United States

Alternative Title: America, U.S., U.S.A., United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Land

People

Economy

Government and society

Cultural life

History

Presidents of the United States

Vice presidents of the United States

First ladies of the United States

State maps, flags, and seals

State nicknames and symbols

Land

The two great sets of elements that mold the physical environment of the United States are, first, the geologic, which determines the main patterns of landforms, drainage, and mineral resources and influences soils to a lesser degree, and, second, the atmospheric, which dictates not only climate and weather but also in large part the distribution of soils, plants, and animals. Although these elements are not entirely independent of one another, each produces on a map patterns that are so profoundly different that essentially they remain two separate geographies. (Since this article covers only the conterminous United States, see also the articles Alaska and Hawaii.)

The Colorado River in Marble Canyon at the northeastern end of Grand Canyon National Park, northwestern Arizona.� Gary Ladd

Relief

The centre of the conterminous United States is a great sprawling interior lowland, reaching from the ancient shield of central Canada on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. To east and west this lowland rises, first gradually and then abruptly, to mountain ranges that divide it from the sea on both sides. The two mountain systems differ drastically. The Appalachian Mountains on the east are low, almost unbroken, and in the main set well back from the Atlantic. From New York to the Mexican border stretches the low Coastal Plain, which faces the ocean along a swampy, convoluted coast. The gently sloping surface of the plain extends out beneath the sea, where it forms the continental shelf, which, although submerged beneath shallow ocean water, is geologically identical to the Coastal Plain. Southward the plain grows wider, swinging westward in Georgia and Alabama to truncate the Appalachians along their southern extremity and separate the interior lowland from the Gulf.

West of the Central Lowland is the mighty Cordillera, part of a global mountain system that rings the Pacific basin. The Cordillera encompasses fully one-third of the United States, with an internal variety commensurate with its size. At its eastern margin lie the Rocky Mountains, a high, diverse, and discontinuous chain that stretches all the way from New Mexico to the Canadian border. The Cordillera�s western edge is a Pacific coastal chain of rugged mountains and inland valleys, the whole rising spectacularly from the sea without benefit of a coastal plain. Pent between the Rockies and the Pacific chain is a vast intermontane complex of basins, plateaus, and isolated ranges so large and remarkable that they merit recognition as a region separate from the Cordillera itself.

These regions�the Interior Lowlands and their upland fringes, the Appalachian Mountain system, the Atlantic Plain, the Western Cordillera, and the Western Intermontane Region�are so various that they require further division into 24 major subregions, or provinces.

The Interior Lowlands and their upland fringes

Andrew Jackson is supposed to have remarked that the United States begins at the Alleghenies, implying that only west of the mountains, in the isolation and freedom of the great Interior Lowlands, could people finally escape Old World influences. Whether or not the lowlands constitute the country�s cultural core is debatable, but there can be no doubt that they comprise its geologic core and in many ways its geographic core as well.

This enormous region rests upon an ancient, much-eroded platform of complex crystalline rocks that have for the most part lain undisturbed by major orogenic (mountain-building) activity for more than 600,000,000 years. Over much of central Canada, these Precambrian rocks are exposed at the surface and form the continent�s single largest topographical region, the formidable and ice-scoured Canadian Shield.

In the United States most of the crystalline platform is concealed under a deep blanket of sedimentary rocks. In the far north, however, the naked Canadian Shield extends into the United States far enough to form two small but distinctive landform regions: the rugged and occasionally spectacular Adirondack Mountains of northern New York and the more-subdued and austere Superior Upland of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As in the rest of the shield, glaciers have stripped soils away, strewn the surface with boulders and other debris, and obliterated preglacial drainage systems. Most attempts at farming in these areas have been abandoned, but the combination of a comparative wilderness in a northern climate, clear lakes, and white-water streams has fostered the development of both regions as year-round outdoor recreation areas.

Mineral wealth in the Superior Upland is legendary. Iron lies near the surface and close to the deepwater ports of the upper Great Lakes. Iron is mined both north and south of Lake Superior, but best known are the colossal deposits of Minnesota�s Mesabi Range, for more than a century one of the world�s richest and a vital element in America�s rise to industrial power. In spite of depletion, the Minnesota and Michigan mines still yield a major proportion of the country�s iron and a significant percentage of the world�s supply.

South of the Adirondack Mountains and the Superior Upland lies the boundary between crystalline and sedimentary rocks; abruptly, everything is different. The core of this sedimentary region�the heartland of the United States�is the great Central Lowland, which stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) from New York to central Texas and north another 1,000 miles to the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. To some, the landscape may seem dull, for heights of more than 2,000 feet (600 metres) are unusual, and truly rough terrain is almost lacking. Landscapes are varied, however, largely as the result of glaciation that directly or indirectly affected most of the subregion. North of the Missouri�Ohio river line, the advance and readvance of continental ice left an intricate mosaic of boulders, sand, gravel, silt, and clay and a complex pattern of lakes and drainage channels, some abandoned, some still in use. The southern part of the Central Lowland is quite different, covered mostly with loess (wind-deposited silt) that further subdued the already low relief surface. Elsewhere, especially near major rivers, postglacial streams carved the loess into rounded hills, and visitors have aptly compared their billowing shapes to the waves of the sea. Above all, the loess produces soil of extraordinary fertility. As the Mesabi iron was a major source of America�s industrial wealth, its agricultural prosperity has been rooted in Midwestern loess.

The Central Lowland resembles a vast saucer, rising gradually to higher lands on all sides. Southward and eastward, the land rises gradually to three major plateaus. Beyond the reach of glaciation to the south, the sedimentary rocks have been raised into two broad upwarps, separated from one another by the great valley of the Mississippi River. The Ozark Plateau lies west of the river and occupies most of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas; on the east the Interior Low Plateaus dominate central Kentucky and Tennessee. Except for two nearly circular patches of rich limestone country�the Nashville Basin of Tennessee and the Kentucky Bluegrass region�most of both plateau regions consists of sandstone uplands, intricately dissected by streams. Local relief runs to several hundreds of feet in most places, and visitors to the region must travel winding roads along narrow stream valleys. The soils there are poor, and mineral resources are scanty.

Eastward from the Central Lowland the Appalachian Plateau�a narrow band of dissected uplands that strongly resembles the Ozark Plateau and Interior Low Plateaus in steep slopes, wretched soils, and endemic poverty�forms a transition between the interior plains and the Appalachian Mountains. Usually, however, the Appalachian Plateau is considered a subregion of the Appalachian Mountains, partly on grounds of location, partly because of geologic structure. Unlike the other plateaus, where rocks are warped upward, the rocks there form an elongated basin, wherein bituminous coal has been preserved from erosion. This Appalachian coal, like the Mesabi iron that it complements in U.S. industry, is extraordinary. Extensive, thick, and close to the surface, it has stoked the furnaces of northeastern steel mills for decades and helps explain the huge concentration of heavy industry along the lower Great Lakes.

The western flanks of the Interior Lowlands are the Great Plains, a territory of awesome bulk that spans the full distance between Canada and Mexico in a swath nearly 500 miles (800 km) wide. The Great Plains were built by successive layers of poorly cemented sand, silt, and gravel�debris laid down by parallel east-flowing streams from the Rocky Mountains. Seen from the east, the surface of the Great Plains rises inexorably from about 2,000 feet (600 metres) near Omaha, Nebraska, to more than 6,000 feet (1,825 metres) at Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the climb is so gradual that popular legend holds the Great Plains to be flat. True flatness is rare, although the High Plains of western Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and eastern Colorado come close. More commonly, the land is broadly rolling, and parts of the northern plains are sharply dissected into badlands.

High PlainsThe High Plains, near Fort Morgan, Colorado.Epimethius

The main mineral wealth of the Interior Lowlands derives from fossil fuels. Coal occurs in structural basins protected from erosion�high-quality bituminous in the Appalachian, Illinois, and western Kentucky basins; and subbituminous and lignite in the eastern and northwestern Great Plains. Petroleum and natural gas have been found in nearly every state between the Appalachians and the Rockies, but the Midcontinent Fields of western Texas and the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, and Kansas surpass all others. Aside from small deposits of lead and zinc, metallic minerals are of little importance.

The Appalachian Mountain system

The Appalachians dominate the eastern United States and separate the Eastern Seaboard from the interior with a belt of subdued uplands that extends nearly 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from northeastern Alabama to the Canadian border. They are old, complex mountains, the eroded stumps of much greater ranges. Present topography results from erosion that has carved weak rocks away, leaving a skeleton of resistant rocks behind as highlands. Geologic differences are thus faithfully reflected in topography. In the Appalachians these differences are sharply demarcated and neatly arranged, so that all the major subdivisions except New England lie in strips parallel to the Atlantic and to one another.

Screw Auger Falls in the Mahoosuc Range, northern Appalachian Mountains, Maine.� George Wuerthner

The core of the Appalachians is a belt of complex metamorphic and igneous rocks that stretches all the way from Alabama to New Hampshire. The western side of this belt forms the long slender rampart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, containing the highest elevations in the Appalachians (Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, 6,684 feet [2,037 metres]) and some of its most handsome mountain scenery. On its eastern, or seaward, side the Blue Ridge descends in an abrupt and sometimes spectacular escarpment to the Piedmont, a well-drained, rolling land�never quite hills, but never quite a plain. Before the settlement of the Midwest the Piedmont was the most productive agricultural region in the United States, and several Pennsylvania counties still consistently report some of the highest farm yields per acre in the entire country.

West of the crystalline zone, away from the axis of primary geologic deformation, sedimentary rocks have escaped metamorphism but are compressed into tight folds. Erosion has carved the upturned edges of these folded rocks into the remarkable Ridge and Valley country of the western Appalachians. Long linear ridges characteristically stand about 1,000 feet (300 metres) from base to crest and run for tens of miles, paralleled by broad open valleys of comparable length. In Pennsylvania, ridges run unbroken for great distances, occasionally turning abruptly in a zigzag pattern; by contrast, the southern ridges are broken by faults and form short, parallel segments that are lined up like magnetized iron filings. By far the largest valley�and one of the most important routes in North America�is the Great Valley, an extraordinary trench of shale and limestone that runs nearly the entire length of the Appalachians. It provides a lowland passage from the middle Hudson valley to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and on southward, where it forms the Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys, and has been one of the main paths through the Appalachians since pioneer times. In New England it is floored with slates and marbles and forms the Valley of Vermont, one of the few fertile areas in an otherwise mountainous region.

ridge-and-valley topographyRidge-and-valley topography in the Appalachian Highlands, near Bristol, Tennessee, U.S.Bantosh

Topography much like that of the Ridge and Valley is found in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, an area generally thought to be a detached continuation of Appalachian geologic structure, the intervening section buried beneath the sediments of the lower Mississippi valley.

The once-glaciated New England section of the Appalachians is divided from the rest of the chain by an indentation of the Atlantic. Although almost completely underlain by crystalline rocks, New England is laid out in north�south bands, reminiscent of the southern Appalachians. The rolling, rocky hills of southeastern New England are not dissimilar to the Piedmont, while, farther northwest, the rugged and lofty White Mountains are a New England analogue to the Blue Ridge. (Mount Washington, New Hampshire, at 6,288 feet [1,917 metres], is the highest peak in the northeastern United States.) The westernmost ranges�the Taconics, Berkshires, and Green Mountains�show a strong north�south lineation like the Ridge and Valley. Unlike the rest of the Appalachians, however, glaciation has scoured the crystalline rocks much like those of the Canadian Shield, so that New England is best known for its picturesque landscape, not for its fertile soil.

Mount Washington, in the White Mountains, New Hampshire.William Hemmel/� New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism Development

Typical of diverse geologic regions, the Appalachians contain a great variety of minerals. Only a few occur in quantities large enough for sustained exploitation, notably iron in Pennsylvania�s Blue Ridge and Piedmont and the famous granites, marbles, and slates of northern New England. In Pennsylvania the Ridge and Valley region contains one of the world�s largest deposits of anthracite coal, once the basis of a thriving mining economy; many of the mines are now shut, oil and gas having replaced coal as the major fuel used to heat homes.

The Atlantic Plain

The eastern and southeastern fringes of the United States are part of the outermost margins of the continental platform, repeatedly invaded by the sea and veneered with layer after layer of young, poorly consolidated sediments. Part of this platform now lies slightly above sea level and forms a nearly flat and often swampy coastal plain, which stretches from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to beyond the Mexican border. Most of the platform, however, is still submerged, so that a band of shallow water, the continental shelf, parallels the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, in some places reaching 250 miles (400 km) out to sea.

The Atlantic Plain slopes so gently that even slight crustal upwarping can shift the coastline far out to sea at the expense of the continental shelf. The peninsula of Florida is just such an upwarp: nowhere in its 400-mile (640-km) length does the land rise more than 350 feet (100 metres) above sea level; much of the southern and coastal areas rise less than 10 feet (3 metres) and are poorly drained and dangerously exposed to Atlantic storms. Downwarps can result in extensive flooding. North of New York City, for example, the weight of glacial ice depressed most of the Coastal Plain beneath the sea, and the Atlantic now beats directly against New England�s rock-ribbed coasts. Cape Cod, Long Island (New York), and a few offshore islands are all that remain of New England�s drowned Coastal Plain. Another downwarp lies perpendicular to the Gulf coast and guides the course of the lower Mississippi. The river, however, has filled with alluvium what otherwise would be an arm of the Gulf, forming a great inland salient of the Coastal Plain called the Mississippi Embayment.

South of New York the Coastal Plain gradually widens, but ocean water has invaded the lower valleys of most of the coastal rivers and has turned them into estuaries. The greatest of these is Chesapeake Bay, merely the flooded lower valley of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries, but there are hundreds of others. Offshore a line of sandbars and barrier beaches stretches intermittently the length of the Coastal Plain, hampering entry of shipping into the estuaries but providing the eastern United States with a playground that is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) long.

Poor soils are the rule on the Coastal Plain, though rare exceptions have formed some of America�s most famous agricultural regions�for example, the citrus country of central Florida�s limestone uplands and the Cotton Belt of the Old South, once centred on the alluvial plain of the Mississippi and belts of chalky black soils of eastern Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Atlantic Plain�s greatest natural wealth derives from petroleum and natural gas trapped in domal structures that dot the Gulf Coast of eastern Texas and Louisiana. Onshore and offshore drilling have revealed colossal reserves of oil and natural gas.

The Western Cordillera

West of the Great Plains the United States seems to become a craggy land whose skyline is rarely without mountains�totally different from the open plains and rounded hills of the East. On a map the alignment of the two main chains�the Rocky Mountains on the east, the Pacific ranges on the west�tempts one to assume a geologic and hence topographic homogeneity. Nothing could be farther from the truth, for each chain is divided into widely disparate sections.

The Rockies are typically diverse. The Southern Rockies are composed of a disconnected series of lofty elongated upwarps, their cores made of granitic basement rocks, stripped of sediments, and heavily glaciated at high elevations. In New Mexico and along the western flanks of the Colorado ranges, widespread volcanism and deformation of colourful sedimentary rocks have produced rugged and picturesque country, but the characteristic central Colorado or southern Wyoming range is impressively austere rather than spectacular. The Front Range west of Denver is prototypical, rising abruptly from its base at about 6,000 feet (1,825 metres) to rolling alpine meadows between 11,000 and 12,000 feet (3,350 and 3,650 metres). Peaks appear as low hills perched on this high-level surface, so that Colorado, for example, boasts 53 mountains over 14,000 feet (4,270 metres) but not one over 14,500 feet (4,420 metres).

The Middle Rockies cover most of west-central Wyoming. Most of the ranges resemble the granitic upwarps of Colorado, but thrust faulting and volcanism have produced varied and spectacular country to the west, some of which is included in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. Much of the subregion, however, is not mountainous at all but consists of extensive intermontane basins and plains�largely floored with enormous volumes of sedimentary waste eroded from the mountains themselves. Whole ranges have been buried, producing the greatest gap in the Cordilleran system, the Wyoming Basin�resembling in geologic structure and topography an intermontane peninsula of the Great Plains. As a result, the Rockies have never posed an important barrier to east�west transportation in the United States; all major routes, from the Oregon Trail to interstate highways, funnel through the basin, essentially circumventing the main ranges of the Rockies.

Grand Teton National Park: Teton RangeThe Teton Range at sunset, with Jenny Lake in the foreground, Grand Teton National Park, northwestern Wyoming, U.S.Robert Glusic/Getty Images

The Northern Rockies contain the most varied mountain landscapes of the Cordillera, reflecting a corresponding geologic complexity. The region�s backbone is a mighty series of batholiths�huge masses of molten rock that slowly cooled below the surface and were later uplifted. The batholiths are eroded into rugged granitic ranges, which, in central Idaho, compose the most extensive wilderness country in the conterminous United States. East of the batholiths and opposite the Great Plains, sediments have been folded and thrust-faulted into a series of linear north�south ranges, a southern extension of the spectacular Canadian Rockies. Although elevations run 2,000 to 3,000 feet (600 to 900 metres) lower than the Colorado Rockies (most of the Idaho Rockies lie well below 10,000 feet [3,050 metres]), increased rainfall and northern latitude have encouraged glaciation�there as elsewhere a sculptor of handsome alpine landscape.

The western branch of the Cordillera directly abuts the Pacific Ocean. This coastal chain, like its Rocky Mountain cousins on the eastern flank of the Cordillera, conceals bewildering complexity behind a facade of apparent simplicity. At first glance the chain consists merely of two lines of mountains with a discontinuous trough between them. Immediately behind the coast is a line of hills and low mountains�the Pacific Coast Ranges. Farther inland, averaging 150 miles (240 km) from the coast, the line of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range includes the highest elevations in the conterminous United States. Between these two unequal mountain lines is a discontinuous trench, the Troughs of the Coastal Margin.

