Music was an immensely popular form of entertainment in America in the first decade of the century, though not in the same way it is today. Americans did not buy prerecorded records or CDs and play them on stereo equipment. Instead, most A...

The 1920s have been called the Golden Age of Sports. From the very beginning of the decade extraordinary athlete-heroes emerged in virtually every sport — baseball, football, tennis, golf, polo, and the Olympic sports. Babe Ruth, Ty...

American fashions shifted in the 1930s. The 1920s had been a decade of excess. Fashions for both young men and women—the "sheiks" and "flappers"—grew increasingly extravagant. The Great Depression ...

During the 1950s, many people suspect that this decade was occupied by conservatism and conformity but they are incorrect. This period was filled with rebellious groups and classes and the struggle for civil rights and wanted liberties....

When journalist Tom Wolfe (1931–) surveyed the changes that had swept America in the past few years, he gave the decade a label that has stuck: "The Me Decade." Wolfe and others noticed that the dominant concerns of mo...

In the 1990s, commerce became e-commerce and the nation was gripped in dot-com fever. The nation's economy had started off the decade in a slump. By the mid-1990s, however, the energizing force of what became known as the dot-com re...

Among the most striking examples of mass civil disobedience ever to occur in the United States, the Underground Railroad occupies a significant place in American history. Although African American slaves were denied the legal protections of...

fratricidal four-year war (1861–65) between the federal government of the United States and 11 Southern states that asserted their right to secede from the Union. Prelude to war The secession of the Southern states (in chronologica...

(1775–83), insurrection by which 13 of Great Britain's North American colonies won political independence and went on to form the United States of America. The war followed more than a decade of growing estrangement between the Briti...

civilization in northeastern Africa dating from the 3rd millennium &BC;. Its many achievements, preserved in its art and monuments, hold a fascination that continues to grow as archaeological finds expose its secrets. This article focuses ...

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), seventh president of the United States, symbolized the democratic advances of his time. His actions strengthened the power of the presidential office in American government. When Andrew Jackson emerged on the na...

Nahuatl-speaking people who in the 15th and early 16th centuries ruled a large empire in what is now central and southern Mexico. The Aztec are so called from Aztlán (“White Land”), an allusion to their origins, probably...

William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton (born 1946) won the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1992 and then defeated incumbent George Bush to become the 42nd president of the United States. He was re-elected to a second term in 1996. Wi...

"The words "civil rights' summon up memories and images in modern minds of grainy television footage of packed mass meetings, firehoses and police dogs, of early 1960s peaceful protestors replaced over time by violent rioters, of soul-stirr...

The controversial, half-fictitious career of William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917), American scout and publicist, helped create the prototype "Wild West" hero. William Cody, born in Scott County, lowa, and raised on a farm, ser...

Who Is an American?...

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was born in Boston on 27 May 1835, the third child and second son of Charles Francis and Abigail Brooks Adams. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, the second president of the United States, and the grandson...

In general, the lives of women and the roles they played in society were very similar throughout the colonies. However, certain conditions in the Chesapeake region changed the roles of the women who lived there and created a life that was ...

The Europeans and Africans who came to the New World brought with them ideas and attitudes about religion, society, gender, race, and power. Europeans self-consciously tried to model their new societies after what they had known before, a...

In March 1917, as the people of Russia demonstrated against the hunger and privations brought by World War I, the tsar of the Russian Empire gave up his throne. A provisional government took power in St. Petersburg, the imperial capital. Se...

military expeditions, beginning in the late 11th century, that were organized by Western Christians in response to centuries of Muslim wars of expansion. Their objectives were to check the spread of Islam, to retake control of the Holy Lan...

a section of the Great Plains of the United States that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico. The term Dust Bowl was suggested by conditions that struc...

What factors helped to promote America's huge industrial growth during the period from 1860-1900? After the Reconstruction Era, the United States was in desperate need of a change. The other world powers had already experienced a series ...

The high tide of the Progressive Era occurred during the 1910s, as a profusion of interest groups with competing legislative proposals made the decade one of the most turbulent and exciting in U.S. history. Reforms at the federal level in...

The administration of Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), fourteenth president of the United States, was marred by the bitter quarrel resulting from the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. Franklin Pierce was born in Hillsborough County, N.H...