior and disposed of it by enacting reception statutes at the first available opportunity. However, they recognized the value of a few aspects of Mexican law and carried them over into their new legal systems. For example, most of the southwestern states adopted community property marital property systems.
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information about gold in California were residents of Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), western Mexico, and Central America. They were the first to go there in late 1848. All told, the news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. California's name became indelibly connected with the Gold Rush, and fast success in a new world became known as the "California Dream." California was perceived as a place of new beginnings, where great wealth could reward hard work and good luck.
The central issue after 1848 was the expansion of slavery, pitting the anti-slavery elements that were a majority in the North, against the pro-slavery elements that overwhelmingly dominated the white South.
Antislavery forces rose in anger and alarm, forming the Republican Party (aka the GOP - "Grand Old Party"). By the late 1850s the young Republican Party dominated nearly all northern states and thus the electoral college, and insisted that slavery would never be allowed to expand (and thus would slowly die out). The southern slave societies had become wealthy based on their cotton and other commodity production, and some particularly profited from the internal slave trade. Northern cities such as Boston and New York, and regional industries, were tied economically to slavery by banking, shipping, and manufacturing, including textile mills. By 1860, there were four million slaves in the South, nearly eight times as many as the total slaves nationwide in 1790.
American civil war
The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States, or a state-based property system protected by the Constitution. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment — to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. To slave holding interests in the South, this strategy was perceived as infringing upon their Constitutional right.
Antislavery Congressmen argued that the language of the Declaration indicated that the Founding Fathers of the United States had been opposed to slavery in principle, and so new slave states should not be added to the country. Proslavery Congressmen, led by Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, argued that since the Declaration was not a part of the Constitution, it had no relevance to the question.
In his October 1854 Peoria speech, Republican congressman Abraham Lincoln said:
Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a "sacred right of self-government. ... Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. ... Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. ... If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union: but we shall have saved it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
The meaning of the Declaration was a recurring topic in the famed debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858. Douglas argued that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration referred to white men only. The purpose of the Declaration, he said, had simply been to justify the independence of the United States, and not to proclaim the equality of any "inferior or degraded race". Lincoln, however, thought that the language of the Declaration was deliberately universal, setting a high moral standard for which the American republic should aspire. "I had thought the Declaration contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere", he said
As early as the 1850s, a time when most political rhetoric focused on the sanctity of the Constitution, Lincoln redirected emphasis to the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of American political values—what he called the "sheet anchor" of republicanism. The Declaration's emphasis on freedom and equality for all, in contrast to the Constitution's tolerance of slavery, shifted the debate. As Diggins concludes regarding the highly influential Cooper Union speech of early 1860, "Lincoln presented Americans a theory of history that offers a profound contribution to the theory and destiny of republicanism itself.
After Republican Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) won the 1860 election, seven Southern states seceded from the union and set up a new nation, the Confederate States of America, on February 8, 1861. It attacked Fort Sumter, a U.S. Army fort in South Carolina, thus igniting the war. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In response to the attack, on April 15, Lincoln called on the states to send detachments totaling 75,000 troops to recapture forts, protect the capital, and "preserve the Union", which in his view still existed intact despite the actions of the seceding states:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that".
After 4 years of bloody combat that left over 1,030,000 casualties (with 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead) and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing civil rights to the freed slaves began. Based on 1860 census figures, about 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% from the North and 18% from the South, establishing the American Civil War as the deadliest war in American history. Its legacy includes ending slavery in the United States, restoring the Union, and strengthening the role of the federal government.
The wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5 million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived; they were nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the border states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied prior to the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on December 18, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.
Many scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable long-term advantage over the Confederacy in terms of industrial strength and population. Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat. Civil War historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly: "I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back ... If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that War"
The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the best-known in American history. It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, while attending the play, Our American Cousin, at Ford's Theatre as the American Civil War was drawing to a close. The assassination of Lincoln was planned and carried out by the well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, as part of a larger conspiracy in a bid to revive the Confederate cause. John Wilkes Booth wrote in his diary that he shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" before shooting President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, in part because of the association with the assassination of Caesar. The Latin phrase means "thus always to tyrants". It is sometimes mistranslated as "death to tyrants" or "down with the tyrant". The full quotation is Sic semper evello mortem tyrannis (literally: "Thus always I eradicate tyrants' lives") is often said to have originated with Marcus Junius Brutus during the assassination of Julius Caesar, but according to Plutarch, Brutus either did not have a chance to say anything, or if he did, no one heard what was said. The phrase was recommended by George Mason to the Virginia Convention in 1776, as part of the commonwealth's seal. The Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia shows Virtue, spear in hand, with her foot on the prostrate form of Tyranny, whose crown lies nearby.
It is widely believed that when he was president, Lincoln might have known of his assassination before he died. On the day of the assassination, Lincoln had told his bodyguard, William H. Crook, that he had been having dreams of himself being assassinated for three straight nights. President Lincoln's assassination made him a national martyr and endowed him with a recognition of mythic proportion. Lincoln was viewed by abolitionists as a champion for human liberty. Republicans linked Lincoln's name to their party. Many, though not all, in the South considered Lincoln as a man of outstanding ability.
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| Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC |
The Recontruction era
The Reconstruction Amendments are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted between 1865 and 1870, the five years immediately following the Civil War. The amendments were important in implementing the Reconstruction of the American South after the war. Their proponents saw them as transforming the United States from a country that was (in Abraham Lincoln's words) "half slave and half free" to one in which the constitutionally guaranteed "blessings of liberty" would be extended to the entire populace, including the former slaves and their descendants. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified in 1865. The 14th Amendment was proposed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, guaranteeing United States citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and granting them federal civil rights. The 15th Amendment, proposed in late February 1869 and passed in early February 1870, decreed that the right to vote could not be denied because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". The amendment did not declare the vote an unconditional right; it prohibited these types of discrimination. States would still determine voter registration and electoral laws.From 1890 to 1910, most black voters in the South were effectively disfranchised by new constitutions and laws incorporating such obstacles as poll taxes and discriminatory literacy tests, from which white voters were exempted by grandfather clauses. A system of whites-only primaries and violent intimidation by white groups also suppressed black participation.
In ten states, coalitions of freedmen, recent black and white arrivals from the North (carpetbaggers), and white Southerners who supported Reconstruction (scalawags) cooperated to form Republican biracial state governments. A carpetbagger was a Northerner (Yankee) who moved to the South after the U.S. Civil War, especially during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877), in order to profit from the instability and power vacuum that existed at this time.The term carpetbagger was a pejorative term referring to the carpet bags (a fashionable form of luggage at the time) which many of these newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. The term is still used today to refer to an outsider perceived as using manipulation or fraud to obtain an objective.
A Republican coalition came to power in nearly all the southern states and set out to transform the society by setting up a free labor economy, using the U.S. Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. The Bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen, negotiated labor contracts, and set up schools and even churches for them.
The Lost Cause is a regional American literary movement seeking to reconcile the traditionalist white society of the antebellum South that they admire, to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865. It forms an important minority viewpoint among the ways to commemorate the war. Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South's superior military skill and courage. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life. The Lost Cause view reached tens of millions of Americans in the best-selling 1936 novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and the Oscar-winning 1939 film. Helen Taylor argues that "Gone with the Wind has almost certainly done its ideological work. It has sealed in popular imaginations a fascinated nostalgia for the glamorous southern plantation house and ordered hierarchical society in which slaves are 'family,' and there is a mystical bond between the landowner and the rich soil those slaves work for him. It has spoken eloquently-albeit from an elitist perspective-of the grand themes (war, love, death, conflicts of race, class, gender, and generation) that have crossed continents and cultures".
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| The most enduring legacy of Gone with the Wind novel is that people worldwide would incorrectly think it was the true story of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film version of the novel "amplified this effect" |
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) emerged in 1867 as a white-supremacist organization opposed to black civil rights and Republican rule. It was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six veterans of the Confederate Army. The name is probably derived from the Greek word kuklos which means circle, suggesting a circle or band of brothers. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact. In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization". It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina. Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan's costume for anonymity, to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence.
White Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers", regained control state by state, sometimes using fraud and violence to control state elections. A deep national economic depression following the Panic of 1873 led to major Democratic gains in the North, the collapse of many railroad schemes in the South, and a growing sense of frustration in the North.
Reconstruction ended after the disputed 1876 election between Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes and Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden. With a compromise Hayes won the election, the federal government withdrew its troops from the South, and Southern Democrats re-entered the national political scene. After 1890 southern states effectively disfranchised black voters. Blacks were segregated in public places and remained second class citizens in a system known as Jim Crow until the successes of the Civil Rights movement in 1964-65.
The West and the Gilded Age
The latter half of the nineteenth century was marked by the United States' development and settlement of the West, first by wagon trains and then aided by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and frequent wars with Native Americans as settlers encroached on their traditional lands. Gradually the US purchased their lands and extinguished their claims, forcing most tribes onto restricted reservations.
The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871. The fire killed up to 300 people, destroyed roughly 3.3 square miles (9 km2) of Chicago, Illinois, and left more than 100,000 residents homeless.Though the fire was one of the largest U.S. disasters of the 19th century, and destroyed much of the city's central business district, Chicago was rebuilt and continued to grow as one of the most populous and economically important American cities.
By the late 19th century there had been a dramatic expansion of American wealth and prosperity and Financiers and industrialists such as J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller began to amass vast fortunes for which many US observers were concerned that the nation was losing its pioneering egalitarian spirit. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry, and along with other key contemporary industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, defined the structure of modern philanthropy. In 1870, he co-founded Standard Oil Company and actively ran it until he officially retired in 1897. By the time of his death in 1937, Rockefeller's remaining fortune, largely tied up in permanent family trusts, was estimated at $1.4 billion, while the total national GDP was $92 billion. He managed to control 85% of the total petrol barrels of US. According to some methods of wealth calculation, Rockefeller's net worth over the last decades of his life would easily place him as the wealthiest known person in recent history. As a percentage of the United States' GDP, no other American fortune — including those of Bill Gates or Sam Walton — would even come close. Rockefeller, at the age of 86, penned the following words to sum up his life:
I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play—
I dropped the worry on the way—
And God was good to me everyday.
The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that triggered a depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 until 1879, and even longer in some countries. Then the Democrats regained control of the house for first time since the Civil War. By 1877, the Panic of 1873 had turned into full-fledged depression. A quarter of the railroads were out of business, and unemployment was 15%. Many who still had jobs worked half the year or less. Looking for someone to blame, many Americans pointed the finger at the new breed of foreigner. Although Irish and English still flooded in between 1870 and 1890, neither group equaled the 2 million German immigrants during that period. The America's first socialist party, the Workingmen's Party, had 3000 members, mostly Germans.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived. Mark Twain was was an American author and humorist.He was a freemason. Although Twain was a Presbyterian, he was sometimes critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life. Those who knew Twain well late in life recount that he dwelt on the subject of the afterlife, his daughter Clara saying: "Sometimes he believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond".
In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) invented the phonograph. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey. Although Edison obtained a patent for the phonograph in 1878, he did little to develop it until Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter produced a phonograph-like device in the 1880s that used wax-coated cardboard cylinders. Edison was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. Edison was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents was the widespread impact of his inventions: electric light and power utilities, sound recording, and motion pictures all established major new industries world-wide. Edison's inventions contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications Edison was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. In an October 2, 1910, interview in the New York Times Magazine, Edison stated: "Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions". He clarified himself in a private letter: "You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made". He also stated, "I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt."
The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; French: La Liberté éclairant le monde) is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in the middle of New York Harbor, in Manhattan, New York City. The statue, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886, was a gift to the United States from the people of France. The statue is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue is an icon of freedom and of the United States: a welcoming signal to immigrants arriving from abroad.
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| Statue of Liberty from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1887 |
A majority of the surviving Native American Nez Perce were forced to surrender against the US Army on October 5, 1877, after the Battle of the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana, 40 miles (64 km) from the Canadian border. Chief Joseph surrendered to General Oliver O. Howard of the U.S. Cavalry. During the surrender negotiations, Chief Joseph sent a message, usually described as a speech, to the US soldiers. It has become renowned as one of the greatest American speeches: "...Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." The route of the Nez Perce flight is preserved by the Nez Perce National Historic Trail.
President Hayes signed the Exclusion Treaty with China in 1880. Congress ended Chinese immigrations two years later, the first significant restriction on immigration in America history. The reason is that Chinese Cheap labor was seen as a curse to the country and a menace to our liberties and the institutions of our country and should be restricted and forever abolished. The act was initially intended to last for 10 years, but was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902. It was finally repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943.
On the morning of July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was on his way to his alma mater, Williams College, where he was scheduled to deliver a speech. As the President was walking through the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad in Washington at 9:30 a.m., he was shot twice from behind, once across the arm and once in the back, by an assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, a rejected and disillusioned Federal office seeker. Secretary Blaine had denied Guiteau, having no qualifications, a Federal appointment as the United States consul in Paris and had banned him from the White House for his aggressive behavior in seeking an appointment. Guiteau believed as well that a short speech he had partially presented before a small group of people during the presidential election campaign was in fact the cause of Garfield's election to the presidency and which, therefore, justified his appointment. The president died two months later due to the injuries.
