Lecture one: Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877. After the Civil War, the country had to settle two questions. How would the Southern states come back into the Union? And what would freedom actually mean for about four million formerly enslaved people? Almost every Reconstruction question on this exam is about the fight between the president and Congress over those two answers.

Presidential Reconstruction: the lenient plans

Lincoln wanted a quick, forgiving reunion. His Ten Percent Plan, from 1863, let a Southern state rejoin once ten percent of its voters swore loyalty to the Union. The Radical Republicans in Congress thought that was far too easy. They passed the Wade-Davis Bill in 1864, which required a majority of a state's white men to swear an "ironclad oath" that they had never supported the Confederacy. Lincoln killed it with a pocket veto, meaning he simply didn't sign it before Congress adjourned. That started the argument over whether the president or Congress controls Reconstruction.

Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, and Andrew Johnson became president. Johnson was a Southern Democrat from Tennessee who had stayed loyal to the Union. He pardoned former Confederates freely and let Southern states rebuild their governments quickly. Those governments immediately passed Black Codes, laws that forced freedpeople into labor contracts, limited what jobs they could hold and whether they could own land, and punished "vagrancy" harshly. In effect, they tried to recreate slavery under a different name. Northern voters were outraged, and that outrage handed power to the Radical Republicans.

Congressional, or Radical, Reconstruction

Learn the following in order, because the exam likes sequence questions.

• The Thirteenth Amendment, 1865, abolished slavery everywhere in the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed people only in rebelling areas, and only as a war measure. The Thirteenth made it permanent.
• The Freedmen's Bureau, 1865, was the first major federal relief agency. It gave food, medical care, and legal help to freedpeople and poor whites, negotiated labor contracts, and above all founded schools, more than four thousand of them. Historians see it as an early model for federal social welfare.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed over Johnson's veto, a direct response to the Black Codes.
• The Fourteenth Amendment, 1868, made everyone born in the United States a citizen. That overturned the Dred Scott decision. It also promised every person "due process" and "equal protection of the laws." This is the most important amendment for later civil rights cases, including Brown versus Board of Education. Star it in your notes.
• The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts. To rejoin, a state had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and let Black men vote.
• The Fifteenth Amendment, 1870, said the right to vote can't be denied because of race. It did not include women. That split the women's movement: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association, and Lucy Stone formed the American Woman Suffrage Association.

Amendment questions are very common. Thirteenth abolished slavery. Fourteenth gave citizenship and equal protection. Fifteenth protected voting regardless of race.

Johnson's impeachment

To stop Johnson from purging their allies, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which barred the president from firing cabinet officers without Senate approval. Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton anyway. In 1868 the House impeached him. The Senate fell one vote short of removing him. So he stayed in office, but his presidency was finished. The acquittal set a precedent that impeachment shouldn't be used for purely political disagreements.

If the question asks why Johnson was impeached, the answer is the Tenure of Office Act.

Life in the Reconstruction South

For a few years, Black men voted and held office. Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce served as U.S. senators from Mississippi. Southern Republican governments built the South's first public school systems.

Know the insults. Carpetbaggers were Northerners who moved South, named for their cheap carpet-fabric luggage. White Southerners painted them as greedy opportunists, though many were teachers, reformers, and businessmen. Scalawags were white Southerners who joined the Republican Party, and other whites treated them as traitors.

Economically, most freedpeople never got land. The promise of "forty acres and a mule" mostly fell through. Instead they ended up in sharecropping: they farmed someone else's land and paid with a share of the crop. Under the crop-lien system, they borrowed seed and supplies against the next harvest at high interest, so debt kept them tied to the land year after year.

The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866, used terror to keep Black people from voting. Congress answered with the Enforcement Acts, including the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which President Grant used to prosecute Klan members.

Why Reconstruction ended

• Ulysses S. Grant, president from 1869 to 1877, supported Reconstruction and the Fifteenth Amendment, but scandals buried his administration. Crédit Mobilier was a railroad construction fraud. The Whiskey Ring was a tax-skimming scheme.
• The Panic of 1873 started a long depression, and Northern voters began caring more about the economy than about the South.
• The Supreme Court narrowed the Fourteenth Amendment in the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873. Later, in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, it struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had banned discrimination in hotels, theaters, and railroads.
• The Compromise of 1877 settled the disputed election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. Hayes got the presidency. In exchange, the last federal troops left the South. Your guide also lists it as the Compromise of 1876, so recognize both names.

Once the troops left, white Southern Democrats who called themselves Redeemers took back every state government. They cut public services, rolled back Black rights, and laid the groundwork for Jim Crow. Some histories call 1877 the "Great Betrayal."

The three phases: Presidential Reconstruction under Lincoln and Johnson, then Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, then Redemption, ending with the Compromise of 1877.

One foreign-policy item from these years: Secretary of State William Seward bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. Critics called it "Seward's Folly."

Next: Lecture 2, Jim Crow, Black leaders, and Gilded Age politics.

Lecture two: what happened in the South after Reconstruction, how Black leaders responded, and what national politics looked like in the Gilded Age.

Jim Crow: taking rights back without saying so

Once federal troops left, Southern states wanted to stop Black men from voting. But the Fifteenth Amendment forbade denying the vote because of race. So they used rules that never mentioned race but worked as if they did.

• Poll taxes: you had to pay to vote, and most freedpeople were poor.
• Literacy tests: white officials decided who passed.
• Grandfather clauses: you skipped those tests if your grandfather could vote before the Civil War. That exempted nearly every white man and no Black men. It's a favorite exam question because the design is so obvious.

Segregation of trains, schools, restaurants, and bathrooms was approved by the Supreme Court in Plessy versus Ferguson, 1896. Homer Plessy deliberately sat in a whites-only Louisiana railroad car, and the Court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. Of course, they were never actually equal. All of this was enforced by violence, especially lynching. The journalist Ida B. Wells led the national campaign against it.

Learn these as a pair. Plessy, 1896, created "separate but equal." Brown versus Board of Education, 1954, overturned it.

Know the difference between tenant farming and sharecropping. A tenant farmer rented land but owned his own tools, mule, and seed. A sharecropper brought only his labor, and the landowner supplied everything else in exchange for a large share of the crop. The sharecropper was worse off and more trapped by debt.

The Black leadership debate

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery and became the greatest abolitionist speaker of his era. After the war he championed the Fifteenth Amendment and stayed loyal to the Republican Party, despite its failures, as the best realistic ally. He fought Jim Crow until he died in 1895.

That same year, 1895, Booker T. Washington gave his famous Atlanta Compromise speech. Washington had been born into slavery and founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881. His message was: accept segregation for now, don't push for political rights directly, and build economic strength through vocational training, farming, and trades. Respect would follow. His autobiography is Up From Slavery. At Tuskegee, the scientist George Washington Carver promoted crop rotation to restore worn-out cotton soil and developed hundreds of uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes, which helped Black farmers become more self-sufficient.

W.E.B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, and he rejected Washington's approach. He demanded full civil and political rights immediately, along with a liberal arts education for a "Talented Tenth" of Black leaders. His 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, introduced "double consciousness," the experience of always seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that looks down on you. Du Bois started the Niagara Movement in 1905, which led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909.

Accommodation and economic progress first means Booker T. Washington. Rights now means Du Bois. Expect at least one question built on this contrast.

Starting around 1916 came the Great Migration. About six million Black Southerners moved to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities between then and 1970, escaping Jim Crow and taking factory jobs. It built communities like Harlem, and it shifted political power, because Black voters in Northern cities could vote freely. You'll see it again in the 1920s.

Gilded Age politics: the spoils system

National politics in the 1870s and 1880s was close and evenly divided. A handful of swing states, like New York, Ohio, and Indiana, decided elections. The biggest political issue was the spoils system, also called patronage: the winning party handed out government jobs to loyal supporters.

The Republican Party split over it. The Stalwarts, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, wanted to keep patronage. The Half-Breeds, led by James G. Blaine, leaned toward moderate reform.

In 1881, President James Garfield had been in office only about two hundred days when he was shot by Charles Guiteau, a mentally unstable man angry that he hadn't been given a government job. Garfield died, and Vice President Chester Arthur, a Stalwart, became president. To almost everyone's surprise, Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, which required competitive merit exams for many federal jobs.

The chain: Garfield's assassination by a disappointed office-seeker led to the Pendleton Act.

In the 1884 election, reform-minded Republicans called Mugwumps refused to support Blaine, whose name was tied to railroad scandals, and backed Democrat Grover Cleveland. Cleveland won and became the first Democratic president since before the Civil War. He's also the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

For timeline questions, here are the presidents in order: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland again, then McKinley.

Next: Lecture 3, industry, labor, and money.

Lecture three: the industrial Gilded Age. Between the Civil War and 1900, the United States went from a mostly farming country to the world's leading industrial power. Almost every question in this chapter fits one of three pieces: business got enormous, workers organized to fight back, and the government slowly started to regulate.

Railroads came first

Railroad track grew from about thirty thousand miles in 1860 to nearly two hundred thousand by 1900. The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, where the Union Pacific, building west, met the Central Pacific, building east. Chinese immigrants did much of the Central Pacific's dangerous work, and Irish immigrants much of the Union Pacific's. The federal government paid for railroad building mainly with huge land grants.

Railroads created national markets, sped up westward settlement, and even gave us standard time zones in 1883, so train schedules would make sense. They also became the first widely hated monopolies. They charged small farmers in one-railroad towns far more than big shippers, formed pools to fix prices, and gave secret rebates, partial refunds, to giant customers like Standard Oil.

The tycoons: match the man to the method

• Andrew Carnegie dominated steel through vertical integration: owning every stage of production, from the iron mines to the ships and railroads that carried the ore to the mills. He used the Bessemer process to make steel cheaply.
• John D. Rockefeller dominated oil with Standard Oil through horizontal integration: buying out or crushing every competitor at the same stage, in his case oil refining. He organized his companies as a trust, and later as a holding company, which is a corporation that controls other corporations by owning their stock.
• J.P. Morgan was the banker who reorganized whole industries. In 1901 he bought Carnegie Steel and created U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation.
• Henry Ford comes a little later: the Model T in 1908 and the moving assembly line in 1913, which made mass production and standardized parts the American model.
• Mail-order catalogs like Montgomery Ward, and later Sears, brought factory goods to farm families.

Vertical integration means controlling the whole chain of supply, which is Carnegie. Horizontal integration means taking over your rivals, which is Rockefeller.

How did the wealthy justify all this? Social Darwinism, associated with Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, applied "survival of the fittest" to society. The rich were the fittest, and helping the poor only interfered with nature. That fit the policy of laissez-faire, the idea that government should stay out of the economy. Horatio Alger's novels sold the rags-to-riches dream. Carnegie added a twist in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth: the rich have a moral duty to give their fortunes away for public good. He funded about twenty-five hundred public libraries, and towns had to supply the land and pay to keep them running. Critics called these men robber barons. Admirers called them captains of industry.

Mark Twain, with Charles Dudley Warner, named the era the Gilded Age: gold on the surface, cheap metal and serious problems underneath.

Regulation: first the states, then Washington

Farmers fought the railroads first. Their organization, the Grange, pushed states to pass Granger laws regulating railroad and grain-elevator rates. In Munn versus Illinois, 1877, the Supreme Court said states could regulate private businesses that serve the public interest.

Then the Court reversed course in Wabash versus Illinois, 1886: states could not regulate railroads crossing state lines, because only Congress can regulate interstate commerce. So Congress acted. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 banned rebates and pools and created the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first federal regulatory agency. At first it was weak and lost most of its court cases.

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed trusts and combinations "in restraint of trade." For years it was weak too. The Court ruled in the E.C. Knight case of 1895 that manufacturing wasn't commerce, and the law was even used against labor unions. It got real teeth only under Theodore Roosevelt. Later laws finished the railroad job: the Elkins Act of 1903 banned rebates, and the Hepburn Act of 1906 let the ICC set rates.

