HIS 132 - American History II: Primary Sources for HIS132 Assignment

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The Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864, in which 700 men of a Colorado territorial militia attacked an encampment of unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho waiting to commence peace negotiations, shocked the nation. Many locals regarded the action as a genuine battle rather than a massacre, as is evident from the following Rocky Mountain News editorials, which reported Chivington's attack as a brilliant victory against a formidable enemy.

Treaty signed in Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico, on February 2, 1848, ending the 1846–1848 Mexican-American War between the United States and Mexico. Under the terms of the t

The Homestead Act, enacted on May 20, 1862, provided 160 acres of unoccupied public land to any citizen (or intended citizen) who was willing to occupy and cultivate the land for five years and who was either head of a family or at least twenty-one years old. The land was free except for a small filing fee. By 1870 nearly 14 million acres had been homesteaded.

Federal U.S. legislation introduced by Missouri congressman William H. Hatch that provided federal funds for establishing experimental stations to conduct agricultural research.

Federal legislation passed on March 3, 1891, that codified many public land laws. The act authorized the president to reserve certain public lands from the public domain and reversed the previous policy of transferring public lands to private ownership. Though the act failed to specify the purpose of these reserves and to provide for their administration (the Forest Management Act of 1897 did both), President Benjamin Harrison used the authority to reserve twenty-two million acres, thus beginning the national forest system.

Federal U.S. legislation enacted on February 8, 1887, that provided for the dissolution of the Indian tribes as legal entities and the distribution of tribal lands among individual members. In an attempt to remove any remaining authority from the Native peoples, the act granted citizenship to Indians who renounced tribal allegiance and "adopted the habits of civilized life." It allotted to heads of families 160 acres of reservation land and to adult single people 80 acres; the land was initially awarded in trust, with full title to be transferred after twenty-five years.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) gave this speech on March 16, 1896, in favor of his Literacy Test Bill, which would have required prospective immigrants over age 14 to prove they could read and write their own language. Congress first passed legislation restricting immigration in 1875, banning convicts and prostitutes from immigrating to the United States.

In 1879 Congress passed a bill prohibiting further Chinese immigration, but it was vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. The following year a new treaty with China gave the United States the right to limit or suspend the entry of Chinese labor, but not to prohibit it absolutely. The 1882 suspension of immigration was renewed in 1892 and was followed by other exclusionary legislation. These acts were repealed in 1943.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major law to restrict immigration into the United States. Specifically, the act excluded all Chinese laborers from entering the country for a period of 10 years. During the debate leading up to its passage in Congress, the influential political magazine Harper's Weekly ran an editorial criticizing the bill, which it said betrayed a key aspect of American democracy that traditionally welcomed "the oppressed of every clime and race."

Treaty signed on December 10, 1898, ending the Spanish-American War (1898). According to the treaty terms, Spain would abandon its claim to Cuba (which remained a U.S. protectorate until 1934) and cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States (both of which remain U.S. territories).

Anita Newcomb McGee (1864–1940) was born and raised in Washington, D.C., the daughter of a noted mathematician and astronomer. She received a medical degree from Columbian College (today George Washington University) in 1892, then studied gynecology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. McGee delivered this speech in Kansas City, Missouri, in September 1899. It was subsequently published in Proceedings of the 8th Annual Meeting of the Association of Military Surgeons.

Josiah Strong, a Protestant clergyman and the secretary of the Congregational Home Missionary Society, called for Christian-based imperialism in Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), excerpted below. Passionately prejudicial, Strong was convinced that Americans must be properly Christianized, especially because of the "perils" they faced from wayward immigrants, Roman Catholics, Mormons, alcohol abusers, socialists, and newly wealthy industrialists.

The Comstock law, named for Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was passed in 1873. It declared contraceptive devices and materials discussing contraception, abortion, or sex education, to be obscene, and prohibited their distribution through the U.S. Postal Service.

The case involved the 1872 presidential election, during which a suffragist from Missouri named Virginia Minor attempted to vote but was denied. The registrar officiating the voting pointed to a Missouri law granting voting rights only to "every male citizen."

Speech delivered by President Woodrow Wilson to the United States Senate, asking that the Senate vote to submit the Nineteenth Amendment to the states for ratification.

Invented in the early 20th century, air conditioning became popular in the 1920s. In the following article from the New York Times in 1928, a journalist describes the growth of climate-controlled facilities in cities.