The apparent simplicity disappears under the most cursory examination. The Pacific Coast Ranges actually contain five distinct sections, each of different geologic origin and each with its own distinctive topography. The Transverse Ranges of southern California are a crowded assemblage of islandlike faulted ranges, with peak elevations of more than 10,000 feet but sufficiently separated by plains and low passes so that travel through them is easy. From Point Conception to the Oregon border, however, the main California Coast Ranges are entirely different, resembling the Appalachian Ridge and Valley region, with low linear ranges that result from erosion of faulted and folded rocks. Major faults run parallel to the low ridges, and the greatest�the notorious San Andreas Fault�was responsible for the earthquake that all but destroyed San Francisco in 1906. Along the California�Oregon border, everything changes again. In this region, the wildly rugged Klamath Mountains represent a western salient of interior structure reminiscent of the Idaho Rockies and the northern Sierra Nevada. In western Oregon and southwestern Washington the Coast Ranges are also different�a gentle, hilly land carved by streams from a broad arch of marine deposits interbedded with tabular lavas. In the northernmost part of the Coast Ranges and the remote northwest, a domal upwarp has produced the Olympic Mountains; its serrated peaks tower nearly 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) above Puget Sound and the Pacific, and the heavy precipitation on its upper slopes supports the largest active glaciers in the United States outside of Alaska.

South Fork Kings River, Kings Canyon National Park, California, U.S.Josef Muench

East of these Pacific Coast Ranges the Troughs of the Coastal Margin contain the only extensive lowland plains of the Pacific margin�California�s Central Valley, Oregon�s Willamette River valley, and the half-drowned basin of Puget Sound in Washington. Parts of an inland trench that extends for great distances along the east coast of the Pacific, similar valleys occur in such diverse areas as Chile and the Alaska panhandle. These valleys are blessed with superior soils, easily irrigated, and very accessible from the Pacific. They have enticed settlers for more than a century and have become the main centres of population and economic activity for much of the U.S. West Coast.

Still farther east rise the two highest mountain chains in the conterminous United States�the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada. Aside from elevation, geographic continuity, and spectacular scenery, however, the two ranges differ in almost every important respect. Except for its northern section, where sedimentary and metamorphic rocks occur, the Sierra Nevada is largely made of granite, part of the same batholithic chain that creates the Idaho Rockies. The range is grossly asymmetrical, the result of massive faulting that has gently tilted the western slopes toward the Central Valley but has uplifted the eastern side to confront the interior with an escarpment nearly two miles high. At high elevation glaciers have scoured the granites to a gleaming white, while on the west the ice has carved spectacular valleys such as the Yosemite. The loftiest peak in the Sierras is Mount Whitney, which at 14,494 feet (4,418 metres) is the highest mountain in the conterminous states. The upfaulting that produced Mount Whitney is accompanied by downfaulting that formed nearby Death Valley, at 282 feet (86 metres) below sea level the lowest point in North America.

Mount Whitney, California.� Index Open

The Cascades are made largely of volcanic rock; those in northern Washington contain granite like the Sierras, but the rest are formed from relatively recent lava outpourings of dun-coloured basalt and andesite. The Cascades are in effect two ranges. The lower, older range is a long belt of upwarped lava, rising unspectacularly to elevations between 6,000 and 8,000 feet (1,825 and 2,440 metres). Perched above the �low Cascades� is a chain of lofty volcanoes that punctuate the horizon with magnificent glacier-clad peaks. The highest is Mount Rainier, which at 14,410 feet (4,392 metres) is all the more dramatic for rising from near sea level. Most of these volcanoes are quiescent, but they are far from extinct. Mount Lassen in northern California erupted violently in 1914, as did Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington in 1980. Most of the other high Cascade volcanoes exhibit some sign of seismic activity.

The Western Intermontane Region

The Cordillera�s two main chains enclose a vast intermontane region of arid basins, plateaus, and isolated mountain ranges that stretches from the Mexican border nearly to Canada and extends 600 miles from east to west. This enormous territory contains three huge subregions, each with a distinctive geologic history and its own striking topography.

Forested slopes of the Beartooth Mountains, Mont., in the northern Rocky Mountains.� John Elk

The Colorado Plateau, nestled against the western flanks of the Southern Rockies, is an extraordinary island of geologic stability set in the turbulent sea of Cordilleran tectonic activity. Stability was not absolute, of course, so that parts of the plateau are warped and injected with volcanics, but in general the landscape results from the erosion by streams of nearly flat-lying sedimentary rocks. The result is a mosaic of angular mesas, buttes, and steplike canyons intricately cut from rocks that often are vividly coloured. Large areas of the plateau are so improbably picturesque that they have been set aside as national preserves. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is the most famous of several dozen such areas.

West of the plateau and abutting the Sierra Nevada�s eastern escarpment lies the arid Basin and Range subregion, among the most remarkable topographic provinces of the United States. The Basin and Range extends from southern Oregon and Idaho into northern Mexico. Rocks of great complexity have been broken by faulting, and the resulting blocks have tumbled, eroded, and been partly buried by lava and alluvial debris accumulating in the desert basins. The eroded blocks form mountain ranges that are characteristically dozens of miles long, several thousand feet from base to crest, with peak elevations that rarely rise to more than 10,000 feet, and almost always aligned roughly north�south. The basin floors are typically alluvium and sometimes salt marshes or alkali flats.

The third intermontane region, the Columbia Basin, is literally the last, for in some parts its rocks are still being formed. Its entire area is underlain by innumerable tabular lava flows that have flooded the basin between the Cascades and Northern Rockies to undetermined depths. The volume of lava must be measured in thousands of cubic miles, for the flows blanket large parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and in southern Idaho have drowned the flanks of the Northern Rocky Mountains in a basaltic sea. Where the lavas are fresh, as in southern Idaho, the surface is often nearly flat, but more often the floors have been trenched by rivers�conspicuously the Columbia and the Snake�or by glacial floodwaters that have carved an intricate system of braided canyons in the remarkable Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington. In surface form the eroded lava often resembles the topography of the Colorado Plateau, but the gaudy colours of the Colorado are replaced here by the sombre black and rusty brown of weathered basalt.

Most large mountain systems are sources of varied mineral wealth, and the American Cordillera is no exception. Metallic minerals have been taken from most crystalline regions and have furnished the United States with both romance and wealth�the Sierra Nevada gold that provoked the 1849 gold rush, the fabulous silver lodes of western Nevada�s Basin and Range, and gold strikes all along the Rocky Mountain chain. Industrial metals, however, are now far more important; copper and lead are among the base metals, and the more exotic molybdenum, vanadium, and cadmium are mainly useful in alloys.

In the Cordillera, as elsewhere, the greatest wealth stems from fuels. Most major basins contain oil and natural gas, conspicuously the Wyoming Basin, the Central Valley of California, and the Los Angeles Basin. The Colorado Plateau, however, has yielded some of the most interesting discoveries�considerable deposits of uranium and colossal occurrences of oil shale. Oil from the shale, however, probably cannot be economically removed without widespread strip-mining and correspondingly large-scale damage to the environment. Wide exploitation of low-sulfur bituminous coal has been initiated in the Four Corners area of the Colorado Plateau, and open-pit mining has already devastated parts of this once-pristine country as completely as it has West Virginia.

Drainage

As befits a nation of continental proportions, the United States has an extraordinary network of rivers and lakes, including some of the largest and most useful in the world. In the humid East they provide an enormous mileage of cheap inland transportation; westward, most rivers and streams are unnavigable but are heavily used for irrigation and power generation. Both East and West, however, traditionally have used lakes and streams as public sewers, and despite efforts to clean them up, most large waterways are laden with vast, poisonous volumes of industrial, agricultural, and human wastes.

The Eastern systems

Chief among U.S. rivers is the Mississippi, which, with its great tributaries, the Ohio and the Missouri, drains most of the midcontinent. The Mississippi is navigable to Minneapolis, nearly 1,200 miles (1,900 km) by air from the Gulf of Mexico, and along with the Great Lakes�St. Lawrence system it forms the world�s greatest network of inland waterways. The Mississippi�s eastern branches, chiefly the Ohio and the Tennessee, are also navigable for great distances. From the west, however, many of its numerous Great Plains tributaries are too seasonal and choked with sandbars to be used for shipping. The Missouri, for example, though longer than the Mississippi itself, was essentially without navigation until the mid-20th century, when a combination of dams, locks, and dredging opened the river to barge traffic.

The Great Lakes�St. Lawrence system, the other half of the midcontinental inland waterway, is connected to the Mississippi�Ohio via Chicago by canals and the Illinois River. The five Great Lakes (four of which are shared with Canada) constitute by far the largest freshwater lake group in the world and carry a larger tonnage of shipping than any other. The three main barriers to navigation�the St. Marys Rapids, at Sault Sainte Marie; Niagara Falls; and the rapids of the St. Lawrence�are all bypassed by locks, whose 27-foot (8-metre) draft lets ocean vessels penetrate 1,300 miles (2,100 km) into the continent, as far as Duluth, Minnesota, and Chicago.

The third group of Eastern rivers drains the coastal strip along the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Except for the Rio Grande, which rises west of the Rockies and flows about 1,900 circuitous miles (3,050 km) to the Gulf, few of these coastal rivers measure more than 300 miles (480 km), and most flow in an almost straight line to the sea. Except in glaciated New England and in arid southwestern Texas, most of the larger coastal streams are navigable for some distance.

The Pacific systems

West of the Rockies, nearly all of the rivers are strongly influenced by aridity. In the deserts and steppes of the intermontane basins, most of the scanty runoff disappears into interior basins, only one of which, the Great Salt Lake, holds any substantial volume of water. Aside from a few minor coastal streams, only three large river systems manage to reach the sea�the Columbia, the Colorado, and the San Joaquin�Sacramento system of California�s Central Valley. All three of these river systems are exotic: that is, they flow for considerable distances across dry lands from which they receive little water. Both the Columbia and the Colorado have carved awesome gorges, the former through the sombre lavas of the Cascades and the Columbia Basin, the latter through the brilliantly coloured rocks of the Colorado Plateau. These gorges lend themselves to easy damming, and the once-wild Columbia has been turned into a stairway of placid lakes whose waters irrigate the arid plateaus of eastern Washington and power one of the world�s largest hydroelectric networks. The Colorado is less extensively developed, and proposals for new dam construction have met fierce opposition from those who want to preserve the spectacular natural beauty of the river�s canyon lands.

Climate

Climate affects human habitats both directly and indirectly through its influence on vegetation, soils, and wildlife. In the United States, however, the natural environment has been altered drastically by nearly four centuries of European settlement, as well as thousands of years of Indian occupancy.

Wherever land is abandoned, however, �wild� conditions return rapidly, achieving over the long run a dynamic equilibrium among soils, vegetation, and the inexorable strictures of climate. Thus, though Americans have created an artificial environment of continental proportions, the United States still can be divided into a mosaic of bioclimatic regions, each of them distinguished by peculiar climatic conditions and each with a potential vegetation and soil that eventually would return in the absence of humans. The main exception to this generalization applies to fauna, so drastically altered that it is almost impossible to know what sort of animal geography would redevelop in the areas of the United States if humans were removed from the scene.

Climatic controls

The pattern of U.S. climates is largely set by the location of the conterminous United States almost entirely in the middle latitudes, by its position with respect to the continental landmass and its fringing oceans, and by the nation�s gross pattern of mountains and lowlands. Each of these geographic controls operates to determine the character of air masses and their changing behaviour from season to season.

The conterminous United States lies entirely between the tropic of Cancer and 50� N latitude, a position that confines Arctic climates to the high mountaintops and genuine tropics to a small part of southern Florida. By no means, however, is the climate literally temperate, for the middle latitudes are notorious for extreme variations of temperature and precipitation.

The great size of the North American landmass tends to reinforce these extremes. Since land heats and cools more rapidly than bodies of water, places distant from an ocean tend to have continental climates; that is, they alternate between extremes of hot summers and cold winters, in contrast to the marine climates, which are more equable. Most U.S. climates are markedly continental, the more so because the Cordillera effectively confines the moderating Pacific influence to a narrow strip along the West Coast. Extremes of continentality occur near the centre of the country, and in North Dakota temperatures have ranged between a summer high record of 121 �F (49 �C) and a winter low of −60 �F (−51 �C). Moreover, the general eastward drift of air over the United States carries continental temperatures all the way to the Atlantic coast. Bismarck, North Dakota, for example, has a great annual temperature range. Boston, on the Atlantic but largely exempt from its influence, has a lesser but still-continental range, while San Francisco, which is under strong Pacific influence, has only a small summer�winter differential.

In addition to confining Pacific temperatures to the coastal margin, the Pacific Coast Ranges are high enough to make a local rain shadow in their lee, although the main barrier is the great rampart formed by the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges. Rainy on their western slopes and barren on the east, this mountain crest forms one of the sharpest climatic divides in the United States.

The rain shadow continues east to the Rockies, leaving the entire Intermontane Region either arid or semiarid, except where isolated ranges manage to capture leftover moisture at high altitudes. East of the Rockies the westerly drift brings mainly dry air, and as a result, the Great Plains are semiarid. Still farther east, humidity increases owing to the frequent incursion from the south of warm, moist, and unstable air from the Gulf of Mexico, which produces more precipitation in the United States than the Pacific and Atlantic oceans combined.

Although the landforms of the Interior Lowlands have been termed dull, there is nothing dull about their weather conditions. Air from the Gulf of Mexico can flow northward across the Great Plains, uninterrupted by topographical barriers, but continental Canadian air flows south by the same route, and, since these two air masses differ in every important respect, the collisions often produce disturbances of monumental violence. Plainsmen and Midwesterners are accustomed to sudden displays of furious weather�tornadoes, blizzards, hailstorms, precipitous drops and rises in temperature, and a host of other spectacular meteorological displays, sometimes dangerous but seldom boring.

The change of seasons

Most of the United States is marked by sharp differences between winter and summer. In winter, when temperature contrasts between land and water are greatest, huge masses of frigid, dry Canadian air periodically spread far south over the midcontinent, bringing cold, sparkling weather to the interior and generating great cyclonic storms where their leading edges confront the shrunken mass of warm Gulf air to the south. Although such cyclonic activity occurs throughout the year, it is most frequent and intense during the winter, parading eastward out of the Great Plains to bring the Eastern states practically all their winter precipitation. Winter temperatures differ widely, depending largely on latitude. Thus, New Orleans, Louisiana, at 30� N latitude, and International Falls, Minnesota, at 49� N, have respective January temperature averages of 55 �F (13 �C) and 3 �F (−16 �C). In the north, therefore, precipitation often comes as snow, often driven by furious winds; farther south, cold rain alternates with sleet and occasional snow. Southern Florida is the only dependably warm part of the East, though �polar outbursts� have been known to bring temperatures below 0 �F (−18 �C) as far south as Tallahassee. The main uniformity of Eastern weather in wintertime is the expectation of frequent change.

Winter climate on the West Coast is very different. A great spiraling mass of relatively warm, moist air spreads south from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, its semipermanent front producing gloomy overcast and drizzles that hang over the Pacific Northwest all winter long, occasionally reaching southern California, which receives nearly all of its rain at this time of year. This Pacific air brings mild temperatures along the length of the coast; the average January day in Seattle, Washington, ranges between 33 and 44 �F (1 and 7 �C) and in Los Angeles between 45 and 64 �F (7 and 18 �C). In southern California, however, rains are separated by long spells of fair weather, and the whole region is a winter haven for those seeking refuge from less agreeable weather in other parts of the country. The Intermontane Region is similar to the Pacific Coast, but with much less rainfall and a considerably wider range of temperatures.

During the summer there is a reversal of the air masses, and east of the Rockies the change resembles the summer monsoon of Southeast Asia. As the midcontinent heats up, the cold Canadian air mass weakens and retreats, pushed north by an aggressive mass of warm, moist air from the Gulf. The great winter temperature differential between North and South disappears as the hot, soggy blanket spreads from the Gulf coast to the Canadian border. Heat and humidity are naturally most oppressive in the South, but there is little comfort in the more northern latitudes. In Houston, Texas, the temperature on a typical July day reaches 93 �F (34 �C), with relative humidity averaging near 75 percent, but Minneapolis, Minnesota, more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north, is only slightly cooler and less humid.

Since the Gulf air is unstable as well as wet, convectional and frontal summer thunderstorms are endemic east of the Rockies, accounting for a majority of total summer rain. These storms usually drench small areas with short-lived, sometimes violent downpours, so that crops in one Midwestern county may prosper, those in another shrivel in drought, and those in yet another be flattened by hailstones. Relief from the humid heat comes in the northern Midwest from occasional outbursts of cool Canadian air; small but more consistent relief is found downwind from the Great Lakes and at high elevations in the Appalachians. East of the Rockies, however, U.S. summers are distinctly uncomfortable, and air conditioning is viewed as a desirable amenity in most areas.

Again, the Pacific regime is different. The moist Aleutian air retreats northward, to be replaced by mild, stable air from over the subtropical but cool waters of the Pacific, and except in the mountains the Pacific Coast is nearly rainless though often foggy. In the meanwhile, a small but potent mass of dry hot air raises temperatures to blistering levels over much of the intermontane Southwest. In Yuma, Arizona, for example, the normal temperature in July reaches 107 �F (42 �C), while nearby Death Valley, California, holds the national record, 134 �F (57 �C). During its summer peak this scorching air mass spreads from the Pacific margin as far as Texas on the east and Idaho to the north, turning the whole interior basin into a summer desert.