The likely chain: Munn, then Wabash, then the Interstate Commerce Act.

Labor: the unions and their leaders

Factory workers faced ten- to twelve-hour days, six days a week, dangerous machines, child labor, and sudden wage cuts. Their weapons were the strike and the boycott. Employers fought back with lockouts, blacklists of union members, yellow-dog contracts that made workers promise never to join a union, private Pinkerton guards, and court injunctions ordering strikers back to work.

The unions, in order:

• The National Labor Union, 1866, led by William Sylvis. It pushed for an eight-hour day through legislation, and won it for federal workers in 1868. It collapsed after the Panic of 1873.
• The Knights of Labor, 1869, founded by Uriah Stephens and later led by Terence Powderly. It accepted almost everyone: skilled and unskilled workers, women, and Black workers, though it excluded the Chinese. It favored the eight-hour day, an end to child labor, and worker-owned cooperatives. It peaked at about seven hundred thousand members in 1886, then collapsed after Haymarket.
• The American Federation of Labor, the AFL, 1886, led by Samuel Gompers. It was a federation of craft unions for skilled workers only, like carpenters and printers. It pursued "bread and butter" goals: higher wages, shorter hours, better conditions, and no grand political program. It survived because skilled strikers were hard to replace, and it became the dominant union. The downside was that it largely excluded unskilled workers, women, and minorities.
• The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, and later the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW or "Wobblies," founded in 1905. The IWW wanted all workers in one big union.

Match leader to union. Sylvis, National Labor Union. Powderly, Knights of Labor. Gompers, AFL. Debs, American Railway Union.

The big strikes, in order:

• The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the first nationwide strike, triggered by wage cuts during the depression. It began in West Virginia and spread to major cities. President Hayes sent federal troops, the first large use of the military against strikers.
• The Haymarket Affair, 1886, in Chicago. At a rally for the eight-hour day, someone threw a bomb that killed several police officers. Eight anarchists were convicted without direct evidence, and four were hanged. The public began associating unions with violent radicals, and the Knights of Labor never recovered. It's also the origin of May Day, International Workers' Day.
• The Homestead Strike, 1892, at a Carnegie steel plant near Pittsburgh. Manager Henry Clay Frick locked out the union and brought in Pinkerton agents. A gun battle broke out, the state militia came in, and the union was crushed.
• The Pullman Strike, 1894. The Pullman railroad-car company cut wages but did not cut rents in its company town, where workers had to live. Debs's American Railway Union refused to handle Pullman cars nationwide. President Cleveland sent federal troops, a court injunction stopped the strike, and Debs went to jail. He read socialist writings there and came out a socialist. He later ran for president five times.
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911, in New York City. A hundred and forty-six garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, died because exit doors were locked. It led to new workplace safety and fire codes and connects directly to the Progressive Era.

The pattern across all these strikes: the government sided with employers. That doesn't change until the New Deal's Wagner Act in 1935.

Money: tariffs and gold versus silver

Tariffs are taxes on imported goods. Republicans wanted high, protective tariffs, like the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897, to shield Northern factories from foreign competition. Farmers and Democrats hated them, because they raised the price of everything farmers bought, and foreign countries retaliated by taxing American crops.

The second money fight was over the currency itself. During the war, the government had printed paper money called greenbacks. Afterward, the question was whether money should be backed by gold alone, or by gold and silver together, which was called bimetallism.

Here's the logic, because you'll need it for the Populists. Farmers and debtors wanted silver. More silver coinage meant more money in circulation, which causes inflation. Inflation raises crop prices and makes old debts easier to pay. Bankers and creditors wanted gold, because it keeps the dollar's value stable, and they wanted to be repaid in strong dollars.

In 1873 Congress stopped coining silver. Silver supporters called this the "Crime of '73." The Bland-Allison Act of 1878 and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 had the government buy limited amounts of silver as a compromise. The fight came to a head in the election of 1896, and the Gold Standard Act of 1900 settled it in gold's favor.

Next: Lecture 4, the West and Native Americans.

Lecture four: the West. This one is shorter. The exam asks fewer questions about the frontier than people expect, but it does ask about land laws, Native American policy, farmers, and one famous historian.

Land laws that pulled people west

• The Homestead Act, 1862, gave a hundred and sixty acres of public land free to anyone who lived on it and farmed it for five years.
• The Morrill Act, 1862, gave states federal land to fund colleges teaching agriculture and engineering. These are the land-grant universities. The Hatch Act of 1887 added agricultural experiment stations.
• The Timber Culture Act of 1873 and the Desert Land Act of 1877 gave extra land to settlers who planted trees or irrigated dry land.

Many settlers came. The Exodusters were thousands of Black Southerners who moved to Kansas around 1879 to escape the post-Reconstruction South. In the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, land that had been Indian Territory opened to settlers in a single race. People who jumped the starting gun were called Sooners; the activists who had pushed to open the land were Boomers.

The West also ran on mining and cattle. Gold and silver strikes created boomtowns overnight, often with vigilante justice instead of courts. Cowboys drove cattle north from Texas to the railroad on trails like the Chisholm Trail. The open range ended with barbed wire, harsh winters in the late 1880s, and range wars between ranchers and farmers.

Native American policy

As settlers, miners, and railroads pushed onto the Great Plains, the government pushed the Plains peoples, like the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche, onto reservations. Treaties were made and broken repeatedly. The key to conquest was the destruction of the buffalo. Herds of millions were hunted nearly to extinction by the 1880s, partly for hides and sport, and partly as deliberate policy, because the Plains peoples depended on the buffalo for food, clothing, and shelter.

The major conflicts:

• The Sand Creek Massacre, 1864, in Colorado. Militia attacked a peaceful Cheyenne camp and killed mostly women and children.
• The Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876. Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull destroyed General Custer's force. It was the Native peoples' biggest victory, and it made the army's campaigns afterward even harsher.
• Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce led his people on a long retreat toward Canada in 1877 before surrendering. He's remembered for saying he would "fight no more forever."
• Geronimo, an Apache leader, resisted in the Southwest until 1886.
• The Ghost Dance was a spiritual movement promising the return of the buffalo and the old way of life. Fear of it led to the Battle of Wounded Knee, 1890, in South Dakota, where the army killed around two hundred Lakota Sioux. Wounded Knee marks the end of major armed resistance on the Plains.

Reformers also pushed back in writing. Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 book A Century of Dishonor documented the government's broken treaties.

But the reformers' answer was assimilation, and that leads to the most tested Native American law on this exam: the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. It broke up tribal reservation land into individual family plots, usually a hundred and sixty acres, to turn Native Americans into individual farmers and break up tribes as political and cultural units. Families who accepted the plots could become citizens. Whatever land was "left over" was sold to white settlers. The result was a disaster: Native land holdings fell by about two-thirds over the next fifty years. The Dawes Act was finally reversed by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, during the New Deal.

The Dawes Act's goal was assimilation by dividing tribal land into individual allotments. Its result was massive land loss.

Farmers get angry

Western and Southern farmers were growing more than ever, but overproduction pushed crop prices down while railroad rates, interest, and tariff-inflated prices for equipment stayed high. Huge bonanza farms owned by companies made it even harder for small farmers. Farmers organized: first the Grange, founded in 1867 as a social and educational group that became political, then the Farmers' Alliances of the 1880s.

Your guide flags a famous line from Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Kansas speaker, telling farmers to raise "less corn and more hell." She means: stop just producing and start organizing politically. That's the mood that produces the Populist Party in Lecture 6.

The historian of the frontier

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his frontier thesis. The 1890 census had announced there was no longer a continuous frontier line. Turner argued the frontier had shaped the American character: individualism, democracy, self-reliance. And it worked as a safety valve for discontent. With the frontier closed, he implied, America would have to look elsewhere for growth. Historians connect that worry to the push for overseas expansion in the 1890s.

Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893: the frontier shaped American democracy and individualism, and the frontier was now closed.

Your guide also flags the Forty-Niners, the gold seekers of the 1849 California Gold Rush. They're technically from before this exam's period, but they started the pattern of mining rushes and boomtowns that continued in Colorado, Nevada, the Black Hills, and later the Klondike in Alaska.

Next: Lecture 5, cities and immigration.

Lecture five: cities and immigrants. Industry needed workers, and workers came from American farms and from all over the world. By the 1920 census, for the first time, more Americans lived in urban areas than rural ones. That date is a common question.

Old immigrants and new immigrants

Before about 1880, most immigrants came from northern and western Europe: Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia. Historians call them the old immigrants. After 1880 came the New Immigration, mostly from southern and eastern Europe: Italians, Poles, Russian and Eastern European Jews, Greeks, Slavs, Hungarians. They were more often Catholic, Jewish, or Orthodox, often poor, and often didn't speak English. Native-born Protestant Americans treated them with suspicion. That hostility is called nativism.

Most European immigrants arrived through Ellis Island in New York Harbor, which opened in 1892. Many settled in the same neighborhoods as others from their homeland, keeping their languages, churches, and newspapers.

On the West Coast, Chinese immigrants faced the harshest discrimination. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first federal law to ban immigration by a specific nationality. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt worked out the Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan: San Francisco ended its segregation of Japanese schoolchildren, and Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to laborers headed for the United States.

Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882, was the first law to exclude a nationality. The Gentlemen's Agreement, 1907, limited Japanese immigration.

How cities grew and how people lived

Cities grew up and out. Steel frames and elevators made skyscrapers possible. The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, 1885, is usually called the first. Electric streetcars and elevated trains let the middle class move to new suburbs, while the poor stayed packed downtown.

The poor lived in tenements, crowded apartment buildings with little light, air, or plumbing. The dumbbell tenement design, from about 1879, was meant as a reform: the building narrowed in the middle like a dumbbell to create a thin air shaft between buildings. In practice the shafts were dark, filled with garbage, and spread fire. New York's Tenement House Act of 1901 finally banned new ones.

Two photographers made the public see these conditions. Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, using flash photography inside New York tenements. Lewis Hine photographed children working in mills, mines, and factories, and his images drove the campaign against child labor.

Riis means tenements and How the Other Half Lives. Hine means child labor photographs.

New York City took its modern form in 1898, when Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island were consolidated into the five boroughs.

Who helped immigrants: machines and settlement houses

Two very different institutions helped newcomers. The first was the political machine, run by a party boss. Machines handed out jobs, food, coal, and help with the law, and in return immigrants voted the way the boss told them. Machines were deeply corrupt, skimming money from city contracts. The most famous was New York's Tammany Hall under Boss William Tweed, who stole millions before cartoonist Thomas Nast helped bring him down in the 1870s.

The second was the settlement house, run by middle-class reformers, many of them college-educated women, who lived in poor neighborhoods. The most famous was Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams in 1889. It offered English classes, child care, kindergartens, and job training. Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York added visiting nurses. The first American settlement was the Neighborhood Guild in New York in 1886. Settlement house workers became leaders of Progressive reform. Jane Addams later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jane Addams equals Hull House equals the settlement house movement.

Workers, women, and schools

The Lowell mill girls were young New England farm women who worked in Massachusetts textile mills, starting before the Civil War. They lived in company boarding houses, and they were among the first American women to organize labor protests. Later, labor's slogan became "the three eights": eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.

Education expanded fast. Many states passed compulsory school laws, public high schools multiplied, and normal schools, two-year colleges that trained teachers, spread, opening a respectable profession to many women.

City versus country

Your guide flags the tension between urban and rural culture, which runs right through the 1920s. Cities were diverse, immigrant, Catholic and Jewish, and modern. The countryside was more native-born, Protestant, and traditional. Expect to see this conflict again in Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan revival, immigration quotas, and the Scopes trial.

Next: Lecture 6, Populists and Progressives.

Lecture six: Populists and Progressives. This is the heaviest early chapter in your guide, with more flagged topics than any other before 1945. The idea is simple. The Gilded Age created huge problems, and two reform movements tried to fix them. First came the Populists, angry farmers in the 1890s. Then came the Progressives, middle-class city reformers from about 1900 to 1920.

