Reagan, overlooking the contras’ brutal tactics, enthusiastically described them as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”

Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, called for more federal funding on AIDS-related research, much to the dismay of critics on the religious right.

Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council, raised money to support the contras by secretly selling American missiles to Iran and funneling the money to Nicaragua.

The two leaders developed a relationship that led to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which committed both sides to a sharp reduction in their nuclear arsenal.

The Vietnam War poisoned many Americans’ perceptions of their government and its role in the world.

Although American officials like General William Westmoreland and secretary of defense Robert McNamara claimed a communist defeat was on the horizon, by 1968 half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam, nearly twenty thousand had been killed, and the war was still no closer to being won. Protests, which would provide the backdrop for the American counterculture, erupted across the country.

In March 1965, activists attempted a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to support local African American voting rights. A few weeks earlier, a twenty-six-year-old black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson had been shot by state troopers during a voting-rights demonstration when he tried to protect his mother from police who were beating her.

In 1965, the CBS Evening News showed U.S. Marines burning the South Vietnamese village of Cam Ne with little regard for the lives of its occupants, who had been accused of aiding Vietcong guerrillas. Rather than addressing the Marines’ actions, president Johnson berated the head of CBS, yelling over the phone, “Your boys just shat on the American flag.”

Angry white mobs attacked riders in Birmingham, burning one of the buses and beating the activists who escaped.

Over 250,000 people marched for civil rights. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, raising the movement’s profile to new heights and putting unprecedented pressure on politicians to pass meaningful civil rights legislation.

In the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago and perhaps unfamiliar with the “etiquette” of Jim Crow, allegedly whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and another man, J. W. Milam, abducted Till from his relatives’ home, beat him, mutilated him, shot him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. Emmett’s mother held an open-casket funeral so that her son’s disfigured body could make national news.

Residential suburbs began to appear along railway lines and later along highways. Unlike the older satellite towns that had once supplied cites with food and had traditionally been economically self-contained, suburbs were mainly residential. Suburban economies generally depended upon the consumption spending of residents who earned their incomes in nearby cities.The first suburban developments in America were New York City’s bedroom communities in Westchester County.

In 1958, radical anticommunists founded the John Birch Society, attacking liberals and civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. as communists. And anticommunism was used as part of an assault against the New Deal and its defenders. Even many liberals who had fought against communism found themselves smeared by the red scare. The leftist American tradition was in tatters, destroyed by anticommunist hysteria. Movements for social justice, from civil rights to gay rights to feminism, were all suppressed under Cold War conformity.

The Pledge of Allegiance was altered to include the words one nation, under God in 1954.

he clearly remembered that the United States had intervened militarily against the Red Army, and when the Soviet Union was founded in 1922 the U.S. refused to recognize it.

The mushroom cloud from the first air-dropped Soviet hydrogen bomb test in 1951.

Berliners watching a C-54 land at Berlin Tempelhof Airport in 1948

With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of war.

My Fellow Americans: The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality. Powerful and resourceful gangsters have banded together to make war upon the whole human race. Their challenge has now been flung at the United States of America. The Japanese have treacherously violated the longstanding peace between us. Many American soldiers and sailors have been killed by enemy action. American ships have been sunk; American airplanes have been destroyed.

Allied bombers destroyed German factories, rail yards, and oil fields during the day and carpet-bombed German cities at night.

B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers on the Boeing assembly line in Wichita, Kansas in 1944.

The Junkers 87 “Stuka” dive-bomber used in blitzkrieg operations over Poland, September–October 1939.

Hitler had betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.

apanese troops raped up to 100,000 women and girls and then shot or bayonetted most of them in what is now recognized as one of the worst atrocities of WWII.

Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work.

I do not promise you that every bank will be reopened or that individual losses will not be suffered, but there will be no losses that possibly could be avoided; and there would have been more and greater losses had we continued to drift.

It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.

