While government planners and factory owners assumed that women’s industrial work during World War II would last only as long as the war lasted, many of the women had other ideas. After the war ended, despite their new skills, they found…

In the fall of 1865, white southerners, most of them ex-Confederates and planters, won large majorities in local and state elections throughout the South. They quickly passed a series of restrictive laws, or Black Codes, which varied only slightly…

What exactly should be done for freedmen, if anything, was hotly debated in the years following the Civil War. As this exchange between a Union military officer and a former slave in Arkansas shows, even the meaning of freedom was up for grabs.

Native American warriors in the 19th century attacked the various people and institutions that threatened their way of life on the Great Plains. As these reports from various federal agents, including the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and General…

Native American warriors in the 19th century resisted the various people and institutions that threatened their way of life on the Great Plains. In these speeches to federal agents during the Indian Wars of the 1860s, Indigenous leaders attempt to…

Federal bureaucrats devised several methods to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American values and culture. One strategy involved trying to change Native Americans' traditional sense of communally held land to a belief in individually…

The Dawes Act of 1887 sought to assimilate Native Americans by, among other things, transforming their traditional uses and attitudes about land and land ownership to more mainstream American values of private ownership and settled farming. Some…

On May 22, 1856 abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a fiery speech denouncing pro-slavery activists in the territory of Kansas and their supporters in the United States Congress. The next day, while Sumner sat defenseless at…

With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States gained over half a million square miles of new lands in the Southwest. However, American settlers who traveled west to settle the land were not moving into unoccupied territory. …

In the United States, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) increased the demand for industrial production while decreasing the flow of European immigration. Labor shortages in both factories, mines, fields, and service industries meant greater…