The Populists

The Farmers' Alliances you heard about in the last lecture turned into a national political party, the People's Party, better known as the Populists. Their 1890 meeting produced the Ocala Demands, and in 1892 they wrote the Omaha Platform. Know what it asked for, because almost all of it eventually became law:

• Free and unlimited coinage of silver, at a ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one of gold, to inflate the money supply.
• A graduated income tax, meaning higher rates on higher incomes.
• Government ownership of the railroads, telegraph, and telephone.
• Direct election of U.S. senators, who were then chosen by state legislatures.
• The secret ballot and an eight-hour workday.

The Populist candidate, James Weaver, won over a million votes in 1892. Then the Panic of 1893 hit, the worst depression before the 1930s. In 1894 Coxey's Army, a march of unemployed workers led by Jacob Coxey, walked to Washington demanding public works jobs. Its leaders were arrested for walking on the Capitol grass.

The election of 1896

This election is flagged in your guide, and it's a classic test question. The Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan, a young congressman from Nebraska, after his famous "Cross of Gold" speech, which attacked the gold standard on behalf of farmers. The Populists endorsed Bryan too, which is called fusion. The Republicans nominated William McKinley, backed by the gold standard, big business, and his campaign manager Mark Hanna, who raised a fortune from corporations. McKinley campaigned from his front porch. Bryan traveled thousands of miles.

McKinley won, because he carried the industrial Northeast and Midwest, where city workers feared that inflation would cut the value of their wages. The Populist Party never recovered. But new gold discoveries in Alaska and South Africa soon inflated the money supply anyway, and the Gold Standard Act of 1900 ended the argument.

Third parties usually lose, but the major parties adopt their ideas. The Populists died, but the income tax, direct election of senators, and the secret ballot all became law.

Populists versus Progressives

Know the difference. The Populists were rural farmers in the South and West, in the 1890s, organized as a third party, focused on money, railroads, and farm debt. The Progressives were urban, educated, middle-class reformers, from about 1900 to 1920. They worked inside both major parties. They believed in experts, science, efficiency, and an active government that could fix the problems of industrial cities.

The muckrakers

Theodore Roosevelt gave investigative journalists their nickname, the muckrakers, because they dug through the filth of American life. Many of them published in McClure's Magazine.

• Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company: Rockefeller's ruthless tactics.
• Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities: corrupt city political machines.
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906: the Chicago meatpacking industry. Sinclair wanted to expose how immigrant workers were treated, but readers were horrified by what went into their sausage. As he put it, he aimed at the public's heart and hit its stomach. The result was the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both 1906.
• Frank Norris, The Octopus: the railroads strangling California farmers.

The Jungle led to the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Tarbell exposed Standard Oil. Steffens exposed city machines.

Religion and reform

The Social Gospel movement, led by ministers like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, taught that Christians should fix society's problems, like poverty, slums, and child labor, not only save individual souls. It inspired settlement houses and much of Progressive reform.

The temperance movement fought alcohol, which reformers blamed for poverty, domestic violence, and corrupt saloon politics. It had deep roots. Lyman Beecher, a famous preacher and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was preaching against drinking back in the 1820s. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the WCTU, was founded in 1874 and became the largest women's organization in the country under Frances Willard. Willard broadened it to support women's suffrage and other reforms, under her slogan "Do Everything." The Anti-Saloon League, from 1893, was the single-issue lobbying group that finally won the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Prohibition was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.

Making government more democratic

Progressives believed the cure for corrupt politics was to give voters more direct power. Know these four:

• The direct primary: voters, not party bosses, choose the party's candidates.
• The initiative: citizens can propose a law by petition.
• The referendum: citizens vote directly on a law.
• The recall: citizens can remove an elected official before the term ends.

The model state was Wisconsin under Governor Robert La Follette, called "Fighting Bob." His Wisconsin Idea used university experts to write laws, created the direct primary, and regulated railroads. Cities adopted home rule and city manager or commission governments. States passed workers' compensation laws, paying workers hurt on the job. Maryland passed the first in 1902.

Two Progressive constitutional amendments, both from 1913:

• The Sixteenth Amendment allowed a federal income tax.
• The Seventeenth Amendment provided for direct election of U.S. senators by voters.

Sixteenth is the income tax, Seventeenth is direct election of senators, Eighteenth is Prohibition, Nineteenth is women's suffrage. Four in a row, all from the Progressive Era.

One court case to know: Muller versus Oregon, 1908. The Supreme Court upheld an Oregon law limiting women's working hours. Lawyer Louis Brandeis won with the "Brandeis brief," full of social science evidence about health. Three years earlier, in Lochner versus New York, the Court had struck down a limit on bakers' hours. So Muller allowed protective laws for women, while men's hours stayed unregulated for years.

Women's suffrage, start to finish

Here is the chronology, which the guide flags directly:

• 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention in New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence.
• 1869, the split over the Fifteenth Amendment: Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association, against Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association. That same year, Wyoming Territory became the first to give women the vote. Western states led the way.
• 1890, the two groups merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, NAWSA. Under Carrie Chapman Catt, it used a patient, state-by-state "Winning Plan."
• Alice Paul led the more militant National Woman's Party. They picketed the White House during World War One, were jailed, and went on hunger strikes.
• 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.

Other women reformers to recognize: Margaret Sanger, who campaigned for birth control. The Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903, which united working women and wealthy supporters to organize women workers. Mother Jones, the labor organizer for coal miners. Emma Goldman, the anarchist writer and speaker who was later deported.

The Progressive presidents

In 1901, President McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president ever, at forty-two.

Roosevelt called his program the Square Deal, built on three Cs: control of corporations, consumer protection, and conservation.

• The trustbuster. Roosevelt revived the Sherman Antitrust Act and broke up J.P. Morgan's railroad holding company in the Northern Securities case of 1904. But he distinguished "good trusts," which behaved responsibly, from "bad trusts," which abused the public, and he went after only the bad ones.
• The 1902 coal strike. When Pennsylvania coal miners struck, Roosevelt brought both sides to the White House and threatened to seize the mines. It was the first time a president acted as a neutral referee instead of simply crushing a strike.
• Consumer protection: the Meat Inspection Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Hepburn Act regulating railroad rates.
• Conservation: with forester Gifford Pinchot, he protected about two hundred thirty million acres as national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges. Naturalist John Muir, a champion of Yosemite, wanted pure preservation. Pinchot wanted wise use of resources. That difference is sometimes tested.

William Howard Taft, elected in 1908 as Roosevelt's chosen successor, actually brought about twice as many antitrust suits as Roosevelt. He signed the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, which extended the Interstate Commerce Commission to telephones and telegraphs. But he angered Progressives by signing the high Payne-Aldrich Tariff and by firing Gifford Pinchot. Roosevelt turned against him.

The election of 1912

This is one of the most tested elections. Four candidates ran:

• Taft, the Republican.
• Theodore Roosevelt, who left the Republicans and ran for the new Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party. His program was the New Nationalism: accept big business as permanent, and control it with a strong federal government.
• Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, a former Princeton president and governor of New Jersey. His program was the New Freedom: break up big business and restore competition among small firms.
• Eugene Debs, the Socialist, who won about six percent, his best result.

The Republican vote split between Taft and Roosevelt, so Wilson won easily.

New Nationalism equals Roosevelt, regulate big business. New Freedom equals Wilson, break it up. The Republican split elected Wilson.

Wilson's first term delivered a lot:

• The Underwood Tariff, 1913, the first big tariff cut since the Civil War. To replace the lost revenue, it created the first income tax under the new Sixteenth Amendment.
• The Federal Reserve Act, 1913, which created the nation's central banking system to control the money supply.
• The Clayton Antitrust Act, 1914, which strengthened the Sherman Act and exempted labor unions from antitrust prosecution. Samuel Gompers called it labor's Magna Carta.
• The Federal Trade Commission, 1914, to police unfair business practices.

One negative: Wilson, a Southerner, allowed segregation of the federal civil service.

Ideas and culture of the era

The guide puts these in a separate culture chapter, but they belong here.

• William James developed pragmatism, the uniquely American philosophy that an idea is true if it works in practice.
• John Dewey applied pragmatism to schools, creating progressive education: learning by doing, with schools as training grounds for democracy.
• Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward imagined a peaceful socialist America in the year 2000. Henry George's Progress and Poverty proposed a single tax on land.
• In the arts, realism replaced romanticism: Mark Twain in literature, Thomas Eakins in painting.
• In architecture, Louis Sullivan built skyscrapers on the principle that "form follows function," and Frank Lloyd Wright designed low, horizontal Prairie style houses that blended into the landscape.
• In music, Scott Joplin was the king of ragtime, which led into jazz.
• In popular entertainment, there were vaudeville shows and amusement parks like Coney Island.
• D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was technically groundbreaking but glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and it helped revive the Klan that same year.

Next: Lecture 7, imperialism.

Lecture seven: America becomes a world power. In the 1890s, the United States turned outward and took an overseas empire. First, why.

Why expand?

• Markets. Factories and farms produced more than Americans could buy, especially during the depression of the 1890s, so business wanted foreign customers.
• The closed frontier. Turner's thesis made people worry about where future growth would come from.
• Sea power. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, argued that great nations need a big navy, plus overseas bases and coaling stations to fuel it. It hugely influenced Theodore Roosevelt.
• Racial and religious ideas. Social Darwinism and Rudyard Kipling's poem about "the white man's burden" claimed Anglo-Saxons had a duty to "civilize" other peoples. Missionaries wanted to spread Christianity.

The starting point of all American policy toward Latin America is the Monroe Doctrine of 1823: Europe must stay out of the Western Hemisphere. In 1895, President Cleveland's administration invoked it to force Britain into arbitration over Venezuela's border with British Guiana.

Hawaii

American sugar planters dominated Hawaii's economy. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 hurt them by removing the advantage Hawaiian sugar had in the U.S. market. Becoming part of the United States would solve that. In 1893, planters, with help from U.S. Marines, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, who had tried to restore royal power. President Cleveland thought the overthrow was wrong and refused to annex the islands. McKinley annexed Hawaii in 1898, during the war with Spain.

The Spanish-American War, 1898

Cubans were fighting for independence from Spain, and Spanish General Weyler herded civilians into deadly reconcentration camps. Two New York newspaper owners, William Randolph Hearst of the Journal and Joseph Pulitzer of the World, competed for readers with exaggerated, sensational stories about Spanish atrocities. This is yellow journalism.

In February 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing about two hundred sixty sailors. The cause was probably an accidental internal explosion, but the papers blamed Spain: "Remember the Maine!" Congress declared war in April. The Teller Amendment promised the United States would not annex Cuba.

The war lasted about four months. Secretary of State John Hay called it a "splendid little war." Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines. In Cuba, Theodore Roosevelt's volunteer Rough Riders charged up the San Juan Heights and made him a national hero.

The Treaty of Paris of 1898 gave Cuba its independence. The United States took Puerto Rico and Guam, and bought the Philippines for twenty million dollars.

The results of the war: Cuba was freed, and the U.S. gained Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

The debate over empire

The Anti-Imperialist League, including Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and William Jennings Bryan, argued that ruling colonies without their consent betrayed the Declaration of Independence. Some members also had racist fears of absorbing non-white peoples. The Senate ratified the treaty anyway.

Filipinos had expected independence. Instead, they fought the United States in the Philippine-American War, also called the Philippine Insurrection, from 1899 to about 1902, led by Emilio Aguinaldo. It was longer and bloodier than the war with Spain. The Philippines finally became independent in 1946.

Cuba was technically independent, but the Platt Amendment of 1901 made it an American protectorate. The United States could intervene in Cuban affairs, and Cuba had to lease it a naval base at Guantánamo Bay.

China

European powers and Japan were carving China into spheres of influence. Secretary of State John Hay issued the Open Door Notes in 1899, asking that all nations have equal trading rights in China. In 1900, Chinese nationalists called Boxers rose up against foreigners, and American troops joined an international force to crush the Boxer Rebellion.

