Dreamers—students who were born elsewhere but grew up in the United States—and immigration officials separated refugee-status-seeking parents and children at the border.

Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of foreign-born individuals in the United States grew from 7.9 percent to 12.9 percent, and the number of undocumented immigrants tripled from 3.5 million to 11.2.

the Grenada invasion overthrew the leftist government after less than a week of fighting.

War Powers Resolution, which dramatically reduced the president’s ability to wage war without congressional consent.

Protesters converged on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of August 1968, when a bitterly fractured Democratic Party gathered to assemble a passable platform and nominate a broadly acceptable presidential candidate.

Legal changes also promoted higher divorce rates

Viet Minh forces led by Ho Chi Minh.

After French troops were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, U.S. officials helped broker a temporary settlement that partitioned Vietnam in two, with a Soviet/Chinese-backed state in the north and an American-backed state in the south.

financial deregulation had rolled back Depression-era restraints and again allowed risky business practices to dominate the world of American finance.

Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that no limits could be placed on political spending by corporations, unions, and nonprofits.

2000 election pitted Vice President Albert Gore Jr. against George W. Bush,

Democratic Party nominated a relative unknown, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton

George H. W. Bush was a World War II veteran, president of a successful oil company, chair of the Republican National Committee, director of the CIA, and member of the House of Representatives from Texas.

The economy continued its halfhearted recovery from the Great Recession.

In December 1998, the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president. I

Bush Doctrine, a policy in which the United States would have the right to unilaterally and preemptively make war on any regime or terrorist organization that posed a threat to the United States or to U.S. citizens.

Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right. Nearly two thirds of Americans supported the position.46

In that year’s presidential race, Republicans spurned their political establishment and nominated a real estate developer and celebrity billionaire, Donald Trump, who, decrying the tyranny of political correctness and promising to Make America Great Again, promised to build a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants and bar Muslim immigrants

ersonal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which decreased welfare benefits, restricted eligibility, and turned over many responsibilities to states. Clinton said it would “break the cycle of dependency.”

the Bush administration set its sights on Iraq

Bush administration officials made plans for military action against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. What would become the longest war in American history began with the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001.

1989 essay, “The End of History?”

The explosive growth of mass incarceration exacted a heavy toll on African American communities long into the twenty-first century

supply-side economics held that lower personal and corporate tax rates would encourage greater private investment and production

Tax Reform Act of 1986. The bill lowered the top corporate tax rate from 46 percent to 34 percent and reduced the highest marginal income tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent, while also simplifying the tax code and eliminating numerous loopholes.

oviet-allied governments in Eastern Europe tottered under pressure from dissident organizations like Poland’s Solidarity and East Germany’s Neues Forum.

This trust made possible the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which committed both sides to a sharp reduction in their nuclear arsenal.

House voted 411–0 to approve the Boland Amendment, which barred the United States from supplying funds to the contras, a right-wing insurgency fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a space-based system that could shoot down incoming Soviet missiles.

a group of centrists formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) as a vehicle for distancing the party from organized labor and Keynesian economics while cultivating the business community.

As a result, the United States experienced a severe economic recession in 1981 and 1982.

n 1979 Jerry Falwell—a Baptist minister and religious broadcaster from Lynchburg, Virginia—founded the Moral Majority, an explicitly political organization dedicated to advancing a “pro-life, pro-family, pro-morality, and pro-American” agenda.

Beverly LaHaye (whose husband, Tim—an evangelical pastor in San Diego—later coauthored the wildly popular Left Behind Christian book series) founded Concerned Women for America, which linked small groups of local activists opposed to the ERA, abortion, homosexuality, and no-fault divorc

Democrat George Wallace masterfully exploited the racial, cultural, and economic resentments of working-class whites during his presidential runs in 1968 and 1972

candidate Ronald Reagan described what he saw as the American Dream under Democratic president Jimmy Carter. T

In the years between 1953 and 1960, East Detroit lost ten plants and over seventy-one thousand jobs

The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 facilitated southern states’ frontal assault on unions

Jerry Falwell, said in 1980, “It is now time to take a stand on certain moral issues. . . . We must stand against the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist revolution, and the homosexual revolution. We must have a revival in this country.”

The Camp David Accords—named for the president’s rural Maryland retreat, where thirteen days of secret negotiations were held—represented the first time an Arab state had recognized Israel, and the first time Israel promised Palestine self-government.