This excerpt comes from an article originally published in Current Opinion in April 1924. Many Americans believed that some populations were simply "unassimilable" into the nation, as the unidentified author of the following document reports.

African Americans were lynched at a rate more than three times greater than that of white Americans. While lynchings took place throughout the United States, the great majority occurred in the South. This editorial, originally published in the Cleveland Advocate on May 15, 1920, called for strict enforcement of antilynching legislation.

Charles S. Johnson, a leading African American social scientist and editor of his day, examined black urbanization in this 1925 essay that appeared in the famous anthology The New Negro, published the same year. According to Johnson, the city changed those African Americans who migrated northward, particularly in terms of economics as well as servility and obsequiousness to whites.

The Appalachian Trail was one of the first large trail systems to be established in the United States. Benton MacKaye described the development of the Appalachian Trail in these remarks to the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation in 1924.

In November 1929, seven months after David Clark's editorial appeared in the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, the North American Review published this defense of the Loray Mill strikers. In the article below, Margaret Larkin attempts to answer some of the charges that Clark made against the striking textile-mill workers.

The U.S. Merchant Marine carried the life's blood of the Allied war effort. Ships were lightly armed and vulnerable to attack, especially by submarines. Sailors of the merchant marine were civilians, but their duty was perhaps the most hazardous of World War II.

After the war, Henry L. Stimson published the following article in Harper's Magazine, which summarized the Manhattan Project and the decision to drop the bombs. Since his appointment as Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of war in 1940, Stimson had been intimately involved in the atomic bomb project.

Address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress delivered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on December 8, 1941, the day after Japan's surprise naval air attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Calling December 7 "a date which will live in infamy," Roosevelt announced that Japanese forces had also attacked other Pacific targets: Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Midway Island. He asked Congress to declare war on Japan because of this "unprovoked and dastardly attack." Within an hour Congress complied, with only one dissenting vote, and the United States entered World War II (1939–1945).

On July 18, 1945, General Leslie R. Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project, which had produced the atomic bomb, sent a top-secret report to Secretary of War Henry A. Stimson narrating the successful test two days earlier. Groves appended General Thomas Farrell's eyewitness account, which was written from the perspective of the observation post he had occupied. Farrell's account is excerpted from an official U.S. State Department publication.

The Japanese surprise air raid on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet—albeit not beyond recovery—and propelled the United States into World War II. Corporal E. C. Nightingale was a member of the U.S. Marine detachment assigned to the USS Arizona, one of the battleships moored along "Battleship Row," the principal target of the first wave of the attack.

The taking of Iwo Jima consumed five bloody weeks and the lives of 6,821 Americans and some 21,000 Japanese soldiers. The Japanese garrison defending this small volcanic island fought from the cover of a complex network of caves, tunnels, and bunkers, which allowed the defenders to hold off conquest for more than a month. More U.S. Marines died here than anywhere else in the Pacific theater. What follows is excerpted from a collection of reports by five official USMC combat writers, published after the battle.

Address given by President John F. Kennedy to a special joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, in which he appealed for a new program that would put a man on the moon before 1970. Kennedy called the speech his "second State of the Union message of 1961."

Hawaii and the United States had a long and complicated relationship before Hawaii was finally admitted to the Union in 1959. Over 100 years earlier, in 1849, the United States signed its first commercial treaty with Hawaii, acknowledging Hawaii's independence.

Letter from President John F. Kennedy to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev written on October 27, 1962. In this letter, Kennedy responds to Khrushchev's terms, received the previous day, for settling the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy accepted Moscow's proposal that all Soviet missiles be removed from Cuba under U.N. supervision if the United States suspended its blockade and gave assurances that it would not invade the island.

Address delivered by U.S. president John F. Kennedy in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, after a visit to the Berlin Wall separating the eastern and western sections of the city. Affirming his support for West Berlin as an island of freedom, Kennedy described the two-year-old wall as an offense against humanity and a demonstration of the failures of the communist system.

Speech given by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on May 22, 1964, to the annual commencement exercises of the University of Michigan. In it Johnson proposed a major new plan to build a "Great Society" in the United States—one in which the quality of individual lives was elevated and American civilization was advanced.

Federal legislation enacted on July 2, 1964, providing the strongest American civil rights legislation since Reconstruction (1867–1877). It prohibited discrimination in all public accommodations (including hotels, gas stations, restaurants, and theaters), if their operations affect commerce, and in any program receiving federal funds.

