Print the Legend

The New World wasn't exactly new.  Native Americans, for thousands of years, prospered before European contact.  Spain possessed much of South America, while France acquired the central portions of North America.  On May 14, 1607, a group of roughly 100 British members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. F...

By November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. As the war stretched on, some soldiers came to mistrust the government’s reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington’s repeated claims that the war was being won.  Bombarded by horrific images of the war on their televisions, Americans on the home front turned against ...

During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers. However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one. Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and concerned about Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical, blood-thirsty rule of his own country. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate...

On June 6, 1944 – observed as “D-Day” - the Allied began a massive invasion of Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, France. In response, Hitler poured all the remaining strength of his army into the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German offensive of the war.  Meanwhile in the Pacific, heavy casualties sustained in the campaigns at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and fears of th...

The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. Over the next eight years, the government instituted a series of experimental New Deal projects and programs, such as the CCC, t...

The Roaring 20s conjures up images of happy people dancing the Charleston, listening to jazz in Harlem nightclubs, and drinking bathtub gin.  In many ways this was a decade dominated by optimism, as people enjoyed the conveniences that technology brought into their lives.  Yet the 1920s were also marked by some troubling trends and events, and not everybody enjoyed the "Coolidge Prosperity."  There was a resurgence o...

The war was over and many Americans spent the 1920s in a great mood. Investors flocked to a rising stock market. Companies launched brand-new, cutting-edge products, like radios and washing machines. Exuberant Americans kicked up their heels to jazz music, tried crazy stunts, and supported a black market in liquor after Prohibition. A popular expression of the time asked, “What will they think of next?” Bootleggers, flappers, batht...

At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. The First World War left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded.  In Paris the following year, a treaty would be signed, but not all in Europe - or t...

On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. But not everyone wanted to join. It took a large propaganda effort and a draft to fill the ranks. It worked. The entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers ...

During the summer of 1914, the tensions in Europe that had been growing for many years culminated with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist organization. Within less than a month, two coalitions emerged—the Central Powers and the Allied Powers. As war raged in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson argued that the United States should remain neutral in this conflict.  But that neutrality was ...

When President McKinley was assassinated and Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901, progressivism became a powerful national movement. During his tenure as president, Roosevelt was a loud and effective advocate for “trust-busting,” the breaking up of enormous monopolies that had controlled prices and prevented competition. He also advocated for fair trade and pro-labor laws, including a decreased workweek, child labor restrictions...

Progressivism responded to the economic and social problems of a rapidly industrializing America at the turn of the 20th century. What began as a social movement, later grew into a political movement, largely out of its predecessor, the Populist movement. Progressives lived mainly in the cities, were college educated, and believed that government could be a tool for change. They concentrated on exposing the evils of corporate greed...

Throughout the 1880s, local political action groups known as Farmers' Alliances grew rapidly among Middle Westerners and Southerners, who were discontented because of crop failures, falling prices, and poor marketing and debt. Although it won some significant regional victories, the alliances generally proved politically ineffective on a national scale - until the Populist Party of 1892. While trying to broaden their base to includ...

The Wild West, the American frontier, holds a special place in American history. Western films depict it as a place where the rules didn't apply, and where scores were settled with gun-slinging and shootouts. Early 20th Century Historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier was not just a place, but a “process” that transformed people into the quintessential American. If settlers weren’t chasing gold, they were roundin...

Innovations of the Gilded Age helped usher in modern America. Urbanization and technological creativity led to many engineering advances such as bridges and canals, elevators and skyscrapers, trolley lines and subways.  But while the middle and upper classes enjoyed the allure of city life, little changed for the poor - particularly immigrants from Europe. Horrific living conditions, high crime rates and a pitiable existence l...

In the mid-19th century, the vast majority of American work was still done on the farm. By the turn of the 20th century, the United States economy revolved around the factory.  The labor movement in the United States grew out of the need to protect the common interest of workers. For those in the industrial sector, organized labor unions fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement...

The late 19th Century was met with unprecedented levels of wealth. Railroads and soon, telephone lines, stretched across the country, creating new opportunities for entrepreneurs and cheaper goods for consumers. But a nation that had long viewed itself in idyllic terms, as a nation of small farmers and craftsmen, confronted the emergence of a society increasingly divided between the haves and the have-nots. Some Americans...