This was because he was a member of an older political generation. Johan F. Kenndy had entered politics as a congressperson in 1947 after serving in world war2. Johnson had been in Washington since 1931 as a congress person himself.

A Hollywood musical, high society blues, captured the hope of instant prosperity. Ironically, the movie didn't reach theatres until after the market crash. Although most Americans had little savings and only the richest 2.5 percent invested in stocks, those who did often borrowed to do so.

 Rosevelt wrote to a friend that "I wish to do everything in my power to make the republican party the party of sane, constructive radicalism, just as it was under Lincoln". But the former president died unexpectedly in January 1919 of coronary embolism. Laking any candidates with compelling personality to replace Roosevelt, the party decided to nominate Harding in a back -channel style of negotiation that became Known as the "smoke -filled room'

        But empires can take many forms, and imperial processes occur in many contexts. One hundred years after the United States won its independence from the British empire, some began to believe America was becoming (and perhaps should become) an empire of its own. 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.

The expanding markets and technological improvements that increased efficiency also decreased commodity prices. Commercialization of agriculture put farmers at the mercy of bankers, railroads, and large equipment manufacturers like McCormick. Fluctuating global commodity markets caused wide swings in the prices farmers could get for their produce.

e are paying particular attention to mostly urban issues of labor and corporate power, and as result passing over some important issues of rural and western American that we will return to in the next chapter. This means we will be covering the same decades from two slightly different angeles in successive chapters.

Marx's ideal of "dictatorship of proletariat", where workers would live in such harmony that police and armies would be unnecessary, never arrived for Soviet Union, Kennan wrote. Instead, the Soviet had to be "contained". Less than two weeks later, on march 5, former British prime minister Winston Churchill visited President Harry Truman in his home state and made a speech at a small Missouri college, declaring that Europe had been cut in half by an "iron curtain" that had "descended a cross the contienent".as the Russian had advanced toward Germany in the final years of world war 2, they had not only retaken Russian territory but expanded their control over eastern Europe.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced combing in the American Island of Oahu, The Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our secretary of state a formal reply to a recent American message.

The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the pacific provide the climax of decade of international immorality. Their challenge has now been flung at the United States of America. The course that Japan has followed for the past ten years in Asia has paralleled the course of Hittler and Mussolini in Europe and Africa.

the war included industrialized genocide and unleashed the most destructive technology ever used in war. the global economic crisis gave way to a global war that became the deadliest and the most destructive in human history. when it ended, the United States stood alone as the world's superpower. The European war began in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland after signing non aggression treaty with the Soviet union defining the Baltic states as russian sphere of influnce and then annexing poland.

It wasn't the first war fought in multiple regions of the world by most of the world's major powers. The US entered the conflict in 1917 and was never again the same. The new Jermany had population of 41 million was an industrial powerhouse. The German navy was second only to the British royal navy.

We have seen previously that many of America's new city -dwellers had migrated from the countryside in search of work in new industries. after the war of 1812, many more were immigrants from foreign countries. Some of the first migrations of large groups followed the Irish Famine in 1845 and a series of failed socialist revolutions in the German states in 1848.Many poor and working class city dwellers were also recent immigrants, who needed time to learn the language and customs of their new homes.