Over most of the United States, as in most continental climates, spring and autumn are agreeable but disappointingly brief. Autumn is particularly idyllic in the East, with a romantic Indian summer of ripening corn and brilliantly coloured foliage and of mild days and frosty nights. The shift in dominance between marine and continental air masses, however, spawns furious weather in some regions. Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, for example, autumn is the season for hurricanes�the American equivalent of typhoons of the Asian Pacific�which rage northward from the warm tropics to create havoc along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts as far north as New England. The Mississippi valley holds the dubious distinction of recording more tornadoes than any other area on Earth. These violent and often deadly storms usually occur over relatively small areas and are confined largely to spring and early summer.

The bioclimatic regions

Three first-order bioclimatic zones encompass most of the conterminous United States�regions in which climatic conditions are similar enough to dictate similar conditions of mature (zonal) soil and potential climax vegetation (i.e., the assemblage of plants that would grow and reproduce indefinitely given stable climate and average conditions of soil and drainage). These are the Humid East, the Humid Pacific Coast, and the Dry West. In addition, the boundary zone between the Humid East and the Dry West is so large and important that it constitutes a separate region, the Humid�Arid Transition. Finally, because the Western Cordillera contains an intricate mosaic of climatic types, largely determined by local elevation and exposure, it is useful to distinguish the Western Mountain Climate. The first three zones, however, are very diverse and require further breakdown, producing a total of 10 main bioclimatic regions. For two reasons, the boundaries of these bioclimatic regions are much less distinct than boundaries of landform regions. First, climate varies from year to year, especially in boundary zones, whereas landforms obviously do not. Second, regions of climate, vegetation, and soils coincide generally but sometimes not precisely. Boundaries, therefore, should be interpreted as zonal and transitional, and rarely should be considered as sharp lines in the landscape.

For all of their indistinct boundaries, however, these bioclimatic regions have strong and easily recognized identities. Such regional identity is strongly reinforced when a particular area falls entirely within a single bioclimatic region and at the same time a single landform region. The result�as in the Piedmont South, the central Midwest, or the western Great Plains�is a landscape with an unmistakable regional personality.

The Humid East

The largest and in some ways the most important of the bioclimatic zones, the Humid East was where the Europeans first settled, tamed the land, and adapted to American conditions. In early times almost all of this territory was forested, a fact of central importance in American history that profoundly influenced both soils and wildlife. As in most of the world�s humid lands, soluble minerals have been leached from the earth, leaving a great family of soils called pedalfers, rich in relatively insoluble iron and aluminum compounds.

Both forests and soils, however, differ considerably within this vast region. Since rainfall is ample and summers are warm everywhere, the main differences result from the length and severity of winters, which determine the length of the growing season. Winter, obviously, differs according to latitude, so that the Humid East is sliced into four great east�west bands of soils and vegetation, with progressively more amenable winters as one travels southward. These changes occur very gradually, however, and the boundaries therefore are extremely subtle.

The Sub-Boreal Forest Region is the northernmost of these bands. It is only a small and discontinuous part of the United States, representing the tattered southern fringe of the vast Canadian taiga�a scrubby forest dominated by evergreen needle-leaf species that can endure the ferocious winters and reproduce during the short, erratic summers. Average growing seasons are less than 120 days, though localities in Michigan�s Upper Peninsula have recorded frost-free periods lasting as long as 161 days and as short as 76 days. Soils of this region that survived the scour of glaciation are miserably thin podzols�heavily leached, highly acid, and often interrupted by extensive stretches of bog. Most attempts at farming in the region long since have been abandoned.

Farther south lies the Humid Microthermal Zone of milder winters and longer summers. Large broadleaf trees begin to predominate over the evergreens, producing a mixed forest of greater floristic variety and economic value that is famous for its brilliant autumn colours. As the forest grows richer in species, sterile podzols give way to more productive gray-brown podzolic soils, stained and fertilized with humus. Although winters are warmer than in the Sub-Boreal zone, and although the Great Lakes help temper the bitterest cold, January temperatures ordinarily average below freezing, and a winter without a few days of subzero temperatures is uncommon. Everywhere, the ground is solidly frozen and snow covered for several months of the year.

Still farther south are the Humid Subtropics. The region�s northern boundary is one of the country�s most significant climatic lines: the approximate northern limit of a growing season of 180�200 days, the outer margin of cotton growing, and, hence, of the Old South. Most of the South lies in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, for higher elevations in the Appalachians cause a peninsula of Northern mixed forest to extend as far south as northern Georgia. The red-brown podzolic soil, once moderately fertile, has been severely damaged by overcropping and burning. Thus much of the region that once sustained a rich, broadleaf-forest flora now supports poor piney woods. Throughout the South, summers are hot, muggy, long, and disagreeable; Dixie�s �frosty mornings� bring a welcome respite in winter.

The southern margins of Florida contain the only real tropics in the conterminous United States; it is an area in which frost is almost unknown. Hot, rainy summers alternate with warm and somewhat drier winters, with a secondary rainfall peak during the autumn hurricane season�altogether a typical monsoonal regime. Soils and vegetation are mostly immature, however, since southern Florida rises so slightly above sea level that substantial areas, such as the Everglades, are swampy and often brackish. Peat and sand frequently masquerade as soil, and much of the vegetation is either salt-loving mangrove or sawgrass prairie.

The Humid Pacific Coast

The western humid region differs from its eastern counterpart in so many ways as to be a world apart. Much smaller, it is crammed into a narrow littoral belt to the windward of the Sierra�Cascade summit, dominated by mild Pacific air, and chopped by irregular topography into an intricate mosaic of climatic and biotic habitats. Throughout the region rainfall is extremely seasonal, falling mostly in the winter half of the year. Summers are droughty everywhere, but the main regional differences come from the length of drought�from about two months in humid Seattle, Washington, to nearly five months in semiarid San Diego, California.

Western Washington, Oregon, and northern California lie within a zone that climatologists call Marine West Coast. Winters are raw, overcast, and drizzly�not unlike northwestern Europe�with subfreezing temperatures restricted mainly to the mountains, upon which enormous snow accumulations produce local alpine glaciers. Summers, by contrast, are brilliantly cloudless, cool, and frequently foggy along the West Coast and somewhat warmer in the inland valleys. This mild marine climate produces some of the world�s greatest forests of enormous straight-boled evergreen trees that furnish the United States with much of its commercial timber. Mature soils are typical of humid midlatitude forestlands, a moderately leached gray-brown podzol.

Toward the south, with diminishing coastal rain the moist marine climate gradually gives way to California�s tiny but much-publicized Mediterranean regime. Although mountainous topography introduces a bewildering variety of local environments, scanty winter rains are quite inadequate to compensate for the long summer drought, and much of the region has a distinctly arid character. For much of the year, cool, stable Pacific air dominates the West Coast, bringing San Francisco its famous fogs and Los Angeles its infamous smoggy temperature inversions. Inland, however, summer temperatures reach blistering levels, so that in July, while Los Angeles expects a normal daily maximum of 83 �F (28 �C), Fresno expects 100 �F (38 �C) and is climatically a desert. As might be expected, Mediterranean California contains a huge variety of vegetal habitats, but the commonest perhaps is the chaparral, a drought-resistant, scrubby woodland of twisted hard-leafed trees, picturesque but of little economic value. Chaparral is a pyrophytic (fire-loving) vegetation�i.e., under natural conditions its growth and form depend on regular burning. These fires constitute a major environmental hazard in the suburban hills above Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay, especially in autumn, when hot dry Santa Ana winds from the interior regularly convert brush fires into infernos. Soils are similarly varied, but most of them are light in colour and rich in soluble minerals, qualities typical of subarid soils.

The Dry West

In the United States, to speak of dry areas is to speak of the West. It covers an enormous region beyond the dependable reach of moist oceanic air, occupying the entire Intermontane area and sprawling from Canada to Mexico across the western part of the Great Plains. To Americans nurtured in the Humid East, this vast territory across the path of all transcontinental travelers has been harder to tame than any other�and no region has so gripped the national imagination as this fierce and dangerous land.

In the Dry West nothing matters more than water. Thus, though temperatures may differ radically from place to place, the really important regional differences depend overwhelmingly on the degree of aridity, whether an area is extremely dry and hence desert or semiarid and therefore steppe.

Americans of the 19th century were preoccupied by the myth of a Great American Desert, which supposedly occupied more than one-third of the entire country. True desert, however, is confined to the Southwest, with patchy outliers elsewhere, all without exception located in the lowland rain shadows of the Cordillera. Vegetation in these desert areas varies between nothing at all (a rare circumstance confined mainly to salt flats and sand dunes) to a low cover of scattered woody scrub and short-lived annuals that burst into flamboyant bloom after rains. Soils are usually thin, light-coloured, and very rich with mineral salts. In some areas wind erosion has removed fine-grained material, leaving behind desert pavement, a barren veneer of broken rock.

Most of the West, however, lies in the semiarid region, in which rainfall is scanty but adequate to support a thin cover of short bunchgrass, commonly alternating with scrubby brush. Here, as in the desert, soils fall into the large family of the pedocals, rich in calcium and other soluble minerals, but in the slightly wetter environments of the West, they are enriched with humus from decomposed grass roots. Under the proper type of management, these chestnut-coloured steppe soils have the potential to be very fertile.

Weather in the West resembles that of other dry regions of the world, often extreme, violent, and reliably unreliable. Rainfall, for example, obeys a cruel natural law: as total precipitation decreases, it becomes more undependable. John Steinbeck�s novel The Grapes of Wrath describes the problems of a family enticed to the arid frontier of Oklahoma during a wet period only to be driven out by the savage drought of the 1930s that turned the western Great Plains into the great American Dust Bowl. Temperatures in the West also fluctuate convulsively within short periods, and high winds are infamous throughout the region.

The Humid�Arid Transition

East of the Rockies all climatic boundaries are gradational. None, however, is so important or so imperceptibly subtle as the boundary zone that separates the Humid East from the Dry West and that alternates unpredictably between arid and humid conditions from year to year. Stretching approximately from Texas to North Dakota in an ill-defined band between the 95th and 100th meridians, this transitional region deserves separate recognition, partly because of its great size, and partly because of the fine balance between surplus and deficit rainfall, which produces a unique and valuable combination of soils, flora, and fauna. The native vegetation, insofar as it can be reconstructed, was prairie, the legendary sea of tall, deep-rooted grass now almost entirely tilled and planted to grains. Soils, often of loessial derivation, include the enormously productive chernozem (black earth) in the north, with reddish prairie soils of nearly equal fertility in the south. Throughout the region temperatures are severely continental, with bitterly cold winters in the north and scorching summers everywhere.

The western edge of the prairie fades gradually into the shortgrass steppe of the High Plains, the change a function of diminishing rainfall. The eastern edge, however, represents one of the few major discordances between a climatic and biotic boundary in the United States, for the grassland penetrates the eastern forest in a great salient across humid Illinois and Indiana. Many scholars believe this part of the prairie was artificially induced by repeated burning and consequent destruction of the forest margins by Indians.

The Western mountains

Throughout the Cordillera and Intermontane regions, irregular topography shatters the grand bioclimatic pattern into an intricate mosaic of tiny regions that differ drastically according to elevation and exposure. No small- or medium-scale map can accurately record such complexity, and mountainous parts of the West are said, noncommittally, to have a �mountain climate.� Lowlands are usually dry, but increasing elevation brings lower temperature, decreased evaporation, and�if a slope faces prevailing winds�greater precipitation. Soils vary wildly from place to place, but vegetation is fairly predictable. From the desert or steppe of intermontane valleys, a climber typically ascends into parklike savanna, then through an orderly sequence of increasingly humid and boreal forests until, if the range is high enough, one reaches the timberline and Arctic tundra. The very highest peaks are snow-capped, although permanent glaciers rarely occur outside the cool humid highlands of the Pacific Northwest. Peirce F. Lewis

Plant life

The dominant features of the vegetation are indicated by the terms forest, grassland, desert, and alpine tundra.

A coniferous forest of white and red pine, hemlock, spruce, jack pine, and balsam fir extends interruptedly in a narrow strip near the Canadian border from Maine to Minnesota and southward along the Appalachian Mountains. There may be found smaller stands of tamarack, spruce, paper birch, willow, alder, and aspen or poplar. Southward, a transition zone of mixed conifers and deciduous trees gives way to a hardwood forest of broad-leaved trees. This forest, with varying mixtures of maple, oak, ash, locust, linden, sweet gum, walnut, hickory, sycamore, beech, and the more southerly tulip tree, once extended uninterruptedly from New England to Missouri and eastern Texas. Pines are prominent on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain and adjacent uplands, often occurring in nearly pure stands called pine barrens. Pitch, longleaf, slash, shortleaf, Virginia, and loblolly pines are commonest. Hickory and various oaks combine to form a significant part of this forest, with magnolia, white cedar, and ash often seen. In the frequent swamps, bald cypress, tupelo, and white cedar predominate. Pines, palmettos, and live oaks are replaced at the southern tip of Florida by the more tropical royal and thatch palms, figs, satinwood, and mangrove.

The grasslands occur principally in the Great Plains area and extend westward into the intermontane basins and benchlands of the Rocky Mountains. Numerous grasses such as buffalo, grama, side oat, bunch, needle, and wheat grass, together with many kinds of herbs, make up the plant cover. Coniferous forests cover the lesser mountains and high plateaus of the Rockies, Cascades, and Sierra Nevada. Ponderosa (yellow) pine, Douglas fir, western red cedar, western larch, white pine, lodgepole pine, several spruces, western hemlock, grand fir, red fir, and the lofty redwood are the principal trees of these forests. The densest growth occurs west of the Cascade and Coast ranges in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, where the trees are often 100 feet (30 metres) or more in height. There the forest floor is so dark that only ferns, mosses, and a few shade-loving shrubs and herbs may be found.

The alpine tundra, located in the conterminous United States only in the mountains above the limit of trees, consists principally of small plants that bloom brilliantly for a short season. Sagebrush is the most common plant of the arid basins and semideserts west of the Rocky Mountains, but juniper, nut pine, and mountain mahogany are often found on the slopes and low ridges. The desert, extending from southeastern California to Texas, is noted for the many species of cactus, some of which grow to the height of trees, and for the Joshua tree and other yuccas, creosote bush, mesquite, and acacias.

The United States is rich in the variety of its native forest trees, some of which, as the species of sequoia, are the most massive known. More than 1,000 species and varieties have been described, of which almost 200 are of economic value, either because of the timber and other useful products that they yield or by reason of their importance in forestry.

Besides the native flowering plants, estimated at between 20,000 to 25,000 species, many hundreds of species introduced from other regions�chiefly Europe, Asia, and tropical America�have become naturalized. A large proportion of these are common annual weeds of fields, pastures, and roadsides. In some districts these naturalized �aliens� constitute 50 percent or more of the total plant population.

Paul H. Oehser Reed C. Rollins The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Animal life

With most of North America, the United States lies in the Nearctic faunistic realm, a region containing an assemblage of species similar to Eurasia and North Africa but sharply different from the tropical and subtropical zones to the south. Main regional differences correspond roughly with primary climatic and vegetal patterns. Thus, for example, the animal communities of the Dry West differ sharply from those of the Humid East and from those of the Pacific Coast. Because animals tend to range over wider areas than plants, faunal regions are generally coarser than vegetal regions and harder to delineate sharply.

The animal geography of the United States, however, is far from a natural pattern, for European settlement produced a series of environmental changes that grossly altered the distribution of animal communities. First, many species were hunted to extinction or near extinction, most conspicuously, perhaps, the American bison, which ranged by the millions nearly from coast to coast but now rarely lives outside of zoos and wildlife preserves. Second, habitats were upset or destroyed throughout most of the country�forests cut, grasslands plowed and overgrazed, and migration paths interrupted by fences, railroads, and highways. Third, certain introduced species found hospitable niches and, like the English sparrow, spread over huge areas, often preempting the habitats of native animals. Fourth, though their effects are not fully understood, chemical biocides such as DDT were used for so long and in such volume that they are believed at least partly responsible for catastrophic mortality rates among large mammals and birds, especially predators high on the food chain. Fifth, there has been a gradual northward migration of certain tropical and subtropical insects, birds, and mammals, perhaps encouraged by gradual climatic warming. In consequence, many native animals have been reduced to tiny fractions of their former ranges or exterminated completely, while other animals, both native and introduced, have found the new anthropocentric environment well suited to their needs, with explosive effects on their populations. The coyote, opossum, armadillo, and several species of deer are among the animals that now occupy much larger ranges than they once did. Peirce F. Lewis

Arrangement of the account of the distribution of the fauna according to the climatic and vegetal regions has the merit that it can be compared further with the distribution of insects and of other invertebrates, some of which may be expected to fall into the same patterns as the vertebrates, while others, with different modes or different ages of dispersal, have geographic patterns of their own.

The transcontinental zone of coniferous forest at the north, the taiga, and the tundra zone into which it merges at the northern limit of tree growth are strikingly paralleled by similar vertical zones in the Rockies, and on Mount Washington in the east, where the area above the timberline and below the snow line is often inhabited with tundra animals like the ptarmigan and the white Parnassius butterflies, while the spruce and other conifers below the timberline form a belt sharply set off from the grassland or hardwood forest or desert at still lower elevations.

A whole series of important types of animals spread beyond the limits of such regions or zones, sometimes over most of the continent. Aquatic animals, in particular, may live equally in forest and plains, in the Gulf states, and at the Canadian border. Such widespread animals include the white-tailed (Virginia) deer and black bear, the puma (though only in the remotest parts of its former range) and bobcat, the river otter (though now rare in inland areas south of the Great Lakes) and mink, and the beaver and muskrat. The distinctive coyote ranges over all of western North America and eastward as far as Maine. The snapping turtle ranges from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains.

