But on March 30, 1981, Reagan survived an assassination attempt. Public support swelled for the hospitalized president

Ronald Reagan had been a B-list Hollywood actor before serving in a stateside public relations unit during World War II

Meanwhile, the Chicano movement in the 1960s emerged out of the broader Mexican American civil rights movement of the post–World War II era. The movement confronted discrimination in schools, politics, agriculture, and other institutions. Organizations like the Mexican American Political Association and the Mexican

John F. Kennedy had entered politics as a Congressperson in 1947 after serving in World War II.

Segregated schooling, however, was rarely “equal” in practice. Black Americans, particularly in the South, received fewer funds for their schools, attended inadequate facilities

At the height of the Great Depression, in 1932, some 250,000 households had lost their homes to foreclosure.

As Germany collapsed at the close of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union raced toward Berlin,

he wrote, and “the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism . . . is more dangerous and insidious than ever before.”

Military oaths of allegiance were changed so that soldiers pledged themselves to Hitler personally rather than to the state or its officials.

eighty-five million people

The end of the World War had reduced demand for American farm products as European farmers gradually got back to work.

Although most Americans had little savings and only the richest 2.5 percent invested in stocks, those who did often borrowed to do so. Most stock purchases were made on “margin”, which meant shares could be bought with money borrowed from brokers.

A young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was being tried for teaching his students evolutionary theory in violation of the Butler Act, a state law preventing any theory that denied “the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible”

Rowland, so they could take him from the jail and kill him. Ten whites and two blacks were killed and many more wounded.

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.”

Why did the promise to return America to “normalcy” resonate with voters?

Russia surrendered Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine,

Border troubles in Mexico served as an important field test for modern American military forces and the National Guard.

“The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts,” he said, “are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.”

By 1900, inland cities such as Buffalo, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis

At the urging of American businessmen who had overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy,

n 1900, American troops joined a multinational force that intervened to prevent the closing of trade threatened by the Boxer Rebellion, a movement opposed to foreign businesses and missionaries operating in China. President McKinley sent the Army without consulting Congress, setting a precedent for U.S. presidents to order American troops to action around the world under their executive powers.

On the northern Plains, the so-called Sioux people had yet to fully surrender. Following Red Cloud’s War, a rare victory for the Plains people, the U.S. government signed the second Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and created the Great Sioux Reservation. In 1874, an American expedition led by George Armstrong Custer to protect Northern Pacific Railway survey crews discovered gold in the Black Hills. White prospectors flooded the area around Deadwood gulch, deep in the western region of the Reservation. Aware that U.S. citizens were violating treaty provisions but unwilling to prevent them from searching for gold, federal officials pressured the western tribes to sign a new treaty transferring control of the Black Hills to the United States while General Philip Sheridan quietly moved troops into the region.

In contrast, the economic power of the individual farmer was threatened by plummeting commodity prices and rising indebtedness.

The American economy had lagged behind Britain, Germany, and France as recently as the 1860s, but by 1900 the United States had taken its place as the world’s leading manufacturing nation

The governor of Maryland deployed the state’s militia in Baltimore and the militia fired into a crowd of striking workers, killing eleven and wounding many more. Strikes convulsed towns and cities across Pennsylvania.