Roosevelt's Big Stick

Roosevelt's motto was "speak softly and carry a big stick." In practice, that meant diplomacy backed by military force.

• The Panama Canal. Colombia controlled Panama and rejected the Hay-Herrán Treaty for a canal in 1903. Roosevelt then supported a Panamanian revolution and sent warships to keep Colombia from stopping it. The new nation of Panama gave the United States the Canal Zone. The canal opened in 1914.
• The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, 1904. It came after European powers threatened Venezuela over unpaid debts. Roosevelt declared that the United States would act as an "international police power" in Latin America, stepping in to fix problems itself so Europe would have no excuse to intervene. The original Monroe Doctrine told Europe to stay out. The Corollary claimed the United States had a right to go in.
• The Treaty of Portsmouth, 1905. Roosevelt mediated the end of the Russo-Japanese War and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
• The Taft-Katsura Agreement, 1905. In this secret understanding, the United States accepted Japanese control of Korea, and Japan accepted American control of the Philippines.
• The Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan in 1907, and the Great White Fleet, a world tour by the U.S. Navy from 1907 to 1909 to show off American power.

The Monroe Doctrine kept Europe out of Latin America. The Roosevelt Corollary claimed a U.S. right to intervene there.

Taft and Wilson

Taft's approach was Dollar Diplomacy: use American investment and loans, not troops, to gain influence in Latin America and Asia. In practice, troops still followed the dollars, for example into Nicaragua.

Wilson promised a moral foreign policy but intervened more than either predecessor. U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and the Dominican Republic too. During the Mexican Revolution, American forces occupied Veracruz in 1914. In 1916, the revolutionary Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and killed Americans. Wilson sent General John J. Pershing on the Punitive Expedition deep into Mexico to catch him. It failed and was called off as war with Germany approached.

Next: Lecture 8, World War One.

Lecture eight: World War One. The exam asks less about battles and more about three things: why the United States entered, what happened at home, and how the peace fell apart.

From neutrality to war

The war began in 1914 after the assassination of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The alliances pulled everyone in. The Central Powers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The Allies were Britain, France, and Russia, later joined by Italy, and in 1917, the United States.

Wilson declared neutrality and asked Americans to be impartial even in their thoughts. But neutrality wasn't equal in practice. American trade and bank loans flowed mostly to Britain and France, and the British blockade cut off Germany. Germany answered with submarines.

Here are the steps toward war, in order. Know them, because the guide flags Wilson's reasons for entering.

• May 1915: a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania, killing 128 Americans. Public opinion turned hard against Germany.
• 1916: in the Sussex Pledge, Germany promised not to sink merchant ships without warning. Wilson was re-elected with the slogan "He kept us out of war."
• January 1917: Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, betting it could starve Britain before America could make a difference.
• Early 1917: the British intercepted and published the Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered Mexico the return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona if Mexico would attack the United States.
• March 1917: the Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsar. Now every major Ally was a democracy, or seemed to be on the way, which made it easier for Wilson to frame the war as a fight to make "the world safe for democracy."
• April 1917: Congress declared war.

The main causes of U.S. entry: unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram, on top of economic ties to the Allies.

Fighting the war

The Selective Service Act of 1917 created a draft, and about four million Americans served. The American Expeditionary Force was commanded by General John J. Pershing, who insisted American troops fight as a separate army rather than as replacements in Allied units. Black soldiers served in segregated units. The 369th Infantry, the "Harlem Hellfighters," fought with the French and won wide honors. American troops arrived in force in 1918 and helped stop Germany's final offensive at the Second Battle of the Marne, then attacked at Saint-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the biggest American battle of the war. The armistice came on November 11, 1918.

The home front

• The War Industries Board, led by Bernard Baruch, coordinated factory production, priorities, and prices.
• The Food Administration, under Herbert Hoover, got Americans to conserve voluntarily with "meatless Mondays" and "wheatless Wednesdays."
• Liberty Bonds paid for much of the war.
• The Committee on Public Information, under George Creel, ran the government's propaganda: posters, films, and speakers. It also fed hostility toward German-Americans.
• The National War Labor Board settled labor disputes so production wouldn't stop. That brought real labor gains: the government supported eight-hour days and union recognition, in exchange for a no-strike pledge, and union membership grew sharply.
• The war pulled women into factory jobs and sped up the Great Migration, as Northern factories needed workers and European immigration stopped.

Civil liberties suffered. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 made it a crime to interfere with the draft or criticize the government, the flag, or the war effort. In Schenck versus United States, 1919, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a socialist who mailed anti-draft leaflets. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that speech can be limited when it creates a "clear and present danger," like falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years for an anti-war speech. He ran for president from prison in 1920 and got nearly a million votes.

Schenck versus United States: "clear and present danger." The Espionage and Sedition Acts limited free speech in wartime.

The peace

In January 1918, Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, his plan for a fair peace. Key ideas: open diplomacy instead of secret treaties, freedom of the seas, free trade, arms reduction, self-determination for national groups, and, as the fourteenth point, a League of Nations to keep the peace.

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Wilson faced the other members of the Big Four: David Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy. They wanted Germany punished. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to accept guilt for the war, pay huge reparations, and give up territory and colonies. Wilson lost most of his points but kept the League.

Then the treaty had to pass the Senate. Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge led the Reservationists, who would accept the treaty with changes, especially to Article Ten, which they feared could drag the United States into foreign wars without a vote of Congress. The Irreconcilables, like William Borah, opposed it completely. Wilson refused to compromise. He went on a national speaking tour to rally the public and suffered a severe stroke. The Senate rejected the treaty, and the United States never joined the League of Nations.

The U.S. never joined the League of Nations, because the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles.

The aftermath

The years 1919 and 1920 were chaotic: huge strikes, including a general strike in Seattle and a police strike in Boston, race riots in Chicago and elsewhere, and a wave of bombs mailed by anarchists. Fear of the new Communist Russia created the First Red Scare. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ran the Palmer Raids, arresting thousands of suspected radicals, many of them immigrants, and deporting hundreds, often without due process.

In 1921, two Italian immigrant anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were convicted of robbery and murder in Massachusetts on thin evidence, and were executed in 1927. Many saw the case as a product of prejudice against immigrants and radicals.

Americans turned away from Wilson's internationalism. In 1920, Republican Warren Harding promised a "return to normalcy" and won in a landslide. Even so, the United States still worked for disarmament. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and 1922, the Five-Power Treaty limited battleship tonnage for the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. In 1928, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced war as national policy, with no way to enforce it.

Next: Lecture 9, the 1920s.

Lecture nine: the Roaring Twenties. The decade had two faces. On one side were prosperity, new technology, and a modern, urban culture. On the other was a fierce backlash from traditional, rural, native-born Protestant America. Most questions sit on one side or the other of that divide.

Republican politics

Three Republican presidents ran the decade.

• Warren Harding, from 1921 to 1923, filled offices with his friends, the "Ohio Gang." His administration produced the Teapot Dome scandal: Interior Secretary Albert Fall secretly leased government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to private oil men in exchange for bribes. Fall became the first cabinet member sent to prison. There were other scandals too: the Veterans Bureau under Charles Forbes, and the Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, accused of taking bribes. Harding died in office in 1923.
• Calvin Coolidge, from 1923 to 1929, was quiet and strongly pro-business. He supposedly said "the business of America is business." His Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, cut taxes on the wealthy. Coolidge twice vetoed the McNary-Haugen Bill, which would have had the government buy surplus crops to raise farm prices.
• Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928, defeating Al Smith, the first Catholic major-party nominee.

Republican policy favored business: the high Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, low taxes, and little regulation. Other laws supported new industries, like the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which regulated and promoted aviation.

Presidential succession: Wilson, then Harding, who died in 1923, then Coolidge, then Hoover. Teapot Dome was Harding's scandal.

The consumer economy

Ford's assembly line made the Model T cheap enough for ordinary families, and the auto industry drove the whole economy: steel, rubber, oil, roads, suburbs, and motels. Electricity reached most city homes, and families bought refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and radios. Commercial radio began in 1920 with station KDKA in Pittsburgh. Modern advertising created desire for new products, and buying on credit, through installment plans, let people buy them before they could afford them.

Unions lost ground. Employers offered welfare capitalism, meaning company benefits like pensions, picnics, and sports teams, to keep workers loyal and unions out. They also used yellow-dog contracts. Union membership fell through the decade.

Not everyone shared in the boom. Farmers were in a depression all decade. During World War One they had borrowed to expand and fed Europe at high prices. After the war, European farms recovered, demand collapsed, and crop prices fell, while farmers still owed their debts. Rural America was already hurting long before the stock market crashed.

Agriculture was depressed throughout the 1920s. That's one of the underlying causes of the Great Depression.

The guide also flags "lesser-known depressions," so be ready to recognize the earlier ones: the Panics of 1819, 1837, 1873, and 1893. The Depression of 1893 was the worst before the 1930s. There was also a short, sharp recession in 1920 and 1921.

New culture

• Flappers were young women with short hair and short skirts who smoked, danced, and drove. They symbolized new freedom, though most women's lives changed less than the image suggested.
• Jazz was born in New Orleans among Black musicians and moved north with the Great Migration to Chicago and New York: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and the blues singer Bessie Smith. F. Scott Fitzgerald named the decade the Jazz Age.
• Movies became the national pastime. The Jazz Singer, 1927, starring Al Jolson, was the first feature-length "talkie," with synchronized sound. Complaints about immoral films led Hollywood to censor itself through the Hays Office.
• Sports heroes filled the radio and newspapers: Babe Ruth in baseball, Jack Dempsey in boxing, Red Grange in football, Bobby Jones in golf. Charles Lindbergh became the biggest hero of all after flying solo across the Atlantic in 1927.

The Harlem Renaissance and Marcus Garvey

The Great Migration made Harlem, in New York, the capital of Black America. The Harlem Renaissance was an explosion of Black literature, art, and music celebrating Black identity and protesting racism. Poets Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. Novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Philosopher Alain Locke, who called it the age of "the New Negro."

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the UNIA. He preached Black pride, Black economic independence, and a return to Africa, and he started a shipping line, the Black Star Line. He drew millions of followers. W.E.B. Du Bois opposed him, and he was convicted of mail fraud and deported in 1927.

Marcus Garvey means Black nationalism, the UNIA, and Back to Africa. Langston Hughes means the Harlem Renaissance.

The Lost Generation

White writers disillusioned by the war and by American materialism were called the Lost Generation, a term from Gertrude Stein. Many lived in Paris.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925: the emptiness behind the wealth of the Jazz Age.
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms: the war and its damaged survivors.
• Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt: the dullness and conformity of small-town, middle-class life. He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• H.L. Mencken, a journalist who mocked small-town America and its religious fundamentalism.

The backlash

• Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment was enforced by the Volstead Act. People drank anyway, in illegal bars called speakeasies, and bootlegging made gangsters like Al Capone rich and powerful. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 by the Twenty-first Amendment.
• The second Ku Klux Klan. It was revived in 1915, inspired partly by The Birth of a Nation, and by the mid-1920s had several million members. Unlike the first Klan, it was strong in the Midwest and the North, and it targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants as well as Black Americans. It collapsed after scandals in the late 1920s.
• Immigration restriction. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited immigration from each country. The National Origins Act of 1924 tightened it to two percent of each nationality's population in the 1890 census, a date chosen specifically to cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe. It banned Japanese and other Asian immigration completely. Mexican immigration was not limited by quota.
• The Scopes "Monkey" Trial, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. Tennessee banned teaching evolution, and teacher John Scopes was tried for doing it. Clarence Darrow defended him. William Jennings Bryan helped the prosecution, and Darrow famously put Bryan on the stand as an expert on the Bible. Scopes was convicted and fined a hundred dollars, but the trial made fundamentalism look backward to many Americans. It's the classic example of the clash between modernism and traditional religion, and between city and country.

The Scopes Trial was fundamentalism versus modernism, with Darrow against Bryan. The National Origins Act targeted southern and eastern Europeans and excluded Asians.