In the northern coniferous forest zone, or taiga, the relations of animals with European or Eurasian representatives are numerous, and this zone is also essentially circumpolar. The relations are less close than in the Arctic forms, but the moose, beaver, hare, red fox, otter, wolverine, and wolf are recognizably related to Eurasian animals. Even some fishes, like the whitefishes (Coregonidae), the yellow perch, and the pike, exhibit this kind of Old World�New World relation. A distinctively North American animal in this taiga assemblage is the Canadian porcupine.

The hardwood forest area of the eastern and the southeastern pinelands compose the most important of the faunal regions within the United States. A great variety of fishes, amphibians, and reptiles of this region have related forms in East Asia, and this pattern of representation is likewise found in the flora. This area is rich in catfishes, minnows, and suckers. The curious ganoid fishes, the bowfin and the gar, are ancient types. The spoonbill cat, a remarkable type of sturgeon in the lower Mississippi, is represented elsewhere in the world only in the Yangtze in China. The Appalachian region is headquarters for the salamanders of the world, with no less than seven of the eight families of this large group of amphibians represented; no other continent has more than three of the eight families together. The eel-like sirens and amphiumas (congo snakes) are confined to the southeastern states. The lungless salamanders of the family Plethodontidae exhibit a remarkable variety of genera and a number of species centring in the Appalachians. There is a great variety of frogs, and these include tree frogs whose main development is South American and Australian. The emydid freshwater turtles of the southeast parallel those of East Asia to a remarkable degree, though the genus Clemmys is the only one represented in both regions. Much the same is true of the water snakes, pit vipers, rat snakes, and green snakes, though still others are peculiarly American. The familiar alligator is a form with an Asiatic relative, the only other living true alligator being a species in central China.

In its mammals and birds the southeastern fauna is less sharply distinguished from the life to the north and west and is less directly related to that of East Asia. The forest is the home of the white-tailed deer, the black bear, the gray fox, the raccoon, and the common opossum. The wild turkey and the extinct hosts of the passenger pigeon were characteristic. There is a remarkable variety of woodpeckers. The birdlife in general tends to differ from that of Eurasia in the presence of birds, like the tanagers, American orioles, and hummingbirds, that belong to South American families. Small mammals abound with types of the worldwide rodent family Cricetidae, and with distinctive moles and shrews.

Settlement patterns

Although the land that now constitutes the United States was occupied and much affected by diverse Indian cultures over many millennia, these pre-European settlement patterns have had virtually no impact upon the contemporary nation�except locally, as in parts of New Mexico. A benign habitat permitted a huge contiguous tract of settled land to materialize across nearly all the eastern half of the United States and within substantial patches of the West. The vastness of the land, the scarcity of labour, and the abundance of migratory opportunities in a land replete with raw physical resources contributed to exceptional human mobility and a quick succession of ephemeral forms of land use and settlement. Human endeavours have greatly transformed the landscape, but such efforts have been largely destructive. Most of the pre-European landscape in the United States was so swiftly and radically altered that it is difficult to conjecture intelligently about its earlier appearance.

Population density of the United States.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The overall impression of the settled portion of the American landscape, rural or urban, is one of disorder and incoherence, even in areas of strict geometric survey. The individual landscape unit is seldom in visual harmony with its neighbour, so that, however sound in design or construction the single structure may be, the general effect is untidy. These attributes have been intensified by the acute individualism of the American, vigorous speculation in land and other commodities, a strongly utilitarian attitude toward the land and the treasures above and below it, and government policy and law. The landscape is also remarkable for its extensive transportation facilities, which have greatly influenced the configuration of the land.

United States: Urban-ruralEncyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Another special characteristic of American settlement, one that became obvious only by the mid-20th century, is the convergence of rural and urban modes of life. The farmsteads�and rural folk in general�have become increasingly urbanized, and agricultural operations have become more automated, while the metropolis grows more gelatinous, unfocused, and pseudo-bucolic along its margins.

Rural settlement

Patterns of rural settlement indicate much about the history, economy, society, and minds of those who created them as well as about the land itself. The essential design of rural activity in the United States bears a strong family resemblance to that of other neo-European lands, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, or tsarist Siberia�places that have undergone rapid occupation and exploitation by immigrants intent upon short-term development and enrichment. In all such areas, under novel social and political conditions and with a relative abundance of territory and physical resources, ideas and institutions derived from a relatively stable medieval or early modern Europe have undergone major transformation. Further, these are nonpeasant countrysides, alike in having failed to achieve the intimate symbiosis of people and habitat, the humanized rural landscapes characteristic of many relatively dense, stable, earthbound communities in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

Early models of land allocation

From the beginning the prevalent official policy of the British (except between 1763 and 1776) and then of the U.S. government was to promote agricultural and other settlement�to push the frontier westward as fast as physical and economic conditions permitted. The British crown�s grants of large, often vaguely specified tracts to individual proprietors or companies enabled the grantees to draw settlers by the sale or lease of land at attractive prices or even by outright gift.

Of the numerous attempts at group colonization, the most notable effort was the theocratic and collectivist New England town that flourished, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, during the first century of settlement. The town, the basic unit of government and comparable in area to townships in other states, allotted both rural and village parcels to single families by group decision. Contrary to earlier scholarly belief, in all but a few cases settlement was spatially dispersed in the socially cohesive towns, at least until about 1800. The relatively concentrated latter-day villages persist today as amoeba-like entities straggling along converging roads, neither fully rural nor agglomerated in form. The only latter-day settlement experiment of notable magnitude to achieve enduring success was a series of Mormon settlements in the Great Basin region of Utah and adjacent states, with their tightly concentrated farm villages reminiscent of the New England model. Other efforts have been made along ethnic, religious, or political lines, but success has been at best brief and fragile.

Creating the national domain

With the coming of independence and after complex negotiations, the original 13 states surrendered to the new national government nearly all their claims to the unsettled western lands beyond their boundaries. Some tracts, however, were reserved for disposal to particular groups. Thus, the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio gave preferential treatment to natives of Connecticut, while the military tracts in Ohio and Indiana were used as bonus payments to veterans of the American Revolution.

A federally administered national domain was created, to which the great bulk of the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase and later beyond the Mississippi and in 1819 in Florida was consigned. The only major exceptions were the public lands of Texas, which were left within that state�s jurisdiction; such earlier French and Spanish land grants as were confirmed, often after tortuous litigation; and some Indian lands. In sharp contrast to the slipshod methods of colonial land survey and disposal, the federal land managers expeditiously surveyed, numbered, and mapped their territory in advance of settlement, beginning with Ohio in the 1780s, then sold or deeded it to settlers under inviting terms at a number of regional land offices.

The design universally followed in the new survey system (except within the French, Spanish, and Indian grants) was a simple, efficient rectangular scheme. Townships were laid out as blocks, each six by six miles in size, oriented with the compass directions. Thirty-six sections, each one square mile, or 640 acres (260 hectares), in size, were designated within each township; and public roads were established along section lines and, where needed, along half-section lines. At irregular intervals, offsets in survey lines and roads were introduced to allow for the Earth�s curvature. Individual property lines were coincident with, or parallel to, survey lines, and this pervasive rectangularity generally carried over into the geometry of fields and fences or into the townsites later superimposed upon the basic rural survey.

This all-encompassing checkerboard pattern is best appreciated from an airplane window over Iowa or Kansas. There one sees few streams or other natural features and few diagonal highways or railroads interrupting the overwhelming squareness of the landscape. A systematic rectangular layout, rather less rigorous in form, also appears in much of Texas and in those portions of Maine, western New York and Pennsylvania, and southern Georgia that were settled after the 1780s.

Distribution of rural lands

Since its formation, Congress has enacted a series of complex schemes for distribution of the national domain. The most famous of these plans was the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered title to 160 acres to individual settlers, subject only to residence for a certain period of time and to the making of minimal improvements to the land thus acquired. The legal provisions of such acts have varied with time as the nature of farming technology and of the remaining lands have changed, but their general effect has been to perpetuate the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic in which yeoman farmers own and till self-sufficient properties.

The program was successful in providing private owners with relatively choice lands, aside from parcels reserved for schools and various township and municipal uses. More than one-third of the national territory, however, is still owned by federal and state governments, with much of this land in forest and wildlife preserves. A large proportion of this land is in the West and is unsuited for intensive agriculture or grazing because of the roughness, dryness, or salinity of the terrain; much of it is leased out for light grazing or for timber cutting.

Patterns of farm life

During the classic period of American rural life, around 1900, the typical American lived or worked on a farm or was economically dependent upon farmers. In contrast to rural life in many other parts of the world, the farm family lived on an isolated farmstead some distance from town and often from farm neighbours; its property averaged less than one-quarter square mile. This farmstead varied in form and content with local tradition and economy. In particular, barn types were localized�for example, the tobacco barns of the South, the great dairy barns of Wisconsin, or the general-purpose forebay barns of southeastern Pennsylvania�as were modes of fencing. In general, however, the farmstead contained dwelling, barn, storage and sheds for small livestock and equipment, a small orchard, and a kitchen garden. A woodlot might be found in the least-accessible or least-fertile part of the farm.

Successions of such farms were connected with one another and with the towns by means of a dense, usually rectangular lattice of roads, largely unimproved at the time. The hamlets, villages, and smaller cities were arrayed at relatively regular intervals, with size and affluence determined in large part by the presence and quality of rail service or status as the county seat. But, among people who have been historically rural, individualistic, and antiurban in bias, many services normally located in urban places might be found in rustic settings. Thus, much retail business was transacted by means of itinerant peddlers, while small shops for the fabrication, distribution, or repair of various items were often located in isolated farmsteads, as were many post offices.

Social activity also tended to be widely dispersed among numerous rural churches, schools, or grange halls; and the climactic event of the year might well be the county fair, political rally, or religious encampment�again on a rural site. Not the least symptomatic sign of the strong tendency toward spatial isolation are the countless family burial plots or community cemeteries so liberally distributed across the countryside.

Regional small-town patterns

There has been much regional variation among smaller villages and hamlets, but such phenomena have received relatively little attention from students of American culture or geography. The distinctive New England village, of course, is generally recognized and cherished: it consists of a loose clustering of white frame buildings, including a church (usually Congregationalist or Unitarian), town hall, shops, and stately homes with tall shade trees around the central green, or commons�a grassy expanse that may contain a bandstand and monuments or flowers. Derivative village forms were later carried westward to sections of the northern Midwest.

Less widely known but equally distinctive is the town morphology characteristic of the Midland, or Pennsylvanian, culture area and most fully developed in southeastern and central Pennsylvania and Piedmont Maryland. It differs totally from the New England model in density, building materials, and general appearance. Closely packed, often contiguous buildings�mostly brick, but sometimes stone, frame, or stucco�abut directly on a sidewalk, which is often paved with brick and usually thickly planted with maple, sycamore, or other shade trees. Such towns are characteristically linear in plan, have dwellings intermingled with other types of buildings, have only one or two principal streets, and may radiate outward from a central square lined with commercial and governmental structures.

The most characteristic U.S. small town is the one whose pattern evolved in the Midwest. Its simple scheme is usually based on the grid plan. Functions are rigidly segregated spatially, with the central business district, consisting of closely packed two- or three-story brick buildings, limited exclusively to commercial and administrative activity. The residences, generally set well back within spacious lots, are peripheral in location, as are most rail facilities, factories, and warehouses.

Even the modest urbanization of the small town came late to the South. Most urban functions long were spatially dispersed�almost totally so in the early Chesapeake Bay country or North Carolina�or were performed entirely by the larger plantations dominating the economic life of much of the region. When city and town began to materialize in the 19th and 20th centuries, they tended to follow the Midwestern model in layout.

Although quite limited in geographic area, the characteristic villages of the Mormon and Hispanic-American districts are of considerable interest. The Mormon settlement uncompromisingly followed the ecclesiastically imposed grid plan composed of square blocks, each with perhaps only four very large house lots, and the block surrounded by extremely wide streets. Those villages in New Mexico in which population and culture were derived from Old Mexico were often built according to the standard Latin-American plan. The distinctive feature is a central plaza dominated by a Roman Catholic church and encircled by low stone or adobe buildings.

The rural�urban transition

Weakening of the agrarian ideal

The United States has had little success in achieving or maintaining the ideal of the family farm. Through purchase, inheritance, leasing, and other means, some of dubious legality, smaller properties have been merged into much larger entities. By the late 1980s, for example, when the average farm size had surpassed 460 acres, farms containing 2,000 or more acres accounted for almost half of all farmland and 20 percent of the cropland harvested, even though they comprised less than 3 percent of all farms. At the other extreme were those 60 percent of all farms that contained fewer than 180 acres and reported less than 15 percent of cropland harvested. This trend toward fewer but larger farms has continued.

The huge, heavily capitalized �neoplantation,� essentially a factory in the field, is especially conspicuous in parts of California, Arizona, and the Mississippi delta, but examples can be found in any state. There are also many smaller but intensive operations that call for large investments and advanced managerial skills. This trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive farm enterprise has been paralleled by a sharp drop in rural farm population�a slump from the all-time high of some 32,000,000 in the early 20th century to about 5,000,000 in the late 1980s; but even in 1940, when farm folk still numbered more than 30,000,000, nearly 40 percent of farm operators were tenants, and another 10 percent were only partial owners.

As the agrarian population has dwindled, so too has its immediate impact lessened, though less swiftly, in economic and political matters. The rural United States, however, has been the source of many of the nation�s values and images. The United States has become a highly urbanized, technologically advanced society far removed in daily life from cracker barrel, barnyard, corral, or logging camp. Although Americans have gravitated, sometimes reluctantly, to the big city, in the daydreams and assumptions that guide many sociopolitical decisions, the memory of a rapidly vanishing agrarian America is well noted. This is revealed not only in the works of contemporary novelists, poets, and painters but also throughout the popular arts: in movies, television, soap operas, folklore, country music, political oratory, and in much leisure activity.

Impact of the motor vehicle

Since about 1920 more genuine change has occurred in American rural life than during the preceding three centuries of European settlement in North America. Although the basic explanation is the profound social and technological transformations engulfing most of the world, the most immediate agent of change has been the internal-combustion engine. The automobile, truck, bus, and paved highway have more than supplanted a moribund passenger and freight railroad system. While many local rail depots have been boarded up and scores of secondary lines have been abandoned, hundreds of thousands of miles of old dirt roads have been paved, and a vast system of interstate highways has been constructed to connect major cities in a single nonstop network. The net result has been a shrinking of travel time and an increase in miles traveled for the individual driver, rural or urban.

Small towns in the United States have undergone a number of changes. Before 1970 towns near highways and urban centres generally prospered; while in the less-fortunate towns, where the residents lingered on for the sake of relatively cheap housing, downtown businesses often became extinct. From the late 1960s until about 1981 the rural and small-town population grew at a faster rate than the metropolitan population, the so-called metro�nonmetro turnaround, thus reversing more than a century of relatively greater urban growth. Subsequent evidence, however, suggests an approach toward equilibrium between the urban and rural sectors.

As Americans have become increasingly mobile, the visual aspect of rural America has altered drastically. The highway has become the central route, and many of the functions once confined to the local town or city now stretch for many miles along major roads.

Reversal of the classic rural dominance

The metropolitanization of life in the United States has not been limited to city, suburb, or exurb; it now involves most of the rural area and population. The result has been the decline of local crafts and regional peculiarities, quite visibly in such items as farm implements, fencing, silos, and housing and in commodities such as clothing or bread. In many ways, the countryside is now economically dependent on the city.

The city dweller is the dominant consumer for products other than those of field, quarry, or lumber mill; and city location tends to determine patterns of rural economy rather than the reverse. During weekends and the vacation seasons, swarms of city folk stream out to second homes in the countryside and to campgrounds, ski runs, beaches, boating areas, or hunting and fishing tracts. For many large rural areas, recreation is the principal source of income and employment; and such areas as northern New England and upstate New York have become playgrounds and sylvan refuges for many urban residents.

The larger cities reach far into the countryside for their vital supplies of water and energy. There is an increasing reliance upon distant coalfields to provide fuel for electrical power plants, and cities have gone far afield in seeking out rural disposal sites for their ever-growing volumes of garbage.

The majority of the rural population now lives within daily commuting range of a sizable city. This enables many farm residents to operate their farms while, at the same time, working part- or full-time at a city job, and it thus helps to prevent the drastic decline in rural population that has occurred in remoter parts of the country. Similarly, many small towns within the shadow of a metropolis, with fewer and fewer farmers to service, have become dormitory satellites, serving residents from nearby cities and suburbs.

Urban settlement

The United States has moved from a predominantly rural settlement into an urban society. In so doing, it has followed the general path that other advanced nations have traveled and one along which developing nations have begun to hasten. More than four-fifths of the population lives clustered within officially designated urban places and urbanized areas, which account for less than 2 percent of the national territory. At least another 15 percent live in dispersed residences that are actually urban in economic or social orientation.

Classic patterns of siting and growth

Although more than 95 percent of the population was rural during the colonial period and for the first years of independence, cities were crucial elements in the settlement system from the earliest days. Boston; New Amsterdam (New York City); Jamestown, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Philadelphia were founded at the same time as the colonies they served. Like nearly all other North American colonial towns of consequence, they were ocean ports. Until at least the beginning of the 20th century the historical geography of U.S. cities was intimately related with that of successive transportation systems. The location of successful cities with respect to the areas they served, as well as their internal structure, was determined largely by the nature of these systems.