A severe nationwide depression broke out in 1893; it was called the Panic of 1893 and impacted farmers, workers, and businessmen who saw prices, wages, and profits fall. Many railroads went bankrupt. The resultant political reaction fell on the Democratic Party, whose leader President Grover Cleveland shouldered much of the blame. Labor unrest involved numerous strikes, most notably the violent Pullman Strike of 1894, which was shut down by federal troops under Cleveland's orders. The Populist Party gained strength among cotton and wheat farmers, as well as coal miners, but was overtaken by the even more popular Free Silver movement, which demanded using silver to enlarge the money supply, leading to inflation that the silverites promised would end the depression. The financial, railroad, and business communities fought back hard, arguing that only the gold standard would save the economy. In the most intense election in the nation's history, conservative Republican William McKinley defeated silverite William Jennings Bryan, who ran on the Democratic, Populist, and Silver Republican tickets. Bryan swept the South and West, but McKinley ran up landslides among the middle class, industrial workers, cities, and among upscale farmers in the Midwest.
In 1886, after a lengthy pursuit, prominent leader of the Bedonkohe Apache Geronimo (1829 - 1909) surrendered to Texan faux-gubernatorial authorities as a prisoner of war. At an old age, he became a celebrity, appearing at fairs, but he was never allowed to return to the land of his birth. After a Mexican attack on his tribe, where soldiers killed his mother, wife, and his three children in 1858, Geronimo joined a number of revenge attacks against the Mexicans. Thanks to a 1939 movie about Geronimo, US paratroopers traditionally shout "Geronimo" to show they have no fear of jumping out of an airplane
In 1886 when Atlanta and Fulton County passed prohibition legislation John Pemberton responded by developing Coca-Cola, essentially a nonalcoholic version of French Wine Coca. Originally Pemberton had invented in the late 19th century as a patent medicine for five cents a glass at soda fountains, which were popular in the United States at the time due to the belief that carbonated water was good for the health. Coca-Cola once contained an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass. In 1903, it was removed. The exact formula of Coca-Cola's natural flavorings (but not its other ingredients, which are listed on the side of the bottle or can) is a trade secret. The original copy of the formula was held in SunTrust Bank's main vault in Atlanta for 86 years. The company produces concentrate, which is then sold to licensed Coca-Cola bottlers throughout the world.
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| Different bottles used by Coca-Cola |
Pepsi (stylized in lowercase as pepsi, formerly stylized in uppercase as PEPSI) is a carbonated soft drink that is produced and manufactured by PepsiCo. Created and developed in 1893 and introduced as Brad's Drink, it was renamed as Pepsi-Cola on August 28, 1898, then to Pepsi in 1961. On three separate occasions between 1922 and 1933, The Coca-Cola Company was offered the opportunity to purchase the Pepsi-Cola company, and it declined on each occasion.
Starting in the early 1880s, Spain had also suppressed an independence movement in the Philippines, which was intensifying, and Spain was now fighting two wars, which were putting a heavy burden on its economy. But it turned down offers in secret negotiations by the US in 1896, which was closely following the war, to buy Cuba from Spain. The Cuban struggle for independence had captured the American imagination for years, and newspapers had been agitating for intervention with sensational stories of Spanish atrocities against the native Cuban population, intentionally sensationalized and exaggerated. In January 1898, a riot by Cuban Spanish loyalists against the new autonomous government broke out in Havana, leading to the destruction of the printing presses of four local newspapers for publishing articles critical of Spanish Army atrocities. The US Consul-General cabled Washington with fears for the lives of Americans living in Havana. In response, the battleship USS Maine was sent to Havana in the last week of January. On February 15, 1898, the Maine was rocked by an explosion, killing 258 of the crew (there were only 89 survivors) and sinking the ship in the harbour. The New York Journal and New York World, owned respectively by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, gave the Maine intense press coverage, but employed tactics that would later be labeled "yellow journalism." Both papers exaggerated and distorted any information they could attain, sometimes even fabricating "news" when none that fitted their agenda was available. The World, while overall not as lurid or shrill in tone as the Journal, nevertheless indulged in similar theatrics, insisting continually that the Maine had been bombed or mined. Privately, Pulitzer believed that "nobody outside a lunatic asylum" really believed that Spain sanctioned the Maine's destruction. Nevertheless, this did not stop the World from insisting that the only "atonement" Spain could offer the U.S. for the loss of ship and life, was the granting of complete Cuban independence. Nor did it stop the paper from accusing Spain of "treachery, willingness, or laxness" for failing to ensure the safety of Havana Harbor. The American public, already agitated over reported Spanish atrocities in Cuba, was driven to increased hysteria. The cause of the explosion has not been clearly established to this day, but the incident was presented as a casus belli by the American media to promote a war with Spain. The U.S. congress formally declared war on April 25. The Senate and Congress passed the amendment April 19, House Speaker McKinley signed the joint resolution on April 20, and the ultimatum was forwarded to Spain. War was declared on April 20/21, 1898. At the Treaty of Paris peace conference the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Cuba became an independent country, under close American tutelage. Although the war itself was widely popular, the peace terms proved controversial. William Jennings Bryan led his Democratic Party in opposition to control of the Philippines, which he denounced as imperialism unbecoming to American democracy. President William McKinley defended the acquisition and was riding high as the nation had returned to prosperity and felt triumphant in the war. He even affirmed about a long Catholic country as Philippines: "there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died". McKinley easily defeated Bryan in a rematch in the 1900 presidential election. Historian Samuel Flagg Bemis argues that Spanish–American War expansionism was a short-lived imperialistic impulse and "a great aberration in American history", a very different form of territorial growth than that of earlier American history. The territorial expansion of 1898 is often seen by historians as the beginning of American empire.
The loss of Cuba caused a national trauma because of the affinity of peninsular Spaniards with Cuba, which was seen as another province of Spain rather than as a colony. Culturally, a new wave called the Generation of '98 originated as a response to this trauma, marking a renaissance in Spanish culture. Economically, the war benefited Spain, because after the war large sums of capital held by Spaniards in Cuba and America were returned to the peninsula and invested in Spain. This massive flow of capital (equivalent to 25% of the gross domestic product of one year) helped to develop the large modern firms in Spain in the steel, chemical, financial, mechanical, textile, shipyard, and electrical power industries. However, the political consequences were serious. The defeat in the war began the weakening of the fragile political stability that had been established earlier by the rule of Alfonso XII.
The 25th President of the United States, William McKinley, was shot and fatally wounded on September 6, 1901, inside the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was shaking hands with the public when he was shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. The President died on September 14 from gangrene caused by the bullet wounds.
In 1888, Eastman Kodak perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film.
He made celluloid film commercially available in 1889. In his final two years, Eastman was in intense pain caused by a disorder affecting his spine. He had trouble standing, and his walk became a slow shuffle.
On March 14, 1932, Eastman committed suicide with a single gunshot through the heart, leaving a note which read, "My work is done – Why wait? GE". His funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Rochester; he was buried on the grounds of the company he founded at Kodak Park in Rochester, New York.
By 1890 American industrial production and per capita income exceeded those of all other world nations. In response to heavy debts and decreasing farm prices, wheat and cotton farmers joined the Populist Party. An unprecedented wave of immigration from Europe served to both provide the labor for American industry and create diverse communities in previously undeveloped areas. From 1880 to 1914, peak years of immigration, more than 22 million people migrated to the United States. Most were unskilled workers who quickly found jobs in mines, mills, factories. Many immigrants were craftsmen (especially from Britain and Germany) bringing human skills, and others were farmers (especially from Germany and Scandinavia) who purchased inexpensive land on the Prairies from railroads who sent agents to Europe. Poverty, growing inequality and dangerous working conditions, along with socialist and anarchist ideas diffusing from European immigrants, led to the rise of the labor movement, which often included violent strikes.
20th century
In 1901 America flooded the Philippines with troops, devasted the countryside, and captured rebel Aguinaldo. U.S. forces substantially crushed the rebellion the next year, at the cost of 4380 American lives and by killing over 200.000 Filipinos.
In 1903 Henry Ford founded in Detroit the Ford Motor Company. Ford's manufacturing—and those of automotive pioneers William C. Durant, the Dodge brothers, Packard, and Walter Chrysler—reinforced Detroit's status as the world's automotive capital; it also served to encourage truck manufacturers such as Rapid and Grabowsky. With the factories came high-profile labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor and the United Auto Workers, which initiated strikes and other tactics in support of such things as the 8-hour day/40-hour work week, healthcare benefits, pensions, increased wages and improved working conditions. The labor activism during those years increased influence of union leaders in the city such as Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters and Walter Reuther of the autoworkers.Ford's antisemitic zeal was detailed in a series of writings under his name called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, prompted Hitler to call Ford his “inspiration.” The man responsible for the death of nearly six million Jews kept a life-sized portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.
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| The Ford Model T (colloquially known as the Tin Lizzie, Tin Lizzy, T-Model Ford, Model T, or T) is an automobile that was produced by Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company from October 1, 1908, to May 27, 1927. It is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, the car that opened travel to the common middle-class American; |
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 struck San Francisco and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. Devastating fires broke out in the city that lasted for several days. As a result of the quake and fires, about 3,000 people died and over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed. The earthquake and resulting fire are remembered as one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States alongside the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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| San Francisco Earthquake |
The Progressive Party of 1912 was an American political party formed by President Theodore Roosevelt, after a split in the Republican Party between him and President William Howard Taft.. In every major city and state, and at the national level as well, and in education, medicine, and industry, the progressives called for the modernization and reform of decrepit institutions, the elimination of corruption in politics, and the introduction of efficiency as a criterion for change. Leading politicians from both parties, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, and Robert LaFollette on the Republican side, and William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson on the Democratic side, took up the cause of progressive reform.Significant changes enacted at the national levels included the imposition of an income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment, direct election of Senators with the Seventeenth Amendment, Prohibition with the Eighteenth Amendment, and women's suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However some Progressive also tried to scientifically manage the species, calling for eugenics to cull the "unfit". Between 1907 and 1963, over 60000 Americans were forcibly sterilized under state eugenics laws.
[Theodore "T.R." Roosevelt, Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919) was an American politician, author, naturalist, explorer, and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States.He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the Progressive Party. He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity.Born into a wealthy family in New York City, Roosevelt was a sickly child who suffered from asthma. To overcome his physical weakness, he embraced a strenuous life. He was home-schooled and became an eager student of nature. He attended Harvard University where he studied biology, boxed, and developed an interest in naval affairs.
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| Theodore Roosevelt |
Roosevelt became president of the board of New York City Police Commissioners in 1895 for two years and radically reformed the police force. The New York Police Department (NYPD) was reputed as one of the most corrupt in America. Roosevelt had demonstrated, through his research and writing, a fascination with naval history; President William McKinley, urged by Roosevelt's close friend Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, appointed Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. Roosevelt was instrumental in preparing the Navy for the Spanish–American War. Roosevelt had an analytical mind, even as he was itching for war. He explained his priorities to one of the Navy's planners in late 1897: "I would regard war with Spain from two viewpoints: first, the advisability on the grounds both of humanity and self-interest of interfering on behalf of the Cubans, and of taking one more step toward the complete freeing of America from European dominion; second, the benefit done our people by giving them something to think of which is not material gain, and especially the benefit done our military forces by trying both the Navy and Army in actual practice."
After leaving the Army, Roosevelt discovered New York Republicans needed him because their current governor was tainted by scandal and would probably lose. He campaigned vigorously on his war record winning the 1898 state election by a historical margin of 1%. As Governor, Roosevelt learned much about current economic issues and political techniques that later proved valuable to his presidency. He was exposed to the problems of trusts, monopoly, labor relations, and conservation. Roosevelt anticipated a second term as governor or in the alternative a cabinet post in the War Department; his friends (especially Henry Cabot Lodge) saw that as a dead end. They promoted him for vice president, and no one else of prominence was actively seeking that job. Grass roots opinion in the Party wanted Roosevelt as vice president.
Roosevelt became President after McKinley was assassinated. He was inaugurated at age 42, the youngest person to become president. He attempted to move the GOP toward Progressivism, including trust busting and increased regulation of businesses.His foreign policy focused on the Caribbean, where he built the Panama Canal and guarded its approaches. There were no wars, but his slogan, "speak softly and carry a big stick" was underscored by sending the greatly expanded Navy—the Great White Fleet—on a world tour. He negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1912 He launched the Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party that called for progressive reforms, splitting the Republican vote. Roosevelt then led a major expedition to the Amazon jungles and contracted several illnesses. From 1914 to 1917 he campaigned for American entry into World War I, and reconciled with GOP leadership. He was seen as the front-runner for the GOP nomination in the 1920 election, but his health collapsed and he died in 1919. Historians credit Roosevelt for changing the nation's political system by permanently placing the presidency at center stage and making character as important as the issues. His notable accomplishments include trust busting and conservationism. He is a hero to liberals for his proposals in 1907–12 that presaged the modern welfare state of the New Deal Era, and put the environment on the national agenda (He was the first president to speak out on conservation, and he greatly expanded the system of national parks and national forests). Conservatives admire his "big stick" diplomacy and commitment to military values. However, liberals have criticized him for his interventionist and imperialist approach to nations he considered "uncivilized".