Next: Lecture 10, the Great Depression and the New Deal.

Lecture ten: the Great Depression and the New Deal. Your guide's New Deal and World War Two chapter is its largest, with more topics than any other. Expect several questions on the New Deal agencies, so we'll be careful with the alphabet soup.

Why the economy collapsed

The stock market crashed in October 1929. The worst day was Black Tuesday, October 29. But the crash was a trigger, not the only cause. The underlying causes, which the exam likes to ask about:

• Speculation and buying on margin. People bought stock with as little as ten percent down, borrowing the rest. When prices fell, they were wiped out and couldn't repay their loans.
• Overproduction and underconsumption. Factories and farms produced more than people could afford to buy.
• Unequal income. Wealth was concentrated at the top, so ordinary consumers couldn't keep buying.
• The farm depression of the 1920s.
• Too much credit and weak banks. When thousands of banks failed, depositors lost their savings, because there was no deposit insurance.
• International problems. Europe owed war debts, and Germany owed reparations. Then the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, the highest in American history, caused other countries to retaliate, and world trade collapsed.

By 1933, about a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, the economy had shrunk by nearly half, and thousands of banks had failed.

Hoover's response

Herbert Hoover was not a do-nothing president, but he believed in "rugged individualism," voluntary cooperation, and local and private charity, not direct federal relief to individuals. He feared that handouts would destroy self-reliance. What he did do:

• He asked business leaders to keep wages up, and he created the President's Emergency Committee for Employment in 1930.
• He started public works, including the dam later named Hoover Dam.
• He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the RFC, in 1932, which lent money to banks, railroads, and big businesses, hoping the benefits would trickle down to workers. Critics said it helped corporations but not hungry people.
• The Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 finally lent money to states for relief, but it was too little, too late.

Shantytowns of the homeless were called Hoovervilles. In 1932, about fifteen thousand World War One veterans, the Bonus Army, camped in Washington demanding early payment of a promised bonus. Hoover sent the army, under Douglas MacArthur, to drive them out with tanks and tear gas. The images destroyed Hoover's reputation.

Meanwhile, drought and over-plowing turned the southern Great Plains into the Dust Bowl. Massive dust storms drove families, the "Okies," west to California as migrant workers. John Steinbeck told their story in The Grapes of Wrath, 1939. Dorothea Lange photographed them for the government, most famously in "Migrant Mother." Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote about them in song.

Dorothea Lange means Depression photography, especially Migrant Mother. The Grapes of Wrath is the Dust Bowl novel.

Franklin Roosevelt and the First New Deal

Franklin Delano Roosevelt won in a landslide in 1932. In his first inaugural address, he said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He relied on a group of expert advisers called the Brain Trust, and spoke directly to Americans by radio in his Fireside Chats. His program had three goals, the three Rs: relief for the suffering, recovery of the economy, and reform so it wouldn't happen again.

In his first Hundred Days, Congress passed a flood of laws:

• A bank holiday closed every bank, and the Emergency Banking Act let only sound banks reopen. It stopped the panic.
• The Glass-Steagall Act created the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures bank deposits. It also separated ordinary banking from risky investment banking.
• The Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, put young men to work planting trees, building parks, and fighting erosion.
• The Federal Emergency Relief Administration, FERA, under Harry Hopkins, gave direct relief money to the states.
• The Agricultural Adjustment Act, the AAA, paid farmers to grow less, to push crop prices back up. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1936, and it was rewritten.
• The Tennessee Valley Authority, the TVA, a government corporation that built dams to control floods and bring cheap electricity to one of the poorest regions in the country.
• The National Industrial Recovery Act created the National Recovery Administration, the NRA. Each industry wrote codes setting prices, wages, and hours, and businesses that cooperated displayed a Blue Eagle. It also guaranteed workers the right to organize. The Public Works Administration, the PWA, under Harold Ickes, built large projects like bridges, dams, and schools.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, came in 1934 to regulate the stock market. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 let the president negotiate lower tariffs country by country, reversing Smoot-Hawley.

In 1935, the Supreme Court struck down the NRA in Schechter Poultry versus United States, the "sick chicken" case, ruling that Congress had given the president too much power and had overreached in regulating businesses that weren't interstate.

Agencies that get mixed up: CCC was jobs for young men in conservation. TVA was dams and electricity. AAA paid farmers to produce less. NRA set industry codes, with the Blue Eagle. FDIC insures bank deposits.

The critics

From the left, people argued the New Deal didn't go far enough. Huey Long, the powerful senator and former governor of Louisiana, proposed Share Our Wealth: tax the rich heavily and guarantee every family a home, a car, and an income. His slogan was "Every Man a King." He was assassinated in 1935. Father Charles Coughlin, a radio priest, attacked bankers, and later turned to anti-Semitism. Dr. Francis Townsend proposed a monthly pension for the elderly, which helped push Roosevelt toward Social Security. From the right, business leaders in the American Liberty League called the New Deal socialism.

The Second New Deal, 1935

• The Works Progress Administration, the WPA, under Harry Hopkins, was the biggest jobs program. It employed millions building roads, schools, and airports, and it hired artists, writers, actors, and musicians too.
• The Social Security Act, 1935, created old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid for dependent children and the disabled, funded by a payroll tax on workers and employers. At first it left out farm workers and domestic servants, which excluded many Black and Mexican American workers.
• The Wagner Act, officially the National Labor Relations Act, 1935, guaranteed workers the right to join unions and bargain collectively, and created the National Labor Relations Board to enforce it. This is the turning point for labor, after decades of government siding with employers.

Unions grew fast. The new Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, led by John L. Lewis, organized whole industries, skilled and unskilled together, unlike the AFL's craft unions. Auto workers won recognition from General Motors through a sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, in 1936 and 1937.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, under Commissioner John Collier, ended the Dawes Act's allotment policy and let tribes restore self-government.

The Wagner Act guaranteed collective bargaining and created the NLRB. Social Security created old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

The New Deal's end

Roosevelt won a huge re-election in 1936. Frustrated that the Supreme Court kept striking down his programs, he proposed in 1937 to add up to six new justices, one for each justice over seventy. This court-packing plan failed and hurt him politically. However, the Court began upholding New Deal laws anyway.

In 1937, Roosevelt cut spending to balance the budget, and the economy fell back into the Recession of 1937. That seemed to prove the theory of British economist John Maynard Keynes: in a downturn, government should spend more than it collects, running deficits, to boost demand. That's called Keynesian economics.

The last major New Deal law was the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It set the first federal minimum wage, twenty-five cents an hour, a maximum forty-hour work week with overtime pay, and banned most child labor.

The people of the New Deal

• Eleanor Roosevelt traveled the country as her husband's eyes and ears and pushed for civil rights and women's causes. After his death she served at the United Nations and chaired the committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
• Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, was the first woman in a cabinet. She helped design Social Security.
• Mary McLeod Bethune led the informal "Black Cabinet" of African American advisers. During the 1930s, Black voters shifted from the Republican Party to the Democrats, a lasting realignment.
• The Scottsboro Boys, 1931: nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama and quickly sentenced to death by all-white juries. Their cases produced two Supreme Court rulings: one guaranteed adequate legal counsel, and one struck down the exclusion of Black jurors.

Did it work? The New Deal didn't end the Depression. Unemployment was still above fifteen percent in 1939. World War Two ended it. But it permanently expanded the federal government, created the basic safety net, regulated banking and markets, protected unions, and built the New Deal coalition: labor, city immigrants, Black voters, Southern whites, and farmers. That coalition kept Democrats dominant for decades.

One more item that leads into the next lecture: from 1934 to 1936, the Nye Committee, led by Senator Gerald Nye, investigated why the United States entered World War One. It concluded that bankers and arms makers, called "merchants of death," had pushed the country into war for profit. That fed the isolationism behind the Neutrality Acts.

Next: Lecture 11, World War Two.

Lecture eleven: World War Two. As with World War One, focus on the road to war, the home front, and the big conferences and decisions. Know only the most famous battles.

Aggression abroad

• 1931: Japan invaded Manchuria in northern China. The U.S. answered only with the Stimson Doctrine, refusing to recognize territory taken by force.
• 1935: Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia.
• 1936: Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles. Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact against communism. 1937: Japan launched full-scale war on China.
• 1938: Germany annexed Austria. At the Munich Conference, Britain and France let Hitler take the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. This is the classic example of appeasement.
• August 1939: the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Hitler and Stalin agreed not to fight each other and secretly divided Poland.
• September 1, 1939: Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war. After a quiet "Phony War," France fell in June 1940, and Britain fought on alone through the Battle of Britain.
• 1940: Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, forming the Axis.

From neutrality to the arsenal of democracy

Remembering World War One and the Nye Committee, Congress passed Neutrality Acts from 1935 to 1937, banning arms sales and loans to countries at war. Then, step by step, Roosevelt moved the country toward helping Britain:

• The Neutrality Act of 1939 allowed arms sales on a cash-and-carry basis: buyers paid cash and carried the weapons in their own ships. In practice, that favored Britain.
• The Destroyers-for-Bases deal, 1940: fifty old American destroyers for leases on British bases.
• The Selective Service Act of 1940: the first peacetime draft. Roosevelt also won an unprecedented third term that year.
• The Four Freedoms speech, January 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
• Lend-Lease, March 1941: the United States would lend or lease weapons to Britain, and later the Soviet Union, without cash. Roosevelt called America the "arsenal of democracy." This is the point where neutrality really ended.
• The Atlantic Charter, August 1941: Roosevelt and Winston Churchill announced shared war aims, including self-determination and no territorial gains. It later shaped the United Nations.
• That fall, an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. A German submarine sank the U.S. destroyer Reuben James in October 1941.

With Japan, the road ran through oil. When Japan moved into French Indochina, the United States froze Japanese assets and cut off oil shipments. Japan decided to strike first. On December 7, 1941, it attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and at the same time attacked the Philippines and other Pacific targets. Roosevelt called it "a date which will live in infamy." Congress declared war on Japan, and days later Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

The neutrality sequence: the Neutrality Acts, then cash-and-carry, then destroyers-for-bases, then Lend-Lease, then Pearl Harbor.

The home front

The war ended the Depression. Government spending doubled the economy, and unemployment nearly disappeared. The War Production Board converted factories to war production. The Office of Price Administration controlled prices and ran rationing of gas, meat, sugar, and tires. The National War Labor Board settled labor disputes and limited wage increases, and unions made a no-strike pledge. The Revenue Act of 1942 turned the income tax into a mass tax paid by most workers, with payroll withholding.

Women: about six million women joined the workforce, symbolized by Rosie the Riveter. Hundreds of thousands served in uniform, in the Women's Army Corps and the Navy's WAVES.

Black Americans: labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a massive march on Washington in 1941. To stop it, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in defense industries, and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Black newspapers launched the Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. The Tuskegee Airmen were Black fighter pilots with an outstanding combat record. The armed forces stayed segregated until President Truman's Executive Order 9981 in 1948.

Executive Order 8802, 1941, banned discrimination in defense jobs. Executive Order 9981, 1948, desegregated the military.

Mexican Americans: the Bracero Program, starting in 1942, brought Mexican farm workers to fill labor shortages. In the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, white servicemen attacked young Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits.

Japanese Americans: in February 1942, Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 led to the forced removal of about a hundred twenty thousand Japanese Americans from the West Coast, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, to internment camps. In Korematsu versus United States, 1944, the Supreme Court upheld it as a wartime necessity. In 1988, Congress formally apologized and paid twenty thousand dollars to each survivor. Meanwhile, the all-Japanese-American 442nd Regiment became one of the most decorated units in the war.

Japanese internment: Executive Order 9066, upheld in Korematsu versus United States.

The war in Europe

The Allies agreed on a Germany First strategy, also called Europe First, because Germany was the stronger and more dangerous enemy.