The colonial cities acted as funnels for the collection and shipment of farm and forest products and other raw materials from the interior to trading partners in Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa and for the return flow of manufactured goods and other locally scarce items, as well as immigrants. Such cities were essentially marts and warehouses, and only minimal attention was given to social, military, educational, or religious functions. The inadequacy and high cost of overland traffic dictated sites along major ocean embayments or river estuaries; the only pre-1800 nonports worthy of notice were Lancaster and York, both in Pennsylvania, and Williamsburg, Virginia. With the populating of the interior and the spread of a system of canals and improved roads, such new cities as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and St. Louis, Missouri, mushroomed at junctures between various routes or at which modes of transport were changed. Older ocean ports, such as New Castle, Delaware; Newport, Rhode Island; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and Portland, Maine, whose locations prevented them from serving large hinterlands, tended to stagnate.

From about 1850 to 1920 the success of new cities and the further growth of older ones in large part were dependent on their location within the new steam railroad system and on their ability to dominate a large tributary territory. Such waterside rail hubs as Buffalo; Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and San Francisco gained population and wealth rapidly, while such offspring of the rail era as Atlanta, Georgia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Minneapolis; Fort Worth, Texas; and Tacoma, Washington, also grew dramatically. Much of the rapid industrialization of the 19th and early 20th centuries occurred in places already favoured by water or rail transport systems, but in some instances�such as in the cities of northeastern Pennsylvania�s anthracite region, some New England mill towns, and the textile centres of the Carolina and Virginia Piedmont�manufacturing brought about rapid urbanization and the consequent attraction of transport facilities. The extraction of gold, silver, copper, coal, iron, and, in the 20th century, gas and oil led to rather ephemeral centres�unless these places were able to capitalize on local or regional advantages other than minerals.

A strong early start, whatever the initial economic base may have been, was often the key factor in competition among cities. With sufficient early momentum, urban capital and population tended to expand almost automatically. The point is illustrated perfectly by the larger cities of the northeastern seaboard, from Portland, Maine, through Baltimore, Maryland. The nearby physical wealth is poor to mediocre, and they are now far off-centre on the national map, but a prosperous mercantile beginning, good land and sea connections with distant places, and a rich local accumulation of talent, capital, and initiative were sufficient to bring about the growth of one of the world�s largest concentrations of industry, commerce, and people.

New factors in municipal development

The pre-1900 development of the American city was almost completely a chronicle of the economics of the production, collection, and distribution of physical commodities and basic services dictated by geography, but there have been striking deviations from this pattern. The physical determinants of urban location and growth have given way to social factors. Increasingly, the most successful cities are oriented toward the more advanced modes for the production and consumption of services, specifically the knowledge, managerial, and recreational industries. The largest cities have become more dependent upon corporate headquarters, communications, and the manipulation of information for their sustenance. Washington, D.C., is the most obvious example of a metropolis in which government and ancillary activities have been the spur for vigorous growth; but almost all of the state capitals have displayed a similar demographic and economic vitality. Further, urban centres that contain a major college or university often have enjoyed remarkable expansion.

With the coming of relative affluence and abundant leisure to the population and a decrease of labour input in industrial processes, a new breed of cities has sprouted across the land: those that cater to the pleasure-seeker, vacationer, and the retired�for example, the young, flourishing cities of Florida or Nevada and many locations in California, Arizona, and Colorado.

The automobile as a means of personal transportation was developed about the time of World War I, and the American city was catapulted into a radically new period, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the further evolution of physical form and function. The size, density, and internal structure of the city were previously constrained by the limitations of the pedestrian and early mass-transit systems. Only the well-to-do could afford horse and carriage or a secluded villa in the countryside. Cities were relatively small and compact, with a single clearly defined centre, and they grew by accretion along their edges, without any significant spatial hiatuses except where commuter railroads linked outlying towns to the largest of metropolises. Workers living beyond the immediate vicinity of their work had to locate within reach of the few horse-drawn omnibuses or the later electric street railways.

The universality of the automobile, even among the less affluent, and the parallel proliferation of service facilities and highways greatly loosened and fragmented the American city, which spread over surrounding rural lands. Older, formerly autonomous towns grew swiftly. Many towns became satellites of the larger city or were absorbed. Many suburbs and subdivisions arose with single-family homes on lots larger than had been possible for the ordinary householder in the city. These communities were almost totally dependent on the highway for the flow of commuters, goods, and services, and many were located in splendid isolation, separated by tracts of farmland, brush, or forest from other such developments. At the major interchanges of the limited-access highways, a new form of agglomerated settlement sprang up. In a further elaboration of this trend, many larger cities have been girdled by a set of mushrooming complexes. These creations of private enterprise embody a novel concept of urban existence: a metropolitan module no longer reliant on the central city or its downtown. Usually anchored on a cluster of shopping malls and office parks, these �hypersuburbs,� whose residents and employees circulate freely within the outer metropolitan ring, offer virtually all of the social and economic facilities needed for the modern life-style.

The new look of the metropolitan area

The outcome has been a broad, ragged, semiurbanized belt of land surrounding each city, large or small, and quite often blending imperceptibly into the suburban-exurban halo encircling a neighbouring metropolitan centre. There is a great similarity in the makeup and general appearance of all such tracts: the planless intermixture of scraps of the rural landscape with the fragments of the scattered metropolis; the randomly distributed subdivisions or single homes; the vast shopping centres, the large commercial cemeteries, drive-in theatres, junkyards, and golf courses and other recreational enterprises; and the regional or metropolitan airport, often with its own cluster of factories, warehouses, or travel-oriented businesses. The traditional city�unitary, concentric in form, with a single well-defined middle�has been replaced by a relatively amorphous, polycentric metropolitan sprawl.

The inner city of a large U.S. metropolitan area displays some traits that are common to the larger centres of all advanced nations. A central business district, almost always the oldest section of the city, is surrounded by a succession of roughly circular zones, each distinctive in economic and social-ethnic character. The symmetry of this scheme is distorted by the irregularities of surface and drainage or the effects of radial highways and railroads. Land is most costly, and hence land use is most intensive, toward the centre. Major business, financial and governmental offices, department stores, and specialty shops dominate the downtown, which is usually fringed by a band of factories and warehouses. The outer parts of the city, like the suburbs, are mainly residential.

With some exceptions�e.g., large apartment complexes in downtown Chicago�people do not reside in the downtown areas, and there is a steady downward gradient in population density per unit area (and more open land and single-family residences) as one moves from the inner city toward the open country. Conversely, there is a general rise in income and social status with increasing distance from the core. The sharply defined immigrant neighbourhoods of the 19th century generally persist in a somewhat diluted form, though specific ethnic groups may have shifted their location. Later migrant groups, notably Southern blacks and Latin Americans, generally dominate the more run-down neighbourhoods of the inner cities.

Individual and collective character of cities

American cities, more so than the small-town or agrarian landscape, tend to be the product of a particular period rather than of location. The relatively venerable centres of the Eastern Seaboard�Boston; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Albany, New York; Chester, Pennsylvania; Alexandria, Virginia; or Georgetown (a district of Washington, D.C.), for example�are virtual replicas of the fashionable European models of their early period rather than the fruition of a regional culture, unlike New Orleans and Santa Fe, New Mexico, which reflect other times and regions. The townscapes of Pittsburgh; Detroit, Michigan; Chicago; and Denver, depict national modes of thought and the technological development of their formative years, just as Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; San Diego; Tucson, Arizona; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, proclaim contemporary values and gadgetry more than any local distinctiveness. When strong-minded city founders instituted a highly individual plan and their successors managed to preserve it�as, for example, in Savannah, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; and Salt Lake City, Utah�or when there is a happy combination of a spectacular site and appreciative residents�as in San Francisco or Seattle�a genuine individuality does seem to emerge. Such an identity also may develop where immigration has been highly selective, as in such places as Miami, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; and Los Angeles.

BostonFaneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts.Geoff Tompkinson/GTImage.com (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

As a group, U.S. cities differ from cities in other countries in both type and degree. The national political structure, the social inclinations of the people, and the strong outward surge of urban development have led to the political fragmentation of metropolises that socially and economically are relatively cohesive units. The fact that a single metropolitan area may sprawl across numerous incorporated towns and cities, several townships, and two or more counties and states has a major impact upon both its appearance and the way it functions. Not the least of these effects is a dearth of overall physical and social planning (or its ineffectuality when attempted), and the rather chaotic, inharmonious appearance of both inner-city and peripheral zones painfully reflects the absence of any effective collective action concerning such matters.

The American city is a place of sharp transitions. Construction, demolition, and reconstruction go on almost ceaselessly, though increasing thought has been given to preserving monuments and buildings. From present evidence, it would be impossible to guess that New York City and Albany date from the 1620s or that Detroit was founded in 1701. Preservation and restoration do occur, but often only when it makes sense in terms of tourist revenue. Physical and social blight has reached epidemic proportions in the slum areas of the inner city; but, despite the wholesale razing of such areas and the subsequent urban-renewal projects (sometimes as apartment or commercial developments for the affluent), the belief has become widespread that the ills of the U.S. city are incurable, especially with the increasing flight of capital, tax revenue, and the more highly educated, affluent elements of the population to suburban areas and the spatial and political polarization of whites and nonwhites.

In the central sections of U.S. cities, there is little sense of history or continuity; instead, one finds evidence of the dominance of the engineering mentality and of the credo that the business of the city is business. Commercial and administrative activities are paramount, and usually there is little room for church buildings or for parks or other nonprofit enterprises. The role of the cathedral, so central in the medieval European city, is filled by a U.S. invention serving both utilitarian and symbolic purposes, the skyscraper. Some cities have felt the need for other bold secular monuments; hence the Gateway Arch looming over St. Louis, Seattle�s Space Needle, and Houston�s Astrodome. Future archaeologists may well conclude from their excavations that American society was ruled by an oligarchy of highway engineers, architects, and bulldozer operators. The great expressways converging upon, or looping, the downtown area and the huge amount of space devoted to parking lots and garages are even more impressive than the massive surgery executed upon U.S. cities a century ago to hack out room for railroad terminals and marshaling yards.

Gateway ArchThe Gateway Arch (left) on the west bank of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.� CrackerClips/Shutterstock.com

Within many urban sites there has been radical physical transformation of shoreline, drainage systems, and land surface that would be difficult to match elsewhere in the world. Thus, in their physical lineaments, Manhattan and inner Boston bear scant resemblance to the landscapes seen by their initial settlers. The surface of downtown Chicago has been raised several feet above its former swamp level, the city�s lakefront extensively reshaped, and the flow of the Chicago River reversed. Los Angeles, notorious for its disregard of the environment, has its concrete arroyo bottoms, terraced hillsides and landslides, and its own artificial microclimate.

The supercities

The unprecedented outward sprawl of American urban settlement has created some novel settlement forms, for the quantitative change has been so great as to induce qualitative transformation. The conurbation�a territorial coalescence of two or more sizable cities whose peripheral zones have grown together�may have first appeared in early 19th-century Europe. There are major examples in Great Britain, the Low Countries, and Germany, as well as in Japan.

Nothing elsewhere, however, rivals in size and complexity the aptly named megalopolis, that supercity stretching along the Atlantic from Portland, Maine, past Richmond, Virginia. Other large conurbations include, in the Great Lakes region, one centred on Chicago and containing large slices of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana; another based in Detroit, embracing large parts of Michigan and Ohio and reaching into Canada; and a third stretching from Buffalo through Cleveland and back to Pittsburgh. All three are reaching toward one another and may form another megalopolis that, in turn, may soon be grafted onto the seaboard megalopolis by a corridor through central New York state.

The city of Chicago accounts for a large share of Illinois's population and economy.� Rvaero/Dreamstime.com

Another example of a growing megalopolis is the huge southern California conurbation reaching from Santa Barbara, through a dominating Los Angeles, to the Mexican border. The solid strip of urban territory that lines the eastern shore of Puget Sound is a smaller counterpart. Quite exceptional in form is the slender linear multicity occupying Florida�s Atlantic coastline, from Jacksonville to Miami, and the loose swarm of medium-sized cities clustering along the Southern Piedmont, from south-central Virginia to Birmingham, Alabama; also of note are the Texas cities of Dallas�Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, which have formed a rapidly growing�though discontinuous�urbanized triangle.

Santa BarbaraSanta Barbara, California.Skyguy414

One of the few predictions that seem safe in so dynamic and innovative a land as the United States is that, unless severe and painful controls are placed on land use, the shape of the urban environment will be increasingly megalopolitan: a small set of great constellations of polycentric urban zones, each complexly interlocked socially and physically with its neighbours.

Traditional regions of the United States

The differences among America�s traditional regions, or culture areas, tend to be slight and shallow as compared with such areas in most older, more stable countries. The muted, often subtle nature of interregional differences can be ascribed to the relative newness of American settlement, a perpetually high degree of mobility, a superb communications system, and the galloping centralization of economy and government. It might even be argued that some of these regions are quaint vestiges of a vanishing past, of interest only to antiquarians.

Yet, in spite of the nationwide standardization in many areas of American thought and behaviour, the lingering effects of the older culture areas do remain potent. In the case of the South, for example, the differences helped to precipitate the gravest political crisis and bloodiest military conflict in the nation�s history. More than a century after the Civil War, the South remains a powerful entity in political, economic, and social terms, and its peculiar status is recognized in religious, educational, athletic, and literary circles.

Even more intriguing is the appearance of a series of essentially 20th-century regions. Southern California is the largest and perhaps the most distinctive region, and its special culture has attracted large numbers of immigrants to the state. Similar trends are visible in southern Florida; in Texas, whose mystique has captured the national imagination; and to a certain degree in the more ebullient regions of New Mexico and Arizona as well. At the metropolitan level, it is difficult to believe that such distinctive cities as San Francisco, Las Vegas, Dallas, Tucson, and Seattle have become like all other American cities. A detailed examination, however, would show significant if sometimes subtle interregional differences in terms of language, religion, diet, folklore, folk architecture and handicrafts, political behaviour, social etiquette, and a number of other cultural categories.

The Las Vegas Strip at night, 2001.� Andrew Zarivny/Shutterstock.com

The hierarchy of culture areas

A multitiered hierarchy of culture areas might be postulated for the United States; but the most interesting levels are, first, the nation as a whole and, second, the five to 10 large subnational regions, each embracing several states or major portions thereof. There is a remarkably close coincidence between the political United States and the cultural United States. Crossing into Mexico, the traveler passes across a cultural chasm. If the contrasts are less dramatic between the two sides of the U.S.-Canadian boundary, they are nonetheless real, especially to the Canadian. Erosion of the cultural barrier has been largely limited to the area that stretches from northern New York state to Aroostook county, Maine. There, a vigorous demographic and cultural immigration by French-Canadians has gone far toward eradicating international differences.

While the international boundaries act as a cultural container, the interstate boundaries are curiously irrelevant. Even when the state had a strong autonomous early existence�as happened with Massachusetts, Virginia, or Pennsylvania�subsequent economic and political forces have tended to wash away such initial identities. Actually, it could be argued that the political divisions of the 48 conterminous states are anachronistic in the context of contemporary socioeconomic and cultural forces. Partially convincing cases might be built for equating Utah and Texas with their respective culture areas because of exceptional historical and physical circumstances, or perhaps Oklahoma, given its very late European occupation and its dubious distinction as the territory to which exiled Indian tribes of the East were relegated. In most instances, however, the states either contain two or more distinctly different culture and political areas or fragments thereof or are part of a much larger single culture area. Thus sharp North�South dichotomies characterize California, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Florida, while Tennessee advertises that there are really three Tennessees. In Virginia the opposing cultural forces were so strong that actual fission took place in 1863 (with the admission to the Union of West Virginia) along one of those rare interstate boundaries that approximate a genuine cultural divide.

Much remains to be learned about the cause and effect relations between economic and culture areas in the United States. If the South or New England could at one time be correlated with a specific economic system, this is no longer easy to do. Cultural systems appear to respond more slowly to agents of change than do economic or urban systems. Thus the Manufacturing Belt, a core region for many social and economic activities, now spans parts of four traditional culture areas�New England, the Midland, the Midwest, and the northern fringes of the South. The great urban sprawl, from southern Maine to central Virginia, blithely ignores the cultural slopes that are still visible in its more rural tracts.

The cultural hearths

The culture areas of the United States are generally European in origin, the result of importing European colonists and ways of life and the subsequent adaptation of social groups to new habitats. The aboriginal cultures have had relatively little influence on the nation�s modern culture. In the Southwestern and the indistinct Oklahoman subregions, the Indian element merits consideration only as one of several ingredients making up the regional mosaic. With some exceptions, the map of American culture areas in the East can be explained in terms of the genesis, development, and expansion of the three principal colonial cultural hearths along the Atlantic seaboard. Each was basically British in character, but their personalities remain distinct because of, first, different sets of social and political conditions during the critical period of first effective settlement and, second, local physical and economic circumstances. The cultural gradients between them tend to be much steeper and the boundaries more distinct than is true for the remainder of the nation.

New England

New England was the dominant region during the century of rapid expansion following the American Revolution and not merely in terms of demographic or economic expansion. In social and cultural life�in education, politics, theology, literature, science, architecture, and the more advanced forms of mechanical and social technology�the area exercised its primacy. New England was the leading source of ideas and styles for the nation from about 1780 to 1880; it furnishes an impressive example of the capacity of strongly motivated communities to rise above the constraints of a harsh environment.