Federal legislation enacted on April 11, 1968, intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in housing in the United States.

Despite earlier disputes, Malcolm X's letter, below, of July 31, 1963, to Martin Luther King Jr. illustrates his willingness to work with other civil-rights leaders in order to defuse what he called the "racial powder keg." He laments the fact that black leaders have failed to come together due to "minor" ideological differences.

Speech delivered by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the evening of April 3, 1968, to an African-American congregation at the Masonic Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. It was the last speech King gave before his assassination.

Richard Wright used the phrase "black power" in his 1954 book of the same title, and Malcolm X developed what he called the gospel of black nationalism. But Stokely Carmichael, as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman, first developed the idea into a full movement ideology. In this July 28, 1966, speech in Chicago, Carmichael laid out a philosophy that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale adopted for their newly formed Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP).

Landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision issued on May 17, 1954, declaring that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

President Barack Obama delivered his second inaugural speech on January 21, 2013, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The president acknowledged the date through his calls for unity, equality, and peaceful action, echoing the orations of the civil rights leader.

Vice President Joseph Biden and President Barack Obama delivered speeches at the White House on January 16, 2013, outlining a proposed set of stricter gun control policies in the United States. The speeches were delivered in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which occurred on December 14, 2012, and resulted in 26 deaths (20 of whom were children).

Resolution passed by the U.S. Congress on September 14, 2001, authorizing President Bush to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In September 2008 the U.S. economy, hit by the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent liquidity crisis, was in the middle of the most severe financial disaster since the Great Depression. In a September 24, 2008, televised address to the nation, President George W. Bush urged Congress to approve Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion bailout plan.

Gee, Brandon. "Supreme Court Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage Nationwide." Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, 2015. ProQuest, http://proxy154.nclive.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/supreme-court-legalizes-same-sex-marriage/docview/1692640561/se-2?accountid=13601.

After several days of waiting for absentee ballot vote tallies to trickle in, Joe Biden was finally declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election on Saturday, November 7. Biden delivered a victory speech that evening in Wilmington, Delaware.

Passed by Congress on January 29, 2009, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act extended the statute of limitations for employees suing for pay discrimination. The act was passed in response to Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., a 2007 Supreme Court decision that ruled Lilly Ledbetter's gender discrimination suit against her employers to be invalid on the basis of that statute of limitations.

Religion in North Carolina
The Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection is a grant-funded project to provide digital access to publications of and about religious bodies in North Carolina. Partner institutions at Duke, UNC, and Wake Forest University, contributed the largest portion of the items.

The North Carolina Digital Collections contain over 90,000 historic and recent photographs, state government publications, manuscripts, and other resources on topics related to North Carolina. The Collections are free and full-text searchable, and bring together content from the State Archives of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina.

Series of four related acts that provided for the military occupation of the former Confederacy. They were passed between March 1867 and March 1868 over the vetoes of President Andrew Johnson.

From 1882. Sharecropping was a system of agriculture in the United States and many other parts of the world. In the United States, it existed mainly during the Reconstruction period but also in some parts of the Antebellum South.

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln proposed the 10 Percent Plan, in which 10 percent of all white males in each Confederate state had to take a loyalty oath, in order for their state to be readmitted into the Union. The states also had to recognize permanent freedom for all former slaves.

Speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on December 18, 1865, by Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens urging a harsh policy of reconstruction toward the defeated Confederacy.

Federal act designed to prohibit social discrimination against blacks, passed by Congress on March 1, 1875. The act guaranteed to all citizens—regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude—equal rights in public places, such as inns, theaters, restaurants, and public conveyances. Denial of these rights was punishable by payment to the aggrieved person and fine or imprisonment. Many whites refused to obey the act, and in 1883 the Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional on the grounds that Congress did not have the authority to legislate the social customs of any state. The 1875 act was the last federal civil rights legislation until the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

First federal U.S. legislation to regulate trusts, enacted on July 2, 1890. Introduced by Republican senator John Sherman, it declared illegal "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations."

This excerpt comes from Helen Keller's November 3, 1912, article, "How I Became a Socialist," published in the New York Call, in response to an offensive commentary in Common Cause that suggested her socialism could be explained as a result of her "limited development."