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Prohibition was the outlawing of the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol. Drinking itself was never prohibited. Throughout the Progressive Era, it remained one of the prominent causes associated with Progressivism at the local, state and national level, though support across the full breadth of Progressives was mixed. It pitted the minority urban Catholic population against the larger rural Protestant element. Prohibition remained a major reform movement from the 1840s until the 1920s, when nationwide prohibition went into effect, and was supported by evangelical Protestant churches, especially the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and Congregationalists. Opposition to prohibition was strong in America's urban industrial centers, where a large, immigrant, working-class population generally opposed it, as did Jewish and Catholic religious groups. Liturgical ("high") churches (Catholic, Episcopal, and German Lutheran) opposed prohibition laws because they did not want the government redefining morality to a narrow standard and criminalizing the common liturgical practice of using wine. During the first years of Prohibition, the new federal law was enforced in regions such as the rural South and western states, where it had popular support; however, in large urban cities and in small industrial or mining towns, residents defied or ignored the law. Prohibition became increasingly unpopular during the Great Depression. Some believe that the demand for increased employment and tax revenues during this time brought an end to Prohibition. Others argue it was the result the economic motivations of American businessmen as well as the stress and excesses of the era that kept it from surviving, even under optimal economic conditions. Al Capone was the most notorious gangster of his generation. Born in 1899, Capone settled in Chicago to take over Johnny Torrio's business dealing with outlawed liquor. Within three years, Capone had nearly 700 men at his disposal. As the profits came in, Capone acquired finesse—particularly in the management of politicians. By the middle of the decade, he had gained control of the suburb of Cicero, and had installed his own mayor. Capone's rise to fame did not come without bloodshed. Rival gangs, such as the Gennas and the Aiellos, started wars with Capone, eventually leading to a rash of killings of epic proportions.In 1927, Capone and his gang were pulling in approximately $60 million per year- most of it from beer. Capone not only controlled the sale of liquor to over 10,000 speakeasies, but he also controlled the supply from Canada to Florida. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre became one of the most infamous slaying between rival gangs of the Prohibition era; resulting in the deaths of 7. Capone was imprisoned for tax violations and died January 25, 1947, from a heart attack and pneumonia.
As World War I raged in Europe from 1914, President Woodrow Wilson took full control of foreign policy, declaring neutrality but warning Germany that resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against American ships supplying goods to Allied nations would mean war. Germany decided to take the risk and try to win by cutting off supplies to Britain; the U.S. declared war in April 1917. One of the triggers was the sinking of the British passenger liner RMS Lusitania in 1915 where 128 Americans died. American money, food, and munitions arrived quickly, but troops had to be drafted and trained; by summer 1918 American soldiers under General John J. Pershing arrived at the rate of 10,000 a day, while Germany was unable to replace its losses.
The result was Allied victory in November 1918. The price was the life of 116708 American soldiers. President Wilson demanded Germany depose the Kaiser and accept his terms, the Fourteen Points. Wilson dominated the 1919 Paris Peace Conference but Germany was treated harshly by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) as Wilson put all his hopes in the new League of Nations. The League lasted for 26 years; the United Nations (UN) replaced it after the end of the Second World War on 20 April 1946, and inherited a number of agencies and organisations founded by the League.
The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus. It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population —making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII), creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit — thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu. In US it killed 600000 Americans, the same as the Civil war by 1920.
The 1920s were called the Roaring Twenties due to the great economic prosperity during this period. Jazz became popular among the younger generation, and thus the decade was also called the Jazz Age. During the 1920s, the nation enjoyed widespread prosperity, albeit with a weakness in agriculture. The first decades of the twentieth century also saw the rise of the studio system. MGM, Universal and Warner Brothers all acquired land in Hollywood, which was then a small subdivision known as "Hollywoodland" on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The enormous variety in terrain and the year round sunshine made film making easier and cheaper, as actors, producers, financiers and craftsmen headed to Hollywood. The movies made California even better known, attracting hundreds of thousands of migrants, especially from the Midwest, who loved the mild Mediterranean climate, cheap land, and new jobs. By the 1930s, Hollywood had extended its reach into radio, and by 1950 Southern California had also become a major center of television production, hosting studios for major networks such as NBC and CBS.
In 1924 Congress decided there was not enough prosperity to go around, and sharply restricted immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe. Immigration from China and Japan was banned entirely.
A financial bubble was fueled by an inflated stock market, which later led to the Stock Market Crash on October 29 (the so-called "Black Tuesday"), 1929. This, along with many other economic factors, triggered a worldwide depression known as the Great Depression. During this time, the United States experienced deflation as prices fell, unemployment soared from 3% in 1929 to 25% in 1933, farm prices fell by half, and manufacturing output plunged by one-third. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in 1930 and lasted until the late 1930s or middle 1940s.It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The Great Depression had devastating effects in countries rich and poor. Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%. Unemployment in the U.S. rose to 25%, and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by approximately 60%. Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as cash cropping, mining and logging suffered the most. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. In many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until after the end of World War II.
Mount Rushmore: Doane Robinson, a state historian of South Dakota, wanted in 1923 a monument to be built in South Dakota in order to help the economy of the state by attracting tourism. Robinson asked Danish-American architect and sculptor Gutzon Borglum to sculpt and design the monument. Borglum decided to use Mount Rushmore for the sculpture, since it seemed to be the easiest of the cliffs to work on. Gutzon Borglum, having decided on the location of the sculpture, he decided to make this monument of four Presidents of the United States. He chose the two most famous Presidents in American history, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He chose Thomas Jefferson because Jefferson nearly doubled the size of the United States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase (which included the land that became South Dakota). The last President Borglum chose was Theodore Roosevelt, suggested by President Calvin Coolidge (who insisted that at least there be two Republicans and at least one Democrat represented.) because of Theodore Roosevelt's introduction of the National Park Service. Borglum's original design was a sculpture of the four presidents intended to go down to their waists, but time and money only provided for their heads. Construction began on October 4, 1927 and finished in 1941.
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| Mount Rushmore monument |
President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964): Before he was forty, Hoover was already a multi-millionaire as an engineer and mining executive. As president (1929-1933) he actively intervened in the economy, advocating and implementing polices that were quite similar to those which his successor Franklin Roosevelt later implemented. There is a myth that persists in spite of the widespread recognition by modern historians that the Hoover presidency was anything but an era of laissez-faire. Among those economic measures that Hoover implemented were new and expanded public works projects which would help curtail unemployment. Also in an attempt to clear out jobs for workers, Hoover ordered Mexican repatriation. The federal government rounded up 500,000 Mexicans and deported them. He tried tax cuts and however He also increased taxes: Hoover raised tariffs, income taxes, estate taxes, corporate taxes, and even slapped a tax on all bank checks.
The Empire State Building is a 103-story skyscraper located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet (380 m), and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 feet (443 m) high. Its name is derived from the nickname for New York, the Empire State. It stood as the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years, from its completion in early 1931 until late 1970.
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| New York and the Empire State Building, 1931 by Samuel H. Gottscho |
Duly chastened by the painful effects of his attempt at balancing the budget, FDR was persuaded to embrace the theories of John Maynard Keynes and called for more deficit spending beginning in 1938 and continuing throughout World War II. His change of heart culminated in his famous speech calling for an Economic Bill of Rights in 1944, in which he said, "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made".
John Maynard Keynes was a British economist whose ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one for him. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments (World War I reparations) being set so high it would traumatise innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit her ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's own economy but that of the wider world. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. Keynes' basic idea was simple: to keep people fully employed, governments have to run deficits when the economy is slowing, as the private sector would not invest enough to keep production at the normal level and bring the economy out of recession. Keynesian economists called on governments during times of economic crisis to pick up the slack by increasing government spending and/or cutting taxes. By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. For the Anglo-American economies, Keynesian economics typically was not officially rejected until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Formal rejection was generally preceded by several years of the adoption of monetarist policies aiming to reduce inflation, which tended to counteract any expansionary fiscal policies that continued to be employed until Keynesianism was formally discarded. In 2008, a rapid shift of opinion took place among many prominent economists in favour of Keynesian stimulus, and, from October onward, policy makers began announcing major stimulus packages, in hopes of heading off the possibility of a global depression. By early 2009 there was widespread acceptance among the world's economic policy makers about the need for fiscal stimulus. Yet by late 2009 the consensus among economists began to break down, and in 2010 with a depression averted but unemployment in many countries still high, policy makers generally decided against further fiscal stimulus. With the end of the brief consensus for Keynesian policies, but with the neoliberal policies that characterised the Washington Consensus era still viewed by many as discredited, several commentators have predicted that the Macroeconomic domain will see a return to ideological struggles. In 2009 more than 300 professional economists, led by three Nobel Laureates in economics, James M. Buchanan, Edward C. Prescott, and Vernon L. Smith, signed a statement against more government spending, arguing that "Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth."
The Warner animation division was founded in 1933 as Leon Schlesinger Productions, an independent company which produced the popular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated short. Warner Bros was one of the most successful animation studios in American media history. The Characters featured in these cartoons, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner, are among the most famous and recognizable characters in the world.
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| Looney Tunes |
The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located adjacent to the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers and 61 crewmen), there were 35 fatalities. There was also one death of a ground crewman.
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| Hindenburg over NYC |
In the Depression years, the United States remained focused on domestic concerns while democracy declined across the world and many countries fell under the control of dictators. Imperial Japan asserted dominance in East Asia and in the Pacific. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy militarized to and threatened conquests, while Britain and France attempted appeasement to avert another war in Europe. US legislation in the Neutrality Acts sought to avoid foreign conflicts; however, policy clashed with increasing anti-Nazi feelings following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 that started World War II. Roosevelt positioned the US as the "Arsenal of Democracy", pledging full-scale financial and munitions support for the Allies—but no military personnel. Japan tried to neutralize America's power in the Pacific by attacking Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which catalyzed American support to enter the war and seek revenge. The Allies—the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union, as well as China, Canada and other countries—fought the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Allies saw Germany as the main threat and gave highest priority to Europe. The US dominated the war against Japan and stopped Japanese expansion in the Pacific in 1942. After losing Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines to the Japanese, and drawing the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 1942), the American Navy inflicted a decisive blow at Midway (June 1942). American ground forces assisted in the North African Campaign that eventually concluded with the collapse of Mussolini's fascist government in 1943, as Italy switched to the Allied side. A more significant European front was opened on D-Day, June 6, 1944, in which American and Allied forces invaded Nazi-occupied France from Britain. The main contributions of the US to the Allied war effort comprised money, industrial output, food, petroleum, technological innovation, and (especially 1944–45), military personnel.
On the home front, mobilization of the US economy was managed by Roosevelt's War Production Board. The wartime production boom led to full employment, wiping out this vestige of the Great Depression. Indeed, labor shortages encouraged industry to look for new sources of workers, finding new roles for women and blacks. Research and development took flight as well, best seen in the Manhattan Project, a secret effort to harness nuclear fission to produce highly destructive atomic bombs.
Harry S.Truman had been vice president for 82 days when President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Shortly after taking the oath of office, Truman said to reporters:
"Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me"
The Allied pushed the Germans out of France but faced an unexpected counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge in December. The final German effort failed, and, as Allied armies in East and West were converging on Berlin, the Nazis hurriedly tried to kill the last remaining Jews. The western front stopped short, leaving Berlin to the Soviets as the Nazi regime formally capitulated in May 1945, ending the war in Europe.Over in the Pacific, the US implemented an island hopping strategy toward Tokyo, establishing airfields for bombing runs against mainland Japan from the Mariana Islands and achieving hard-fought victories at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945. Bloodied at Okinawa, the U.S. prepared to invade Japan's home islands when B-29s dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the empire's surrender in a matter of days and thus ending World War II. The US occupied Japan (and part of Germany), sending Douglas MacArthur to restructure the Japanese economy and political system along American lines. Though the nation lost more than 400,000 military personnel, the mainland prospered untouched by the devastation of war that inflicted a heavy toll on Europe and Asia.
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| Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a United States Navy corpsman raising a U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. |
Following World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two dominant superpowers, the USSR being the other. The U.S. Senate on a bipartisan vote approved U.S. participation in the United Nations (UN), which marked a turn away from the traditional isolationism of the U.S. and toward increased international involvement.
The primary American goal of 1945–48 was to rescue Europe from the devastation of World War II and to contain the expansion of Communism, represented by the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 provided military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey to counteract the threat of Communist expansion in the Balkans. In 1948, the United States replaced piecemeal financial aid programs with a comprehensive Marshall Plan, which pumped money into the economy of Western Europe, and removed trade barriers, while modernizing the managerial practices of businesses and governments. In 1949, the United States, rejecting the long-standing policy of no military alliances in peacetime, formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, which continues into the 21st century. In response the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact of communist states.
On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union blocked access to the three Western-held sectors of Berlin. The Allies had never negotiated a deal to guarantee supply of the sectors deep within the Soviet-occupied zone. The commander of the American occupation zone in Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, proposed sending a large armored column across the Soviet zone to West Berlin with instructions to defend itself if it were stopped or attacked. Truman believed this would entail an unacceptable risk of war. He approved a plan to supply the blockaded city by air. On June 25, the Allies initiated the Berlin Airlift, a campaign that delivered food and other supplies, such as coal, using military aircraft on a massive scale. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, and no single nation had the capability, either logistically or materially, to have accomplished it. The airlift worked; ground access was again granted on May 11, 1949. Nevertheless, the airlift continued for several months after that. Altogether, a total of 692 aircraft were engaged in the Berlin Airlift, more than 100 of which belonged to civilian operators. A total of 101 fatalities were recorded as a result of the operation, including 40 Britons and 31 Americans, mostly due to non-flying accidents. Seventeen American and eight British aircraft crashed during the operation. The cost of the Airlift was shared between the USA, UK, and Germany. Estimated costs range from approximately US$224 million to over US$500 million (equivalent to approximately $2.22 billion to $4.96 billion now).The Berlin Airlift was one of Truman's great foreign policy successes; it significantly aided his election campaign in 1948 .
In August 1949 the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon, thereby escalating the risk of warfare. Indeed, the threat of mutually assured destruction prevented both powers from going too far, and resulted in proxy wars, especially in Korea and Vietnam, in which the two sides did not directly confront each other. The unexpected leapfrogging of American technology by the Soviets in 1957 with Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, began the Space Race, won by the Americans as Apollo 11 landed astronauts on the moon in 1969. The angst about the weaknesses of American education led to large-scale federal support for science education and research.