United States: New EnglandNew England.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

During its first two centuries, New England had an unusually homogeneous population. With some exceptions, the British immigrants shared the same nonconformist religious beliefs, language, social organization, and general outlook. A distinctive regional culture took form, most noticeably in terms of dialect, town morphology, and folk architecture. The personality of the people also took on a regional coloration both in folklore and in actuality; there is sound basis for the belief that the traditional New England Yankee is self-reliant, thrifty, inventive, and enterprising. The influx of immigrants that began in the 1830s diluted and altered the New England identity, but much of its early personality survived.

By virtue of location, wealth, and seniority, the Boston metropolitan area has become the cultural economic centre of New England. This sovereignty is shared to some degree, however, with two other old centres, the lower Connecticut Valley and the Narragansett Bay region of Rhode Island.

The early westward demographic and ideological expansion of New England was so influential that it is justifiable to call New York, northern New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, and much of the Upper Midwest �New England Extended.� Further, the energetic endeavours of New England whalers, merchants, and missionaries had a considerable impact on the cultures of Hawaii, various other Pacific isles, and several points in the Caribbean. New Englanders also were active in the Americanization of early Oregon and Washington, with results that are still visible. Later, the overland diffusion of New England natives and practices meant a recognizable New England character not only for the Upper Midwest, from Ohio to the Dakotas, but also in the Pacific Northwest in general, though to a lesser degree.

The South

The Midland

The significance of this region has not been less than that of New England or the South, but its characteristics are the least conspicuous to outsiders as well as to its own residents�reflecting, perhaps, its centrality in the course of U.S. development. The Midland (a term not to be confused with Midwest) comprises portions of Middle Atlantic and Upper Southern states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Serious European settlement of the Midland began a generation or more after that of the other major cultural centres and after several earlier, relatively ineffectual trials by the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and British. But once begun late in the 17th century by William Penn and his associates, the colonization of the area was a success. Within southeastern Pennsylvania this culture area first assumed its distinctive character: a prosperous, sober, industrious agricultural society that quickly became a mixed economy as mercantile and later industrial functions came to the fore. By the mid-18th century much of the region had acquired a markedly urban character, resembling in many ways the more advanced portions of the North Sea countries. In this respect, at least, the Midland was well ahead of neighbouring areas to the north and south.

United States: Middle Atlantic regionThe Middle Atlantic region.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

It differed also in its polyglot ethnicity. From almost the beginning, the various ethnic and religious groups of the British Isles were joined by immigrants from the European mainland. This diversity has grown and is likely to continue. The mosaic of colonial ethnic groups has persisted in much of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, as has the remarkable variety of nationalities and churches in coalfields, company towns, cities, and many rural areas. Much of the same ethnic heterogeneity can be seen in New England, the Midwest, and a few other areas, but the Midland stands out as perhaps the most polyglot region of the nation. The Germanic element has always been notably strong, if irregularly distributed, in the Midland, accounting for more than 70 percent of the population of many towns. Had the Anglo-American culture not triumphed, the area might well have been designated Pennsylvania German.

Physiography and migration carried the Midland culture area into the Maryland Piedmont. Although its width tapers quickly below the Potomac, it reaches into parts of Virginia and West Virginia, with traces legible far down the Appalachian zone and into the South.

The northern half of the greater Midland region (the New York subregion, or New England Extended) cannot be assigned unequivocally to either New England or this Midland. Essentially it is a hybrid formed mainly from two regional strains of almost equal strength: New England and the post-1660 British element moving up the Hudson valley and beyond. There has also been a persistent, if slight, residue of early Dutch culture and some subtle filtering northward of Pennsylvanian influences. Apparently within the New York subregion occurred the first major fusion of American regional cultures, especially within the early 19th-century �Burned-Over District,� around the Finger Lakes and Genesee areas of central and western New York. This locality, the seedbed for a number of important social innovations, was a major staging area for westward migration and possibly a major source for the people and notions that were to build the Midwestern culture area.

Toward the west the Midland retains its integrity for only a short distance�certainly no further than eastern Ohio�as it becomes submerged within the Midwest. Still, its significance in the genesis of the Midwest and the national culture should not be minimized. Its success in projecting its image upon so much of the country may have drawn attention away from the source area. As both name and location suggest, the Midland is intermediate in character in many respects, lying between New England and the South. Its residents are much less concerned with, or conscious of, a strong regional identity (excepting the Pennsylvania Dutch caricatures) than is true for the other regions, and, in addition, the Midland lacks their strong political and literary traditions, though it is unmistakable in its distinctive townscapes and farmsteads.

The newer culture areas

The Midwest

There is no such self-effacement in the Midwest, that large triangular region justly regarded as the most nearly representative of the national average. Everyone within or outside of the Midwest knows of its existence, but no one is certain where it begins or ends. The older apex of the eastward-pointing triangle appears to rest around Pittsburgh, while the two western corners melt away somewhere in the Great Plains, possibly in southern Manitoba in the north and southern Kansas in the south. The eastern terminus and the southern and western borders are broad, indistinct transitional zones.

United States: The MidwestThe Midwest.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Serious study of the historical geography of the Midwest began only in the 20th century, but it seems likely that this culture region was the combination of all three colonial regions and that this combination first took place in the upper Ohio valley. The early routes of travel�the Ohio and its tributaries, the Great Lakes, and the low, level corridor along the Mohawk and the coastal plains of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie�converge upon Ohio. There, the people and cultural traits from New England, the Midland, and the South were first funneled together. There seems to have been a fanlike widening of the new hybrid area into the West as settlers worked their way frontierward.

Two major subregions are readily discerned, the Upper and Lower Midwest. They are separated by a line, roughly approximating the 41st parallel, that persists as far west as Colorado in terms of speech patterns and indicates differences in regional provenance in ethnic and religious terms as well. Much of the Upper Midwest retains a faint New England character, although Midland influences are probably as important. A rich mixture of German, Scandinavian, Slavic, and other non-WASP elements has greatly diversified a stock in which the British element usually remains dominant and the range of church denominations is great. The Lower Midwest, except for the relative scarcity of blacks, tends to resemble the South in its predominantly Protestant and British makeup. There are some areas with sizable Roman Catholic and non-WASP populations, but on the whole the subregion tends to be more WASP in inclination than most other parts of the nation.

The problem of �the West�

The foregoing culture areas account for roughly the eastern half of the conterminous United States. There is a dilemma in classifying the remaining half. The concept of the American West, strong in the popular imagination, is reinforced constantly by romanticized cinematic and television images of the cowboy. It is facile to accept the widespread Western livestock complex as epitomizing the full gamut of Western life, because although the cattle industry may have once accounted for more than one-half of the active Western domain as measured in acres, it employed only a relatively small fraction of the total population. As a single subculture, it cannot represent the total regional culture.

It is not clear whether there is a genuine, single, grand Western culture region. Unlike the East, where virtually all the land is developed and culture areas and subregions abut and overlap in splendid confusion, the eight major and many lesser nodes of population in the western United States resemble oases, separated from one another by wide expanses of nearly unpopulated mountain or arid desert. The only obvious properties these isolated clusters have in common are, first, the intermixture of several strains of culture, primarily from the East but with additions from Europe, Mexico, and East Asia, and, second, except for one subregion, a general modernity, having been settled in a serious way no earlier than the 1840s. Some areas may be viewed as inchoate, or partially formed, cultural entities; the others have acquired definite personalities but are difficult to classify as first-order or lesser order culture areas.

There are several major tracts in the western United States that reveal a genuine cultural identity: the Upper Rio Grande region, the Mormon region, southern California, and, by some accounts, northern California. To this group one might add the anomalous Texan and Oklahoman subregions, which have elements of both the West and the South.

People

A country for less than two and a half centuries, the United States is a relatively new member of the global community, but its rapid growth since the 18th century is unparalleled. The early promise of the New World as a refuge and land of opportunity was realized dramatically in the 20th century with the emergence of the United States as a world power. With a total population exceeded only by those of China and India, the United States is also characterized by an extraordinary diversity in ethnic and racial ancestry. A steady stream of immigration, notably from the 1830s onward, formed a pool of foreign-born persons unmatched by any other nation; 60 million people immigrated to U.S. shores in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many were driven, seeking escape from political or economic hardship, while others were drawn, by a demand for workers, abundant natural resources, and expansive cheap land. Most arrived hoping to remake themselves in the New World.

Spectators are showered with confetti during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.� Joseph Sohm/Dreamstime.com

Americans also have migrated internally with great vigour, exhibiting a restlessness that thrived in the open lands and on the frontier. Initially, migratory patterns ran east to west and from rural areas to cities, then, in the 20th century, from the South to the Northeast and Midwest. Since the 1950s, though, movement has been primarily from the cities to outlying suburbs and from aging northern metropolises to the growing urban agglomerations of the South, Southwest, and West.

United States: Age breakdownEncyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the majority of the U.S. population had achieved a high level of material comfort, prosperity, and security. Nonetheless, Americans struggled with the unexpected problems of relative affluence, as well as the persistence of residual poverty. Crime, drug abuse, affordable energy sources, urban sprawl, voter apathy, pollution, high divorce rates, AIDS, and excessive litigation remained continuing subjects of concern, as were inequities and inadequacies in education and managed health care. Among the public policy issues widely debated were abortion, gun control, welfare reforms, and capital punishment.

Many Americans perceive social tension as the product of their society�s failure to extend the traditional dream of equality of opportunity to all people. Ideally, social, political, economic, and religious freedom would assure the like treatment of everyone, so that all could achieve goals in accord with their individual talents, if only they worked hard enough. This strongly held belief has united Americans throughout the centuries. The fact that some groups have not achieved full equality troubles citizens and policy-makers alike.

Ethnic distribution

After decades of immigration and acculturation, many U.S. citizens can trace no discernible ethnic identity, describing themselves generically only as �American,� while others claim mixed identities. The 2000 U.S. census introduced a new category for those who identified themselves as a member of more than one race, and, of 281.4 million counted, 2.4 percent chose this multiracial classification. Ten years later, in the 2010 census, those figures had grown to 2.9 percent of 308.7 million.

United States: Population by race and Hispanic originEncyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Ethnic European Americans

Although the term ethnic is frequently confined to the descendants of the newest immigrants, its broader meaning applies to all groups unified by their cultural heritage and experience in the New World. In the 19th century, Yankees formed one such group, marked by common religion and by habits shaped by the original Puritan settlers. From New England, the Yankees spread westward through New York, northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas. Tightly knit communities, firm religious values, and a belief in the value of education resulted in prominent positions for Yankees in business, in literature and law, and in cultural and philanthropic institutions. They long identified with the Republican Party. Southern whites and their descendants, by contrast, remained preponderantly rural as migration took them westward across Tennessee and Kentucky to Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. These people inhabited small towns until the industrialization of the South in the 20th century, and they preserved affiliations with the Democratic Party until the 1960s.

The colonial population also contained other elements that long sustained their group identities. The Pennsylvania Germans, held together by religion and language, still pursue their own way of life after three centuries, as exemplified by the Amish. The great 19th-century German migrations, however, were made up of families who dispersed in the cities as well as in the agricultural areas to the West; to the extent that ethnic ties have survived they are largely sentimental. That is also true of the Scots, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and Dutch, whose colonial nuclei received some reinforcement after 1800 but who gradually adapted to the ways of the larger surrounding groups.

Distinctive language and religion preserved some coherence among the descendants of the Scandinavian newcomers of the 19th century. Where these people clustered in sizeable settlements, as in Minnesota, they transmitted a sense of identity beyond the second generation; and emotional attachments to the lands of origin lingered.

Religion was a powerful force for cohesion among the Roman Catholic Irish and the Jews, both tiny groups before 1840, both reinforced by mass migration thereafter. Both have now become strikingly heterogeneous, displaying a wide variety of economic and social conditions, as well as a degree of conformity to the styles of life of other Americans. But the pull of external concerns�in the one case, unification of Ireland; in the other, Israel�s security�have helped to preserve group loyalty.

Indeed, by the 1970s ethnic (in its narrow connotation) had come to be used to describe the Americans of Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Czech, and Ukrainian extraction, along with those of other eastern and southern European ancestry. Tending to be Roman Catholic and middle-class, most settled in the North and Midwest. The city neighbourhoods in which many of them lived initially had their roots in the "Little Italys" and "Polish Hills" established by the immigrants. By the 1980s and �90s a significant number had left these enclaves for nearby suburbs. The only European ethnic group to arrive in large numbers at the end of the 20th century were Russians, especially Russian Jews, benefiting from perestroika.

In general, a pattern of immigration, self-support, and then assimilation was typical. Recently established ethnic groups often preserve greater visibility and greater cohesion. Their group identity is based not only upon a common cultural heritage but also on the common interests, needs, and problems they face in the present-day United States. As the immigrants and their descendants, most have been taught to believe that the road to success in the United States is achieved through individual effort. They tend to believe in equality of opportunity and self-improvement and attribute poverty to the failing of the individual and not to inequities in society. As the composition of the U.S. population changed, it was projected that sometime in the 21st century, Americans of European descent would be outnumbered by those from non-European ethnic groups.

African Americans

From colonial times, African Americans arrived in large numbers as slaves and lived primarily on plantations in the South. In 1790 slave and free blacks together comprised about one-fifth of the U.S. population. As the nation split between Southern slave and Northern free states prior to the American Civil War, the Underground Railroad spirited thousands of escaped slaves from the South to the North. In the century following abolition, this migration pattern became more pronounced as some six million blacks moved from rural areas of the South to northern and western cities between 1916 and 1970 during the so-called Great Migration. On the heels of this massive internal shift came new immigrants from Western Africa and the West Indies, principally Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic.

The American civil rights movement in the 1950s and �60s awakened the country�s conscience to the plight of African Americans, who had long been denied first-class citizenship. The movement used nonviolence and passive resistance to change discriminatory laws and practices, primarily in the South. As a result, increases in median income and college enrollment among the black population were dramatic in the late 20th century. Widening access to professional and business opportunities included noteworthy political victories. By the early 1980s black mayors in Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., had gained election with white support. In 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson ran for U.S. president; he was the first African American to contend seriously for a major party nomination. In 2008 Barack Obama became the first African American elected to the country�s highest office. However, despite an expanding black middle-class and equal-opportunity laws in education, housing, and employment, African Americans continue to face staunch social and political challenges, especially those living in the inner cities, where some of American society�s most difficult problems (such as crime and drug trafficking) are acute.

Hispanics

Hispanics (Latinos) make up between one-sixth and one-fifth of the U.S. population. They constitute the country�s largest ethnic minority. More than half of the increase in the country�s total population from 2000 to 2010 was due to growth in the Hispanic population alone. The growth rate of the Hispanic population during this period was 43 percent�four times the growth rate of the general population. Hispanics live in all regions of the United States, but more than three-fourths live in the West or the South. They make up the largest share of the overall population in the West, where nearly three-tenths of the region�s residents are Hispanic. Almost half of the country�s total Hispanic population resides in the states of California and Texas, where they make up more than one-third of the population in each state.

Although they generally share Spanish as a second (and sometimes first) language, Hispanics are hardly a monolithic group. The majority, more than three-fifths, are of Mexican origin�some descended from settlers in portions of the United States that were once part of Mexico (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California), others legal and illegal migrants from across the Mexico�U.S. border. The greater opportunities and higher living standards in the United States have long attracted immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Puerto Ricans are the second largest group of Hispanics in the country. Their experience in the United States is markedly different from that of Mexican Americans. Most importantly, Puerto Ricans are American citizens by virtue of the island commonwealth�s association with the United States. As a result, migration between Puerto Rico and the United States has been fairly fluid, mirroring the continuous process by which Americans have always moved to where chances seem best. While most of that migration traditionally has been toward the mainland, by the end of the 20th century in- and out-migration between the island and the United States equalized. Puerto Ricans now make up nearly one-tenth of the U.S. Latino population.

Quite different, though also Spanish-speaking, are the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro�s communist revolution of 1959 and their descendants. While representatives of every social group are among them, the initial wave of Cubans was distinctive because of the large number of professional and middle-class people who migrated. Their social and political attitudes differ significantly from those of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, though this distinction was lessened by an influx of 120,000 Cuban refugees in the 1980s, known as the Mariel immigrants.

The United States� three largest Hispanic groups are concentrated in different parts of the country. Most Mexicans live in western states; most Puerto Ricans live in northeastern states; and most Cubans live in southern states (primarily Florida).

After 1960 easy air travel and political and economic instability stimulated a significant migration from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The arrivals from Latin America in earlier years were often political refugees, more recently they usually have been economic refugees. Constituting about one-fourth of the Hispanic diaspora, this group comprises largely Central Americans, Colombians, and Dominicans, the last of whom have acted as a bridge between the black and Latino communities. Of Central American groups, three had population increases of more than 100 percent between 2000 and 2010. Hondurans (191 percent), Guatemalans (180 percent), and Salvadorans (152 percent). Latinos have come together for better health, housing, and municipal services, for bilingual school programs, and for improved educational and economic opportunities.

Asian Americans

Asian Americans as a group have confounded earlier expectations that they would form an indigestible mass in American society. The Chinese, earliest to arrive (in large numbers from the mid-19th century, principally as labourers, notably on the transcontinental railroad), and the Japanese were long victims of racial discrimination. In 1924 the law barred further entries; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. In 1942 thousands of Japanese, many born in the United States and therefore American citizens, were interned in relocation camps because their loyalty was suspect after the United States engaged Japan in World War II. Subsequently, anti-Asian prejudice largely dissolved, and Chinese and Japanese, along with others such as the Vietnamese and Taiwanese, have adjusted and advanced. Among generally more recent arrivals, many Koreans, Filipinos, and Asian Indians have quickly enjoyed economic success. Though enumerated separately by the U.S. census, Pacific Islanders, such as native Hawaiians, constitute a small minority but contribute to making Hawaii and California the states with the largest percentages of Asian Americans.

