At the University of California, for example, thirty-one professors were dismissed in 1950 for refusing to sign a loyalty oath.

More than 1.5 million people had died during the conflict,

The Korean peninsula was divided because when Japan surrendered in September 1945, a U.S.-Soviet joint occupation quickly became a standoff.

Although Roosevelt was skeptical of Stalin, he always held out hope that the Soviets could be brought into the “Free World.” Harry S. Truman

President Roosevelt’s sudden death in April 1945

made headlines by threatening President Roosevelt with a march on Washington, D.C. In this “crisis of democracy,” Randolph said, defense industries refused to hire African Americans and the armed forces remained segregated.

Jim Crow segregation in both the civilian and military sectors remained a problem for black women who wanted to join the war effort. Even after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 in 1941, supervisors who hired black women still often relegated them to the most menial tasks on factory floors.

With so many American workers deployed overseas and so many new positions created by war production, posters like the iconic “We Can Do It!” urged women to support the war effort by entering the work force.

The federal government raised income taxes and boosted the top marginal tax rate to 94 percent.

Nagasaki before and after the bombing and the fires had burnt out.

The German-Hungarian-American physicist Leó Szilárd wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 which Albert Einstein signed

A residential section Tokyo that was destroyed during the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

Ten billion dollars in investments (equivalent to about $100 billion today) disappeared in a matter of hours.

What did the rebirth of the Klan and the continuation of lynching suggest about US attitudes regarding their communities?

Despite the breadth of its political activism, the Klan is today remembered largely as a violent vigilante group, with good reason.

A Klan parade in Washington, in 1926.

the second national Klan was composed largely of middle-class members

William Jennings Bryan at the trial in 1925. He died a few weeks later.

The need to protect working-class women was starkly illustrated in 1911 when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan caught fire. The doors of the factory had been chained shut to prevent women employees from taking unauthorized breaks. The managers who held the keys had saved themselves when the fire broke out, but they left over two hundred women locked in the factory. A rickety fire escape ladder on the side of the building collapsed immediately. Women lined the rooftop and crowded the windows of the ten-story building to avoid the flames and smoke. Many jumped, landing in what newspaper reports described as a “mangled, bloody pulp”. Life nets held by firemen tore at the impact of the falling bodies. Among the onlookers, “women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept [and] hurled themselves against the police lines.” By the time the fire burned itself out, 71 workers were injured and 146 had died.

It would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life. Generations of women had pushed for the right to vote.

Drunkenness was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease

The adoption of indoor plumbing made human waste disposal a municipal service rather than the responsibility of the people producing the waste. Toilets broke an age-old ecological cycle that had returned nutrients back to the soils that had produced them. This created a soil nutrient problem on farms and a waste disposal problem in cities. What had been a circular resource flow from farm to table and back to farm became a one-way trip. Crops drained farm soils of fertility only to be shipped to cities for consumption and converted into waste that was flushed away. Out of sight, out of mind.

One of the most prominent changes in American life in the nineteenth century was the growth of cities and of the number and percentage of Americans living in them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, Boston had a population of 25,000. New York City was not much bigger, with only 60,000 and Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles had not even been established. By

Americans had apparently witnessed so many startling technological advances that would have seemed far-fetched mere years earlier, that the Edison food machine seemed plausible to some readers.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Chicago became a symbol of the triumph of American industrialization. Its meatpacking industry represented many of the troubling changes occurring in American life. In the last decades of the century Chicago became America’s butcher

We have seen previously that many of America’s new city-dwellers had migrated from the countryside in search of work in new industries.

New conflicts and territorial problems forced Americans to confront the ideological elements of imperialism.

Editorial cartoon from after USA conquest of the Philippines, 1902.

Uncle Sam as a teacher, standing behind a desk in front of his new students who are labeled “Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, Philippines”. They do not look happy to be there. A book on Uncle Sam’s desk is titled “U.S. First Lessons in Self-Government”.

As Americans had explored and settled the West before the Civil War, a sense of “Manifest Destiny” had become a key component of popular culture.

Tom Torlino, a member of the Navajo Nation, entered the Carlisle Indian School in 1882 and departed in 1886. Torlino’s student file contained photographs from 1882 and 1885.

Photo of a pile of American Bison skulls outside a glue-works in Detroit, 1892.

Some women went West with husbands and families; others worked in businesses including brothels catering to the large population of single miners.

But mass production also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions.

He had relied on skilled blacksmiths, skilled machinists, and skilled woodworkers to handcraft horse-drawn machines. But production was slow and the machines were expensive. The reapers enabled massive efficiency gains in grain farming, but their high cost and slow production times put them out of reach of most American wheat farmers

The wealthy president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Andrew Scott, who had been Assistant Secretary of War for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, is often named as one of the first Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Scott suggested that if striking workers complained they were hungry, they should be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”

“The Depression”.