Author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) was living abroad when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, but he had long been a vocal critic of what he saw as the rampant greed and corruption that plagued America, as displayed in his work The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, cowritten with colleague Charles Dudley Warner. Upon Twain's triumphant return to the United States, he made the following anti-imperialist editorial statement, recorded in October 15, 1900.

Written by muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, "The Rise of the Standard Oil Company" exposes John D. Rockefeller's unethical business practices in turning his oil company into the largest monopoly in existence at the beginning of the 20th century. The article was originally published in a 16-part series in McClure's Magazine. Tarbell had a particular interest in the Standard Oil Company because it had forced her father's independent oil refinery out of business.

The following is an excerpt from Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner's 1883 piece, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. For all the criticism of the wealthy, there were also staunch defenders of the new economic order. Sumner, in particular, applied some of Darwin's principles of natural selection and evolution to argue that the laissez-faire approach to economics was the best way to ensure the progress of society.

Political platform adopted on July 10, 1912, by the Prohibition Party at its national nominating convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Shortly after President William Howard Taft fired Gifford Pinchot as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service in 1910, Pinchot published this famous statement summarizing the principles of Progressive Era conservation. Pinchot believed that the conservation of forests and other natural resources was essential to American security, prosperity, and democracy.

Federal U.S. legislation passed on October 28, 1919, to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, establishing Prohibition. The act, introduced by Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota and passed over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, defined intoxicating liquor as any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume.

Two excerpts from The Blue Book, a collection of essays published in 1917 by the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company. "Why Women Should Vote," by Jane Addams, and "Objections Answered," by Alice Stone Blackwell take different approaches in arguing for woman suffrage.

Message from President Woodrow Wilson to the U.S. Senate on August 19, 1914, following the outbreak of World War I in Europe. Issued shortly after his Proclamation of Neutrality of August 4, this appeal to the American people called for neutrality "in thought as well as in action."

Federal legislation enacted on May 18, 1917, establishing registration and classification for military service of all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, inclusive. Local civilian draft boards were given responsibility for administering the draft. Exemptions were allowed for alienage, physical unfitness, and conscientious objections on religious grounds.

Even after the American declaration of war against Germany, Socialists, pacifists, Progressives, and other Americans were not convinced the United States had a vested interest in the European conflict. In 1917, in order to sell the war to the American people, President Woodrow Wilson mobilized public opinion through the establishment of the Committee of Public Information, headed by Denver journalist George Creel.

In early 1917, while the U.S. Congress was debating arming merchant ships to offset Germany's unrestricted submarine attacks on neutral vessels, the British government released a telegram intercepted and deciphered by their Royal Navy from German foreign secretary Alfred Zimmermann to Heinrich von Eckhardt, the German minister to Mexico; the telegram, sent January 19, 1917, is reprinted below.

From the start of the Great Depression, with the spectacular stock-market crash of October 1929, President Herbert Hoover continually declared his confidence in the soundness of the American economy. In the following press release from November 15, 1929, he notes his recent meetings with business leaders and reaffirms his belief in the general strength of the economy.

The New Deal established public programs that fought to alleviate the widespread unemployment, poor economy, and unstable financial system that plagued the United States during the Great Depression. In a Fireside Chat on May 7, 1933, Roosevelt outlined the New Deal legislation that had already been approved by Congress, and he campaigned for legislation that had yet to be passed, including what became the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

National radio address delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democratic governor of New York, on April 7, 1932, in which he argued that hope for national economic recovery from the Great Depression resided with the ordinary farmer and industrial worker—"the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid."

Arturo, an Italian-American stonecutter in his fifties, was interviewed by Mary Tomasi and Roaldus Richmond of the WPA's Federal Writers' Project (FWP) in Barre, Vermont, in 1938. Arturo alternated his time between working as a letter-cutter for a local quarry and engaging in days-long drinking binges. The health and safety hazards of stonecutting, Arturo told them, had the potential to kill him if his drinking habit did not, but neither had thus far destroyed him.

In a Federal Writers' Project (FWP) interview with a family of tenant farmers near Fletcher, North Carolina, Anne Winn Stevens described the striking contrast between the palatial estate occupied by the farm's owners and the ramshackle cabin in which the Riddle family lived.

Widely considered to be former prime minister Winston Churchill's most important speech as leader of the opposition in Parliament (1945–1951). He delivered the speech, formally entitled "A Shadow Has Fallen Over Europe and Asia," on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill expressed alarm and concern at the Soviet Union's expansion in eastern Europe.