Carter had touted the “misery index,” the simple addition of the unemployment rate to the inflation rate, as an indictment of Gerald Ford and Republican rule

Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a nuclear physicist and peanut farmer who represented the rising generation of younger, racially liberal “New South” Democrats, captured the Democratic nomination.

Americans of 1968 turned their back on hope. They wanted peace. They wanted stability. They wanted “law and order.”

The previous month Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel of the world’s leading oil producers, embargoed oil exports to the United States in retaliation for American intervention in the Middle East

Altamont was a disorganized disaster. Inadequate sanitation, a horrid sound system, and tainted drugs strained concertgoers.

Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA organization (“Stop Taking Our Privileges”) trumpeted the value and advantages of being a homemaker and mother

Carter Doctrine not only signaled Carter’s ambivalent commitment to de-escalation and human rights, it testified to his increasingly desperate presidency

Nothing did more to expose this gap than the 1968 Tet Offensive

Rioting in Watts stemmed from local African American frustrations with residential segregation, police brutality, and racial profiling

Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the most dramatic foreign policy crisis in the history of the United States.

On April 16, 1961, an invasion force consisting primarily of Cuban émigrés landed on Girón Beach at the Bay of Pigs.

Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army initiated a new era of Cuban history. Having ousted the corrupt Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, who had fled Havana on New Year’s Eve, Castro and his rebel forces made their way triumphantly through the capital city’s streets.

Americans were captivated by the 1960 race between Republican vice president Richard Nixon and Democratic senator John F. Kennedy,

Vietcong (VC) units

the USS Maddox reported incoming fire from North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin

Dien Bien Phu

Iran and Guatemala

General Dwight Eisenhower (“Ike”), most recently North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) supreme commander, felt obliged to join the race in order to beat back the conservatives and “prevent one of our great two Parties from adopting a course which could lead to national suicide.”

economist Milton Friedman became its president

Keynesian economics—the dominant notion that government fiscal and monetary policy were necessary economic tools

Libertarianism took as its core principle the promotion of individual liberty, property rights, and an economy with a minimum of government regulation

National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)

Mattachine Society in Los Angeles and gay women formed the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco as support group

Beat Generation, disillusioned with capitalism, consumerism, and traditional gender roles, sought a deeper meaning in life. Beats traveled across the country, studied Eastern religions, and experimented with drugs, sex, and art.

Books like Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946) were diligently studied by women who took their career as housewife as just that: a career, complete with all the demands and professional trappings of job development and training.

John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society. Galbraith’s celebrated book examined America’s new post–World War II consumer economy and political culture

UN member-states and was given one of five seats—alongside the United States, Britain, France, and China—on the select Security Council

he Internal Security Act, or McCarran Act, passed by Congress in September 1950, mandated all “communist organizations” to register with the government, gave the government greater powers to investigate sedition, and made it possible to prevent suspected individuals from gaining or keeping their citizenship

Joseph McCarthy burst onto the national scene during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950. Waving a sheet of paper in the air, he proclaimed: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping [U.S.] policy.

Bretton Woods Conference

when the CCP, led by Mao Zedong, declared victory against Kuomintang nationalists led by the Western-backed Chiang Kai-shek

the Domino Theory became a standard basis for the justification of U.S. interventions abroad.

the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (SPSI) held hearings on communist influence in American society.

through the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD)

On October 1, ROK/UN forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, and on October 26 they reached the Yalu River, the traditional Korea-China border

“National Security Memorandum 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” a national defense memo known as NSC-68,

Warsaw Pact, which included Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact in which the United States and Canada were joined by England, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.

Berlin, which lay squarely within the GDR, was divided into two sections (and, from August 1961 until November 1989, famously separated by physical walls).

“iron curtain”

Mexican Revolution

Roosevelt had been the assistant secretary of the navy but had resigned his position in order to see action in the war. His actions in Cuba made him a national celebrity.

The Maine sat undisturbed in the harbor for about two weeks. Then, on the evening of February 15, a titanic explosion tore open the ship and sent it to the bottom of the ocean.

gunboat diplomacy

Congress ratified the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Spanish-American War and gave Spain $20 million in exchange for the Philippine Islands.

Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, proclaiming U.S. police power in the Caribbean

As a result, Catholics in America faced two intertwined challenges: one external, related to Protestant anti-Catholicism, and the other internal, having to do with the challenges of assimilation.

Chiang Kai-shek

Between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands of women were raped, when the Japanese besieged and then sacked Nanjing. The Western press labeled it the Rape of Nanjing

Championing German racial supremacy, fascist government, and military expansionism, Hitler rose to power and, after aborted attempts to take power in Germany, became chancellor in 1933 and the Nazis conquered German institutions

Mao Zedong recognized the power of the Chinese peasant population

Blitz—a bombing campaign against cities and civilians.

In the north, the German army starved Leningrad to death during an interminable siege;

Sudetenland, a large, ethnically German area of Czechoslovakia

he Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—with the Soviet Union that coordinated the splitting of Poland between the two powers and promised nonaggression thereafter

he G.I. Bill was a multifaceted, multibillion-dollar entitlement program that rewarded honorably discharged veterans with numerous benefits

Wagner-Rogers Bill, an act to allow twenty thousand German-Jewish children into the United States

President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any persons from designated “exclusion zones”

the Double V campaign. It called on African Americans to fight two wars: the war against Nazism and fascism abroad and the war against racial inequality at home.

A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest Black trade union in the nation, made headlines by threatening President Roosevelt with a march on Washington, D.C.

etween 1942 and 1964, the United States contracted thousands of Mexican nationals to work in American agriculture and railroads in the Bracero Program

the Manhattan Project, a hugely expensive, ambitious program to harness atomic energy and create a single weapon capable of leveling entire cities

D-Day, as it became popularly known, was the largest amphibious assault in history.

Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin)

Axis,

The European war began when the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.

Japan established the nation of Manchukuo out of the former province of Manchuria.1

It was called Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.

, mandates “were inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”

Germans again pursued unrestricted submarine warfare to deprive the Allies of replenishment supplies

Germans sank the RMS Lusitania.

The real fight for the League of Nations was on the American home front.

The War Department, however, barred Black troops from combat and relegated Black soldiers to segregated service units where they worked as general laborers.

Committee on Public Information, known as the Creel Committee, headed by Progressive George Creel, to inspire patriotism and generate support for military adventures

American Expeditionary Force in France

Congress approved the Selective Service Act,

America suffered through the “Red Summer.

Boxer Rebellion, a movement opposed to foreign businesses and missionaries operating in China

Dollar diplomacy offered a less costly method of empire and avoided the troubles of military occupation

Alfred Thayer Mahan’s naval theories, described in his The Influence of Sea Power upon History, influenced Roosevelt a great deal

Guano Islands Act of 1856.

Second New Deal

he Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to provide emergency loans to banks

Federal Emergency Relief Administration

President Herbert Hoover reassured an audience that “the depression is over.”4 But the president was not simply guilty of false optimism. Hoover made many mistakes

imed to raise the prices of agricultural commodities (and hence farmers’ income) by offering cash incentives to voluntarily limit farm production

Senator Huey Long, a flamboyant Democrat from Louisiana, was perhaps the most important “voice of protest.”

Their patrons, afraid that reactionary policies meant further financial trouble, rushed to withdraw money before institutions could close their doors, ensuring their fate. Such bank runs were not uncommon in the 1920s, but in 1930, with the economy worsening and panic from the crash accelerating

he highest tariff in American history, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930

a new national workers’ organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), breaking with the more conservative, craft-oriented AFL

Francis Townsend, a former doctor and public health official from California, promoted a plan for old-age pensions which, he argued, would provide economic security for the elderly (who disproportionately suffered poverty) and encourage recovery by allowing older workers to retire from the workforce.

his “court-packing scheme,” as opponents termed it, was clearly designed to allow the president to appoint up to six friendly, pro–New Deal justices to drown the influence of old-time conservatives on the Court

“Scottsboro Boys,” who soon became a national symbol of continuing racial prejudice in America and a rallying point for civil rights–minded Americans.

Los Angeles County Department of Charities began a simultaneous drive to repatriate Mexicans and Mexican Americans on relief, negotiating a charity rate with the railroads to return Mexicans “voluntarily” to their mother country

Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a Chicano nationalist manifesto that reflected Gonzales’s vision of Chicanos as a unified, historically grounded, all-encompassing group fighting against discrimination in the United States.

