Bush’s presidency would take a bigger hit from his failure to respond to the domestic tragedy that followed Hurricane Katrina’s devastating hit on the Gulf Coast. New Orleans suffered a direct hit, the levees broke, and the city flooded. Thousands of refugees flocked to the Superdome, where supplies and medical treatment and evacuation were slow to come. Individuals died in the heat, waiting for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to arrive with aid.

The study also examined the credentials of the authors and editors of these climate change denial books and found that “an increasing portion of denial books are produced by individuals with no scientific training. It appears that at least 90% of denial books do not undergo peer review, allowing authors or editors to recycle scientifically unfounded claims that are then amplified by the conservative movement, media, and political elites.”

The Population Bomb may have done more harm than good in the long run, by making worry over the population issue an easy target for critics.

The Reagan administration made Latin America a showcase for its aggressive new policies. Jimmy Carter had sought to promote human rights in the region, but Reagan  instead focused on fighting communism.

Christian conservatives also felt threatened by liberalism. In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court had prohibited teacher-led prayer and Bible reading in public schools.

Carter had not made human rights a central theme in his campaign, but in May 1977 he declared his wish to move away from a foreign policy in which “inordinate fear of communism” caused American leaders to “adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries.”

However, no scandal did more to destroy public trust than Watergate. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate Hotel Complex in downtown Washington, D.C. After being tipped off by a security guard, police found the men attempting to install sophisticated bugging equipment.

Perhaps no single issue contributed more to public disillusionment than the Vietnam War. The Johnson administration, which many believed had begun the war under false pretenses, escalated American involvement by deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to prevent the communist takeover of the south.

The American public remained largely unaware of Vietnam in the early 1960s, even as President John F. Kennedy secretly deployed sixteen thousand military advisors to help South Vietnam suppress a domestic communist insurgency.

Kennedy promised support for a civil rights bill, but southern resistance was intense and the bill stalled in Congress. Then, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

In 1953 an African American woman named Sarah Keys publicly challenged segregated public transportation.

That July, U.N. forces mobilized under American general Douglas MacArthur. Troops landed at Inchon, a port city about thirty miles from Seoul, and liberated the city on September 28.

In the late 1970s a period of relaxed tensions and increased communication and cooperation, known by the French term détente began, which lasted until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War reshaped the world and its threat hung over the generations of Americans that lived under its shadow.

So we are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows.

This Government will put its trust in the stamina of the American people, and will give the facts to the public just as soon as two conditions have been fulfilled: first, that the information has been definitely and officially confirmed; and, second, that the release of the information at the time it is received will not prove valuable to the enemy directly or indirectly. Most earnestly I urge my countrymen to reject all rumors

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.

The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality.

Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States entered the war in a crippling economic depression and exited at the beginning of an unparalleled economic boom.

In June 1945, after eighty days of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties, the Americans captured the island of Okinawa.

But if Britain was safe from invasion, it was not immune from additional air attacks. Frustrated by the Battle of Britain, Hitler began a bombing campaign against cities and civilians

Britain and France, alarmed but still anxious to avoid war, agreed that Germany could annex the region in return for a promise to stop all future German aggression. T

I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.

It is possible that when the banks resume a very few people who have not recovered from their fear may again begin withdrawals.

As a result we start tomorrow, Monday, with the opening of banks in the twelve Federal Reserve Bank cities—those banks which on first examination by the Treasury have already been found to be all right.

Because of undermined confidence on the part of the public, there was a general rush by a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold. A rush so great that the soundest banks could not get enough currency to meet the demand.

Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. 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.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.

Survivors of the Great Depression and their children the “baby boomers” would not quickly forget the hard times or the fact that government had helped end them. Historians debate when the New Deal ended. Some identify the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 as the last major New Deal legislation.

Southern farmers earned on average $183 per year at a time when farmers on the West Coast made more than four times that. Worse, they were producing cotton and corn, crops that paid little while depleting the soil.

Hoover had entered office with widespread popular support, but by the end of 1929 the economic collapse had overwhelmed his presidency. Hoover and his advisors assumed, and then desperately hoped, that the sharp economic decline was just a temporary downturn; part of the inevitable boom-bust cycles that stretched back through America’s commercial history.

On Thursday, October 24, stock market prices plummeted. Ten billion dollars in investments (equivalent to about $100 billion today) disappeared in a matter of hours

The release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915 valorized the Reconstruction Era Klan as a protector of feminine virtue and white racial purity. Taking advantage of this sudden surge of popularity, Colonel William Joseph Simmons organized what is often called the “second” Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in late 1915. This new Klan, modeled after other fraternal organizations with elaborate rituals and a hierarchy, remained largely confined to Georgia and Alabama until 1920, when Simmons began a professional recruiting effort that resulted in individual chapters being formed across the country and membership rising to an estimated five million.

The new freedom of women, however, was never far from consumption. A 1930 Chicago Tribune advertisement called “Feminine Values” declared, “Today’s woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom’s color scheme.”

Not content with distributing thirty-minute films in cheap, five-cent amusement halls known as nickelodeons, these early film moguls produced longer, higher-quality films and showed them in palatial theaters, attracting viewers who had previously shunned the film industry.