Doctrine enunciated by President Harry S. Truman in a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, proclaiming a U.S. commitment to help non-communist countries resist Soviet expansion.

Written on July 8, 1950, approximately two weeks after the start of the Korean conflict, this document is titled "Consequences of the Korean Incident." Here the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyzes Soviet motives for launching an attack on South Korea, probable developments of the conflict, and immediate effects of a failure to hold South Korea.

The Korean War (1950–1953) solidified the country's divide into two states—North Korea and South Korea. The war also set the stage for the coming cold war, situating the communist nations of the Soviet Union and China against the United States in the nuclear age.

Joint declaration on control of atomic energy issued by U.S. president Harry S. Truman, British prime minister Clement Attlee, and Canadian prime minister W. L. Mackenzie King on November 15, 1946. In January 1946 the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission was formed to establish international control over atomic energy and devise a scheme for nuclear disarmament.

Officially called Hoa Lo Prison, the "Hanoi Hilton" (as U.S. prisoners of war christened it) had been built by the French to house political prisoners and became infamous during the Vietnam War as the principal repository for American POWs, who were mostly aviators shot down on missions over North Vietnam.

The Tet Offensive, which began on January 30, 1968, sent shock waves through the U.S. home front and rapidly eroded waning popular support for the Vietnam War. A massive tactical defeat for the Viet Cong and NVA, Tet was nevertheless a profound psychological and propaganda victory for them and therefore a strategic triumph.

On January 23, 1973, President Richard Nixon announced to the country that the Paris negotiation talks between the United States, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam had resulted in an agreement to cease fire.

Since even an accidental confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States could have destabilized world peace, the summit of 1972 was a necessary step to peaceful coexistence. Regional conflicts had the potential of setting the two superpowers against each other, and the summit attempted to lessen the possibility that such an event would escalate into a nuclear crisis.

Immediately after the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, it was clear to observers that the events would have a lasting impact on the relationship between American youths and more-conservative elements in the United States. The following statement from the FBI files is a firsthand account of the Kent State shootings by a freshman at Kent State University. It demonstrates the grim realities of that day.

Law passed as part of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, stating that no one could be excluded from or subjected to discrimination because of her sex by any educational program receiving Federal aid.

In the following 1971 opinion, from Baker v. Nelson, the Minnesota Supreme Court communicates its decision in support of the county clerk who denied an attempt by two men, Richard John (Jack) Baker and James Michael McConnell, both gay-rights activists, to obtain a marriage license in Hennepin County. This case was the first in the United States involving same-sex marriage.

Legislation enacted on October 14, 1972, that extended the life of the Commission on Civil Rights. In addition, the act extended the jurisdiction of the commission to include sexual discrimination and to authorize appropriations.

Address given by civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to a rally of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 12, 1965, in Birmingham, Alabama.

The Watergate scandal, which involved the break-in and subsequent cover up at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, consumed the last two years of Richard Nixon's presidency. On May 22, 1973, after multiple denials of having any connection to the scandal, Nixon issued a 4,000-word statement to the public that defended his involvement in the affair. In the report, Nixon assumed fault for not heeding "the warning signals I received along the way about a Watergate coverup," but he denied having anything to do with either the break-in or cover up.

The statement below was drafted in April 1977 by founders Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, and Beverly Smith of the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist group formed in 1974. The group held meetings in Massachusetts and New York to assess the state of black feminism and to plan future activism.

Jimmy Carter's third State of the Union address, delivered before a joint session of Congress on January 23, 1980. The president's third annual message was delivered during a time of national crisis. Nine weeks earlier, the American embassy in Teheran was seized by radical Iranian students, who took 52 Americans hostage.

While speaking to reporters on December 28, 1979, President Carter announced his administration's plans to seek a resolution to end the occupation of the American embassy in Iran and free the embassy personnel taken hostage. Carter also went on record as protesting the recent invasion and overthrow of the Afghanistan government by the Soviet Union.

Broadcast address given by President Ronald Reagan on January 28, 1986, following the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger shortly after takeoff.

Speech given by Vice President George H. W. Bush to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans on August 18, 1988, as he accepted the party's nomination for president. The speech, widely regarded as perhaps the finest of Bush's career, gave rise to two popular catchphrases: "a thousand points of light" and "a kinder and gentler nation."