March on Washington. The march called for, among other things, civil rights legislation, school integration, an end to discrimination by public and private employers, job training for the unemployed, and a raise in the minimum wage.

President Lyndon Johnson

Medgar Evers was assassinated at his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

The Albany Movement included elements of a Christian commitment to social justice in its platform, with activists stating that all people were “of equal worth” in God’s family and that “no man may discriminate against or exploit another.”

with all deliberate speed” was so vague and ineffectual that it left the actual business of desegregation in the hands of those who opposed it.

Shelley v. Kraemer, declared racially restrictive neighborhood housing covenants—property deed restrictions barring sales to racial minorities—legally unenforceable.

Congress passed the Emergency Immigration Act as a stopgap immigration measure and then, three years later, permanently established country-of-origin quotas through the National Origins Act.

The area’s cultural ferment produced the Harlem Renaissance and fostered what was then termed the New Negro Movement

There was a profound and keenly felt cultural shift that, for many women, meant increased opportunity to work outside the home. The number of professional women, for example, significantly rose in the decade.

The automobile industry also fostered the new culture of consumption by promoting the use of credit.

Democratic governor of New York, Al Smith, whose Catholic faith and immigrant background aroused nativist suspicions and whose connections to Tammany Hall and anti-Prohibition politics offended reformers, and the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover,

omen had already lent their efforts to prohibition, which went into effect under the Eighteenth Amendment

Harding’s administration suffered a tremendous setback when several officials conspired to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for cash. Known as the Teapot Dome scandal

Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States.

Clarence Darrow, an agnostic attorney and a keen liberal mind from Chicago, volunteered to aid the defense and came up against William Jennings Bryan.

Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee, emphasized in his New Freedom agenda neither trust busting nor federal regulation but rather small-business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances.

In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision that legalized segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Du Bois said Washington had, in his 1895 “Compromise” speech, “implicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . . I never thought Washington was a bad man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.”

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that “unreasonably” stifled free trade.

Addams returned to the United States and in 1889 founded Hull House in Chicago with her longtime confidant and companion Ellen Gates Starr

The social gospel emerged within Protestant Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. It emphasized the need for Christians to be concerned for the salvation of society, and not simply individual souls

Meat Inspection Act

Journalists who exposed business practices, poverty, and corruption—labeled by Theodore Roosevelt as “muckrakers”—aroused public demands for reform.

Other champions of muscular Christianity, such as the newly formed Young Men’s Christian Association, built gymnasiums, often attached to churches, where youths could strengthen their bodies as well as their spirits

That a “New South” emerged in the decades between Reconstruction and World War I is debatable. If measured by industrial output and railroad construction, the New South was a reality but if measured relative to the rest of the nation, it was a limited one. If measured in terms of racial discrimination, however, the New South looked much like the Old.

urban political machines

he corporation, using new state incorporation laws passed during the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century, became a legal mechanism for nearly any enterprise to marshal vast amounts of capital while limiting the liability of shareholders.

nd so alliance members organized a political party—the People’s Party, or the Populists, as they came to be known.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor.

The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism

Cyrus McCormick had overseen the construction of mechanical reapers

By the turn of the century, corporate leaders and wealthy industrialists embraced the new principles of scientific management, or Taylorism, after its noted proponent, Frederick Taylor

World’s Columbian Exposition

Of all the Midwestern and western cities that blossomed from the bridging of western resources and eastern capital in the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most spectacular.

over two hundred thousand Chinese migrants lived in the United States.

Indian Peace Commission

hus began a period of Navajo history called the Long Walk

The Sand Creek Massacre

The Homestead Act excluded married women from filing claims

American bison slaughter

convict-lease system

Compromise of 1877,

Enforcement Acts between 1870 and 1871. The acts made it criminal to deprive African Americans of their civil rights. The acts also deemed violent Klan behavior as acts of rebellion against the United States and allowed for the use of U.S. troops to protect freedpeople.

the Lost Cause tried to rewrite the history of the antebellum South to deemphasize the brutality of slavery. They also created the myth that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights instead of slavery, which was the actual cause.

hese so-called Lincoln governments sprang up in pockets where Union support existed like Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Unsurprisingly, these were also the places that were exempted from the liberating effects of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Freedmen’s Bureau

first Reconstruction Act

The Fourteenth Amendment

offered southern states a quick restoration into the Union.

Thirteenth Amendment