Middle Easterners

Among the trends of Arab immigration in the 20th century were the arrival of Lebanese Christians in the first half of the century and Palestinian Muslims in the second half. Initially Arabs inhabited the East Coast, but by the end of the century there was a large settlement of Arabs in the greater Detroit area. Armenians, also from southwest Asia, arrived in large numbers in the early 20th century, eventually congregating largely in California, where, later in the century, Iranians were also concentrated. Some recent arrivals from the Middle East maintain national customs such as traditional dress.

Native Americans

Native Americans form an ethnic group only in a very general sense. In the East, centuries of coexistence with whites has led to some degree of intermarriage and assimilation and to various patterns of stable adjustment. In the West the hasty expansion of agricultural settlement crowded the Native Americans into reservations, where federal policy has vacillated between efforts at assimilation and the desire to preserve tribal cultural identity, with unhappy consequences. The Native American population has risen from its low point of 235,000 in 1900 to 2.5 million at the turn of the 21st century.

Native American drummingTraditional Native American drumming being practiced at the Sacramento Native American Health Center in Sacramento, California.Lezlie Sterling�MCT/Landov

The reservations are often enclaves of deep poverty and social distress, although the many casinos operated on their land have created great wealth in some instances. The physical and social isolation of the reservation prompted many Native Americans to migrate to large cities, but, by the end of the 20th century, a modest repopulation occurred in rural counties of the Great Plains. In census numerations Native Americans are categorized with Alaskan natives, notably Aleuts and Eskimos. In the latter half of the 20th century, intertribal organizations were founded to give Native Americans a unified, national presence.

Religious groups

The U.S. government has never supported an established church, and the diversity of the population has discouraged any tendency toward uniformity in worship. As a result of this individualism, thousands of religious denominations thrive within the country. Only about one-sixth of religious adherents are not Christian, and, although Roman Catholicism is the largest single denomination (about one-fifth of the U.S. population), the many churches of Protestantism constitute the majority. Some are the products of native development�among them the Disciples of Christ (founded in the early 19th century), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons; 1830), Seventh-day Adventists (officially established 1863), Jehovah�s Witnesses (1872), Christian Scientists (1879), and the various Pentecostal churches (late 19th century).

Other denominations had their origins in the Old World, but even these have taken distinctive American forms. Affiliated Roman Catholics look to Rome for guidance, although there are variations in practice from diocese to diocese. More than 5.5 million Jews are affiliated with three national organizations (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform), as well as with many smaller sects. Most Protestant denominations also have European roots, the largest being the Baptists, Pentecostals, and Methodists. Among other groups are Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, various Eastern churches (including Orthodox), Congregationalists, Reformed, Mennonites and Amish, various Brethren, Unitarians, and the Friends (Quakers). By 2000 substantial numbers of recent immigrants had increased the Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu presence to about 4 million, 2.5 million, and 1 million believers, respectively.

ordinationOrdination of a pastor by the Slovak Zion Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 2006.Thespiano7

Immigration

Economy

The United States is the world�s greatest economic power in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) and historically has been among the world�s highest-ranking countries in terms of GDP per capita. With less than 5 percent of the world�s population, the United States produces about one-fifth of the world�s economic output.

Boeing factoryTest planes being assembled at Boeing's manufacturing site in Everett, Washington.Jeff McNeill

The sheer size of the U.S. economy makes it the most important single factor in global trade. Its exports represent more than one-tenth of the world total. The United States also influences the economies of the rest of the world because it is a significant source of investment capital. Just as direct investment, primarily by the British, was a major factor in 19th-century U.S. economic growth, so direct investment abroad by U.S. firms is a major factor in the economic well-being of Canada, Mexico, China, and many countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

Strengths and weaknesses

The U.S. economy is marked by resilience, flexibility, and innovation. In the first decade of the 21st century, the economy was able to withstand a number of costly setbacks. These included the collapse of stock markets following an untenable run-up in technology shares, losses from corporate scandals, the September 11 attacks in 2001, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast near New Orleans in 2005, and the punishing economic downturn that became widely known as the Great Recession, which officially dated from December 2007 to June 2009 and was caused in part by a financial debacle related to subprime mortgages.

For the most part, the U.S. government plays only a small direct role in running the country�s economic enterprises. Businesses are free to hire or fire employees and open or close operations. Unlike the situation in many other countries, new products and innovative practices can be introduced with minimal bureaucratic delays. The government does, however, regulate various aspects of all U.S. industries. Federal agencies oversee worker safety and work conditions, air and water pollution, food and prescription drug safety, transportation safety, and automotive fuel economy�to name just a few examples. Moreover, the Social Security Administration operates the country�s pension system, which is funded through payroll taxes. The government also operates public health programs such as Medicaid (for the poor) and Medicare (for the elderly).

In an economy dominated by privately owned businesses, there are still some government-owned companies. These include the U.S. Postal Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Amtrak (formally the National Railroad Passenger Corporation), and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The federal government also influences economic activity in other ways. As a purchaser of goods, it exerts considerable leverage on certain sectors of the economy�most notably in the defense and aerospace industries. It also implements antitrust laws to prevent companies from colluding on prices or monopolizing market shares.

Despite its ability to weather economic shocks, in the earliest years of the 21st century the U.S. economy developed many weaknesses that pointed to future risks. The country faces a chronic trade deficit; imports greatly outweigh the value of U.S. goods and services exported to other countries. For many citizens, household incomes have effectively stagnated since the 1970s, while indebtedness reached record levels. Moreover, many observers have pointed to an increasing gap in income disparity between the small cohort at the top of the economic pyramid and the rest of the country�s citizens. Rising energy prices made it more costly to run businesses, heat homes, and transport goods and people. The country�s aging population placed new burdens on public health spending and pension programs (including Social Security). At the same time, the burgeoning federal budget deficit limited the amount of funding available for social programs.

Taxation

Nearly all of the federal government�s revenues come from taxes, with total income from federal taxes representing about one-fifth of GDP. The most important source of tax revenue is the personal income tax (accounting for roughly half of federal revenue). Gross receipts from corporate income taxes yield a far smaller fraction (about one-eighth) of total federal receipts. Excise duties yield yet another small portion (less than one-tenth) of total federal revenue; however, individual states levy their own excise and sales taxes. Federal excises rest heavily on alcohol, gasoline, and tobacco. Other sources of revenue include Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes (which account for almost two-fifths of federal revenue) and estate and gift taxes (yielding only about 1 percent of the total).

Labour force

With an unemployment rate that returned to the traditional level of roughly 5 percent per year following the higher rates that had resulted from the Great Recession, the U.S. labour market is in line with those of other developed countries. The service sector accounts for more than three-fourths of the country�s jobs, whereas industrial and manufacturing trades employ less than one-fifth of the labour market.

After peaking in the 1950s, when 36 percent of American workers were enrolled in unions, union membership at the beginning of the 21st century had fallen to less than 15 percent of U.S. workers, nearly half of them government employees. The transformation in the late 20th century to a service-based economy changed the nature of labour unions. Organizational efforts, once aimed primarily at manufacturing industries, are now focused on service industries. The country�s largest union, the National Education Association (NEA), represents teachers. In 2005 three large labour unions broke their affiliation with the American Federation of Labor�Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the nationwide federation of unions, and formed a new federation, the Change to Win coalition, with the goal of reviving union influence in the labour market. Although the freedom to strike is qualified with provisions requiring cooling-off periods and in some cases compulsory arbitration, major unions are able and sometimes willing to embark on long strikes.

AFL-CIO �Make Wall Street Pay� demonstrationWorkers participating in an AFL-CIO �Make Wall Street Pay� demonstration on March 25, 2010, in Miami, Florida. Joe Raedle�Getty Images News/Thinkstock

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing

Despite the enormous productivity of U.S. agriculture, the combined outputs of agriculture, forestry, and fishing contribute to only a small percentage of GDP. Advances in farm productivity (stemming from mechanization and organizational changes in commercial farming) have enabled a smaller labour force to produce greater quantities than ever before. Improvements in yields have also resulted from the increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides and from changes in agricultural techniques (such as irrigation). Among the most important crops are corn (maize), soybeans, wheat, cotton, grapes, and potatoes.

Harvesting corn on a farm near Alden, north-central Iowa.Thomas Hovland/Grant Heilman Photography

The United States is the world�s major producer of timber. More than four-fifths of the trees harvested are softwoods such as Douglas fir and southern pine. The major hardwood is oak.

The United States also ranks among the world�s largest producers of edible and nonedible fish products. Fish for human consumption accounts for more than half of the tonnage landed. Shellfish account for less than one-fifth of the annual catch but for nearly half the total value.

Less than one-fiftieth of the GDP comes from mining and quarrying, yet the United States is a leading producer of coal, petroleum, and some metals.

Resources and power

The United States is one of the world�s leading producers of energy. It was long the world�s biggest consumer of energy, until it was passed by China in the early 21st century. It relies on other countries for many energy sources�petroleum products in particular. The country is notable for its efficient use of natural resources, and it excels in transforming its resources into usable products.

Minerals

With major producing fields in Alaska, California, the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, the United States is one of the world�s leading producers of refined petroleum and has important reserves of natural gas. Beginning in the 1990s, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale gas also grew in importance in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The United States is also among the world�s coal exporters. Recoverable coal deposits are concentrated largely in the Appalachian Mountains and in Wyoming. Nearly half the bituminous coal is mined in West Virginia and Kentucky, while Pennsylvania produces the country�s only anthracite. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio also produce coal.

Iron ore is mined predominantly in Minnesota and Michigan. The United States also has important reserves of copper, magnesium, lead, and zinc. Copper production is concentrated in the mountainous western states of Arizona, Utah, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico. Zinc is mined in Tennessee, Missouri, Idaho, and New York. Lead mining is concentrated in Missouri. Other metals mined in the United States are gold, silver, molybdenum, manganese, tungsten, bauxite, uranium, vanadium, and nickel. Important nonmetallic minerals produced are phosphates, potash, sulfur, stone, and clays.

Biological resources

More than two-fifths of the total land area of the United States is devoted to farming (including pasture and range). Tobacco is produced in the Southeast and in Kentucky and cotton in the South and Southwest; California is noted for its vineyards, citrus groves, and truck gardens; the Midwest is the centre of corn and wheat farming, while dairy herds are concentrated in the Northern states. The Southwestern and Rocky Mountain states support large herds of livestock.

Most of the U.S. forestland is located in the West (including Alaska), but significant forests also grow elsewhere. Almost half of the country�s hardwood forests are located in Appalachia. Of total commercial forestland, more than two-thirds is privately owned. About one-fifth is owned or controlled by the federal government, the remainder being controlled by state and local governments.

Power

Hydroelectric resources are heavily concentrated in the Pacific and Mountain regions. Hydroelectricity, however, contributes less than one-tenth of the country�s electricity supply. Coal-burning plants provide more than one-fourth of the country�s power, nuclear generators contribute about one-fifth, and renewable sources of energy constitute between one-tenth and one-fifth.

United States: 17.1% renewable energy breakdown (2017)Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Manufacturing

Since the mid-20th century, services (such as health care, entertainment, and finance) have grown faster than any other sector of the economy. Nevertheless, while manufacturing jobs have declined since the 1960s, advances in productivity have caused manufacturing output, including construction, to remain relatively constant at about one-sixth of GDP.

Significant economic productivity occurs in a wide range of industries. The manufacture of transportation equipment (including motor vehicles, aircraft, and space equipment) represents a leading sector. Computer and telecommunications firms (including software and hardware) remain strong, despite a downturn in the early 21st century. Other important sectors include drug manufacturing and biotechnology, health services, food products, chemicals, electrical and nonelectrical machinery, energy, and insurance.

Finance

Under the Federal Reserve System, which regulates bank credit and influences the money supply, central banking functions are exercised by 12 regional Federal Reserve banks. The Board of Governors, appointed by the U.S. president, supervises these banks. Based in Washington, D.C., the board does not necessarily act in accord with the administration�s views on economic policy. The U.S. Treasury also influences the working of the monetary system through its management of the national debt (which can affect interest rates) and by changing its own deposits with the Federal Reserve banks (which can affect the volume of credit). While only about two-fifths of all commercial banks belong to the Federal Reserve System, these banks hold almost three-fourths of all commercial bank deposits. Banks incorporated under national charter must be members of the system, while banks incorporated under state charters may become members. Member banks must maintain minimum legal reserves and must deposit a percentage of their savings and checking accounts with a Federal Reserve bank. There are also thousands of nonbank credit agencies such as personal credit institutions and savings and loan associations (S&Ls).

Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board BuildingMarriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, Washington, D.C.�Adam Parent/Shutterstock.com

Although banks supply less than half of the funds used for corporate finance, bank loans represent the country�s largest source of capital for business borrowing. A liberalizing trend in state banking laws in the 1970s and �80s encouraged both intra- and interstate expansion of bank facilities and bank holding companies. Succeeding mergers among the country�s largest banks led to the formation of large regional and national banking and financial services corporations. In serving both individual and commercial customers, these institutions accept deposits, provide checking accounts, underwrite securities, originate loans, offer mortgages, manage investments, and sponsor credit cards.

Financial services are also provided by insurance companies and security brokerages. The federal government sponsors credit agencies in the areas of housing (home mortgages), farming (agricultural loans), and higher education (student loans). New York City has three organized stock exchanges�the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NYSE Amex Equities, and NASDAQ�which account for the bulk of all stock sales in the United States. The country�s leading markets for commodities, futures, and options are the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) specializes in futures contracts for greenhouse gas emissions (carbon credits). Smaller exchanges operate in a number of American cities.

New York Stock ExchangeTrading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, New York City.Carol M. Highsmith Archive/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-highsm-11972)

Foreign trade

Transportation

The economic and social complexion of life in the United States mirrors the country�s extraordinary mobility. A pervasive transportation network has helped transform the vast geographic expanse into a surprisingly homogeneous and close-knit social and economic environment. Another aspect of mobility is flexibility, and this freedom to move is often seen as a major factor in the dynamism of the U.S. economy. Mobility has also had destructive effects: it has accelerated the deterioration of older urban areas, multiplied traffic congestion, intensified pollution of the environment, and diminished support for public transportation systems.

Roads and railroads

Central to the U.S. transportation network is the 45,000-mile (72,000-km) Interstate System, officially known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The system connects about nine-tenths of all cities of at least 50,000 population. Begun in the 1950s, the highway system carries about one-fifth of the country�s motor traffic. Nearly nine-tenths of all households own at least one automobile or truck. At the end of the 20th century, these added up to more than 100 million privately owned vehicles. While most trips in metropolitan areas are made by automobile, the public transit and rail commuter lines play an important role in the most populous cities, with the majority of home-to-work commuters traveling by public carriers in such cities as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Although railroads once dominated both freight and passenger traffic in the United States, government regulation and increased competition from trucking reduced their role in transportation. Railroads move about one-third of the nation�s intercity freight traffic. The most important items carried are coal, grain, chemicals, and motor vehicles. Many rail companies had given up passenger service by 1970, when Congress created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (known as Amtrak), a government corporation, to take over passenger service. Amtrak operates a 21,000-mile (34,000-km) system serving more than 500 stations across the country.

Interstate System Interstate System bypasses, Albuquerque, New Mexico.� Zack Frank/Shutterstock.com

Water and air transport

Navigable waterways are extensive and centre upon the Mississippi River system in the country�s interior, the Great Lakes�St. Lawrence Seaway system in the north, and the Gulf Coast waterways along the Gulf of Mexico. Barges carry more than two-thirds of domestic waterborne traffic, transporting petroleum products, coal and coke, and grain. The country�s largest ports in tonnage handled are the Port of South Louisiana; the Port of Houston, Texas; the Port of New York/New Jersey; and the Port of New Orleans.

Mississippi River: bargeA barge on the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.Ron Chapple Studios/Thinkstock

Air traffic has experienced spectacular growth in the United States since the mid-20th century. From 1970 to 1999, passenger traffic on certified air carriers increased 373 percent. Much of this growth occurred after airline deregulation, which began in 1978. There are more than 14,000 public and private airports, the busiest being in Atlanta and Chicago for passenger traffic. Airports in Memphis, Tennessee (the hub of package-delivery company Federal Express), and Los Angeles handle the most freight cargo.

air distances from United StatesEncyclop�dia Britannica, Inc. Wilfred Owen The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Government and society

Constitutional framework

The Constitution of the United States, written to redress the deficiencies of the country�s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation (1781�89), defines a federal system of government in which certain powers are delegated to the national government and others are reserved to the states. The national government consists of executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are designed to ensure, through separation of powers and through checks and balances, that no one branch of government is able to subordinate the other two branches. All three branches are interrelated, each with overlapping yet quite distinct authority.

The Mall, looking east toward the Capitol, Washington, D.C.� Peter Gridley/FPG International

The U.S. Constitution (see original text), the world�s oldest written national constitution still in effect, was officially ratified on June 21, 1788 (when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document), and formally entered into force on March 4, 1789, when George Washington was sworn in as the country�s first president. Although the Constitution contains several specific provisions (such as age and residency requirements for holders of federal offices and powers granted to Congress), it is vague in many areas and could not have comprehensively addressed the complex myriad of issues (e.g., historical, technological, etc.) that have arisen in the centuries since its ratification. Thus, the Constitution is considered a living document, its meaning changing over time as a result of new interpretations of its provisions. In addition, the framers allowed for changes to the document, outlining in Article V the procedures required to amend the Constitution. Amending the Constitution requires a proposal by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress or by a national convention called for at the request of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures or by conventions in as many states.