On November 1, 1950, Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate Truman at Blair House. The attack, which could easily have taken the president's life, drew new attention to security concerns surrounding Truman's residence at Blair House. Acknowledging the importance of the question of Puerto Rican independence, Truman allowed a plebiscite in Puerto Rico in 1952 to determine the status of its relationship to the U.S. Nearly 82% of the people voted in favor of a new constitution for the Estado Libre Associado.
In the decades after World War II, the United States became a global influence in economic, political, military, cultural, and technological affairs. Beginning in the 1950s, middle-class culture became obsessed with consumer goods. White Americans made up nearly 90% of the population in 1950.
The Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) was a war between South Korea and North Korea, in which a United Nations force led by the United States of America fought for the South, and China fought for the North. Korea was ruled by Japan from 1910 until the closing days of the war. In August 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and, by agreement with the United States, occupied Korea north of the 38th parallel. U.S. forces subsequently occupied the south. By 1948 two separate governments had been set up: a Communist government in North Korea and a right-wing government in South Korea. Both governments claimed to be the legitimate government of Korea and neither side accepted the border as permanent. The conflict escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces, supported by the Soviet Union and China, invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. On that day, the United Nations Security Council recognized this North Korean act as invasion and called for an immediate ceasefire. Truman promptly urged the United Nations to intervene; it did, authorizing troops under the UN flag led by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur.
By August 1950, U.S. troops pouring into South Korea under UN auspices were able to stabilize the situation. Responding to criticism over readiness, Truman fired his Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, replacing him with the retired General Marshall. With UN approval, Truman decided on a "rollback" policy—conquest of North Korea. UN forces led by General MacArthur led the counterattack, scoring a stunning surprise victory with an amphibious landing at the Battle of Inchon that nearly trapped the invaders. UN forces then marched north, towards the Yalu River boundary with China, with the goal of reuniting Korea under UN auspices. However, China surprised the UN forces with a large-scale invasion in November. The UN forces were forced back to below the 38th parallel, then recovered. By early 1951 the war became a fierce stalemate at about the 38th parallel where it had begun. Truman rejected MacArthur's request to attack Chinese supply bases north of the Yalu, but MacArthur nonetheless promoted his plan to Republican House leader Joseph Martin, who leaked it to the press. Truman was gravely concerned that further escalation of the war might lead to open conflict with the Soviet Union, which was already supplying weapons and providing warplanes (with Korean markings and Soviet fliers). Therefore, on April 11, 1951, Truman fired MacArthur from his commands. The dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur was among the least politically popular decisions in presidential history. Truman's approval ratings plummeted.The war remained a frustrating stalemate for two years, with over 30,000 Americans killed, until an armistice ended the fighting in 1953. In February 1952, Truman's approval mark stood at 22% according to Gallup polls, which was, until George W. Bush in 2008, the all-time lowest approval mark for an active American president. The fighting ended on 27 July 1953, when the armistice agreement was signed. The agreement established a new border between the Koreas close to the previous one and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 2.5-mile (4.0 km)-wide fortified buffer zone between them. Border incidents have continued to the present.
The Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) or the revolution on Cuba was an armed revolt conducted by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and its allies against the government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The revolution began in July 1953, and finally ousted Batista on 1 January 1959, replacing his government with a revolutionary socialist state. The United States imposed trade restrictions on the Batista administration and sent an envoy who attempted to persuade Batista to leave the country voluntarily.With the military situation becoming untenable, Batista fled on 1 January 1959, and Castro took over. Within months of taking control, Castro moved to consolidate his power by brutally marginalizing other resistance groups and figures and imprisoning and executing opponents and dissident former supporters. As the revolution became more radical and continued its persecution of those who did not agree with its direction, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled the island, eventually forming a large exile community in the United States. The United States embargo against Cuba (known in Cuba as el bloqueo) is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo imposed on Cuba by the United States. It began on 19 October 1960.
In 1957, Jewish Jonas Salk' vaccine was introduced when polio was considered the most frightening public health problem of the post-war United States. Annual epidemics were increasingly devastating. The 1952 epidemic was the worst outbreak in the nation's history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis, with most of its victims being children. Polio was the worst disease of the postwar era. According to a 2009 PBS documentary, "Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio." By 1962, polio had become almost extinct, with only 910 cases reported that year—down from 37,476 in 1954. By the end of 1990, it was estimated that 500,000 annual cases worldwide of paralysis resulting from polio had been prevented due to immunization programs carried out by WHO, UNICEF, and many other organizations, and in 1991, transmission of polio was declared as "interrupted" in the Western hemisphere. Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute, viral, infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route. Roosevelt was one of the affected by Polio. Roosevelt was totally and permanently paralyzed from the waist down after becoming paralytic at age of 39 while vacationing at Campobello Island in Canada (Roosevelt fell into the cold waters of the Bay of Fundy while boating).
Jack St. Clair Kilby was an American electrical engineer who took part in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on December 10, 2000. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.
Jewish Theodore Maiman, an American physicist, designed and operated the first laser in 1960. A laser is a device that produces a very narrow, powerful beam of light. Although there seemed to be no particular use for the laser when Maiman first created it, lasers soon became one of the most useful inventions of the 1900's. Lasers are used in communications, industry, medicine, and scientific research.
In 1961 American writer Ernest Hemingway committed suicide.
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| E. Hemingway |
[Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.In his junior year, he took a journalism class.
Early in 1918, Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and signed on to become an ambulance driver in Italy. On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line. While recuperating, he fell in love, for the first time, with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. By the time of his release and return to the United States in January 1919, Agnes and Hemingway had decided to marry within a few months in America. However, in March, she wrote that she had become engaged to an Italian officer.
Hemingway returned home early in 1919. In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth. When St. Louis native Hadley Richardson came to Chicago to visit the sister of Hemingway's roommate, he became infatuated and later claimed, "I knew she was the girl I was going to marry". Hadley was red-haired, with a "nurturing instinct", and eight years older than Hemingway.The two corresponded for a few months and then decided to marry and travel to Europe. They were married on September 3, 1921; two months later, Hemingway was hired as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and the couple left for Paris.
The following September, the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. Hemingway, Hadley and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924.With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting.
In December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began revising the manuscript "Sun Also Rises" extensively. The Sun Also Rises is about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation, received good reviews, and is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work".
In the spring of 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who came to Pamplona with them that July. On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation; in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway's offer of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises. The couple were divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer in May. Pfeiffer, who was from a wealthy Catholic Arkansas family, had moved to Paris to work for Vogue magazine. Before their marriage Hemingway converted to Catholicism.
They left Paris in March 1928 for Key West. In the late spring, Hemingway and Pauline traveled to Kansas City, where their son Patrick was born on June 28, 1928. Pauline had a difficult delivery, which Hemingway fictionalized in A Farewell to Arms. In the winter, he was in New York with Bumby, about to board a train to Florida, when he received a cable telling him that his father had committed suicide. Hemingway was devastated, having earlier written his father telling him not to worry about financial difficulties; the letter arrived minutes after the suicide.
In 1933, Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to East Africa.In 1937, Hemingway agreed to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), arriving in Spain in March with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.Ivens, who was filming The Spanish Earth, wanted Hemingway to replace John Dos Passos as screenwriter, since Dos Passos had left the project when his friend José Robles was arrested and later executed. The incident changed Dos Passos' opinion of the leftist republicans, creating a rift between him and Hemingway, who later spread a rumor that Dos Passos left Spain out of cowardice. Journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, whom Hemingway had met in Key West the previous Christmas (1936), joined him in Spain.
In the spring of 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they almost immediately rented "Finca Vigia". Pauline and the children left Hemingway that summer, after the family was reunited during a visit to Wyoming. After Hemingway's divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba, Key West, and Sun Valley, Idaho in 1939.It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. The novel graphically describes the brutality of civil war.
From May 1944 to March 1945, Hemingway was in London and Europe. When Hemingway first arrived in London he met TIME magazine correspondent, Mary Welsh, with whom he became infatuated. On August 25, he was present at the liberation of Paris, although contrary to the Hemingway legend, he was not the first into the city, nor did he liberate the Ritz
In 1947 Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery during World War II. He was recognized for his valor, having been "under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions". In 1946 he married Mary Welsh, who had an ectopic pregnancy five months later.
In 1951 he wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, saying that it was "the best I can write ever for all of my life". The Old Man and the Sea became a book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1952, a month before he left for his second trip to Africa.
In 1954, while in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two successive plane crashes.The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow. After the plane crashes, Hemingway, who had been "a thinly controlled alcoholic throughout much of his life, drank more heavily than usual to combat the pain of his injuries. In October 1954 Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature.Because he was suffering pain from the African accidents, he decided against traveling to Stockholm.
The Finca Vigia became crowded with guests and tourists, as Hemingway, beginning to become unhappy with life there, considered a permanent move to Idaho. In July 1960 the Hemingways left Cuba for the last time, leaving art and manuscripts in a bank vault in Havana. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Finca Vigia was expropriated by the Cuban government, complete with Hemingway's collection of "four to six thousand books". Hemingway continued to rework the material that would be published as A Moveable Feast through the end of the 1950s. In the summer of 1959 he visited Spain to research a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by Life magazine, returning to Cuba in January 1960 to work on the manuscript.
Hemingway "quite deliberately" shot himself on July 2,1961.His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also committed suicide. Hemingway's family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral which was officiated by the local Catholic priest, who believed the death accidental.
Hemingway never came out and expressed his personal religious views and wrongly attributed autobiographical quote 'All thinking men are atheists' comes actuallly from one of his novel characters in 'A Farewell to Arms' (Chapter 2 page 7).
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In 1960, the charismatic politician John F. Kennedy was elected as the first and—thus far—only Roman Catholic President of the United States. The Kennedy family brought a new life and vigor to the atmosphere of the White House. His time in office was marked by such notable events as the acceleration of the United States' role in the Space Race, escalation of the American role in the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the jailing of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Birmingham campaign, and the appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy to his Cabinet as Attorney General. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, leaving the nation in profound shock.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) commonly known as Jack Kennedy, or by his initials JFK, was an American politician. After military service as commander of Motor Torpedo Boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in the South Pacific, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960.
In 1960 he ran for US president. Kennedy appeared with Republican candidate Richard Nixon, then vice president, in the first televised U.S. presidential debates in U.S. history. During these programs, Nixon, with a sore injured leg and his "five o'clock shadow", was perspiring and looked tense and uncomfortable, while Kennedy, choosing to avail himself of makeup services, appeared relaxed, leading the huge television audience to favor Kennedy as the winner. Radio listeners either thought Nixon had won or that the debates were a draw. The debates are now considered a milestone in American political history—the point at which the medium of television began to play a dominant role in politics Kennedy was a Catholic but he didnt intend to mix his religion with the politics: He famously told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me."
On November 8, Kennedy defeated Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the 20th century. In the national popular vote Kennedy led Nixon by just two-tenths of one percent (49.7% to 49.5%), while in the Electoral College he won 303 votes to Nixon's 219 (269 were needed to win).John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th president at noon on January 20, 1961. In his inaugural address he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens, famously saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." He asked the nations of the world to join together to fight what he called the "common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself".
President Kennedy's foreign policy was dominated by American confrontations with the Soviet Union, manifested by proxy contests in the early stage of the Cold War. On April 17, 1961, Kennedy ordered what became known as the "Bay of Pigs Invasion": 1,500 U.S.-trained Cubans, called "Brigade 2506", landed on the island. No U.S. air support was provided. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, later stated that they thought the president would authorize any action required for success once the troops were on the ground. By April 19, 1961, the Cuban government had captured or killed the invading exiles, and Kennedy was forced to negotiate for the release of the 1,189 survivors. After twenty months, Cuba released the captured exiles in exchange for $53 million worth of food and medicine.
On October 14, 1962, CIA U-2 spy planes took photographs of intermediate-range ballistic missile sites being built in Cuba by the Soviets. On October 28 Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites, subject to UN inspections.The U.S. publicly promised never to invade Cuba and privately agreed to remove its missiles in Turkey. This crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point before or since. In the end, "the humanity" of the two men prevailed. The crisis improved the image of American willpower and the president's credibility. Kennedy's approval rating increased from 66% to 77% immediately thereafter.
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space, reinforcing American fears about being left behind in a technological competition with the Soviet Union. Kennedy was eager for the U.S. to take the lead in the Space Race for reasons of strategy and prestige. He first announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon in the speech to a Joint Session of Congress on May 25, 1961, stating: "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish".Kennedy made a speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, in which he said: "No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. ... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 pm Central Standard Time on Friday November 22, 1963. Only 46, President Kennedy died younger than any U.S. president to date. Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository from which the shots were suspected to have been fired, was arrested for the murder of a local police officer, and was subsequently charged with the assassination of Kennedy. A Gallup Poll in mid-November 2013, showed 61% believed in a conspiracy, and only 30% thought Oswald did it alone. Kennedy and his wife were younger in comparison to the presidents and first ladies who preceded them, and both were popular in the media culture. The charisma of Kennedy and his family led to the figurative designation of "Camelot" for his administration, credited by his wife, who coined the term for the first time in print during a post-assassination interview with Theodore White, to his affection for the then contemporary Broadway musical of the same name.Kennedy's assassination had been compared to the fall of King Arthur. Jacqueline his wife said "There'll be great Presidents again," she added, "but there'll never be another Camelot again … it will never be that way again".
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| John F Kennedy Official Portrait |
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.In January 1950, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union recognized Viet Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam, based in Hanoi, as the legitimate government of Vietnam.The following month the United States and Great Britain recognized the French-backed State of Vietnam in Saigon, led by former Emperor Bao Dai, as the legitimate Vietnamese government. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 convinced many Washington policymakers that the war in Indochina was an example of communist expansionism directed by the Soviet Union. The Viet Cong (also known as the National Liberation Front, or NLF), a lightly armed South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The People's Army of Vietnam (aka the North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units into battle.
