History of the United States of America

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U.S. History covers the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present.

to 1700

18th century

Revolution and Early National periods

Historians speak of Franklin's genius, Washington's charismatic leadership, Jefferson's paradoxical egalitarianism, Madison's brilliant constitutionalism and Hamilton's ambitious state-building, and Adams's quirkiness.

19th century

Ante Bellum


Civil War, Reconstruction

Gilded Age


20th century

Progressive Movement

Great Depression

World War II

Postwar

Civil Rights Movement

The years from 1954 to 1965 are often regarded as the Civil Rights Revolution, or Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

While most of the political elite in Washington tended to be sympathetic to the Civil Rights cause (if not totally in favor of legislating in favour of civil rights), international factors was used as an argument; Americans, however, ignoired foreign opinions.

The Brown vs. Board of education decision of May 17, 1954 in the US Supreme Court was the culmination of a judicial movement that had been underway for a decade. It had the short-term effect of ending segregated schools in border states, and the long-term effect of ending legalized segregation in schools.

Black leaders claimed that their own efforts were more important in causing change, emphasizing activities like bus boycotts, lunch-counter sit-ins. A black Baptist minister from Atlanta Martin Luther King led the new movement. Painstaking work by labor unions, civil rights groups, and mainstream churches, aided by popular outrage at the violent techniques used by police in some southern cities fueled a national consensus that segregated and second class status had to end. Some of the organizations that spearheaded the movement were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or 'Snick'), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the older National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). All were committed to non-violence and Gandhian Civil Disobedience in the early years, a tactic that was politically essential in order to win public support and to avoid alienating northern voters. Meanwhile a growing black radical movement, led by Muslims like Malcolm X, and inner city gangs, pulled the black community toward separatism. By 1966 the tensions inside the black community were ripping apart the civil rights coalition, as the radicals called for the ousting of all whites in leadership positions.

Civil Rights Rally in Washington.

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson became proactive in the Civil Rights movement.

In 1957, governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas mobilised the National Guard to prevent a court ordered desegregation of Little Rock Public School, a decision overcome by President Eisenhower's decision to to use Federal troops to enforce legality. In the following years, many southern states and legislatures expressed forceful opposition to what was considered Federal tyranny, and some revised their flags to include the old Confederate banner. In 1962, the prospect of a black student being admitted to the University of Mississippi resulted in lengthy campus riots suppressed by Federal troops and a national guard now brought under Federal control.

Vigilante and terrorist groups formed, such as the reborn Ku Klux Klan. Many individual acts of mobbing and violence towards blacks was common. In 1963, organiser Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi, and four children were killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama. The following year the Freedom Summer campaign was accompanied by many attacks and murders, which drew worldwide condemnation and the disgust of northerners.

The Civil Rights movement reached its peak between 1963 and 1965. In 1963 the symbolic focus shifted once again to Birmingham, Alabama, which saw concentrated mass protest against segregation laws. The protest turned ugly that May, when police used brutal violence against protesters. This event was shocking in its own right, but was also one of the first times that television cameras broadcast these images to the rest of the world within hours. The images of southern police turning dogs and water-cannon on black children sparked even more international outrage which completely smashed the US's image in the rest of the world as a defender of democracy and Liberty in the face of communist tyranny.

August 1963 brought a mass march in Washington, at which King delivered his famous 'I have a Dream' speech. Pressure for Federal Civil Rights law became overwhelming, all the more so when the cause was linked to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. In 1964 Johnson introduced the sweeping Civil Rights Act that prohibited discrimination in public facilities and employment.

Still, black voters were widely excluded from the vote by various non-racial voter tests, and only a federal law could permit blacks to secure their gains by a long term restructing of the political system. Once again, the measure was obtained in direct response to southern repression, this time with 'Bloody Sunday' at Selma, Alabama which happened in March. By August 1965 the United States passed the Federal voting rights act, the consequences of which would reshape Southern politics. With millions of blacks now enfranchised, President Johnson also recognised he was giving away the Democratic 'Solid South' to pass to the Republican Party for at least a generation.

Cold War

1960s, 1970s and Popular Culture

The 1960s and 1970s saw enormous societal changes in the United States, a direct result of the Civil Rights Movement. The Supreme Court became a symbol of the new social liberalism. The whole desegregation process was supervised by the courts--not by elected officials--beginning with the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education decision that said the system of segregated schools violated the 14th amendment guaranteeing equal rights.

This was an age of prosperity, on a scale greater than other periods of economic growth [1] In 1960 the US had a GDP of $513 billion, a figure which grew dramatically, even taking into account inflation. GDP was one trillion dollars in 1970, over four trillion by 1985 and six and a half trillion in the mid 1990s. [2] The long period of economic growth provided many opportunities for the average citizen, reflected by the move to the suberbs and an exploding middle class. Higher educational institutions were expanded and took in more and more students every year. A lifestyle that was once confined to the wealthy had now become available to a vast middle class.

Growing prosperity had a huge impact on the young people of this era, leading to the formation of what is now known as the Popular Culture. The evolving youth culture of the time ushered in an era of rock stars, rock concerts (Such as the legendary Woodstock) and for the first time, recreational drugs such as Cannabis, MDMA and LSD. Also, a British 'invasion' of popular culture followed, with Beatlemania gripping the teenagers of America by storm.

