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

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 favour of legislating in favour of civil rights), international factors also played a role as the US could hardly seek to win the friendship of former colonies in Africa, or indeed sustain the support of her European allies if she was seen as been repressive to her minorities at home. As well as the support of Liberals, many conservatives recognised the benefit that desegregation offered to the global anti-communist effort.

The Brown vs. Board of education decision of May 17, 1954 in the US Supreme Court set the cause in motion, and acted as the catalyst for the Rosa Parks Bus boycott in 1955. Parks refused to cede her seat at the front of the bus to a white passenger, setting in motion a massive public boycott of the transportation system, which generally forced blacks to sit at the back of the bus all along the deep south. Martin Luther King led the new movement. The boycott was important on its own, but also symbolised a much wider political movement in the 1950s, as blacks themselves worked to ensure the changes begun by the courts would continue their momentum. Black activists - and their white, generally Liberal allies - were also constantly on the lookout for opportunities to bring the Federal government into the situation, to supersede the juristiction of southern states and city authorities, which generally supported segregation. Southerners often resorted to extreme repression that outraged Northern audiences, who in turn demanded Federal intervention.

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson became proactive in the Civil Rights movement, perhaps reluctantly. Over the next decade, many protests and boycotts challenged legal segregation as widely as possible, effectively demanding that the authorities denounce legal segregation or take more and more repressive measures to impose it, which caused great international embarresment for the US. Some groups demanded service at segregated eating facilities, and when they were denied they organised sit-ins. Meanwhile, protesters travelled throughout states on buses, demanding service at lunch counters and restaurants at bus terminals; the Freedom Rides were the leading edge of the movement in 1961. Any issue involving interstate travel brought the issue into the Federal arena and thus into the jurisdiction of Federal courts. Some of the organisations that headlined 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 Coloured People (NAACP). All were committed to non-violence and Gandhian Civil Disobedience in the early years, a tactic that was not only morally correct but also politically essential in order to win public support and to avoid alienating northern voters.

The campaign met great resistence from the Southern establishment, and the alliance with white radicals raised old nightmares of interracial sex and interracial children. In 1957, the governer 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 harrasment 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 churchs 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 independant 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

To European observers, Clinton's proposed healthcare reform seemed like a natural reaction to the fact that millions of Americans were without health insurance. The degree of difference between American and European politics however was never more starkly recognized than during the Clinton era - on the one hand, the USA had a fairly Liberal and extremely popular President. On the other, the Republican Revolution of 1994 displayed vast differences of opinion between the coastal areas and southern and Midwestern regions of the Unites States. To the Liberal North East, the Pacific Seaboard and the bigger cities of the Midwest like Chicago and St. Louis, Clinton was a reasonable personification of their values. His popularity and undoubted charisma also played a role in his electoral successes. In the best Liberal tradition, Clinton saw the state as a potential agent for good. He supported the expansion of state powers and obligations in areas like Gun Control, removal of legal disabilities against homosexuals and the legal right to abortion. His national health-care proposals went down to ruinous defeat, despite having much popular support in the early period. The momentum of the campaign which featured brilliant speeches, bizarre displays of executive leadership by Hillary Clinton, the First Lady was lost by fresh crises in Haiti, Russia and Somalia. [8] The plan ultimately failed in the Republican dominated Houses of Congress.

For conservative opponents, Clinton's ideal state represented the triumph of feminist and anti-male mores, a denial of all the national and military values that had made the country great. The so called Culture War (A term occasionally used by Conservative talk radio and Liberal chat shows) was personified by the Presidents high profile wife, Hillary Clinton, who epitomized both aggressive feminism and the maternalistic (or nanny) state. Many American Conservatives who remembered the Reagan years with fondness disliked the notion of America going down the European path of continually expanding the Welfare State. Racial grievances also played a role, especially the continuation of Affirmative Action. The Congressional elections of 1994 gave the Republicans a major triumph, as the party took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in a generation. And as in all subsequent elections, the 1994 contests demonstrated a striking gender gap between the parties: Increasingly, the Democrats were the party of women as well of racial minorities.

Anti-Clinton sentiment powered a new populist conservative movement, manifested especially in the flourishing medium of talk radio. By mid-decade, anti-government agitation was further fired by widespread reports of corruption scandals which both Clinton's had been involved during their years in Arkansas: Most of the charges revolved around land deals connected to dubious savings and loans institutions. In addition, the administration was accused of using government agencies against enemies and dissidents in much the same way Nixon had twenty years earlier.

The 1990s witnessed a revival of right wing extremism, often religious based. The Clinton administration was viewed as sinister but also lead to gloomy warnings of international government as a result of Clinton's pro UN and interventionist foreign policy. Some of the most extreme interpreted this as a 'New World Order' that would be one of the instruments of anti-Christ foretold in the Book of Revelation. This was a stark contrast between 'Liberal America' and the fringe right wing movement in America, both authentically American in their own right.

These two strands came into conflict in 1993 at Waco, Texas, when Federal agents stormed a compound of the millenarian Branch Davidian sect in search of illegal automatic weapons. Several members and agents were killed in a firefight, and there began a siege that lasted until 19th April, when a final federal assault resulted in the death of eighty Davidians. The incident is significant if only for the complete and utter incomprehension between the two sides; each of whom represented a wholly different thought world and historical tradition. There were hundreds of religious denominations in the US with only a few hundred members, and the Davidians were not unusual in this respect. Millions of Americans also shared the apocalyptic expectations of the Davidians and many shared the idea that Christians would in the last days have to take up literal rather than spiritual arms to resist the Babylonian forces of the Anti-Christ. American religious tradition saw several waves of radical religious thought, be it the early puritanical settlers or the nineteenth century Utah conversions but the major difference was that these groups now were viewed upon as been dangerous and insane by society at large, and were met with utter bewilderment by Europeans.

The destruction of Waco mobilized these archaic trends still further as militias and paramilitary groups dedicated themselves to resistence against the 'Beast', when over 160 people were killed in a terrorist attack in a federal office building in Oklahoma City. The date was highly symbolic, having occured on the same day as Lexington in 1775.

Oklahoma transformed the political landscape, in forcing anti-government activists to confront the real world consquences of the often overheated language of the previous two years. In the ensuing public outcry, militia movements quickly crumbled and right wing extremism became suspect. Although Clintons presidency was seen as doomed in the 1994 midterms, he made an impressive comeback in the 1996 elections. In addition to the growing crisis within the conservative movement, this political revival can also be accredited to a remarkable economic boom that prevailed from 1993 to 2001, a direct result of the 'new economy' - the internet and other IT enterprises. Against this background, most Americans had a sense of prosperity and well-being, and in such periods, people tend to avoid any kind of adventurism or any policy that threatens their prosperity. As in earlier era's of prosperity, like the 1920's, real political issues were by and large sidelined and gave way to a preference for spectacle and celebrity; Something Bill and Hillary Clinton would become famous for.

21st century

See also

Economic, labor and business history

Political history

Republicanism, U.S.

Religious history

Social history

Bibliography

External links

notes

  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
  8. ↑ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/may96/background/health_debate_page2.html
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