As the war wore on, the part of the Viet Cong in the fighting decreased as the role of the NVA grew. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. At the start of 1955, French Indochina was dissolved, leaving Ngo Dinh Diem in temporary control of the south. A referendum was scheduled for 23 October 1955 to determine the future direction of the south. It was contested by Ba?o ?a.i, the Emperor, advocating the restoration of the monarchy, while Die^.m ran on a republican platform. Die^.m recorded 98.2 percent of the vote—an implausibly high result that could have only been obtained through fraud. The total announced number of votes for a republic exceeded the number of registered voters by over 380,000—further evidence that the referendum was heavily rigged. In the course of the war, the U.S. conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and over time the North Vietnamese airspace became the most heavily defended airspace of any in the world. The U.S. government viewed American involvement in the war as a way to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was part of a wider containment strategy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism. According to the U.S. domino theory, if one state went Communist, other states in the region would follow, and U.S. policy thus held that accommodation to the spread of Communist rule across all of Vietnam was unacceptable. The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam under communist rule. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war, fought initially against forces from France and then America, as France was backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state.
Die^.m was passionately anti-Communist. According to Gabriel Kolko about 12,000 suspected opponents of Die^.m were killed between 1955 and 1957 and by the end of 1958 an estimated 40,000 political prisoners had been jailed. However, Guenter Lewy argues that such figures were exaggerated and that there were never more than 35,000 prisoners of all kinds in the whole country. In a country where surveys of the religious composition estimated the Buddhist majority to be between 70 and 90 percent, Die^.m's policies generated claims of religious bias. As a member of the Vietnamese Catholic minority, he is widely regarded by historians as having pursued pro-Catholic policies that antagonized many Buddhists, since the Catholic community is anti-Communist. Specifically, the government was regarded as being biased towards Catholics in public service and military promotions, as well as the allocation of land, business favors and tax concessions. The government was overthrown on 1 November 1963 (21 days before Kennedy was killed) in a swift coup with the help of the CIA. With only the palace guard remaining to defend Die^.m and his younger brother, Nhu, the generals called the palace offering Die^.m exile if he surrendered. But the brothers were assassinated together in the back of an M113 armoured personnel carrier with a bayonet and revolver by Captain Nguye^~n Va(n Nhung, under orders from Du+o+ng Va(n Minh, while en route to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters. Die^.m was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery next to the house of the U.S. ambassador. Upon learning of Die^.m's ouster and assassination, Ho^` Chí Minh reportedly stated: "I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid." The North Vietnamese Politburo was more explicit: "The consequences of the 1 November coup d'état will be contrary to the calculations of the U.S. imperialists ... Die^.m was one of the strongest individuals resisting the people and Communism. Everything that could be done in an attempt to crush the revolution was carried out by Die^.m. Die^.m was one of the most competent lackeys of the U.S. imperialists ... Among the anti-Communists in South Vietnam or exiled in other countries, no one has sufficient political assets and abilities to cause others to obey. Therefore, the lackey administration cannot be stabilized. The coup d'état on 1 November 1963 will not be the last." After Die^.m's assassination, South Vietnam was unable to establish a stable government and several coups took place after his death. While the U.S. continued to influence South Vietnam's government, the assassination bolstered North Vietnamese attempts to characterize the South Vietnamese as supporters of colonialism. When Kennedy learned of the deaths during a White House meeting, he appeared shaken and left the room. Kennedy later penned a memo, lamenting that the assassination was "particularly abhorrent" and blaming himself for approving Cable 243, which authorised Lodge to explore coup options in the wake of Nhu's attacks on the Buddhist pagodas.
During the course of the Vietnam War a large segment of the American population came to be opposed to U.S. involvement in South Vietnam. Public opinion steadily turned against the war following 1967 and by 1970 only a third of Americans believed that the U.S. had not made a mistake by sending troops to fight in Vietnam. The fatal shooting of four students at Kent State University in 1970 led to nation-wide university protests. Under the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, between North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Lê ?u+'c Tho. and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and reluctantly signed by South Vietnamese president Thie^.u, U.S. military forces withdrew from South Vietnam and prisoners were exchanged. North Vietnam was allowed to continue supplying communist troops in the South, but only to the extent of replacing expended materiel. Later that year the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kissinger and Tho., but the Vietnamese negotiator declined it saying that a true peace did not yet exist. The capture of Saigon at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese service members and civilians killed vary from 800,000 to 3.1 million. On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Following the communist takeover, 1–2.5 million South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps, with an estimated 165,000 prisoners dying. Between 100,000 and 200,000 South Vietnamese were executed. R. J. Rummel, an analyst of political killings, estimated that about 50,000 South Vietnamese deported to "New Economic Zones" died performing hard labor, out of the 1 million that were sent. 200,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to the communist Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge would eventually kill 1–3 million Cambodians in the Killing Fields, out of a population of around 8 million.
Starting in the late 1950s, institutionalized racism across the United States, but especially in the South, was increasingly challenged by the growing Civil Rights movement. The activism of African-American leaders Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which launched the movement. In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give her seat on the bus to a white man. Found guilty on December 5, Parks was fined $10 plus a court cost of $4, but she appealed. This resulted in the Montgomery Busy Boycott where blacks in Montgomery refused to ride the buses, crippling the bus company. Pressure increased across the country. The related civil suit was heard in federal district court and, on June 4, 1956, the court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. As the state appealed the decision, the boycott continued. The case moved on to the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling, issuing its decision in December, followed quickly by a court order to the state to desegregate the buses. For years African Americans would struggle with violence against them but would achieve great steps toward equality with Supreme Court decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation between whites and blacks. The Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation. As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968) was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs. He was born Michael King, but his father changed his name in honor of the German reformer Martin Luther. A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
King then began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Ph.D. degree on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation on "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman". An academic inquiry concluded in October 1991 that portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was twenty-five years old, in 1954.As a Christian minister, his main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses.
Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's success with non-violent activism, King had "for a long time...wanted to take a trip to India". With assistance from the Quaker group the American Friends Service Committee, he was able to make the journey in April 1959. The trip to India affected King, deepening his understanding of non-violent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity".
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by E.D. Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. On December 20, 1956, a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional.
Veteran African-American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin served as King's main advisor and mentor in the late 1950s. Bayard Rustin's open homosexuality, support of democratic socialism, and his former ties to the Communist Party USA caused many white and African-American leaders to demand King distance himself from Rustin, which King agreed to do. However, King agreed that Rustin should be one of the main organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began tapping King's telephone in the fall of 1963. Concerned that allegations of communists in the SCLC, if made public, would derail the administration's civil rights initiatives, Kennedy warned King to discontinue the suspect associations, and later felt compelled to issue the written directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap King and other SCLC leaders.
In April 1963 a campaign began against racial segregation and economic injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics, developed in part by Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker. Black people in Birmingham, organizing with the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating laws that they considered unjust. King was arrested and jailed early in the campaign—his 13th arrest out of 29. From his cell, he composed the now-famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" which responds to calls on the movement to pursue legal channels for social change.
King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the so-called "Big Six" civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. King delivered a 17-minute speech, later known as "I Have a Dream". In the speech's most famous passage—in which he departed from his prepared text, possibly at the prompting of Mahalia Jackson, who shouted behind him, "Tell them about the dream!" —King said:
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
"I Have a Dream" came to be regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the agenda of reformers in the United States and facilitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
In 1965 King began to publicly express doubts about the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence". He spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, arguing that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today"
The "Beyond Vietnam" speech reflected King's evolving political advocacy in his later years, which paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with which he was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation, and more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. He guarded his language in public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism.
King supported the ideals of democratic socialism, although he was reluctant to speak directly of this support due to the anti-communist sentiment being projected throughout America at the time, and the association of socialism with communism. King believed that capitalism could not adequately provide the basic necessities of many American people, particularly the African American community. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." King had read Marx while at Morehouse, but while he rejected "traditional capitalism", he also rejected communism because of its "materialistic interpretation of history" that denied religion, its "ethical relativism", and its "political totalitarianism"
In April 4, 1968, a shot rang out as King stood on the motel's second-floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. James Earl Ray (March 10, 1928 – April 23, 1998) was the American criminal convicted of the assassination. Ray harbored a strong prejudice against African Americans and was quickly drawn to Wallace's segregationist platform. He spent much of his time in Los Angeles volunteering at the Wallace campaign headquarters in North Hollywood. He also considered emigrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where a white minority regime had unilaterally assumed independence from the United Kingdom in 1965. The notion of residing in Rhodesia continued appealing to Ray for several years afterward, and would be his intended destination after King's assassination.
The assassination led to a nationwide wave of race riots in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Kansas City, and dozens of other cities. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was on his way to Indianapolis for a campaign rally when he was informed of King's death. He gave a short speech to the gathering of supporters informing them of the tragedy and urging them to continue King's ideal of non-violence. James Farmer, Jr. and other civil rights leaders also called for non-violent action, while the more militant Stokely Carmichael called for a more forceful response.
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| The civil rights leader Martin Luther KIng waves to supporters 28 August 1963 on the Mall in Washington DC |
Martin Luther King Jr. followed the Christian faith. Malcolm X, another civil right black activist, was a Muslim, and believed in Muslim principles. His most famous line was “By any Means Necessary”. He believed in fighting back physically. Malcolm X felt that American blacks should be more concerned with helping each other. He felt blacks should start by giving the same race self-respect first. He did not agree with what King had to say, he felt that kings dream was not a dream but a nightmare.
Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little , was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans; detractors accused him of preaching racism and violence. In 1946, he was arrested while picking up a stolen watch he had left at a shop for repairs, and in February began serving an eight-to-ten year sentence at Charlestown State Prison for larceny and breaking and entering. At this time, several of his siblings wrote to him about the Nation of Islam, a relatively new religious movement preaching black self-reliance and, ultimately, the return of the African diaspora to Africa, where they would be free from white American and European domination.
In late 1948, Little wrote to Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Muhammad advised him to renounce his past, humbly bow in prayer to Allah, and promise never to engage in destructive behavior again. Though he later recalled the inner struggle he experienced in bending his knees to pray, he soon became a member of the Nation of Islam. In 1950, the FBI opened a file on him after he wrote a letter from prison to President Truman expressing opposition to the Korean War and declaring himself a communist. That year, Little also began signing his name "Malcolm X". He explained in his autobiography that the Muslim's "X" symbolized the true African family name that he could never know.
Beside his skill as a speaker, Malcolm X had an impressive physical presence. He stood 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m) tall and weighed about 180 pounds (82 kg). One writer described him as "powerfully built", and another as "mesmerizingly handsome ... and always spotlessly well-groomed". In 1955, Betty Sanders met Malcolm X and they married two days later. They had six daughters.
Malcolm X first came to the notice of the American public in 1957, after Johnson Hinton, a Nation of Islam member, was beaten by two New York City police officers. Alerted by a witness, Malcolm X and a small group of Muslims went to the police station and demanded to see Hinton. Police initially denied that any Muslims were being held, but when the crowd grew to about five hundred they allowed Malcolm X to speak with Hinton, after which, at Malcolm X's insistence, an ambulance took Hinton to Harlem Hospital. A grand jury declined to indict the officers who beat Hinton, and in October, Malcolm X sent an angry telegram to the police commissioner. Soon undercover officers were assigned to infiltrate the Nation of Islam.
From his adoption of the Nation of Islam in 1952 until he broke with it in 1964, Malcolm X promoted the Nation's teachings. These included the beliefs:
that black people are the original people of the world
that white people are "devils"
that blacks are superior to whites, and
that the demise of the white race is imminent.
Malcolm X said "history proves the white man is a devil", "Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and drops hell bombs on people... anybody who does these things is nothing but a devil." Malcolm X said that Islam was the "true religion of black mankind" and that Christianity was "the white man's religion" that had been imposed upon African Americans by their slave-masters
Malcolm X was equally critical of the civil rights movement. He labeled Martin Luther King, Jr. a "chump" and other civil rights leaders "stooges" of the white establishment. He called the 1963 March on Washington "the farce on Washington", and said he did not know why so many black people were excited about a demonstration "run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn't like us when he was alive".
On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X publicly announced his break from the Nation of Islam. He was still a Muslim, he said, but felt that the Nation had "gone as far as it can" because of its rigid teachings. He planned to organize a black nationalist organization to "heighten the political consciousness" of African Americans.
Throughout 1964, as conflict with the Nation of Islam intensified, Malcolm X was repeatedly threatened. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom when someone in the 400-person audience rushed forward and shot him once in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun; two other men charged the stage firing semi-automatic handguns. Malcolm X was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm
Up until one week before his death, Malcolm X continued to publicly advocate that black people should achieve advancement "by any means necessary". In a famous letter from Mecca, he wrote that his experiences with white people during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem convinced him to "rearrange" his thinking about race and "toss aside some of [his] previous conclusions". In a conversation with Gordon Parks, two days before his assassination, Malcolm said:
[L]istening to leaders like Nasser, Ben Bella, and Nkrumah awakened me to the dangers of racism. I realized racism isn't just a black and white problem. It's brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another.
Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn't a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I'm glad to be free of them".
Amid the Cold War, the United States entered the Vietnam War, whose growing unpopularity fed already existing social movements, including those among women, minorities, and young people. President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society social programs and numerous rulings by the Warren Court added to the wide range of social reform during the 1960s and 1970s. Feminism and the environmental movement became political forces, and progress continued toward civil rights for all Americans. The Counterculture Revolution swept through the nation and much of the western world in the late sixties and early seventies, further dividing Americans in a "culture war" but also bringing forth more liberated social views.
