Postwar America (1946-1975)
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Henry A. Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president and Secretary of Commerce under Harry Truman, delivered this speech to a gathering of leftist and liberal groups in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1946. In it, he urges taking a more conciliatory approach in America's foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. In contrast to Truman's…

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Item Type: Speech
Date: 1946

President Harry S. Truman proclaimed the Truman Doctrine in a speech addressed to Congress on March 12, 1947. In addition to drawing a stark contrast between the two different "ways of life" represented by the United States and the Soviet Union, the speech marked a shift in American foreign policy toward a policy of "containment" of Soviet…

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Item Type: Speech
Date: 1947

President Johnson, in this speech delivered at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, 1965, lists the reasons for escalating the United State's involvement in Vietnam. Having secured Congressional authorization with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Johnson launched a bombing campaign in the North, and in March 1965, dispatched 3,500 marines to South…

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Item Type: Speech
Date: 1965

The three murdered civil rights workers from the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project are pictured on this FBI "missing" poster. On June 21st, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were abducted and killed by Klansmen in an effort to intimidate volunteers working to register black voters. Their badly beaten bodies were found weeks…

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Item Type: Poster/Print
Date: 1964

Prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, many southern (and some western) states had devised "literacy tests" and other voting requirements whose primary purpose was to deny African Americans the vote. The tests consisted of written and oral questions about often-obscure aspects of state law and the United States Constitution. They…

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: Circa 1965

This curriculum was created by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for their Freedom Schools, part of the Freedom Summer organizing effort that brought hundreds of college students from around the country to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. SNCC hoped that the Freedom Schools would serve as a "parallel institution" to…

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: 1964

This plan, written by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member Charles Cobb, proposed that SNCC include Freedom Schools as part of the massive organizing effort it was planning for the summer of 1964. SNCC was creating Freedom Summer to bring hundreds of college students from around the country to Mississippi, and Cobb believed that…

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: 1963

The National Liberation Front Committee of Quang Ngai province began disseminating this shortly after the My Lai massacre. While the notice exaggerates some aspects of the massacre, the document suggests the potential of incidents like My Lai to be used by pro-Communist forces as propaganda.

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: 1968

The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán is a manifesto advocating Chicano nationalism and self-determination for Mexican Americans. It was adopted by the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference, a March 1969 convention hosted by Rodolfo Gonzales's Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado.

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: 1969

The U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended the Montgomery bus boycott introduced integrated public transportation to the city in December 1956. Anticipating mixed reactions to the boycott's success, the Montgomery Improvement Association distributed this pamphlet as an advisory guide to passengers reboarding the buses after a year of protest.

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Item Type: Pamphlet
Date: 1956