In correspondence with her husband John as he and other leaders were framing a government for the United States, Abigail Adams (1744–1818) argued that the laws of the new nation should recognize women as something more than property and protect them from the arbitrary and unrestrained power men held over them.
Commercial radio broadcasting, a technological innovation in the 1920s, transformed American culture and politics. Whether those transformations were a boon or bane to society provoked as compelling a debate then as do the changes wrought by social media and the Internet today. The debate reflects the worry and hope with which Americans greeted new technologies … Continued
The Columbian Exchange — the interchange of plants, animals, disease, and technology sparked by Columbus’s voyages to the New World — marked a critical point in history. It allowed ecologies and cultures that had previously been separated by oceans to mix in new and unpredictable ways. It was an interconnected web of events with immediate … Continued
The airplane offered a potent symbol of man’s innovative thrust into the future. In the 1920s, artists depicted the airplane in canvases that, while creating quite different visual impressions, reflected the shared drive to depict the modern.
Political, economic, social, and moral issues molded the antebellum fugitive slave crisis in the US and in turn the Underground Railroad (UGRR). A metaphor for an interracial collaboration — at times formal, informal, visible, and invisible — the Underground Railroad helped direct thousands of fugitives toward freedom in the face of such ever-present challenges as … Continued
In the 1850s abolition was not a widely embraced movement in the United States. It was considered radical, extreme, and dangerous. In “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass sought not only to convince people of the wrongfulness of slavery but also to make abolition more acceptable to Northern whites.
First contact experiences on Hispaniola included brutal interactions between the Spanish and the Native Americans. Conquistadors subjugated populations primarily to garner personal economic wealth, and Natives little understood the nature of the conquest. As early as 1522 Bartolome de Las Casas worked to denounce these activities on political, economic, moral, and religious grounds by chronicling … Continued
From the 1890s through the 1920s, Progressivism manifested itself in a variety of ways from cleaning up slums to eliminating government corruption to Americanizing immigrants to standardizing industrial practices. Such initiatives often sought to improve life by applying insights derived from the newly emerging social sciences—disciplines like sociology, psychology, economics, and statistics. When applied to … Continued
Shays’ Rebellion (1786–1787) and its aftermath reflected more than just problems within the Articles of Confederation government. Reaction to Massachusetts’ treatment of the rebels following the insurrection served as a reminder to those in power of the republican nature of the American government. It emphasized the importance of the right to vote as a key … Continued
The slave family did all the things families normally do, but the fact that other human beings owned its members made it vulnerable to unique constrictions, disruptions, frustrations, and pain.