President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society social programs and numerous rulings by the Warren Court added to the wide range of social reform during the 1960s and 1970s. Feminism and the environmental movement became political forces, and progress continued toward civil rights for all Americans. The Counterculture Revolution swept through the nation and much of the western world in the late sixties and early seventies, further dividing Americans in a "culture war" but also bringing forth more liberated social views. Johnson was often seen as a wildly ambitious, tireless, and imposing figure who was ruthlessly effective at getting legislation passed. He worked 18–20-hour days without break and was apparently absent of any leisure activities At 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) tall, Johnson had his own particular brand of persuasion, known as "The Johnson Treatment". Johnson's cowboy hat and boots reflected his Texas roots and genuine love of the rural hill country.
In 1962 James Watson (b. 1928), Francis Crick (1916–2004), and Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004) jointly received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their 1953 determination of the DNA. Wilkins was the first to produce the first clear X-ray images of DNA and his belief from beginning was that DNA was helical. In 1953 Wilkins showed Watson a high quality image of "B" form DNA and using additional data from Wilkins, Watson and Crick proposed a double-helix model for DNA. After this Wilkins led a major project at King's College London to test, verify and make significant corrections to the DNA model proposed by Watson and Crick and to study the structure of RNA. Watson is an Atheist stating: "Take love. At the end of it, love doesn't come from God, so it's not the greatest gift of God but the greatest gift of our genes. You see evidence of maternal care in birds, and they feel seemingly pretty strong about it. So it's an emotion that has an enormous selective advantage. You've probably met someone who you think is just not capable of love. I suspect that they lack a gene that is necessary for the emotion. The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls. I see ourselves as products of evolution, which itself is a great mystery". Crick defined himself an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism". He critised the concept of soul: "At what point during biological evolution did the first organism have a soul? At what moment does a baby get a soul? Crick stated his view that the idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that, an imagined idea. For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years". Crick suggested that it might be possible to find chemical changes in the brain that were molecular correlates of the act of prayer: "I speculated that there might be a detectable change in the level of some neurotransmitter or neurohormone when people pray". He might have been imagining substances such as dopamine that are released by the brain under certain conditions and produce rewarding sensations. Crick's suggestion that there might someday be a new science of "biochemical theology" seems to have been realized under an alternative name: there is now the new field of neurotheology Neurotheology, also known as spiritual neuroscience, attempts to explain religious experience and behaviour in neuroscientific terms. Proponents of neurotheology say there is a neurological and evolutionary basis for subjective experiences traditionally categorized as spiritual or religious. On the other hand, Wilkins however towards universalism, focusing on core beliefs found in many religions:
I have been exploring ways to emphasize certain similarities between religion and science. As I see it, the main point is that the open-minded inquiry of the scientist is not something peculiar to science itself, but is a characteristic of the good way of living for human beings in general. It is equivalent to the religious concept of love, where you are always giving attention to new developments and new possibilities. To say that the essence of science is that you are always inquiring and open-minded is to say that you are in fact living a virtuous life.This, of course, refers to how the scientist ideally works; in practice, you find that it is very different. Most science is done by established procedures in a more or less routine manner. In my opinion, the degree of open-mindedness in most scientific work is really very little. It is a very limited open-mindedness within established ideas or in a paradigm. So in the work of most scientists today, the equivalent of religious love or the truly noble, in the sense of the morally admirable, does not exist very much.
Most scientists today are being led increasingly away from the fundamental aim of science to achieve unity into rather limited ways of thinking without much open-mindedness and are doing things merely to meet limited material needs. In particular, about half the world's scientists and engineers are now engaged in war programs. This shocking fact does not receive enough attention.Scientists behave as though the intellect and analytical processes were the whole basis of the human being. Therefore their approach to questions like national security is largely from the point of view of counting the weapons, the way the weapons work, the military strategy, and all such technical things. Most scientists shy away from political, psychological, spiritual, and other dimensions. They don't consider these dimensions in their work, so they behave as though they don't exist. This is one of the troubles with science, although, of course, the analytical and rational approach has been very productive in some respects. When you talk about politics or religion, scientists often get quite upset. "We are scientists," they say. "We don't want to get involved in politics. It would be a terrible waste of time, pure stupidity," etc. Some of them get very annoyed about religion, too. In fact, many scientists behave like very narrow-minded people, I am sorry to say. The whole question of moral, spiritual, and other dimensions is normally pushed out of science. So something in the nature of science often does lead people towards destruction. Abstraction can be regarded as a form of violence and, as various poets have remarked, science often does violence to nature. Leading scientists who do really important pioneering work are often not so bad, but the ordinary, average scientist is rather like that. the narrow-minded attitudes of many of today's scientists on social, political, psychological, and other issues are also deplorable. They really are anti-scientific.Molecular biology brings the demarcation between the living and the nonliving becomes more and more difficult to make. The very complicated properties of nonliving matter begin to overlap with the properties of the simplest type of living material. But I don't agree with the molecular biologists who think that the whole nature of life can be comprehended in terms of molecular biology alone. I think that is a very simple-minded, mechanistic way of thinking. It is yet another example of hubris. In their work, scientists are very successful in a limited way, and as a result, because of hubris, they think, "This is all that matters, doing science like this"---even to the extent that they will go on doing science that may blow up the whole world and, of course, all science too. That is the dreadful thing about it. I agree with Einstein that the sort of scientific education we have now has produced a narrow-minded way of thinking amongst scientists, so that they give no proper attention to the moral and psychological dimensions. "
The Hart-Celler Act or Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the restrictive national qouota system and allowed unlimited "family reunification". Within 20 years annual immigration totals more than doubled. Immigrants increasingly came from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean rather than Europe.
In 1966 Walt Disney died. As a prominent figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, he is regarded as a cultural icon, known for his influence and contributions to entertainment during the 20th century. As a Hollywood business mogul, he and his brother Roy O. Disney co-founded The Walt Disney Company. He and his staff created various fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. Disney himself was the original voice for Mickey. During his lifetime, he received four honorary Academy Awards and won 22 Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations. Walt Disney was a strongly religious man who truly believed that good would triumph over evil and that it was important to accept and help everyone even if they were very different from yourself:
"Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance, and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not as a plea for special favors nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is a supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God".
"I have a strong personal belief and reliance on the power of prayer for divine inspiration. Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not as a plea for special favors or as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request.
All prayer, by the humble or the highly placed has one thing in common, as I see it: a supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best human impulses which should bind us all together for a better world. Without such inspiration, we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish".
"In these days of world tensions, when the faith of men is being tested as never before, I am personally thankful that my parents taught me at a very early age to have a strong personal belief and reliance in the power of prayer for Divine inspiration. My people were members of the Congregational Church in our home town of Marceline, Missouri. It was there where I was first taught the efficacy of religion ... how it helps us immeasurably to meet the trial and stress of life and keeps us attuned to the Divine inspiration. Both my study of Scripture and my career in entertaining children have taught me to cherish them. But I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do".
"I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things. Lecturing to children is no answer to delinquency. Preaching won't keep youngsters out of trouble, but keeping their minds occupied will".
"Thus, whatever success I have had in bringing clean, informative entertainment to people of all ages, I attribute in great part to my Congregational upbringing and my lifelong habit of prayer. To me, today, at age sixty-one, all prayer, by the humble or highly placed, has one thing in common: supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best human impulses which should bind us together for a better world. Without such inspiration, we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish. But in our troubled time, the right of men to think and worship as their conscience dictates is being sorely pressed. We can retain these privileges only by being constantly on guard and fighting off any encroachment on these precepts. To retreat from any of the principles handed down by our forefathers, who shed their blood for the ideals we still embrace, would be a complete victory for those who would destroy liberty and justice for the individual".
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| Walt Disney |
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Supreme Court's unanimous decision held this prohibition was unconstitutional, overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. The plaintiffs in the case were Mildred Delores Loving, née Jeter (July 22, 1939 – May 2, 2008), a woman of African-American descent, and Richard Perry Loving (October 29, 1933 – June 1975), a white man. At the time that the decision was handed down, 17 States, all Southern States, had such laws.
Amid the tragedy of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King on Thursday, April 4th, 1968, an extraordinary moment in American political history occurred as Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, broke the news of King's death to a large gathering of African Americans that evening in Indianapolis, Indiana. The gathering was actually a planned campaign rally for Robert Kennedy in his bid to get the 1968 Democratic nomination for president. Just after he arrived by plane at Indianapolis, Kennedy was told of King's death. He was advised by local police against making the campaign stop which was in a part of the city considered to be a dangerous ghetto. But Kennedy insisted on going:
"I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings.
He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
(Interrupted by applause)
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
(Interrupted by applause)
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. (Applause)"
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| Robert F. Kennedy announces to a crowd gathered in Indianapolis on April 5 1968 that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed in Memphis, Tenn. |
On July 18, 1969 Senator Edward M. Kennedy drove off a bridge on his way home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.According to his own testimony, Kennedy accidentally drove his car off a bridge and into the channel, before swimming free and leaving the scene, and not reporting about the accident within nine hours. Meanwhile, Kopechne had died in the car through drowning or suffocation. The next day, Kopechne's body and the car were finally recovered. Kennedy pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury and later received a two-month suspended jail sentence. The incident became a national scandal. One of the fundamental aspects of the Kennedy family is a tragic strain which has run through the family, due to the violent and untimely deaths of many of its members. Kennedy eldest brother Joe Jr. died in World War II at the age of 29. It was Joe Jr. who was originally to carry the family's hopes for the Presidency. Then both Jack himself, and his brother Bobby died due to assassinations. Ted had brushes with death, the first in a plane crash in 1964 and the second due to a car accident in 1969 known as the Chappaquiddick incident. Ted died at age 77, on August 25, 2009, from the effects of a malignant brain tumor. John Fitzgerald "John-John" Kennedy, Jr., was born in late November 1960, 17 days after his father was elected. John-John died from a plane crash in July 1999, when the small plane he was piloting crashed en route to Martha's Vineyard. His wife Carolyn Jeanne Bessette and her sister Lauren were also killed. The Kennedy family originally came from Dunganstown, County Wexford, Ireland. In 1848, Patrick Kennedy (1823–1858) left his farm and boarded a ship in New Ross bound for Liverpool on his way to Boston. Kennedy departed at the height of Ireland's Great Famine. It was in Boston he met the woman he was to marry, Bridget Murphy (c.1824–1888). Patrick came to Boston and took a job as a migrant worker. He died several years later from cholera. They had three daughters and two sons (the elder son died young from cholera). He left behind a widow and four children to carry on, the youngest child being Joe Sr.'s father Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy.
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans on the Moon, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC. Armstrong became the first to step onto the lunar surface six hours later on July 21 at 02:56 UTC. Armstrong spent about two and a half hours outside the spacecraft, Aldrin slightly less, and together they collected 47.5 pounds (21.5 kg) of lunar material for return to Earth. Broadcast on live TV to a world-wide audience, Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface and described the event as "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." Apollo 11 effectively ended the Space Race and fulfilled a national goal proposed in 1961 by the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy in a speech before the U.S. Congress: "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."Amstrong labeled himself as a deist. His mother later said that Armstrong's religious views caused her grief and distress in later life as she was more religious. His official biography also describes him as a deist. Michael Collins was Episcopalian and Aldrin a Presbyterian who even took communion on the surface of the Moon: "Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind – be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God."
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| Astronauts Neil A.Armstrong (Commander for Apollo 11), Michael Collins (Command Module Pilot), Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin (Lunar Module Pilot). |
Johnson was succeeded in 1969 by Republican Richard Nixon, who attempted to gradually turn the war over to the South Vietnamese forces.; He negotiated the peace treaty in 1973 which secured the release of POWs and lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The war had cost the lives of 58,000 American troops. Nixon manipulated the fierce distrust between the Soviet Union and China to the advantage of the United States, achieving détente (relaxation; ease of tension) with both parties.
On August 9, 1969, while at home with friends, Actress Sharon Tate was murdered by the followers of Charles Manson's gang in Los Angeles. At trial, the prosecution stated Manson's desire to start "Helter Skelter" (an apocalyptic race war) was the motive for the crimes. Initially, Manson told the group that during this war, they would hide in a hole in the desert and emerge when the war was over. He said the blacks would win the war, but would be unable to govern and would turn to Manson. In the weeks prior to the murders, Manson began to say that the war wasn't starting fast enough, and the group would have to start it by murdering wealthy white people.
Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module (CM) depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17. Roman Catholic "Gene" Kranz (born August 17, 1933) is a retired NASA Flight Director and manager who served as a Flight Director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and is best known for his role in directing the successful Mission Control team efforts to save the crew of Apollo 13.