The "Baby Boom" generation was reflected by a large increase in the birth rate; during the 1930's the birth rate stood at 20 per 1,000. The boom followed the Second World War, where birth rates raised on average to 25 per 1,000 that stood roughly up until the early 1960's. [3] The post-war babies thus began their teenage years in the late 1950s, and had matured by the late 1960's and 1970's (See The Summer of Love, 1967) American youth culture was helped in 1971 by the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18.

Social changes were aided by factors of gender as well as age. New contraceptive technologies had loosened the role of reproduction in sexuality, especially with the introduction of the Contraceptive Pill in 1961. This resulted in what is now known as the Sexual Revolution, creating a trend in sexual experimentation the older generation labeled 'promiscuity'. This revolution was stemmed in its tracks by the AIDs disease in the 1980's. Sexual, social and political changes combined to transform the role of women in society. Women of the 1960s and 1970's were much more likely to work outside the home, a trait that threatened traditional norms about the male breadwinner status. In 1970 about 43% of women aged over 16 were in the work force, a figure that grew to 52% by 1980 and approached 60% in the early 1990s. [4]

This coincided with the emergence of the feminist movement, and these factors contributed to the rise of divorce. In 1958 there was roughly four marriages for every divorce in the United States. By 1970 the ratio was three to one. By 1976 it reached the level of two to one, a level maintained until the early 1990's. These trends helped change the political landscape and public debate - emphasis was now placed on morality and gender issues like it never had been before. By the 1980's Sexual Harrasment had been defined as a social problem. In 1991, Senate hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court resulted in the airing of sexual harassment charges that gave the issue the status of a national scandal; Thomas was cornofirmed to the disgust of feminists.

The Rise of the New Right

Following a lengthy period of social and political Liberalisation, the 1980's and 1990's saw an increased role of Conservatives in the political scene, personified by the election and popular support for President Ronald Reagan and the 1994 Republican Revolution. There was also a rise in popularity and membership of Conservative churches at the expense of more Liberal denominations such as the Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians who lost as much as 20/30% of their membership in two decades. [5] Meanwhile, conservative churches such as the Southern Baptists and Assemblies of God were recording increases of 50 or 100% in the same era. [6] Throughout the 1980's, opinion polls regularly reported that around half of all Americans believed firmly in the Biblical account of creation taught in the Book of Genesis, and most wished this would be taught in the public schools. The new Evangelicalism found prominence in the Mass Media through Christian publications and the ascent of television evangelists (or televangelists) such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Politically the new Evangelical movement supported the Baptist Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976, but thereafter drifted to the far right, or Religious Right and became a strong voting base for the Republican Party.

From the late 1970s, Evangelical and Political conservatives found common cause in the anti abortion movement and the struggle to prevent states and cities fostering gay rights legislation. They were also critical of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, which would prohibit Gender discrimination. The Amendment was passed in Congress but failed to win ratification by the States. Both sides of the political divide rallied both in favour and against the amendment; in 1978, 100,000 feminists and sympathists marched in Washington to support the amendment. Similarily, the Religious Right mobilized and finally won their battle, as the ERA failed to win enough support in the States. With the foundation of the Moral Majority in 1979, the Christian conservative movement had found a structural base. By the 1990's this had been replaced by the Christain Coalition.

Foreign policy also became an important issue for the religious right. With the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the gas shortages due to the Oil Crisis, America had been humiliated in the arena of foreign policy. American weakness abroad also seemed evident by a treaty that would revert control of the Panama Canal to Panama. Meanwhile, Cold War fears were mobilized following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979/1980. Internation tension with the Soviet Union seemed to reaffirm conservative claims of inevitable conflict and the necessity for rearmament. By 1980, during the presidency of the relatively Liberal Carter, the American political debate had swung far to the right than what it had been before Carter's Presidency. The Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan as their candidate for President, a man who had been dismissed years earlier as a right wing extremist. Reagans victory that November was assisted by the defection of millions of Liberals from Carter to the independent candidate John Anderson. Even so the Republicans triumphed, winning the Presidency and the Senate and ushering in an era of right wing policies at home and abroad. From 1989, Reagans policies were continued by his former Vice President, George Bush.

Ronald Reagan's Presidential victory of 1984.


Reagans victories in 1980 and 1984 were a direct result from a shift in electoral geography. As the Southern and Western States grew, they steadily acquired more electoral votes, while those of their northern counterparts contracted. For example, between 1952 and 2002, New York lost fourteen electoral votes, Pensylvania lost ten and Illinois six. Meanwhile, in the same years, Texas gained ten, Florida seventeen and California twenty three. [7] The rise of these States now reflected the political causes important to these regions; which included among other things hostility to social welfare and government intervention, more sympathy for the religious right, and deeper commitment to national defense and the defense industries. Conservative voters began to recognise their natural affinity to the New Right that found prominence in the Reaganite Republican Party.

1980s

1990s

21st century


Bibliography

External links

References

  1. ↑ Such as the Roaring Twenties and the Gilded Age
  2. ↑ Phillip Jenkins; A History of the United States (New York, 2003) p. 282
  3. ↑ Ibid, p. 282/283
  4. ↑ Ibid
  5. ↑ Jenkins, A History of the United States, pp. 287/288
  6. ↑ Ibid
  7. ↑ Ibid, p. 289
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