FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO 21ST CENTURY AMERICA

1865-1877 Reconstruction of the South

1865  - Lincoln fatally shot at Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth. Vice President Johnson sworn as president. He will fight the Radical Republicans

1865 Amendment XIII: Slavery is abolished and prohibited throughout the States.

1865 Ku Klux Klan created

1865-66 Black Codes before Radical Republican Reconstruction, held the freedmen on the plantations where they had worked as slaves.

1866 - The Civil Rights Act in theory gave the right to vote to Blacks.

1866 > 1868 Amendment XIV: This amendment creates national citizenship for all males, therefore to Blacks. Along with amendments XIII (abolition of slavery) and XV (the suffrage i.e. the right to vote cannot be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude) it might be looked upon as the peace settlement forced upon the South.

1868 (feb.) - President Johnson narrowly misses impeachment.

1869>1870 - Amendment XV grants the franchise (the right to vote)  to freedmen .

1869 - Ulysses Grant is President.

1869 The first transcontinental railroad

1872  - Congress gives amnesty to most Confederates.

1877  - End of Reconstruction.

The  conquest of the West

http://www.over-land.com/

         Grand Teton (Wyoming)

The Rockies

The two railroad companies in charge of the construction of the first intercontinental railorad , the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad join at Promontory Point, Utah. The railroad makes access to the frontier easier for pioneers.

1876 Little Big Horn : General Custer defeated by Indians.

1876 Invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell.

1878 Edison invents the electric bulb.

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

1887 General Allotment Act of 1887 or the Dawes Act

Later on, the old idea of assimilation reappeared. “Carl Schurz, for instance, had believed, already in the 1870’s, that Indians could be regenerated and assimilated , if their tribalism were broken up. The Dawes Act of 1887 had been based on such premises (Merk  242).”

The General Allotment Act of 1887 or the Dawes Act as it is also called, resulted in the sale of 90 million acres of the 140-million-acre Indian estate and allowed low-cost grazing leases on the remaining reservation rangelands.

With the Dawes Act, Congress  provided for the granting of landholdings (allotments, usually 160 acres/65 hectares) to individual Native Americans, replacing communal tribal holdings. Sponsored by U.S. Senator H. L. Dawes, the act sought to absorb tribe members into the national body politic. Allotments could be sold after a statutory period (25 years), and “surplus” land not allotted was opened to settlers. Within decades following the passage of the act the vast majority of what had been tribal land in the West was in white hands. (http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0814821.html) 11nov. 2000.

1890 End of the frontier.
1890 Wounded Knee Massacre: last Indian rebellion.  Chief Big Foot and his tribe massacred.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner's most famous essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," was read before the American Historical Association at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.

 
"[T]he powerful romantic attraction of primitivism, dating back at least to Rousseau [was] the belief that the best antidote to the ills of an overly refined and civilized modern world was a return to simpler, more primitive living. In the United States, this was embodied most strikingly in the national myth of the frontier. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893 the classic academic statement of this myth, but it had been part of American cultural traditions for well over a century. As Turner described the process, easterners and European immigants, in moving to the wild unsettled lands of the frontier, shed the trappings of civilization, rediscovered their primitive racial energies, reinvented direct democratic institutions, and thereby reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that were the source of American democracy and national character." (William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," Cronon, William ed. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.)

1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson : the Supreme Court sets forth the doctrine of "equal but separate facilities" which makes segregation legal.  

1898 - The signing of the Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-American War. Spain recognised the independence of Cuba and sold Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico to the United States for US$20 million. Source: Wikipedia

1902 Reclamation Act

1919 Prohibition enforced (Amendment XVIII). Prohibition is the forbidding by law of the making or sale of alcoholic drinks.

1920 Amendment XIX: Female suffrage: all  American women are given the right to vote.

1920S The roaring twenties

1929 Beginning of the Great Depression: Black Thursday at Wall Street (24th October).

1933 - Prohibition Amendment is repealed (Amendment  XXI)
 

1933 The New Deal is launched : The Tennessee Valley Authority improves the economy of the Tennessee Valley.

Suggested movie

1941-1945 SECOND WORLD WAR

1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7).

1945 Atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 

1946-1960 THE YEARS OF AFFLUENCE

1947  Marshall Plan launched: twelve billion dollars lent or given to European countries by 1951 for recovery.

1950-1953  Korean war

1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy initiates an anti-communist campaign.

1953-1961 DWIGHT  D. EISENHOWER

1957  Peak of Baby Boom

1954 "Brown vs. Topeka" (Separate but equal doctrine  [1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson] overturned).

The prevailing policy especially in education was the famous "separate but equal" doctrine. (cf. 1896) This was the doctrine that was ruled out in a famous case  that the Supreme Court  had to examine in 1954. Chief Justice was Earl Warren, who  possibly stands out as one of the most famous American Chief  Justices along with  John Marshall . The case judged in 1954 was  called "Oliver Brown et al. vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas." Chief Justice Earl Warren  in his conclusion delivered the unanimous opinion of the court "that in the field of public education  the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate education  facilities are inherently unequal." In other words, segregation i

1961President JOHN F. KENNEDY 1961-1963

1961President Kennedy calls for a “New Frontier”
1961-1973 The Vietnam War
1962 Cuban missile crisis
1963 March on Washington
1963 November : President J.F.Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.

1973 Viet Nam Peace Pact signed in Paris.

1973 OPEC quadruples price of oil ,which leads to the energy crisis of the seventies.

1974 President Nixon resigns on August 9th following the Watergate scandal so as not to be impeached. Vice-President Gerald Ford takes over.

1977-1981 JIMMY  CARTER

1979  Hostages seized in Iran

1981-1989  RONALD  REAGAN

1981  Hostages return home.

The Clinton years

See this link

About G.W. Bush