The OPEC oil embargo marked a long-term economic transition since, for the first time, energy prices skyrocketed, and American factories faced serious competition from foreign automobiles, clothing, electronics, and consumer goods. By the late 1970s the economy suffered an energy crisis, slow economic growth, high unemployment, and very high inflation coupled with high interest rates (the term stagflation was coined). Since economists agreed on the wisdom of deregulation, many of the New Deal era regulations were ended, such as in transportation, banking, and telecommunications. OAPEC initiated the embargo in response to US involvement in the Oct 6, 1973 Yom Kippur War. Six days after Egypt and Syria launched the surprise military campaign against Israel in order to regain Arab territories lost to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, the United States chose to re-supply Israel with arms. OAPEC decided to retaliate, announcing an oil embargo against Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. In March 1970, Sarah Weddington filed suit against Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney and the person responsible for enforcing the anti-abortion statute. Norma McCorvey, a pregnant woman seeking abortion, became the landmark plaintiff and was referred in the legal documents as "Jane Roe" to protect her identity. She signed the papers, and thus began Roe v. Wade. The case took three years of trials to reach the United States Supreme Court, and Norma never attended even one trial. In the meantime, McCorvey had given birth to the baby in question, who was eventually adopted. The Court issued its decision on January 22, 1973, with a 7-to-2 majority vote in favor of Roe on January 22, 1973 and the Supreme Court ruled that a Texas statute forbidding abortion except when necessary to save the life of the mother was unconstitutional. The Court arrived at its decision by concluding that the issue of abortion and abortion rights falls under the right to privacy. In its opinion it listed several landmark cases where the court had previously found a right to privacy implied by the Constitution. The Court held that a right to privacy existed and included the right to have an abortion. The court found that a mother had a right to abortion until viability, a point to be determined by the abortion doctor. After viability a woman can obtain an abortion for health reasons, which the Court defined broadly to include psychological well-being. A central issue in the Roe case (and in the wider abortion debate in general) is whether human life or personhood begins at conception, birth, or at some point in between. The Court declined to make an attempt at resolving this issue, noting: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." Instead, it chose to point out that historically, under English and American common law and statutes, "the unborn have never been recognized ...as persons in the whole sense" and thus the fetuses are not legally entitled to the protection afforded by the right to life specifically enumerated in the Fourteenth Amendment. So rather than asserting that human life begins at any specific point, the court simply declared that the State has a "compelling interest" in protecting "potential life" at the point of viability. The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks." .The Court stated that during the first trimester, when the procedure is more safe than childbirth, the decision to abort must be left to the mother and her physician. The State has the right to intervene prior to fetal viability only to protect the health of the mother, and may regulate the procedure after viability so long as there is always an exception for preserving maternal health. Justices Byron R. White and William H. Rehnquist wrote emphatic dissenting opinions in this case. White wrote:
I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.
Rehnquist elaborated upon several of White's points, by asserting that the Court's historical analysis was flawed:
To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. As early as 1821, the first state law dealing directly with abortion was enacted by the Connecticut Legislature. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, there were at least 36 laws enacted by state or territorial legislatures limiting abortion. While many States have amended or updated their laws, 21 of the laws on the books in 1868 remain in effect today
In response to Roe v. Wade, most states enacted or attempted to enact laws limiting or regulating abortion, such as laws requiring parental consent for minors to obtain abortions, parental notification laws, spousal mutual consent laws,etc. Perhaps the most notable opposition to Roe comes from Roe herself; in 1995, Norma L. McCorvey revealed that she became pro-life and is now a vocal opponent of abortion. Norma McCorvey became a member of the pro-life movement in 1995; she now supports making abortion illegal. In 1998, she testified to Congress:
It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the "right" to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, "Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible." Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.
McCorvey's second book, Won by Love, was published in 1998. She explained her change on the stance of abortion with the following comments:
I was sitting in O.R.'s offices when I noticed a fetal development poster. The progression was so obvious, the eyes were so sweet. It hurt my heart, just looking at them. I ran outside and finally, it dawned on me. 'Norma', I said to myself, 'They're right'. I had worked with pregnant women for years. I had been through three pregnancies and deliveries myself. I should have known. Yet something in that poster made me lose my breath. I kept seeing the picture of that tiny, 10-week-old embryo, and I said to myself, that's a baby! It's as if blinders just fell off my eyes and I suddenly understood the truth — that's a baby! I felt crushed under the truth of this realization. I had to face up to the awful reality. Abortion wasn't about 'products of conception'. It wasn't about 'missed periods'. It was about children being killed in their mother's wombs. All those years I was wrong. Signing that affidavit, I was wrong. Working in an abortion clinic, I was wrong. No more of this first trimester, second trimester, third trimester stuff. Abortion — at any point — was wrong. It was so clear. Painfully clear.
Shortly thereafter, McCorvey released a statement that affirmed her entrance into the Roman Catholic Church, and she has been confirmed into the church as a full member.
The Watergate scandal, involving Nixon's cover-up of his operatives' break-in into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex destroyed his political base, sent many aides to prison, and forced Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974. He was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford. The Fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War and resulted in North and South Vietnam being reunited. Communist victories in neighboring Cambodia and Laos occurred in the same year.
Bill Gates established Microsoft on April 4, 1975. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows. Microsoft is the world's largest software maker measured by revenues. Gates has stated regarding his faith: "The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief".
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| Bill Gates and Paul Allen, founders of Microsoft |
On September 5, 1975, Charles Manson Family cult member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to kill U.S. President Gerald Ford in California. Although Fromme stood a little more than an arm's length from Ford that Friday morning and pointed a M1911 pistol at him in the public grounds of the California State Capitol building, her gun failed to fire and no one was injured.
Jimmy Carter, running as someone who was not a part of the Washington political establishment, was elected president in 1976. On the world stage, Carter brokered the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. In 1979, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage, resulting in the Iran hostage crisis. With the hostage crisis and continuing stagflation, Carter lost the 1980 election to the Republican Ronald Reagan. On January 20, 1981, minutes after Carter's term in office ended, the remaining U.S. captives held at the U.S. embassy in Iran were released, ending the 444-day hostage crisis. Carter's ability to use the hostage crisis to regain public acceptance eroded when his attempt to rescue the hostages ended in disaster and drew further skepticism towards his leadership skills. Following the failed rescue attempt, Jimmy Carter was overwhelmingly blamed for the Iran hostage crisis, in which the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans, paraded the captured American hostages in public, and burned effigies of Carter. Carter's critics saw him as an inept leader who had failed to solve the worsening economic problems at home.
The mass-suicide of 909 American citizens in November 1978 who were members of the religious cult the Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, occurred in Guyana. With the addition murders of nine others, including Congressman Leo Ryan, the 918 deaths were the largest loss of American life in a single incident and in a non-natural disaster at the time.
On July 15, 1979, President Carter gave a nationally-televised address in which he identified what he believed to be a "crisis of confidence" among the American people. This came to be known as his "malaise" speech, although Carter never used the word in the speech. Carter’s use of rhetoric was one of the main reasons that his speech was memorable. Specifically his use of juxtaposition in the line “It is a crisis of confidence”, which is the main line of the speech. Carter juxtaposed “crisis” and “confidence” to explain how overconsumption in the United States was leading to an energy crisis. Although at first this resonated with the public and he went up in the polls, there was a boomerang effect and the speech prompted the public to backlash against him. The "malaise" speech was criticized later on; many perceived Carter as too reliant on the American people, and as having announced little effort to fix the oil crisis himself. Carter mentioned energy so much that he may have overwhelmed the American public with it.
I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel.... I have seen the strength of America in the inexhaustible resources of our people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for an energy-secure nation. . . .
His later election loss may have discouraged future politicians from asking Americans to conserve energy in a similar way.
In 1980, a major volcanic eruption occurred at Mount St. Helens, a volcano located in state of Washington, in the United States. The eruption (which was a level 5 event) was the only significant one to occur in the contiguous 48 U.S. states since the 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak in California.The eruption was preceded by a two-month series of earthquakes and steam-venting episodes, caused by an injection of magma at shallow depth below the volcano that created a huge bulge and a fracture system on the mountain's north slope.
Ted Kennedy did challenge Carter in the 1980 primaries. But after being unable to clearly answer the question "Why do you want to be president?" in a TV interview, and losing a rules battle at the Democratic National Convention, he laid aside those ambitions.
Ronald Reagan produced a major realignment with his 1980 and 1984 landslide elections. Reagan's economic policies (dubbed "Reaganomics") and the implementation of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 lowered income taxes from 70% to 28% over the course of seven years. Reagan continued to downsize government taxation and regulation. The US experienced a recession in 1982, but the negative indicators reversed, with the inflation rate decreasing from 11% to 2%, the unemployment rate decreasing from 10.8% in December 1982 to 7.5% in November 1984, and the economic growth rate increasing from 4.5% to 7.2%. Reagan ordered a buildup of the US military, incurring additional budget deficits. Reagan introduced a complicated missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) (dubbed "Star Wars" by opponents) in which, theoretically, the U.S. could shoot down missiles with laser systems in space. The Soviets reacted harshly because they thought it violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and would upset the balance of power by giving the U.S. a major military advantage. For years Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev argued vehemently against SDI. However, by the late 1980s he decided the system would never work and should not be used to block disarmament deals with the U.S. Reagan's Invasion of Grenada and bombing of Libya were popular in the US, though his backing of the Contras rebels was mired in the controversy over the Iran–Contra affair that revealed Reagan's poor management style.
A U.S.–Caribbean force invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983, in an action called Operation Urgent Fury, swiftly defeated the Grenadan forces and their Cuban allies. During the fighting 45 Grenadians, 25 Cubans, and 19 Americans were killed. This action was taken in response to an appeal obtained from the governor general and to a request for assistance from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean State. The island had been previously taken over by the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement which suspended the constitution. The United States government military strategists feared that Soviet use of the island would enable the Soviet Union to project tactical power over the entire Caribbean region. U.S. citizens were evacuated, and constitutional government was resumed.
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger (mission STS-51-L) broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. Approximately 17 percent of Americans witnessed the launch live because of the presence of crew member Christa McAuliffe, the first member of the Teacher in Space Project, who would have been the first teacher in space.
The Soviet Union collapsed on Christmas Day 1991, ending the US–Soviet Cold War.
The United States emerged as the world's sole remaining superpower and continued to intervene in international affairs during the 1990s, including the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Following his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton oversaw one of the longest periods of economic expansion and unprecedented gains in securities values, a side effect of the digital revolution and new business opportunities created by the Internet. The Gulf War was a war waged by coalition forces from 34 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.The U.S. and the U.N. gave several public justifications for involvement in the conflict, the most prominent being the Iraqi violation of Kuwaiti territorial integrity. In addition, the U.S. moved to support its ally Saudi Arabia, whose importance in the region, and as a key supplier of oil, made it of considerable geopolitical importance. Other justifications for foreign involvement included Iraq’s history of human rights abuses under Saddam. Iraq was also known to possess biological weapons and chemical weapons, which Saddam had used against Iranian troops during the Iran–Iraq War and against his own country's Kurdish population in the Al-Anfal Campaign.
Following his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton oversaw one of the longest periods of economic expansion and unprecedented gains in securities values, a side effect of the digital revolution and new business opportunities created by the Internet. He also worked with the Republican Congress to pass the first balanced federal budget in 30 years. In 1998, Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors" for lying about a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky but was later acquitted by the Senate.
The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. Timothy McVeigh , an American militia movement sympathizer who was a Gulf War veteran, had detonated an explosive-filled Ryder rental truck parked in front of the building. McVeigh's co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had assisted in the bomb preparation. Motivated by his hatred of the federal government since the Gulf War (He said he was shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners) and angered by its handling of the 1993 Waco siege and the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992, McVeigh timed his attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the deadly fire that ended the siege at Waco.
The Columbine High School massacre was a school shooting which occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County in the State of Colorado. In addition to the shootings, the complex and highly planned attack involved a fire bomb to divert firefighters, propane tanks converted to bombs placed in the cafeteria, 99 explosive devices, and bombs rigged in cars. The perpetrators, two senior students, murdered a total of 12 students and one teacher. Although their motives remain unclear, the personal journals of the perpetrators document that they wished their actions to rival the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as other deadly attacks that occurred in the United States in the 1990s. The youths placed the duffel bags containing propane bombs inside the cafeteria. Had the bombs exploded with full power, they would have killed or severely wounded all 488 students in the cafeteria and possibly collapsed the ceiling, dropping part of the library into the cafeteria. The bombs failed to explode. Highly influential, the incident is noted as one of the first and most serious of a series of high profile spree shootings which have occurred ever since.
The presidential election in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore was one of the closest in US history and helped lay the seeds for political polarization to come. The vote in the decisive state of Florida was extremely close and produced a dramatic dispute over the counting of votes. The US Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore ended the recount with a 5–4 vote. That meant Bush, then in the lead, carried Florida and the election.
On September 11, 2001 ("9/11"), the United States was struck by a terrorist attack when 19 al-Qaeda hijackers commandeered four airliners and intentionally crashed into both twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people, mostly civilians. Four passenger airliners were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists so they could be flown into buildings in suicide attacks. Two of those planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within two hours, both towers collapsed with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the WTC complex, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense), leading to a partial collapse in its western side. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was targeted at Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers tried to overcome the hijackers.
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| The Twin Towers in NYC were destroyed during the 9/11 Attacks |
In response on September 20, President George W. Bush announced a "War on Terror". On October 7, 2001, the United States and NATO then invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, which had provided safe haven to al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.
In 2003, from March 19 to May 1, the United States launched an invasion of Iraq, which led to the collapse of the Iraq government and the eventual capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, with whom the US had long-standing tense relations. The reasons for the invasion cited by the Bush administration included the spreading of democracy, the elimination of weapons of mass destruction (a key demand of the UN as well, though later investigations found parts of the intelligence reports to be inaccurate), and the liberation of the Iraqi people. Despite some initial successes early in the invasion, the continued Iraq War fueled international protests and gradually saw domestic support decline as many people began to question whether or not the invasion was worth the cost.
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster occurred on February 1, 2003, when Columbia disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana as it reentered Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.
During the launch of STS-107, Columbia's 28th mission, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the Space Shuttle external tank and struck the left wing. Most previous shuttle launches had seen minor damage from foam shedding, but some engineers suspected that the damage to Columbia was more serious. NASA managers limited the investigation, reasoning that the crew could not have fixed the problem if it had been confirmed.