• November 1942: American and British forces, under General Dwight Eisenhower, invaded North Africa.
• January 1943: at the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to demand unconditional surrender.
• 1943: the Allies invaded Sicily and then Italy. Mussolini was overthrown, and Italy surrendered in September 1943, though German troops kept fighting there.
• November 1943: the Tehran Conference, the first meeting of the Big Three: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. They agreed on a cross-Channel invasion of France, which Stalin had long demanded.
• June 6, 1944: D-Day, the invasion of Normandy, France, commanded by Eisenhower.
• December 1944: the Battle of the Bulge, Germany's last major offensive, in Belgium. It failed.
• May 8, 1945: V-E Day, Germany surrendered.

The war in the Pacific

• May 1942: the Battle of the Coral Sea stopped Japan's advance toward Australia. It was the first battle fought entirely by aircraft carriers.
• June 1942: the Battle of Midway. Thanks to broken Japanese codes, the U.S. sank four Japanese carriers. It's the turning point of the Pacific war.
• Then island hopping: capturing key islands and bypassing others, moving toward Japan. The Navy under Admiral Nimitz, and the army under General MacArthur, who returned to the Philippines in 1944.
• 1945: Iwo Jima, with its famous flag-raising photo, and Okinawa, where Japanese kamikaze suicide pilots attacked American ships. The huge losses at Okinawa made a planned invasion of Japan look extremely costly.

Midway, June 1942, was the turning point in the Pacific.

The end of the war

In February 1945, at the Yalta Conference, a visibly ill Roosevelt met Churchill and Stalin. Stalin promised free elections in Eastern Europe, which he never held, and promised to join the war against Japan. They agreed to divide Germany into occupation zones and to create the United Nations, which was founded in San Francisco in 1945. Critics later said Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe at Yalta, but Soviet armies already occupied it.

Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and Harry Truman became president. Truman had been vice president only a few months and hadn't even been told about the atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project was the secret program to build the bomb, with scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, New Mexico. They tested it in July 1945. At the Potsdam Conference that July, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding Japan's unconditional surrender or "prompt and utter destruction." Japan didn't accept.

The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8. Japan surrendered on August 15, V-J Day, and signed the formal surrender on September 2.

The debate over the bomb is a common essay-style topic. Truman's justification was that it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives that an invasion would have cost. Critics argue Japan was already close to surrender, and that the bomb was also meant to impress the Soviet Union.

After the war, the Nuremberg Trials prosecuted Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as the full horror of the Holocaust became known. The guide also flags the Geneva Conventions, the international rules for treating prisoners of war and civilians. Japan's Bataan Death March of American and Filipino prisoners in 1942 was a notorious violation.

Next: Lecture 12, the early Cold War and the 1950s.

Lecture twelve: the postwar years and the 1950s. This is the start of the forty percent of the exam that covers 1946 to the present, so give it full attention.

Coming home

The GI Bill, officially the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, paid for veterans' college and job training and gave them low-cost home loans. It built the postwar middle class and paid for the move to the suburbs.

Converting back to a peacetime economy was rough. When wartime price and wage controls ended, prices jumped. In 1946, about five million workers went on strike, in coal, steel, autos, and railroads, the largest strike wave in American history. Truman threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the army. Voters were frustrated, and Republicans won Congress in 1946.

That Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Truman's veto. It rolled back parts of the Wagner Act:

• It banned the closed shop, where you must be a union member before you can be hired.
• It allowed states to pass right-to-work laws banning the union shop, where you must join the union after you're hired. Many Southern and Western states did.
• It let the president impose an eighty-day "cooling-off period" on strikes that threatened national safety, and it required union leaders to swear they weren't communists.

Closed shop: you must be a member before hiring, and Taft-Hartley banned it. Union shop: you must join after hiring, and right-to-work laws ban it.

Truman's domestic program was the Fair Deal, an extension of the New Deal: a higher minimum wage, expanded Social Security, public housing, and national health insurance, which Congress rejected.

The 1948 election was the great upset. Everyone expected Republican Thomas Dewey to win, and one newspaper famously printed "Dewey Defeats Truman" before the votes were counted. The Democrats split three ways. Southern Democrats angry at Truman's civil rights proposals formed the States' Rights Party, the Dixiecrats, behind Strom Thurmond. Liberals unhappy with Truman's tough line on the Soviets backed Henry Wallace's Progressive Party. Truman campaigned by train in a "whistle-stop" tour, attacking the "do-nothing Congress," and won.

The Cold War begins

The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union fell apart quickly, mostly over Eastern Europe, where Stalin installed communist governments instead of holding the free elections he'd promised. In 1946, Winston Churchill said in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe.

The American strategy was containment, the idea of diplomat George Kennan: don't try to roll back communism, but stop it from spreading any further.

• The Truman Doctrine, 1947: four hundred million dollars in aid to Greece and Turkey, which were resisting communist pressure, and a promise to support free peoples resisting outside domination everywhere.
• The Marshall Plan, 1948: about thirteen billion dollars to rebuild Western Europe's economy, on the idea that poor, desperate countries were more likely to turn communist. Stalin refused it for Eastern Europe.
• The Berlin Blockade, 1948: the Soviets cut off road and rail access to West Berlin. The United States and Britain responded with the Berlin Airlift, flying in food and fuel for almost a year until Stalin backed down.
• The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, 1949: the first peacetime military alliance in U.S. history. An attack on one member is an attack on all. The Soviets answered with the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

Then came 1949's two shocks: the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, and in China, Mao Zedong's Communists won the civil war, while Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. Republicans asked "who lost China?" A 1950 secret plan called NSC-68 called for a massive military buildup.

Containment was Kennan's idea. The Truman Doctrine was aid to Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan was economic recovery for Western Europe.

The Korean War

After World War Two, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel: a Soviet-backed North and an American-backed South. In June 1950, North Korea invaded the South. The UN Security Council voted to defend South Korea. The Soviets couldn't veto it, because they were boycotting the Council to protest that Communist China wasn't seated.

General Douglas MacArthur led a brilliant landing at Inchon and pushed the North Koreans almost to the Chinese border. Then, in late 1950, China intervened with hundreds of thousands of troops and drove the UN forces back. MacArthur publicly demanded bombing China, which risked a wider war. Truman fired MacArthur in 1951 for insubordination, upholding civilian control of the military. MacArthur was wildly popular, and the decision was unpopular at the time.

The war became a stalemate near the 38th parallel. In the 1952 campaign, Dwight Eisenhower promised "I will go to Korea." As president, he quietly hinted he might use nuclear weapons, and an armistice was signed in July 1953. There was never a peace treaty. Korea was the first limited war of the Cold War, fought to contain communism rather than for total victory.

The Second Red Scare

Fear of communist spies at home grew alongside the Cold War.

• Truman's Federal Employee Loyalty Program, 1947, investigated government workers.
• The House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, investigated Hollywood. The Hollywood Ten, screenwriters and directors who refused to answer questions, went to jail, and hundreds of people were blacklisted.
• Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused of spying for the Soviets by Whittaker Chambers. Young congressman Richard Nixon made his name pursuing the case. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950.
• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for passing atomic secrets.
• The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, passed over Truman's veto, required communist organizations to register with the government.

Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin claimed in 1950 to have a list of communists working in the State Department. For four years he made reckless accusations, and the word McCarthyism now means smearing people with unproven charges. His downfall was the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, where the army's lawyer famously asked him, "Have you no sense of decency?" The Senate censured him that December.

Eisenhower at home

Eisenhower, president from 1953 to 1961, called his approach dynamic conservatism, or Modern Republicanism: conservative about money, but he kept and even expanded New Deal programs like Social Security instead of repealing them. His running mate, Nixon, survived a 1952 scandal over a political fund with the televised Checkers Speech, named after his family's dog.

• The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 built forty-one thousand miles of highway, partly justified as a way to evacuate cities and move troops in a nuclear war. The highways sped up suburban growth.
• The St. Lawrence Seaway, opened in 1959 with Canada, let ocean ships reach the Great Lakes.
• In his 1961 farewell address, Eisenhower, a former general, warned against the growing power of the "military-industrial complex," the alliance between the military and defense contractors.

The military-industrial complex warning came from Eisenhower, in his farewell address.

Eisenhower abroad

Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles relied on nuclear weapons, which were cheaper than a large army. That policy was called massive retaliation: respond to aggression with nuclear force. Dulles's willingness to push to the edge of war to make the other side back down was called brinkmanship.

• The domino theory, 1954: if one country in Southeast Asia fell to communism, its neighbors would fall like a row of dominoes. This shaped policy in Vietnam. The U.S. also formed SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.
• The CIA organized coups that overthrew elected governments: in Iran in 1953, removing Prime Minister Mossadegh, who had nationalized the oil industry, and restoring the Shah; and in Guatemala in 1954, removing President Árbenz, whose land reform threatened the American United Fruit Company.
• The Suez Crisis, 1956: Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt after it took over the Suez Canal. Eisenhower pressured them to withdraw.
• The Eisenhower Doctrine, 1957: the U.S. would give aid, and if necessary troops, to Middle Eastern countries resisting communism. Troops went to Lebanon in 1958.
• When Hungarians revolted against Soviet rule in 1956, the U.S. did not intervene.
• Relations with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had brief thaws, like the 1955 Geneva Summit. But in 1960 the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, which wrecked a planned summit in Paris.
• In October 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite. Americans panicked that they'd fallen behind. The response was NASA, created in 1958, and the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which funded math, science, and foreign-language education. That started the space race.

Sputnik led to NASA and the National Defense Education Act. Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 were CIA-backed coups.

1950s society

The 1950s were a time of enormous prosperity. The baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Families moved to the suburbs, led by William Levitt, who mass-produced identical, affordable houses in planned communities called Levittown. Levitt refused to sell to Black families, and the move of white families out of cities, called white flight, left inner cities poorer and more segregated.

• Television spread from a few homes to most homes within the decade, replacing radio as the center of family entertainment.
• A religious revival: church membership rose, preacher Billy Graham drew huge crowds, "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and "In God We Trust" became the national motto in 1956, partly to contrast America with "godless communism."
• Alfred Kinsey's reports on sexual behavior, in 1948 and 1953, shocked the public by showing a gap between stated values and actual behavior.
• Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, released in 1955, ended the epidemic that had terrified parents.
• Rock and roll, from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, borrowed heavily from Black rhythm and blues and alarmed many parents. The guide also files the Beatles here. They arrived in 1964, on The Ed Sullivan Show, leading the "British Invasion."

The decade also had critics. The Beat Generation, writers like Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, and poet Allen Ginsberg, author of "Howl," rejected conformity and materialism. They were forerunners of the 1960s counterculture. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society argued that America had private wealth but neglected public needs. Michael Harrington's The Other America, 1962, exposed the invisible poor and inspired the War on Poverty.

Two policies toward minority groups. The Bracero Program continued bringing Mexican farm workers until 1964, while the 1954 deportation campaign known as Operation Wetback forced out many Mexican immigrants. And in 1950s Native American policy, termination ended federal recognition of many tribes and relocated Native people to cities. It largely failed and was replaced by self-determination in the 1970s.

Next: Lecture 13, civil rights and social movements.

Lecture thirteen: the civil rights movement and the movements it inspired. The core story runs from the courtroom, to nonviolent protest, to federal law, and then to Black Power.

Brown and the backlash

The NAACP spent decades attacking segregation in court. Its chief lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first Black Supreme Court justice in 1967. The big win was Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, in 1954. The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled unanimously that segregated schools are "inherently unequal" and violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. That overturned Plessy versus Ferguson. A follow-up ruling in 1955 ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed," which the South read as permission to go slowly.

The white South answered with "massive resistance." About a hundred Southern members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto in 1956, pledging to resist the ruling. White Citizens' Councils formed to fight integration through economic pressure, and the Ku Klux Klan used violence. In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and his mother's decision to hold an open-casket funeral shocked the nation.

In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block nine Black students, the Little Rock Nine, from entering Central High School. Eisenhower, who wasn't enthusiastic about civil rights, sent the army's 101st Airborne Division to escort them in, because he would not let a state defy federal courts.

Brown versus Board, 1954, overturned Plessy. Little Rock, 1957, was when Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce it.