A rush so great that the soundest banks could not get enough currency to meet the demand.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

By the end of the 1930s, Roosevelt and his Democratic Congresses had transformed American government and realigned politics. Before World War I, the American federal government had been a “government out of sight.” After the New Deal, Americans came to see the federal government as a potential ally in their daily struggles finding work, securing a decent wage, getting a fair price for agricultural products, or organizing unions.

Hoover’s insensitivity toward suffering Americans, his unwillingness to address widespread economic problems, and his repeated platitudes about returning prosperity condemned his presidency. Hoover was not personally responsible for the Depression, just as he had not been responsible for the previous prosperity. But neither he nor his advisors understood the enormity of a crisis his conservative ideology could neither accommodate nor address. As a result, Americans found little relief from Washington until the election of 1932.

When thousands ignored Hoover’s order, he sent General Douglas MacArthur. Accompanied by local police, the U.S. Army infantry, cavalry, tanks, and a machine gun squadron, MacArthur evicted the Bonus Army and burned the tent city. National media covered the disaster as troops attacked veterans, chased down men and women, tear-gassed children, and torched the shantytown. Several veterans were killed in the attack.

A billboard posted outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, informed potential migrants that there were “NO JOBS in California” and warned them to “KEEP OUT.”

We wish to escape,

But violence began when a 17-year old white woman ran out of an elevator in a public building and claimed a 19-year old black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland had sexually assaulted her. Rowland was arrested by the county sheriff and newspapers picked up the story and announced that the white community was planning to take action against the accused man.

a lingering “Red Scare” sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,

The Germans first used poison gas successfully at the Battle of Ypres in 1915. Although the allies expressed outrage at this violation of 1899 and 1907 international Conventions on Land Warfare, they quickly developed their own gases and followed the German lead. Poison gases were generally heavier than air, so they flowed downhill into trenches. Gases also frequently blew into villages and towns near battlefields, killing up to a quarter million civilians during the course of the war.

In Europe, the experiences of black soldiers were often transformative. For example, the 15th New York National Guard Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters, was one of the first African American regiments formed (it also included Puerto Rican Americans). Previously, black men who wanted to fight had been forced to enlist in the French or Canadian armies. Originally assigned to labor duties, the unit petitioned to be combat trained but white troops refused to cooperate.

He dismissed Bismarck as Chancellor in 1890 and began looking for ways to make Germany a colonial empire.

Wilhelm ordered his military leaders to read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, which had so impressed Theodore Roosevelt in America.

When words failed to convey the jarring disparity he witnessed between the glittering world of New York high society and the hopeless world of the poor, Riis turned to photography. In 1889, Riis’s eighteen-page article “How the Other Half Lives” was included in the widely-circulated Christmas issue of Scribner’s Magazine, with nineteen line drawings rendered from his photographs. Riis expanded the material into a 303-page book, which he followed two years later with a sequel called The Children of the Poor. Jacob Riis wrote a dozen more books over the next ten years and lectured regularly on social conditions in New York City. His efforts to call attention to the inequities of city life brought Riis to the attention of New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, who later called Riis “the most useful citizen of New York.”

Sinclair reportedly remarked, “I aimed at America’s heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach.”

On April Fool’s Day in 1878, the New York Daily Graphic published a fictitious interview with the celebrated inventor Thomas A. Edison. The article described a fictional “biggest invention of the age”, a new Edison machine that could create forty different kinds of food and drink out of only air, water, and dirt. “Meat will no longer be killed and vegetables no longer grown, except by savages,” Edison promised in the fictional account. The miraculous new machine would end “famine and pauperism.” And all for just $5 or $6 per machine!

By 1920, a majority of Americans lived in towns and cities. Chicago’s newcomers had at first come mostly from Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia, but by 1890, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and others from southern and eastern Europe made up a majority of new immigrants.

Many prominent Americans, such as Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, and Jack London, became socialists.

The Democratic Party’s 1896 national convention nominated Bryan for president on a platform asserting that the gold standard was “not only un-American but anti-American.” Bryan spoke last at the convention, declaring, “we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” After a few seconds of stunned silence, the convention went wild.

Cooperatives were a well-established economic tool that had been popular with liberal reformers in Great Britain and America since the early nineteenth century.