National politics throughout the 1920s was dominated by the Republican Party, which held not only the presidency but both houses of Congress as well.

As news of the gun battle spread, white rioters attacked Greenwood in force overnight and the violence continued into the following day.

Despite the efforts of politicians such as Warren Harding, the 1920s would be anything but “normal.” The decade so reshaped American life that it is remembered by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and, most commonly, the Roaring Twenties

The “Spanish Flu” infected about 500 million people worldwide and resulted in the deaths of between fifty and a hundred million people; possibly more.

Even as war raged on the Western Front, a new deadly threat loomed. In the spring of 1918, a new strain of the influenza virus appeared in the farm country of Kansas and hit nearby Camp Funston, one of the largest army training camps in the nation.

Many women reacted to war preparations by joining military and civilian organizations. Most civilian wartime organizations, although chaired by male members of the business elite, had all-female volunteer workforces.

By the spring of 1917, President Wilson believed a German victory would drastically and dangerously alter the balance of power in Europe. But he had promised to keep the U. S. out of the war.

It was a good thing, in a way, that America was not keen to enter the fighting.

The Great War toppled empires, created new nations, and sparked tensions that would explode across future years; especially in the Second World War less than a generation later.

But the president was also an expert at reading which way the political winds were blowing, and may have been responding to popular opinion in his choice of targets.

Advocates of a more masculine, muscular Christianity tried to stiffen young men’s backbones by putting them in touch with their primal manliness.

Many American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social problem. Drunkenness was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. T

Hull House settlement workers provided for their neighbors by running a nursery and a kindergarten, classes for parents and clubs for children, and by organizing social, recreational, and cultural events for the community.

By 1844, more than 6,000 homes of upper-class New Yorkers had been connected to the public water distribution system and public bathing facilities had been constructed for the poor.

population historians discovered that the most mobile city-dwellers were often wage-workers and the poor.

At the height of Southern lynching, in the last years of the nineteenth century, white southerners murdered two to three African Americans every week.

Lynching, the illegal hanging of victims by angry mobs, was not just murder. Many victims were not simply hanged: they were terrorized, tortured, mutilated, burned alive, and shot.

Segregation was built on the Supreme Court’s judgment of “separate but equal.” Southern whites erected a defense of white supremacy that would last nearly sixty years.

Washington was both praised as a race leader and criticized as an accommodationist to America’s unjust racial hierarchy.

Since the colonial period, East Coast states had regulated immigration through passenger laws that prohibited the landing of destitute foreigners.

Debates over American imperialism revolved around more than just politics and economics and national self-interest. They also included notions of humanitarianism, morality, religion, and ideas of “civilization.” And they included significant participation by American women.

Roosevelt’s policy justified police actions in “dysfunctional” Caribbean and Latin American countries by U.S. Marines and naval forces that included the founding of a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Roosevelt resigned his naval office in order to fight in Cuba. After winning headlines in the war, Roosevelt was rewarded by being selected to replace McKinley’s first vice president, Garret Hobart, who had died in office, in the 1900 election. When McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became president, he acted immediately to expand naval power. This

Although acquiring the Philippines had not been a goal of the war, the United States found itself in possession of a valuable foothold in the Pacific.

After this long history of international economic, missionary, and cultural engagement, the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1898–1902) marked a crucial turning point in American interventions abroad.

The romance of the West would continue to pull at generations of Americans and would influence their ideas about the U.S. in world affairs.

Conquest throughout the nineteenth century had displaced generations of Native Americans. Many took comfort from the words of Indian prophets and holy men. I

If the Indians could not be convinced through kindness to change their ways, most Americans agreed it was acceptable to use force.

ore than two thousand Dakota people had been captured during the fighting. Many of the men were tried at federal forts for murder, rape, and atrocities against white civilians that were sensationalized in newspaper accounts.

Like many activists including Helen Keller, Robert LaFollette, and Jane Addams, Debs spoke out loudly against America’s entry into World War I.

The Democrats were able to siphon off a large part of the Populists’ political support, but were unable to beat McKinley

The socialist movement drew from a diverse constituency that included reformers as well as revolutionaries. Party membership was open to all regardless of race, gender, class, ethnicity, or religion. Many prominent Americans, such as Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, and Jack London, became socialists.

Despite its racial failures, Populism exploded in popularity. The first major political movement to tap into the discomfort of many Americans with the disruptions created by industrial capitalism, the People’s Party seemed poised to capture political victory.

Kansas orator Mary Lease, one of the movement’s most fervent speakers, admonished farmers to “raise less corn and more Hell.”

the fruits of the toil of millions [had been] boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.”

Mass production and corporate consolidations spawned giant trusts that monopolized nearly every sector of the U.S. economy in the decades after the Civil War.

Their dissatisfaction with an erratic and impersonal system put many of them at the forefront of what would become perhaps the most serious challenge to the established political economy of Gilded Age America. Farmers organized and launched their challenge first through cooperatives and the Farmers’ Alliance and later through the politics of the People’s (or Populist) Party.

Farmers, who remained a majority of the American population through the first decade of the twentieth century, were hit especially hard by industrialization.

“Wall Street owns the country,”