The Congress and the people of the United States have accepted that challenge. Together with other free peoples, we are now fighting to maintain our right to live among our world neighbors in freedom, in common decency, without fear of assault. I have prepared the full record of our past relations with Japan, and it will be submitted to the Congress. It begins with the visit of Commodore Parry to Japan eighty-eight years ago. It ends with the visit of two Japanese emissaries to the Secretary of State last Sunday, an hour after Japanese forces had loosed their bombs and machine guns against our flag, our forces and our citizens.

The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality. Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race. Their challenge has now been flung at the United States of America. The Japanese have treacherously violated the longstanding peace between us. Many American soldiers and sailors have been killed by enemy action. American ships have been sunk; American airplanes have been destroyed.

The US declared war on Japan the following day, and Germany and Italy declared war on America on December 11th. ​

It was the Soviet Union that broke Hitler’s army.

Ideologically, the Japanese justified their conquests by claiming they were liberating Asia from European colonialism. Not all the Asian countries they invaded, however, were happy to become part of the Pan-Asian empire Japan wanted to rule over.

the time the U.S. entered they war, Hitler had betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.

They were unemployed and homeless war veterans, but Hoover called the remaining protesters “insurrectionists” and ordered them to leave.

In 1932, nearly 2,300 banks collapsed, taking credit, personal deposits, and people’s life savings with them.

On October 29, Black Tuesday, the stock market began a fall that would continue for three years.

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

Occupations such as law and medicine remained overwhelmingly male and most female professionals were in feminized professions such as teaching and nursing. And even within these fields, it was difficult for women to rise to leadership positions.

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.

Pickford and other female stars popularized the image of the “flapper,” an independent woman who favored short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes.

Coolidge also supported and signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which for the first time made Indians living on reservations U.S. citizens

The new draft law required all men between the ages of 18 and 30 to register; the following year the top age was raised to 45. Facing the potential of being drafted, 2 million American men volunteered.

Technologically advanced nations had previously restricted their use of weapons like Gatling Guns, Hotchkiss Cannons, and Maxim Guns to suppress natives and expand their imperial reach in the American West, Africa, and the Middle East. When they deployed these weapons against each other, the war quickly became a static conflict fought from trenches dug in the fall of 1914 and occupied for the next five years. Trenches extended from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea coast in Belgium, becoming a symbol of the futility of the war.

A foreign policy of neutrality also reflected America’s focus on the construction and management of its new powerful industrial economy, built in large part with loans and investments from Europe and especially London. U.S.

Washington had urged his countrymen to avoid “foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues”, warning against “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

Although the growing U.S. economy needed large numbers of immigrant workers for its factories and mills and corporations supported immigration to keep wages low, many Americans resented the arrival of so many immigrants.

Presidents Taft and Wilson continued the practice during their own administrations. Lenders took advantage of the region’s need for cash and exacted punishing interest rates on massive loans, which were then sold off in pieces on the secondary bond market.

sixteen all-white battleships

Roosevelt resigned his naval office in order to fight in Cuba. After winning headlines in the war, Roosevelt was rewarded by being selected to replace McKinley’s first vice president, Garret Hobart, who had died in office, in the 1900 election. When McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became president, he acted immediately to expand naval power. This included commissioning eleven battleships between 1904 and 1907.

Debs ran for president again while in prison and again received nearly a million votes.

Black farmers responded by establishing the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union in 1886. Their organization spread quickly and grew to 1.2 million members by 1891.

At its peak, the Farmers’ Alliance claimed 1,500,000 members meeting in 40,000 local sub-alliances.

Farmers met in Lampasas, Texas in 1877 and organized the first Farmers’ Alliance to try to regain some economic power as they negotiated with railroads, merchants, and bankers. Farmers reasoned that if they banded together, they might gain economic leverage similar to that of big business. They could share machinery, bargain collectively with both suppliers and wholesalers, to negotiate higher prices for their crops.

An 1886 advertisement for Magic Washer detergent declared “The Chinese Must Go”. Many Chinese people ran laundries that competed with the company’s detergent and washing machines.

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.”

When local police forces would not or could not suppress the strikes, governors called on state militias or even the US Army to break them and restore rail service.

The Lincoln administration’s Pacific Railway Act created a new transcontinental rail industry. Its elimination of state banking in favor of a system of national banks consolidated credit in eastern financial centers, primarily in New York City.