An example of this was the Rosenberg case of 1951-3, which resulted in the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

“increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction” and warned “every individual” of “the ever-present possibility of annihilation.”

A new chapter in the Cold War began on October 1, 1949, when Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to victory against Western-backed Kuomintang nationalists led by the Chiang Kai-shek.

n the eve of American involvement in World War II, on August 14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill had issued a joint declaration of goals for postwar peace, known as the Atlantic Charter. An adaptation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the charter established the United Nations. The Soviet Union was among the fifty charter UN member-states and was given one of five seats alongside the “Four Policemen” (the United States, Britain, France, and China) on the Security Council

he wrote, and “the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism . . . is more dangerous and insidious than ever before.”

Historians still debate when American leaders and the public realized the full extent of the Holocaust.

the Rape of Nanjing

Members of the Mochida family awaiting transport to an internment camp. Mr. Mochida lost his home and florist business.

When it ended, the United States stood alone as the world’s superpower.

The war included industrialized genocide and unleashed the most destructive technology ever used in war.

We Americans are not destroyers—we are builders. We are now in the midst of a war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children.

We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.

With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

At the same time, for many lesbians in the decade, the increased sexualization of women brought new scrutiny to same-sex female relationships previously dismissed as harmless.

On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh concluded the first ever nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. Armed with only a few sandwiches, bottles of water, paper maps, and a flashlight, Lindbergh successfully navigated over the Atlantic Ocean in thirty-three hours.

The New York Times had ridiculed jazz as “savage” because of its racial heritage, but the music represented cultural independence to others. As Harlem-based musician William Dixon put it, “It did seem, to a little boy, that . . . white people really owned everything. But that wasn’t entirely true. They didn’t own the music that I played.”

“We wish to escape,” explained Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, “the restrictions of manmade laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us.” Burroughs published a new Tarzan story nearly every year from 1914 until 1939. “We would each like to be Tarzan,” he said. “At least I would; I admit it.” Like many Americans in the 1920s, Burroughs wished to escape the constraints of a society that seemed more industrialized with each passing day.

Headlines announced, “To Lynch Negro Tonight” and “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”

In 1921 the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa was one of the most affluent and commercially successful black communities in America. Originally attracted by the Oklahoma oil boom, black workers, merchants, and professionals built a thriving business district that Booker T. Washington had called the “Negro Wall Street”. Although they made up only about an eighth of the population, African Americans prospered in Tulsa.

The Great War toppled empires, created new nations, and sparked tensions that would explode across future years; especially in the Second World War less than a generation later.

otions of patriotic duty and adventure appealed to many young men.

In 1919, racist riots erupted across the country from April until October. The bloodshed included thousands of injuries, hundreds of deaths, and vast destruction of private and public property across the nation. The weeklong Chicago Riot, from July 27 to August 3, 1919, considered the summer’s worst, included mob violence, murder, and arson. Race riots had rocked the nation before, but the Red Summer was something new. Recently empowered black Americans actively defended their families and homes from hostile white rioters, often with militant force.

The charred corpse of Will Brown after being killed, mutilated and burned in Omaha, Nebraska, September 1919.

In 1900, nearly 80 percent of Chicago’s population was either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born immigrants.

An early critic of urban inequality was Jacob Riis, a native of Denmark who became one of New York’s most prominent journalists. Riis had been born in 1849 into a family of fifteen children and had emigrated to New York at the age of 21. Originally trained as a carpenter, Riis became a newspaper reporter specializing in melodramatic accounts of the poverty and misery he found in neighborhoods like New York’s infamous Five Points. When words failed to convey the jarring disparity he witnessed between the glittering world of New York high society and the hopeless world of the poor, Riis turned to photography.

While many women worked to liberate themselves socially and sexually, many, sometimes simultaneously, worked to uplift others. Reform opened new possibilities for women’s activism in American public life and gave new energy to the long campaign for women’s suffrage.

As young women pushed back against traditional expectations about premarital sexual expression, some social welfare experts and moral reformers labeled them feeble-minded, preferring to believe that such unfeminine behavior must be a symptom of clinical insanity rather than free-willed expression. Young people challenged the norms of their parents’ generations by wearing new fashions and enjoying the attractions of the city. Women’s clothing loosened their physical constraints: corsets relaxed and hemlines rose.

As railroad networks and cities expanded, so did the anonymity and freedom of southern blacks. Southern cities were becoming a center of black middle-class life that threatened racial hierarchies. White southerners relied on segregation to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals.

Southern lynchings often became public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators.

Major powers plan to cut up China for themselves in 1899, but “Uncle Sam” objects.

The word empire typically conjures images of ancient Rome, Genghis Khan, or the British Empire: powers that depended on military conquest, colonization, occupation, or direct resource exploitation

The transcript of Chief Joseph’s surrender, recorded by an Army officer, became a landmark of American rhetoric. “Hear me, my chiefs,” Joseph said, “I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

Illustration of the largest mass execution in U.S. history, December 26, 1862 in Mankato Minnesota. 38 Indians were hanged.

American agents supervising reservations considered Indians lazy and thought Native cultures were inferior to their own. The views of J. L. Broaddus, appointed to oversee tribes on the Hoopa Valley reservation in California, are typical: “The great majority of them are idle, listless, careless, and improvident. They seem to take no thought about provision for the future, and many of them would not work at all if they were not compelled to do so. They would rather live upon the roots and acorns gathered by their women than to work for flour and beef.”

Missionary women played a central role in cultural reeducation programs that tried to not only instill Protestant religion but also to impose traditional American gender roles and family structures. Their goal was to replace Indians’ communal social structures with small, patriarchal households. Women’s labor became a contentious issue because few tribes divided work according to the gender norms of middle- and upper-class Americans. Fieldwork traditional for white males was primarily done by Native women who controlled the products of their labor and the land that was worked. This gave the women status in society as food providers. Missionaries urged Native women to leave the fields and engage in more proper “women’s work”.

Industrial capitalism produced the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity that the world had ever seen.

The Workingmen’s Party reorganized in 1878 as the Socialist Labor Party, which still exists today.

By 1889, less than a decade later, McCormick was producing over one hundred thousand a year in spite of labor disputes that exploded into the Haymarket Massacre of 1886

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court supported a policy of “separate but equal” in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson.