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Apr 30, 2024 · The 1619 Project is a multimedia journalism series that reframes U.S. history around African American experiences, particularly slavery and its legacy in contemporary American life. The project was originated by New York Times Magazine staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for the project’s introductory essay.
2 days ago · Roe v. Wade, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, ruled (7–2) that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. The Court held that a set of Texas statutes criminalizing abortion in most instances violated a constitutional right to privacy.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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- Abolitionism to Jim Crow
The American civil rights movement started in the mid-1950s. A major catalyst in the push for civil rights was in December 1955, when NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.
Montgomery bus boycott
Read about Rosa Parks and the mass bus boycott she sparked.
Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?
Martin Luther King, Jr., was an important leader of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white customer, was also important. John Lewis, a civil rights leader and politician, helped plan the March on Washington.
What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?
American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.
As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement (see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.
Britannica Quiz
Pop Quiz: 15 Things to Know About Martin Luther King, Jr.
During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.
Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography—one of many slave narratives—and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.
Apr 26, 2024 · Great Depression, worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world, sparking fundamental changes in economic institutions, macroeconomic policy, and economic theory.
Trying to identify any single event as crucial to the understanding of a given decade may be even more arbitrary. It is certainly subjective. Nevertheless, that attempt can at the very least be a catalyst for discussion. What follows is an attempt to identify decade-defining moments in the history of the United States since the country’s ...
Apr 9, 2024 · Texas City explosion of 1947, industrial disaster sparked by the fire and explosion of the SS Grandcamp on April 16–17, 1947, in Texas City, Texas. The blast set off a chain of fires as well as a 15-foot (4.5-metre) tidal wave. Between 400 and 600 people were killed, with as many as 4,000 injured.
3 days ago · The Cold War had solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in eastern Europe.