Nonviolent protest

In December 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and NAACP activist, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Black residents launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted more than a year, until the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. Its leader was a twenty-six-year-old minister named Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1957, King and other ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SCLC, which organized nonviolent protest through Black churches. King's philosophy drew on Christianity, Henry David Thoreau, and Gandhi's nonviolent resistance. The same year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction, followed by another in 1960. Both were weak and mostly dealt with voting rights.

• Sit-ins, starting in 1960: four Black college students sat at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave. Sit-ins spread across the South, and student activists founded SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with guidance from organizer Ella Baker.
• Freedom Rides, 1961: the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, led by James Farmer, sent integrated groups on interstate buses to test a Supreme Court ruling against segregated bus terminals. Mobs firebombed a bus in Alabama and beat the riders, and the Kennedy administration finally sent federal marshals.
• Birmingham, 1963: King led protests in what he called the most segregated city in America. Police commissioner Bull Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on demonstrators, including children, on national television. Jailed there, King wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail, arguing that people have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws, and answering white ministers who told him to wait.
• The March on Washington, August 1963: about two hundred fifty thousand people. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. A few weeks later, a bombing at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four girls.

The great laws

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964, pushed through by President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination. It banned segregation in public accommodations like hotels, restaurants, and theaters, and banned job discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. That employment section, Title Seven, created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC.
• The Twenty-fourth Amendment, 1964, banned poll taxes in federal elections.
• Freedom Summer, 1964: volunteers, many of them white college students, went to Mississippi to register Black voters. Three civil rights workers were murdered. Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the state's all-white delegation at the Democratic convention.
• Selma, 1965: marchers walking from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for voting rights were beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a day called Bloody Sunday. Future congressman John Lewis was among them. The outrage led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned literacy tests, sent federal examiners to register voters, and required certain Southern states to get federal approval before changing voting rules. Black voter registration in the South soared.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned discrimination in housing. It passed days after King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968.

1964 Civil Rights Act: public accommodations and jobs, plus the EEOC. 1965 Voting Rights Act: came after Selma, banned literacy tests. 1968: fair housing.

Black Power

By the mid-1960s, many young activists had lost patience with nonviolence, and Northern cities, where segregation wasn't written into law, saw riots. The Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965 was the first big one. In 1968, the Kerner Commission warned the nation was moving toward two societies, one Black and one white, separate and unequal.

• Malcolm X, a minister of the Nation of Islam, rejected nonviolence and integration in favor of Black pride, separatism, and self-defense "by any means necessary." After a pilgrimage to Mecca, he broke with the Nation of Islam and softened his views on cooperation with whites. He was assassinated in 1965.
• Stokely Carmichael, who led SNCC, popularized the slogan "Black Power" in 1966: Black political and economic control of Black communities, and racial pride.
• The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, carried guns for self-defense against police and ran community programs like free breakfasts for children.

Compare these with the moderate leaders: Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, focused on courts and legislation, and Whitney Young of the Urban League, focused on jobs and economic opportunity.

Match the leader to the group. King, SCLC. James Farmer, CORE. Carmichael, SNCC and Black Power. Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam. Newton and Seale, the Black Panthers. Wilkins, NAACP.

The women's movement

Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique described the frustration of educated suburban housewives, "the problem that has no name." It's usually credited with starting second-wave feminism. In 1966, Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women, NOW.

• The Equal Pay Act of 1963, and Title Seven of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned sex discrimination in employment.
• Title Nine, 1972, banned sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money, and it transformed women's athletics.
• Roe versus Wade, 1973, legalized abortion nationwide, based on a right to privacy.
• The Equal Rights Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights regardless of sex, passed Congress in 1972 but fell three states short of ratification. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly led the campaign against it, arguing it would hurt traditional homemakers.

Other women writers the guide flags include Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring exposed the dangers of the pesticide DDT and launched the modern environmental movement, and Gloria Steinem, who founded Ms. magazine.

Other movements

• Mexican American farm workers: César Chávez and Dolores Huerta founded the United Farm Workers and led a national boycott of California grapes from 1965 to 1970, using nonviolence.
• Native Americans: the American Indian Movement, AIM, founded in 1968, occupied Alcatraz Island and, in 1973, Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 gave tribes more control over federal programs.
• Gay rights: the Stonewall Riots, June 1969, began when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, and patrons fought back. Stonewall is considered the start of the modern gay rights movement.

Stonewall, 1969, launched gay rights. Chávez equals the United Farm Workers and the grape boycott. AIM occupied Wounded Knee in 1973.

Students and the counterculture

• Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, issued the Port Huron Statement in 1962, written mainly by Tom Hayden. It called for "participatory democracy" and launched the New Left.
• The Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 protested a ban on political activity on campus.
• At Columbia University in 1968, students occupied buildings to protest the school's ties to military research and its plan to build a gym in a Harlem park with only limited access for neighborhood residents.
• The counterculture: hippies rejected mainstream values, with long hair, communes, rock music, and drugs. Timothy Leary promoted LSD with the slogan "turn on, tune in, drop out." The Woodstock festival in New York in August 1969 drew about four hundred thousand people.

Next: Lecture 14, Kennedy, Johnson, and Vietnam.

Lecture fourteen: the 1960s presidents and the Vietnam War. Your guide flags more topics in this chapter than in almost any other, so expect several questions here.

John F. Kennedy

The 1960 election matched Senator John F. Kennedy against Vice President Richard Nixon. It featured the first televised presidential debates. People who heard the first debate on radio thought Nixon won, but television viewers saw a calm, tanned Kennedy next to a pale, sweating Nixon, and thought Kennedy won. Kennedy won narrowly and became the first Catholic president. In his inaugural address he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

His domestic program was the New Frontier. It created the Peace Corps, which sent young American volunteers to work in developing countries, and set the goal of putting a man on the moon. It also included the Housing Act of 1961 and the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which cut tariffs. But a conservative Congress blocked most of his bigger plans, like federal aid to education and medical care for the elderly.

Kennedy's foreign policy was dominated by Cuba.

• The Bay of Pigs, April 1961: a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles invaded Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. It was a disaster, and Kennedy took the blame. That same year, the Soviets built the Berlin Wall.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962: U-2 photos showed Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida. Kennedy rejected an air strike and ordered a naval "quarantine," a blockade, of Cuba. For thirteen days the world was closer to nuclear war than ever before. The agreement: Khrushchev removed the missiles, and the U.S. publicly promised not to invade Cuba, and secretly agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey.
• Afterward, both sides tried to lower the risk. They set up a direct hotline between Washington and Moscow in 1963, and signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear tests in the air, in space, and underwater. Both sides understood mutual assured destruction: a nuclear war would destroy everyone, so neither side could win one.

Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, then shot two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that Oswald acted alone.

The Cuban Missile Crisis deal: Soviet missiles left Cuba in exchange for a U.S. promise not to invade, plus the secret removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society

Lyndon Johnson, a Texan and master of Congress, used Kennedy's death to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then he declared a War on Poverty. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created the Job Corps, Head Start for preschool children, and VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, a domestic version of the Peace Corps. In 1964 Johnson crushed conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in a landslide, and with big majorities in Congress he passed his Great Society:

• Medicare, health insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, health care for the poor, both 1965.
• The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the first large federal aid to public schools.
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• The Immigration Act of 1965, also called Hart-Celler, which ended the national-origins quotas of 1924. Immigration from Asia and Latin America rose dramatically afterward. Your guide flags it.
• The new Department of Housing and Urban Development. Its first secretary, Robert C. Weaver, was the first Black cabinet member.
• The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and public broadcasting.

Medicare is for the elderly. Medicaid is for the poor. The 1965 Immigration Act ended national-origins quotas.

Vietnam: how the U.S. got in

Vietnam had been part of French Indochina. After World War Two, the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh fought the French, and beat them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords of 1954 temporarily divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, with national elections planned for 1956. The United States, fearing Ho would win, backed Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of South Vietnam, and the elections never happened. Diem was corrupt and persecuted Buddhists. In November 1963, South Vietnamese generals overthrew and killed him, with American approval.

Eisenhower sent aid, citing the domino theory. Kennedy increased the number of American military advisers to about sixteen thousand. Then came the turning point:

• The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, August 1964: the administration reported that North Vietnamese boats attacked American destroyers twice. The second attack almost certainly never happened.
• The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: Congress, almost unanimously, authorized the president to take "all necessary measures" to repel attacks. It wasn't a declaration of war, but Johnson treated it like a blank check.

In 1965 Johnson began sustained bombing of North Vietnam and sent combat troops. American forces peaked at over half a million by 1968. Vietnam was the first television war: Americans saw the fighting on the evening news, and as official claims of progress clashed with what people saw, a "credibility gap" opened between the government and the public.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Johnson broad power to escalate without a declaration of war.

1968: the year everything broke

• January: the Tet Offensive. During the Vietnamese New Year holiday, communist forces launched surprise attacks on more than a hundred cities, even reaching the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Militarily, the communists lost badly. Politically, it was a huge win for them, because it showed that the war was nowhere near over. Respected news anchor Walter Cronkite told viewers the war was a stalemate. In March, Johnson announced he would not run again.
• That March, American troops massacred hundreds of unarmed villagers at My Lai. The public didn't learn about it until 1969.
• April: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. June: Robert Kennedy, running for president, was assassinated.
• August: the Democratic convention in Chicago, where police clashed violently with anti-war protesters on television. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated.
• November: Richard Nixon won with appeals to "law and order" and the "silent majority." Alabama Governor George Wallace, running as the segregationist candidate of the American Independent Party, won about thirteen percent of the vote and five Southern states. That's the answer to the guide's question about the 1968 third-party candidate.

Tet was a military defeat but a political victory for the communists, because it turned American opinion against the war.

Nixon's war and how it ended

Nixon's plan was Vietnamization: gradually withdraw American troops and turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese army, while keeping up heavy bombing. At the same time, he widened the war. He secretly bombed communist supply routes in Cambodia, and in April 1970 sent troops into Cambodia, followed by an attack into Laos in 1971.

The Cambodian invasion set off huge campus protests. At Kent State University in Ohio, in May 1970, National Guard troops fired on protesters and killed four students. Two more students were killed at Jackson State in Mississippi days later.

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the war leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, showed that officials had misled the public for years. The Supreme Court allowed newspapers to publish them. Also in 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen. The argument was that if you're old enough to be drafted, you're old enough to vote.

The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 ended American involvement. U.S. troops left and prisoners of war came home. The draft ended the same year. Without American troops, South Vietnam fell when Saigon was captured in April 1975, and Vietnam was unified under communist rule.

Congress responded with the War Powers Act of 1973, passed over Nixon's veto. The president must notify Congress within forty-eight hours of sending troops into combat, and must bring them home within sixty days unless Congress approves.

Vietnamization was Nixon's withdrawal strategy. The War Powers Act limits the president's power to wage war without Congress.

Next: Lecture 15, Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

Lecture fifteen: the 1970s. Nixon's surprising policies, Watergate, and the troubled presidencies of Ford and Carter.

Nixon at home

Nixon was a Republican, but much of his domestic record looks liberal. Under his New Federalism, he wanted to shift power from Washington back to the states. The key tool was revenue sharing: the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972 gave federal tax money to states and cities with few strings attached. He also proposed the Family Assistance Plan, a guaranteed minimum income for poor families, which Congress rejected.

The environmental movement, energized by Silent Spring and the first Earth Day in 1970, got major laws under Nixon:

• The National Environmental Policy Act, 1970, requiring environmental impact statements for federal projects.
• The Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, created in 1970.
• The Clean Air Act of 1970.
• He also created OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to enforce workplace safety.

The economy suffered from stagflation: high inflation and high unemployment at the same time, which standard economics said shouldn't happen. In 1971 Nixon froze wages and prices and took the dollar off the gold standard.

The EPA, Clean Air Act, and OSHA all came under Nixon. Revenue sharing was his New Federalism.

