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| Civil War and Reconstuction |
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1861-1877
The Civil War was fought over differences between the North and South of the United States. S. Carolina was the first to suceed and was follwed by several other states. They started the Confederacy. The War lasted until 1865 and resulted in total devestation and destruction in the south. Reconstruction was the period of time after the civil war when the southern part of the U.S was being rebuilt. |
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The "Gilded Age" in American History refers to the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction Era from 1865 to 1901, which saw unprecedented economic, territorial, industrial, and population expansion. The drastic increase in the diversity of the United States due to immigration, drawn by the promise of American prosperity, encountered increased prejudice and racial discrimination from the largely Anglo-Saxon majority.
The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), employing the ironic difference between a "gilded" and a Golden Age. The inequalities of the period are highlighted by the American upper class's proclamation of an "American Renaissance", citing the rush of new public institutions established during the period—hospitals, museums, schools, opera houses, public libraries, symphony orchestras—and the Beaux-Arts architectural idiom of the time.
The age of prosperity enjoyed by the upper classes of American society after the recovery from the Panic of 1873 floated on the surface of the booming economy of the Second Industrial Revolution, and it was fired by the period of wealth transfer that catalyzed dramatic social changes, creating for the first time a class of the super-rich "captains of industry". These "Robber barons" whose network of business, social and family connections, ruled a social world with clearly defined boundaries. Other important features of the Gilded Age were drastic changes made in education to assimilate the immigrants, the religion movements, and the huge empires that were built in a newly national press, notably by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. |
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1898-1914
In the United States of America, the Progressive Era was a period of reform which lasted from the 1890s through the 1920s, although some experts use the narrower time frame of 1900 to 1917. The reformers advocated the Efficiency Movement. Progressives assumed that anything old was encrusted with inefficient and useless practices. A scientific study of the problem would enable experts to discover the "one best solution." Progressives strongly opposed waste and corruption, and tended to assume that opponents were motivated by ignorance or corruption. They sought change in all policies at all levels of society, economy and government. Initially the movement was successful at local level, and then it progressed to state and gradually national. The reformers (and their opponents) were predominantly members of the middle class. Most were well educated, white, Protestants who lived in the cities.
Women also came to the fore in the Progressive era and proved their value as social workers. The Progressives pushed for social justice, general equality and public safety, but there were contradictions within the movement, especially regarding race. The Catholics had their own version of the movement which they applied to their schools, colleges, and hospitals |
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| The First World War, and (before 1939) the Great War, was a world conflict lasting from August 1914 to the final Armistice on November 11, 1918. The Allied Powers (led by the United Kingdom, France and until 1917 Russia , and, after 1917, the United States) defeated the Central Powers (led by the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). The war caused the collapse of four empires and a radical change in the map of Europe and the Middle East. Before 1917 the Allied powers are sometimes referred to as the Triple Entente, and the Central Powers are sometimes referred to as the Triple Alliance |
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The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between World War I and World War II, particularly in North America, largely coinciding with the Roaring Twenties; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of this age saw much decline. The focus of the elements of this age, in some contrast with the Roaring Twenties, in historical and cultural studies, are somewhat different, with a greater emphasis on Modernism per se.
The age takes its name from jazz music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity among many segments of society. Among the prominent concerns and trends of the period include the public embrace of technological developments (typically seen as progress)—cars, air travel and the telephone—as well as new trends in social behavior, the arts, and culture. Central developments included Art Deco design and architecture. A great theme of the age was individualism and a greater emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment in the wake of the misery, destruction and perceived hypocrisy and waste of WWI and pre-war values. |
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| A period of time in the US when the economy had failed. The Banks, the stock market crahs and over indulgece were causes of the depression. |
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World War II, also, The Second World War, or WWII, was the global military conflict that took place between 1939 and 1945. World War II was the largest and deadliest war in history.
The war began between Nazi Germany and the Allies. Germany was later joined by Italy, Japan, and others, jointly known as the Axis. The Allies at first were made up of Poland, the British Commonwealth, France, and others. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and in December, Japan attacked the United States. China, which had been at war with Japan since the mid-1930s, also joined the Allies, as eventually did a number of other countries.
Italy surrendered in September, 1943, Germany in May 1945. The surrender of Japan marked the end of the war, on 2 September 1945.
It is possible that up to 62 million people died in the war; with estimates varying greatly. Most were civilians, as a result of disease, starvation, genocide, and the aerial bombing of cities. Estimates place deaths in the Soviet Union at around 23 million, while China suffered about 10 million. Poland suffered the most deaths in proportion to its population of any country, losing approximately 5.6 million out of a pre-war population of 34.8 million (16%).
The war was responsible for the re-drawing of national boundaries and the creation of new nations, the end of western colonialism, and the beginning of the Cold War. [1]
After World War II, Europe was informally split into western and Soviet spheres of influence. Western Europe largely aligned as NATO, and Eastern Europe largely as the Warsaw pact. There was a fundamental shift in power from Western Europe and the British Empire to the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
In Asia, the United States' military occupation of Japan led to Japan's democratization. China's civil war continued through and after the war, resulting eventually in the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The former colonies of the European powers began their road to independence. |
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1945-1992
A era of competition and confrentation between the United States and Russia. |
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The Civil Rights Movement refers to a set of noted events and reform movements in the United States aimed at abolishing public and private acts of racial discrimination against African Americans between 1954 to 1968, particularly in the southern United States. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, enlarged and gradually eclipsed the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century in the United States, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom. This period is sometimes referred to as the nadir of American race relations. Elected, appointed, or hired government authorities began to require or permit discrimination, specifically in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas. There were four required or permitted acts of discrimination against African Americans. They included racial segregation – upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 - which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities. Although racial discrimination was present nationwide, the combination of law, public and private acts of discrimination, marginal economic opportunity, and violence directed toward African Americans in the southern states became known as Jim Crow.
Noted strategies employed prior to the Civil Rights Movement of 1955 to 1968 to abolish discrimination against African Americans initially included litigation and lobbying efforts by traditional organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These efforts were the distinction of the American Civil Rights Movement from 1896 to 1954. However, by 1955, private citizens became frustrated by gradual approaches to implement desegregation by federal and state governments and the "massive resistance" by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, they adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance known as civil disobedience. The acts of civil disobedience produced crisis situations between practitioners and government authorities. The authorities of federal, state, and local governments often had to act with an immediate response to end the crisis situations – sometimes in the practitioners favor. Some of the different forms of civil disobedience employed include boycotts as successfully practiced by the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) in Alabama, "sit-ins" as demonstrated by the influential Greensboro sit-in (1960) in North Carolina, and marches as exhibited by the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama.
Noted achievements of the Civil Rights Movement are the legal victory in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case that overturned the legal doctrine of "separate but equal" and made segregation legally impermissible, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that restored voting rights, passage of the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 which dramatically changed U.S. immigration policy, and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. |
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