Dr Francis S. Collins (April 14, 1950) is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993-2008. By graduate school Collins considered himself an atheist but currently He has described himself as a "serious Christian". His own belief, he wrote, was theistic evolution or evolutionary creation, which he preferred to call BioLogos. He wrote that one can "think of DNA as an instructional script, a software program, sitting in the nucleus of the cell" In a 1998 interview with Scientific American, Collins stated that he is "intensely uncomfortable with abortion as a solution to anything" and does not "perceive a precise moment at which life begins other than the moment of conception". However, in the same interview it was said that Collins also "does not advocate changing the law". He is also quoted saying:
- "The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful".
- "There are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist"
- "Evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things".
- "I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers".
-"I would not expect religion to be the right tool for sequencing the human genome and by the same token would not expect science to be the means to approaching the supernatural. But on the really interesting larger questions, such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘Why do human beings long for spirituality?,’ I find science unsatisfactory. Many superstitions have come into existence and then faded away. Faith has not, which suggests it has reality".
In August 2005, hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coastlines killing at least 1,836 people and causing $81 billion in damage.
The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. A senior student at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, before committing suicide (another six people were injured escaping from classroom windows).The massacre is the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history and one of the deadliest by a single gunman worldwide. The incident reignited the gun politics debate in the United States, with proponents of gun control legislation arguing that guns are too accessible, citing that the perpetrator, a mentally unsound individual, was able to purchase two semi-automatic pistols despite state laws which should have prevented such purchase
In 2008, the unpopularity of President Bush and the Iraq war, along with the 2008 financial crisis, led to the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the United States. After his election, Obama reluctantly continued the war effort in Iraq until August 31, 2010, when he declared that combat operations had ended.
In September 2008, the United States, and most of Europe, entered the longest post–World War II recession, often called the "Great Recession." Multiple overlapping crises were involved, especially the housing market crisis, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, an automotive industry crisis, rising unemployment, and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The financial crisis threatened the stability of the entire economy in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers failed and other giant banks were in grave danger.
The recession officially ended in June 2009, and the economy slowly began to expand once again. The unemployment rate peaked at 10.1% in October 2009 after surging from 4.7% in November 2007, and gradually fell to 6.7% as of March 2014. However, overall economic growth has remained weaker in the 2010s compared to expansions in previous decades.
The Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 was signed into law, ending the Don't ask, don't tell policy regarding homosexuals in the United States Armed Forces. The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.
In May 2011, after nearly a decade in hiding, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was killed in Pakistan in a raid conducted by US naval special forces acting under President Obama's direct orders.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut when a 20-year-old guy fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members. The incident was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school or grade school in U.S. history and the second-deadliest mass shooting by a single person in U.S. history, after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The shooting prompted renewed debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals for making the background-check system universal, and for new federal and state legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition.
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[Benjamin Franklin
A world-famous polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity.
Benjamin Franklin was born on Milk Street, in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1706. Benjamin Franklin's mother, Abiah Folger, was born into a Puritan family among those that fled to Massachusetts to establish a purified Congregationalist Christianity in New England, when King Charles I of England began persecuting Puritans.
In 1727, Benjamin Franklin, then 21, created the Junto, a group of "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community." The Junto was a discussion group for issues of the day; it subsequently gave rise to many organizations in Philadelphia.
In 1728, Franklin had set up a printing house in partnership with Hugh Meredith; the following year he became the publisher of a newspaper called The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum for agitation about a variety of local reforms and initiatives through printed essays and observations. Over time, his commentary, and his adroit cultivation of a positive image as an industrious and intellectual young man, earned him a great deal of social respect
Franklin saw the printing press as a device to instruct colonial Americans in moral virtue. Franklin thereby invented the first newspaper chain. It was more than a business venture, for like many publishers since, he believed that the press had a public-service duty.
Franklin established a common-law marriage with Deborah Read on September 1, 1730. They took in Franklin's young, recently acknowledged illegitimate son, William, and raised him in their household. In addition, they had two children together. The first, Francis Folger Franklin, born October 1732, died of smallpox in 1736. Their second child, Sarah Franklin, familiarly called Sally, was born in 1743.
In 1730, at the age of 24, Franklin publicly acknowledged an illegitimate son named William, and raised him in his household. His mother's identity is not known. He was educated in Philadelphia.
In 1731, Franklin was initiated into the local Masonic Lodge. He became Grand Master in 1734, indicating his rapid rise to prominence in Pennsylvania. That same year, he edited and published the first Masonic book in the Americas, a reprint of James Anderson's Constitutions of the Free-Masons. Franklin remained a Freemason for the rest of his life.
A Loyalist, William and his father eventually broke relations over their differences about the American Revolutionary War. The elder Franklin could never accept William's position. Deposed in 1776 by the revolutionary government of New Jersey and imprisoned for a time, the younger Franklin went to New York in 1782, which was still occupied by British troops.
In 1733, Franklin began to publish the famous Poor Richard's Almanack (with content both original and borrowed) under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on which much of his popular reputation is based. Franklin frequently wrote under pseudonyms. Although it was no secret that Franklin was the author, his Richard Saunders character repeatedly denied it.
Franklin was an avid chess player. He was playing chess by around 1733, making him the first chess player known by name in the American colonies
In 1743, Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society to help scientific men discuss their discoveries and theories. He began the electrical research that, along with other scientific inquiries, would occupy him for the rest of his life, in between bouts of politics and moneymaking
In 1747, he retired from printing and went into other businesses. He created a partnership with his foreman, David Hall, which provided Franklin with half of the shop's profits for 18 years. This lucrative business arrangement provided leisure time for study, and in a few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation with educated persons throughout Europe and especially in France.
In 1750 he published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm that appeared capable of becoming a lightning storm. On May 10, 1752, Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot-tall (12 m) iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. On June 15 Franklin may possibly have conducted his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia, successfully extracting sparks from a cloud. Franklin's experiment was not written up with credit
In recognition of his work with electricity, Franklin received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753, and in 1756 he became one of the few 18th-century Americans elected as a Fellow of the Society. The cgs unit of electric charge has been named after him: one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb.
Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his many creations were the lightning rod, glass armonica (a glass instrument, not to be confused with the metal harmonica), Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and the flexible urinary catheter. Franklin never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote, "... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
His discoveries resulted from his investigations of electricity. Franklin proposed that "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity were not different types of "electrical fluid" (as electricity was called then), but the same electrical fluid under different pressures. He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively, and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge.
Franklin became involved in Philadelphia politics and rapidly progressed. In October 1748, he was selected as a councilman, in June 1749 he became a Justice of the Peace for Philadelphia, and in 1751 he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly. On August 10, 1753, Franklin was appointed joint deputy postmaster-general of North America. His most notable service in domestic politics was his reform of the postal system, with mail sent out every week.
In 1758, the year he ceased writing for the Almanack, he printed Father Abraham's Sermon, also known as The Way to Wealth. Franklin's autobiography, begun in 1771 but published after his death, has become one of the classics of the genre.
He was elected Speaker of the Pennsylvania House in May 1764. In London, Franklin opposed the 1765 Stamp Act. Unable to prevent its passage, he made another political miscalculation and recommended a friend to the post of stamp distributor for Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians were outraged, believing that he had supported the measure all along, and threatened to destroy his home in Philadelphia.
While touring Ireland, he was moved by the level of poverty he saw. Ireland's economy was affected by the same trade regulations and laws of Britain that governed America. Franklin feared that America could suffer the same effects should Britain's "colonial exploitation" continued.
In 1763, soon after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania from England for the first time, the western frontier was engulfed in a bitter war known as Pontiac's Rebellion. The Paxton Boys, a group of settlers convinced that the Pennsylvania government was not doing enough to protect them from American Indian raids, murdered a group of peaceful Susquehannock Indians and marched on Philadelphia. Franklin helped to organize a local militia to defend the capital against the mob. He met with the Paxton leaders and persuaded them to disperse.
By the time Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, after his second mission to Great Britain, the American Revolution had begun – with fighting between colonials and British at Lexington and Concord. The New England militia had trapped the main British army in Boston.
On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Post Office and named Benjamin Franklin as the first United States Postmaster General. Franklin had been a postmaster for decades and was a natural choice for the position.
In December 1776, Franklin was dispatched to France as commissioner for the United States. Franklin remained in France until 1785. He conducted the affairs of his country toward the French nation with great success, which included securing a critical military alliance in 1778 and negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1783). During his stay in France, Benjamin Franklin was active as a freemason, serving as Grand Master of the Lodge Les Neuf Sœurs from 1779 until 1781. His lodge number was 24. He was a Past Grand Master of Pennsylvania.
Franklin also served as American minister to Sweden, although he never visited that country. He negotiated a treaty that was signed in April 1783. On August 27, 1783, in Paris, Franklin witnessed the world's first hydrogen balloon flight.
When he returned home in 1785, Franklin occupied a position only second to that of George Washington as the champion of American independence.
Between 1771 and 1788, he finished his autobiography. While it was at first addressed to his son, it was later completed for the benefit of mankind at the request of a friend.
Franklin strongly supported the right to freedom of speech:
"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech ...
"Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man ..." (1722)
Like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous. All his life he explored the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in Poor Richard's aphorisms. Franklin felt that organized religion was necessary to keep men good to their fellow men, but rarely attended religious services himself. When Franklin met Voltaire in Paris and asked this great apostle of the Enlightenment to bless his grandson, Voltaire said in English, "God and Liberty," and added, "this is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of Monsieur Franklin."
Franklin formulated a presentation of his beliefs and published it in 1728. It did not mention many of the Puritan ideas as regards belief in salvation, the divinity of Jesus, and indeed most religious dogma. He clarified himself as a deist in his 1771 autobiography, although he still considered himself a Christian. He retained a strong faith in a God as the wellspring of morality and goodness in man, and as a Providential actor in history responsible for American independence.
When he stopped attending church, Franklin wrote in his autobiography:
... Sunday being my studying day, I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that He made the world, and governed it by His providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter.
Franklin retained a lifelong commitment to the Puritan virtues and political values he had grown up with, and through his civic work and publishing, he succeeded in passing these values into the American culture permanently. He had a "passion for virtue". These Puritan values included his devotion to egalitarianism, education, industry, thrift, honesty, temperance, charity and community spirit.
"Puritanism ... and the epidemic evangelism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification" by preaching that the Bible taught all men are equal, that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class, and that all men can be saved. Franklin, steeped in Puritanism and an enthusiastic supporter of the evangelical movement, rejected the salvation dogma, but embraced the radical notion of egalitarian democracy.
These Puritan values and the desire to pass them on, were one of Franklin's quintessentially American characteristics, and helped shape the character of the nation. Franklin's writings on virtue were derided by some European authors, such as Jackob Fugger in his critical work Portrait of American Culture.
Although Franklin's parents had intended for him to have a career in the Church, Franklin as a young man adopted the Enlightenment religious belief in deism, that God's truths can be found entirely through nature and reason. "I soon became a thorough Deist."
After the disillusioning experience of seeing the decay in his own moral standards, and those of two friends in London whom he had converted to Deism, Franklin turned back to a belief in the importance of organized religion, on the pragmatic grounds that without God and organized churches, man will not be good.
At one point, he wrote to Thomas Paine, criticizing his manuscript, The Age of Reason:
"For without the Belief of a Providence that takes Cognizance of, guards and guides and may favour particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its Protection ... think how great a Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc'd and inconsiderate Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great Point for its Security; And perhaps you are indebted to her originally that is to your Religious Education, for the Habits of Virtue upon which you now justly value yourself. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it."
Franklin was a proponent of religion in general. He prayed to "Powerful Goodness" and referred to God as "the infinite". John Adams noted that Franklin was a mirror in which people saw their own religion: "The Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker." Whatever else Franklin was, concludes Morgan, "he was a true champion of generic religion." In a letter to Richard Price, Franklin stated that he believed that religion should support itself without help from the government, claiming, "When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
On July 4, 1776, Congress appointed a three-member committee composed of Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design the Great Seal of the United States. Franklin's proposal (which was not adopted) featured the motto: "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God" and a scene from the Book of Exodus, with Moses, the Israelites, the pillar of fire, and George III depicted as pharaoh.
His autobiography lists his 13 virtues as:
"Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation."
"Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation."
"Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time."
"Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."
"Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing."
"Industry. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."
"Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly."
"Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty."
"Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve."
"Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation."
"Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable."
"Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation."
"Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates."
During Franklin's lifetime slaves were numerous in Philadelphia. In 1750, half the persons in Philadelphia who had established probate estates owned slaves. Dock workers in the city consisted of 15% slaves. Franklin owned as many as seven slaves, two males of whom worked in his household and his shop. Franklin, however, later became a "cautious abolitionist" and became an outspoken critic of landed gentry slavery. In 1758, Franklin advocated the opening of a school for the education of black slaves in Philadelphia. After returning from England in 1762, Franklin became more anti-slavery, in his view believing that the institution promoted black degradation rather than the idea blacks were inherently inferior.
By 1770, Franklin had freed his slaves and attacked the system of slavery and the international slave trade. Franklin, however, refused to publicly debate the issue of slavery at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Similar to Thomas Jefferson, Franklin tended to take both sides of the issue of slavery, never fully divesting himself from the institution.
Benjamin Franklin died from pleuritic attack at his home in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at age 84. Approximately 20,000 people attended his funeral. He was interred in Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia.
Some quotes by Franklin:
"Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy".
"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail".
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing".
"Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants".
"Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late".
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do".
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes".
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself".
"Energy and persistence conquer all things".
"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment".
“There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self.”
"Marriage is the most natural state of man, and... the state in which you will find solid happiness".
"Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75".
"Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God".
"Genius without education is like silver in the mine".
How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!”
"Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them".
"Work as if you were to live a hundred years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow".
"All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones".
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