Nixon abroad: détente

Nixon and his national security adviser, later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, practiced détente, a relaxing of Cold War tensions. They used realism, not ideology: deal with communist powers when it serves American interests, and play China and the Soviet Union against each other.

• Nixon's China visit, February 1972. After a thaw started by "ping-pong diplomacy," Nixon became the first president to visit Communist China, opening relations. Because he was a lifelong anti-communist, he was safe from charges of being soft. That's the origin of the phrase "only Nixon could go to China." Full diplomatic relations came under Carter in 1979.
• In Moscow in May 1972, Nixon signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement, SALT One, which limited the number of long-range nuclear missiles, along with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. When the United States supported Israel, Arab members of OPEC, the oil producers' cartel, imposed the 1973 Arab oil embargo on the United States. Oil prices roughly quadrupled, and Americans waited in long lines for gas. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, flying back and forth between capitals, arranged disengagement agreements, including Israeli pullbacks in the Sinai.

Détente means relaxed tensions: the China trip and SALT One. The 1973 oil embargo was an OPEC response to U.S. support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

Watergate

In June 1972, five men working for Nixon's re-election committee were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. Nixon won re-election in a landslide that November, but he had joined the cover-up, ordering aides to have the CIA block the FBI's investigation and approving hush money.

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein kept digging, and televised Senate hearings in 1973 revealed that Nixon had secretly taped his White House conversations.

• In the Saturday Night Massacre, October 1973, Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had subpoenaed the tapes. The attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than carry out the order.
• Separately that same month, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned over bribery and tax evasion from his time as governor of Maryland. Nixon appointed House leader Gerald Ford vice president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
• In United States versus Nixon, July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to hand over the tapes. One recorded him ordering the cover-up, the "smoking gun." The House Judiciary Committee had already approved articles of impeachment.
• On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the only president ever to resign.

Ford became the only president never elected as either president or vice president. A month later, he gave Nixon a full pardon. Ford said it would end the national nightmare, but many people suspected a deal, and it probably cost him the 1976 election. Ford's anti-inflation campaign handed out "WIN" buttons, for "Whip Inflation Now," and it was widely mocked. Saigon fell during his term.

The Watergate sequence: break-in, cover-up, tapes revealed, Saturday Night Massacre, U.S. versus Nixon, resignation, then Ford's pardon.

Jimmy Carter

In the 1976 election, Jimmy Carter, a little-known former governor of Georgia and peanut farmer, ran as an honest Washington outsider and narrowly beat Ford.

• Energy: Carter created the Department of Energy in 1977 and pushed conservation. The 1979 Iranian Revolution caused a second oil shock. In a 1979 televised speech, often called the "malaise" speech, Carter said America faced a crisis of confidence. It went over badly. Inflation passed thirteen percent, and interest rates soared.
• Environment: toxic waste buried under the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, sickened residents and led to the Superfund law of 1980 to clean up hazardous sites.
• Human rights was the center of Carter's foreign policy. He cut aid to dictatorships that abused their people.
• The Panama Canal Treaties of 1977 agreed to return the canal to Panama by the end of 1999.
• The Camp David Accords, 1978: Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together at the presidential retreat. That led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab nation. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. It's Carter's biggest achievement.
• Full diplomatic relations with China in 1979.
• SALT Two was signed in 1979, but Carter withdrew it from the Senate after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. He responded with a grain embargo and a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Détente was over.
• The Iran hostage crisis. In 1979, Islamic revolutionaries under Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, the ruler restored by the CIA in 1953. In November 1979, students seized the American embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days. A rescue mission failed in the desert in 1980. The hostages were released minutes after Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981. The crisis doomed Carter's re-election.

Camp David means Egypt and Israel. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the Olympic boycott. The hostage crisis lasted 444 days.

Next: Lecture 16, Reagan to today.

Lecture sixteen, the last one: from Reagan to the present. Your guide says test takers are reporting questions all the way into the 1990s and 2000s, so don't skip this. It ends with a review of Supreme Court cases and a game plan for tomorrow.

The conservative resurgence

Conservatism had been building since Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. In the 1970s, it gained energy from frustration with inflation, high taxes, crime, busing, and the cultural changes of the 1960s. Evangelical Christians became a political force. Televangelists reached millions, and in 1979 the Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority to fight abortion, the ERA, and what it saw as moral decline. Together these groups formed the New Right.

In 1980, former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide.

Reagan at home

Reagan's economic program was called Reaganomics, based on supply-side economics. The theory: cutting taxes, especially for businesses and high earners, would encourage investment and work, and the resulting growth would benefit everyone. Critics called it trickle-down economics.

• Tax cuts: the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 cut income tax rates by about a quarter. The 1986 tax reform cut the top rate to twenty-eight percent.
• Smaller government: cuts to domestic social programs. In his words, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
• Deregulation of industries like airlines, banking, and energy, and looser environmental enforcement.
• A massive military buildup.

The combination of tax cuts and military spending produced huge budget deficits. The national debt roughly tripled during his presidency. In 1981 he fired over eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers, which weakened unions nationally. After a deep recession in 1982, the economy boomed. In 1984, with the theme "Morning in America," Reagan won forty-nine states against Walter Mondale, whose running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, was the first woman on a major-party ticket.

Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, in 1981. Reagan's and the first President Bush's appointments, including Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas, moved the Court to the right. Robert Bork's nomination was rejected in 1987.

Reaganomics means supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, and military spending, which together produced big deficits.

Reagan abroad

Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and rejected détente.

• He proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, a space-based shield against nuclear missiles that critics nicknamed "Star Wars."
• He supported anti-communist rebels around the world. In Nicaragua, he backed the Contras against the leftist Sandinista government. He sent aid to the government of El Salvador against leftist rebels, and to Afghan fighters resisting the Soviets.
• In October 1983, a suicide truck bomb killed 241 American service members at their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, and Reagan soon withdrew U.S. forces. That same week, U.S. forces invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada to remove a Marxist government and protect American medical students.
• The Iran-Contra scandal, revealed in 1986. Officials secretly sold weapons to Iran, hoping to free American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon, then illegally sent the profits to the Contras, after Congress had banned aid to them. Marine officer Oliver North was a central figure. Reagan claimed he didn't know about the money diversion. It's the biggest scandal of his presidency.
• In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the Soviet Union and introduced glasnost, openness, and perestroika, economic restructuring. Reagan built a working relationship with him. In Berlin in 1987, Reagan said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The two signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the INF Treaty, in 1987. It was the first treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Iran-Contra: arms to Iran for hostages, with the profits illegally sent to the Nicaraguan Contras. The INF Treaty eliminated a whole class of nuclear missiles.

One labor law the guide flags: the WARN Act of 1988, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires large employers to give sixty days' notice before plant closings and mass layoffs.

George H.W. Bush

Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, won in 1988 after promising "Read my lips: no new taxes." In 1990, facing big deficits, he agreed to a budget deal that raised taxes, which infuriated conservatives. A recession in 1990 and 1991 hurt him further. He also had to clean up the savings and loan crisis: after deregulation, hundreds of savings banks failed from risky loans, and the government created the Resolution Trust Corporation to handle the bailout. He signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which banned discrimination against people with disabilities.

Abroad, Bush presided over the end of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Germany reunified in 1990, and the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. In 1989, U.S. troops invaded Panama and arrested its dictator, Manuel Noriega, on drug charges.

In August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Bush assembled a large international coalition with UN approval. Operation Desert Shield protected Saudi Arabia. Then Operation Desert Storm, in January and February 1991, drove Iraq out of Kuwait in about six weeks, mostly from the air, with a ground war of only about a hundred hours. This was the Persian Gulf War.

Bill Clinton

In 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, won with a focus on the struggling economy. Billionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent, attacking the deficit, and won nearly nineteen percent, one of the best third-party showings ever.

• NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, took effect in 1994 and removed most trade barriers among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Clinton also backed the GATT round that created the World Trade Organization.
• His national health-care plan, led by Hillary Clinton, failed.
• In 1994, Republicans led by Newt Gingrich won both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years, running on the Contract with America. The budget fights that followed caused government shutdowns.
• The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 replaced the old AFDC program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, with temporary aid tied to work requirements and time limits. Clinton had promised to "end welfare as we know it."
• The economy boomed with the internet revolution, and by the late 1990s the federal budget showed its first surpluses in decades.
• Abroad: the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, including ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, ended with the Dayton Accords in 1995. NATO bombed Serbia over Kosovo in 1999. Madeleine Albright became the first woman secretary of state in 1997. Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997.
• The Lewinsky scandal: in 1998 the House impeached Clinton for lying under oath and obstruction of justice related to his affair with a White House intern. The Senate acquitted him in 1999. He was the second president impeached, after Andrew Johnson.

The guide flags women's roles in the 1990s. More women entered professions and politics. 1992 was called the "Year of the Woman" for the number of women elected to Congress, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court in 1993. In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the TV character Murphy Brown for having a child as a single mother, which set off a national argument about "family values."

NAFTA, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and impeachment were Clinton. Gingrich's Contract with America was the 1994 Republican takeover.

The 2000s

• The 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to a disputed recount in Florida. In Bush versus Gore, the Supreme Court stopped the recount, and Bush won the presidency, though Gore won the national popular vote.
• After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, which was sheltering al-Qaeda. In 2002, Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an "axis of evil." In 2003, the U.S. led the second invasion of Iraq, citing weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Saddam Hussein was overthrown and captured.
• The 2008 financial crisis began when the housing bubble burst and risky subprime mortgages failed, threatening the banking system. Congress created TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to bail out banks. That year, Barack Obama was elected the first Black president. The guide compares 2008 with 1960: in both, a young senator ran on change and used a new medium well, television for Kennedy and the internet for Obama.

The Supreme Court cases, all in one place

Your guide flags court cases as a group. Here is every major case from tonight, in order. Listen to this list twice if you have time.

• Munn versus Illinois, 1877: states can regulate businesses serving the public interest.
• Wabash versus Illinois, 1886: states can't regulate interstate commerce, which led to the Interstate Commerce Act.
• Plessy versus Ferguson, 1896: "separate but equal."
• Muller versus Oregon, 1908: upheld limits on women's working hours.
• Schenck versus United States, 1919: "clear and present danger."
• Schechter Poultry versus United States, 1935: struck down the NRA.
• Korematsu versus United States, 1944: upheld Japanese internment.
• Brown versus Board of Education, 1954: school segregation is unconstitutional.
• Gideon versus Wainwright, 1963: the state must provide a lawyer to defendants who can't afford one.
• Miranda versus Arizona, 1966: police must tell suspects their rights, including the right to remain silent.
• Roe versus Wade, 1973: legalized abortion based on a right to privacy. It was overturned in 2022.
• United States versus Nixon, 1974: Nixon had to release the tapes.
• Regents of the University of California versus Bakke, 1978: racial quotas in admissions are unconstitutional, but race can be one factor. This is the key affirmative action case.
• Texas versus Johnson, 1989: flag burning is protected free speech.
• Bush versus Gore, 2000: ended the Florida recount.

Two more names from the 1960s and 70s: consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whose 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed led to federal auto safety standards; and writer James Baldwin, whose 1963 book The Fire Next Time warned white America about the anger building over racism. And recall playwright Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, 1949, about the emptiness of chasing the American dream of success.

Game plan for tomorrow

• You'll have about 120 questions in 90 minutes, so roughly forty-five seconds each. Don't get stuck. If a question stumps you, pick your best guess, flag it, and move on. Come back if you have time.
• There's no penalty for wrong answers, so never leave a question blank.
• When you're unsure, use chronology to eliminate answers. If the question is about the 1920s, cross out anything from the New Deal or later. Many wrong answers are real events from the wrong decade.
• Watch for "except" and "not" in questions, and read all four or five choices before picking one.
• You need a scaled score of fifty to pass. You don't need perfection.
• Tonight, sleep. In the morning, if you have time, replay just the quick checks and the court case list.

That's the end of the lectures. Good luck tomorrow.