In the more than two centuries since the Constitution�s ratification, there have been 27 amendments. All successful amendments have been proposed by Congress, and all but one�the Twenty-first Amendment (1933), which repealed Prohibition�have been ratified by state legislatures. The first 10 amendments, proposed by Congress in September 1789 and adopted in 1791, are known collectively as the Bill of Rights, which places limits on the federal government�s power to curtail individual freedoms. The First Amendment, for example, provides that �Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.� Though the First Amendment�s language appears absolute, it has been interpreted to mean that the federal government (and later the state governments) cannot place undue restrictions on individual liberties but can regulate speech, religion, and other rights. The Second and Third amendments, which, respectively, guarantee the people�s right to bear arms and limit the quartering of soldiers in private houses, reflect the hostility of the framers to standing armies. The Fourth through Eighth amendments establish the rights of the criminally accused, including safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, protection from double jeopardy (being tried twice for the same offense), the right to refuse to testify against oneself, and the right to a trial by jury. The Ninth and Tenth amendments underscore the general rights of the people. The Ninth Amendment protects the unenumerated residual rights of the people (i.e., those not explicitly granted in the Constitution), and the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states or to the people those powers not delegated to the United States nor denied to the states.

The guarantees of the Bill of Rights are steeped in controversy, and debate continues over the limits that the federal government may appropriately place on individuals. One source of conflict has been the ambiguity in the wording of many of the Constitution�s provisions�such as the Second Amendment�s right �to keep and bear arms� and the Eighth Amendment�s prohibition of �cruel and unusual punishments.� Also problematic is the Tenth Amendment�s apparent contradiction of the body of the Constitution; Article I, Section 8, enumerates the powers of Congress but also allows that it may make all laws �which shall be necessary and proper,� while the Tenth Amendment stipulates that �powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.� The distinction between what powers should be left to the states or to the people and what is a necessary and proper law for Congress to pass has not always been clear.

Between the ratification of the Bill of Rights and the American Civil War (1861�65), only two amendments were passed, and both were technical in nature. The Eleventh Amendment (1795) forbade suits against the states in federal courts, and the Twelfth Amendment (1804) corrected a constitutional error that came to light in the presidential election of 1800, when Democratic-Republicans Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr each won 73 electors because electors were unable to cast separate ballots for president and vice president. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery, while the Fifteenth (1870) forbade denial of the right to vote to former male slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship rights to former slaves and guaranteed to every citizen due process and equal protection of the laws, was regarded for a while by the courts as limiting itself to the protection of freed slaves, but it has since been used to extend protections to all citizens. Initially, the Bill of Rights applied solely to the federal government and not to the states. In the 20th century, however, many (though not all) of the provisions of the Bill of Rights were extended by the Supreme Court through the Fourteenth Amendment to protect individuals from encroachments by the states. Notable amendments since the Civil War include the Sixteenth (1913), which enabled the imposition of a federal income tax; the Seventeenth (1913), which provided for the direct election of U.S. senators; the Nineteenth (1920), which established woman suffrage; the Twenty-fifth (1967), which established succession to the presidency and vice presidency; and the Twenty-sixth (1971), which extended voting rights to all citizens 18 years of age or older.

The executive branch

The executive branch is headed by the president, who must be a natural-born citizen of the United States, at least 35 years old, and a resident of the country for at least 14 years. A president is elected indirectly by the people through an electoral college system to a four-year term and is limited to two elected terms of office by the Twenty-second Amendment (1951). The president�s official residence and office is the White House, located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. in Washington, D.C. The formal constitutional responsibilities vested in the presidency of the United States include serving as commander in chief of the armed forces; negotiating treaties; appointing federal judges, ambassadors, and cabinet officials; and acting as head of state. In practice, presidential powers have expanded to include drafting legislation, formulating foreign policy, conducting personal diplomacy, and leading the president�s political party.

The members of the president�s cabinet�the attorney general and the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Education, Energy, and Veterans Affairs�are appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate; although they are described in the Twenty-fifth Amendment as �the principal officers of the executive departments,� significant power has flowed to non-cabinet-level presidential aides, such as those serving in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council (NSC), and the office of the White House Chief of Staff; cabinet-level rank may be conferred to the heads of such institutions at the discretion of the president. Members of the cabinet and presidential aides serve at the pleasure of the president and may be dismissed by him at any time.

Bush, George W.; National Security CouncilU.S. Pres. George W. Bush meeting with the National Security Council in the Cabinet Room of the White House, September 12, 2001.Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum/NARA

The executive branch also includes independent regulatory agencies such as the Federal Reserve System and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Governed by commissions appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate (commissioners may not be removed by the president), these agencies protect the public interest by enforcing rules and resolving disputes over federal regulations. Also part of the executive branch are government corporations (e.g., the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation [Amtrak], and the U.S. Postal Service), which supply services to consumers that could be provided by private corporations, and independent executive agencies (e.g., the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), which comprise the remainder of the federal government.

The legislative branch

The U.S. Congress, the legislative branch of the federal government, consists of two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Powers granted to Congress under the Constitution include the power to levy taxes, borrow money, regulate interstate commerce, impeach and convict the president, declare war, discipline its own membership, and determine its rules of procedure.

With the exception of revenue bills, which must originate in the House of Representatives, legislative bills may be introduced in and amended by either house, and a bill�with its amendments�must pass both houses in identical form and be signed by the president before it becomes law. The president may veto a bill, but a veto can be overridden by a two-thirds vote of both houses. The House of Representatives may impeach a president or another public official by a majority vote; trials of impeached officials are conducted by the Senate, and a two-thirds majority is necessary to convict and remove the individual from office. Congress is assisted in its duties by the General Accounting Office (GAO), which examines all federal receipts and expenditures by auditing federal programs and assessing the fiscal impact of proposed legislation, and by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a legislative counterpart to the OMB, which assesses budget data, analyzes the fiscal impact of alternative policies, and makes economic forecasts.

The House of Representatives is chosen by the direct vote of the electorate in single-member districts in each state. The number of representatives allotted to each state is based on its population as determined by a decennial census; states sometimes gain or lose seats, depending on population shifts. The overall membership of the House has been 435 since the 1910s, though it was temporarily expanded to 437 after Hawaii and Alaska were admitted as states in 1959. Members must be at least 25 years old, residents of the states from which they are elected, and previously citizens of the United States for at least seven years. It has become a practical imperative�though not a constitutional requirement�that a member be an inhabitant of the district that elects him. Members serve two-year terms, and there is no limit on the number of terms they may serve. The speaker of the House, who is chosen by the majority party, presides over debate, appoints members of select and conference committees, and performs other important duties; he is second in the line of presidential succession (following the vice president). The parliamentary leaders of the two main parties are the majority floor leader and the minority floor leader. The floor leaders are assisted by party whips, who are responsible for maintaining contact between the leadership and the members of the House. Bills introduced by members in the House of Representatives are received by standing committees, which can amend, expedite, delay, or kill legislation. Each committee is chaired by a member of the majority party, who traditionally attained this position on the basis of seniority, though the importance of seniority has eroded somewhat since the 1970s. Among the most important committees are those on Appropriations, Ways and Means, and Rules. The Rules Committee, for example, has significant power to determine which bills will be brought to the floor of the House for consideration and whether amendments will be allowed on a bill when it is debated by the entire House.

Each state elects two senators at large. Senators must be at least 30 years old, residents of the state from which they are elected, and previously citizens of the United States for at least nine years. They serve six-year terms, which are arranged so that one-third of the Senate is elected every two years. Senators also are not subject to term limits. The vice president serves as president of the Senate, casting a vote only in the case of a tie, and in his absence the Senate is chaired by a president pro tempore, who is elected by the Senate and is third in the line of succession to the presidency. Among the Senate�s most prominent standing committees are those on Foreign Relations, Finance, Appropriations, and Governmental Affairs. Debate is almost unlimited and may be used to delay a vote on a bill indefinitely. Such a delay, known as a filibuster, can be ended by three-fifths of the Senate through a procedure called cloture. Treaties negotiated by the president with other governments must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. The Senate also has the power to confirm or reject presidentially appointed federal judges, ambassadors, and cabinet officials.

Chamber of the U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.U.S. Senate Photo Studio

The judicial branch

State and local government

Because the U.S. Constitution establishes a federal system, the state governments enjoy extensive authority. The Constitution outlines the specific powers granted to the national government and reserves the remainder to the states. However, because of ambiguity in the Constitution and disparate historical interpretations by the federal courts, the powers actually exercised by the states have waxed and waned over time. Beginning in the last decades of the 20th century, for example, decisions by conservative-leaning federal courts, along with a general trend favouring the decentralization of government, increased the power of the states relative to the federal government. In some areas, the authority of the federal and state governments overlap; for example, the state and federal governments both have the power to tax, establish courts, and make and enforce laws. In other areas, such as the regulation of commerce within a state, the establishment of local governments, and action on public health, safety, and morals, the state governments have considerable discretion. The Constitution also denies to the states certain powers; for example, the Constitution forbids states to enter into treaties, to tax imports or exports, or to coin money. States also may not adopt laws that contradict the U.S. Constitution.

The governments of the 50 states have structures closely paralleling those of the federal government. Each state has a governor, a legislature, and a judiciary. Each state also has its own constitution.

Mirroring the U.S. Congress, all state legislatures are bicameral except Nebraska�s, which is unicameral. Most state judicial systems are based upon elected justices of the peace (although in many states this term is not used), above whom are major trial courts, often called district courts, and appellate courts. Each state has its own supreme court. In addition, there are probate courts concerned with wills, estates, and guardianships. Most state judges are elected, though some states use an appointment process similar to the federal courts and some use a nonpartisan selection process known as the Missouri Plan.

State governors are directly elected and serve varying terms (generally ranging from two to four years); in some states, the number of terms a governor may serve is limited. The powers of governors also vary, with some state constitutions ceding substantial authority to the chief executive (such as appointment and budgetary powers and the authority to veto legislation). In a few states, however, governors have highly circumscribed authority, with the constitution denying them the power to veto legislative bills.

Most states have a lieutenant governor, who is often elected independently of the governor and is sometimes not a member of the governor�s party. Lieutenant governors generally serve as the presiding officer of the state Senate. Other elected officials commonly include a secretary of state, state treasurer, state auditor, attorney general, and superintendent of public instruction.

State governments have a wide array of functions, encompassing conservation, highway and motor vehicle supervision, public safety and corrections, professional licensing, regulation of agriculture and of intrastate business and industry, and certain aspects of education, public health, and welfare. The administrative departments that oversee these activities are headed by the governor.

Each state may establish local governments to assist it in carrying out its constitutional powers. Local governments exercise only those powers that are granted to them by the states, and a state may redefine the role and authority of local government as it deems appropriate. The country has a long tradition of local democracy (e.g., the town meeting), and even some of the smallest areas have their own governments. There are some 85,000 local government units in the United States. The largest local government unit is the county (called a parish in Louisiana or a borough in Alaska). Counties range in population from as few as 100 people to millions (e.g., Los Angeles county). They often provide local services in rural areas and are responsible for law enforcement and keeping vital records. Smaller units include townships, villages, school districts, and special districts (e.g., housing authorities, conservation districts, and water authorities).

Municipal, or city, governments are responsible for delivering most local services, particularly in urban areas. At the beginning of the 21st century there were some 20,000 municipal governments in the United States. They are more diverse in structure than state governments. There are three basic types: mayor-council, commission, and council-manager governments. The mayor-council form, which is used in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and thousands of smaller cities, consists of an elected mayor and council. The power of mayors and councils vary from city to city; in most cities the mayor has limited powers and serves largely as a ceremonial leader, but in some cities (particularly large urban areas) the council is nominally responsible for formulating city ordinances, which the mayor enforces, but the mayor often controls the actions of the council. In the commission type, used less frequently now than it was in the early 20th century, voters elect a number of commissioners, each of whom serves as head of a city department; the presiding commissioner is generally the mayor. In the council-manager type, used in large cities such as Charlotte (North Carolina), Dallas (Texas), Phoenix (Arizona), and San Diego (California), an elected council hires a city manager to administer the city departments. The mayor, elected by the council, simply chairs the council and officiates at important functions.

Rock Hill, South CarolinaCity Hall in Rock Hill, South Carolina.Akhenaton06

As society has become increasingly urban, politics and government have become more complex. Many problems of the cities, including transportation, housing, education, health, and welfare, can no longer be handled entirely on the local level. Because even the states do not have the necessary resources, cities have often turned to the federal government for assistance, though proponents of local control have urged that the federal government provide block-grant aid to state and local governments without federal restrictions.

Political process

The framers of the U.S. Constitution focused their efforts primarily on the role, power, and function of the state and national governments, only briefly addressing the political and electoral process. Indeed, three of the Constitution�s four references to the election of public officials left the details to be determined by Congress or the states. The fourth reference, in Article II, Section 1, prescribed the role of the electoral college in choosing the president, but this section was soon amended (in 1804 by the Twelfth Amendment) to remedy the technical defects that had arisen in 1800, when all Democratic-Republican Party electors cast their votes for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, thereby creating a tie because electors were unable to differentiate between their presidential and vice presidential choices. (The election of 1800 was finally settled by Congress, which selected Jefferson president following 36 ballots.)

In establishing the electoral college, the framers stipulated that �Congress may determine the Time of chusing [sic] the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.� In 1845 Congress established that presidential electors would be appointed on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November; the electors cast their ballots on the Monday following the second Wednesday in December. Article I, establishing Congress, merely provides (Section 2) that representatives are to be �chosen every second Year by the People of the several States� and that voting qualifications are to be the same for Congress as for the �most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.� Initially, senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures (Section 3), though this was changed to popular election by the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Section 4 leaves to the states the prescription of the �Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives� but gives Congress the power �at any time by Law [to] make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.� In 1875 Congress designated the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even years as federal election day.

Suffrage

All citizens at least 18 years of age are eligible to vote. (Prisoners, ex-felons, and individuals on probation or parole are prohibited, sometimes permanently, from voting in some states.) The history of voting rights in the United States has been one of gradual extension of the franchise. Religion, property ownership, race, and gender have disappeared one by one as legal barriers to voting. In 1870, through the Fifteenth Amendment, former slaves were granted the right to vote, though African Americans were subsequently still denied the franchise (particularly in the South) through devices such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses. Only in the 1960s, through the Twenty-fourth Amendment (barring poll taxes) and the Voting Rights Act, were the full voting rights of African Americans guaranteed. Though universal manhood suffrage had theoretically been achieved following the American Civil War, woman suffrage was not fully guaranteed until 1920 with the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment (several states, particularly in the West, had begun granting women the right to vote and to run for political office beginning in the late 19th century). Suffrage was also extended by the Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971), which lowered the minimum voting age to 18.

woman suffrage Woman suffrage advocates parading in an open car in support of ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote in federal elections.George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 19032)

Voting and elections

Voters go to the polls in the United States not only to elect members of Congress and presidential electors but also to cast ballots for state and local officials, including governors, mayors, and judges, and on ballot initiatives and referendums that may range from local bond issues to state constitutional amendments (see referendum and initiative). The 435 members of the House of Representatives are chosen by the direct vote of the electorate in single-member districts in each state. State legislatures (sometimes with input from the courts) draw congressional district boundaries, often for partisan advantage (see gerrymandering); incumbents have always enjoyed an electoral advantage over challengers, but, as computer technology has made redistricting more sophisticated and easier to manipulate, elections to the House of Representatives have become even less competitive, with more than 90 percent of incumbents who choose to run for reelection regularly winning�often by significant margins. By contrast, Senate elections are generally more competitive.

polling placeA polling place sign posted at a polling station, November 2, 2010, in Drake, Kentucky. Tom Pennington�Getty Images/Thinkstock

Voters indirectly elect the president and vice president through the electoral college. Instead of choosing a candidate, voters actually choose electors committed to support a particular candidate. Each state is allotted one electoral vote for each of its senators and representatives in Congress; the Twenty-third Amendment (1961) granted electoral votes to the District of Columbia, which does not have congressional representation. A candidate must win a majority (270) of the 538 electoral votes to be elected president. If no candidate wins a majority, the House of Representatives selects the president, with each state delegation receiving one vote; the Senate elects the vice president if no vice presidential candidate secures an electoral college majority. A candidate may lose the popular vote but be elected president by winning a majority of the electoral vote (as George W. Bush did in the U.S. presidential election of 2000), though such inversions are rare. Presidential elections are costly and generate much media and public attention�sometimes years before the actual date of the general election. Indeed, some presidential aspirants have declared their candidacies years in advance of the first primaries and caucuses, and some White House hopefuls drop out of the grueling process long before the first votes are cast.

A certificate from Alabama showing the signatures of the state's electors in 2000. The nine electors voted for George W. Bush. Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration

Voting in the United States is not compulsory, and, in contrast to most other Western countries, voter turnout is quite low. In the late 20th and the early 21st century, about 50 percent of Americans cast ballots in presidential elections; turnout was even lower for congressional and state and local elections, with participation dropping under 40 percent for most congressional midterm elections (held midway through a president�s four-year term). Indeed, in some local elections (such as school board elections or bond issues) and primaries or caucuses, turnout has sometimes fallen below 10 percent. High abstention rates led to efforts to encourage voter participation by making voting easier. For example, in 1993 Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act (the so-called �motor-voter law�), which required states to allow citizens to register to vote when they received their driver�s licenses, and in 1998 voters in Oregon approved a referendum that established a mail-in voting system. In addition, some states now allow residents to register to vote on election day, polls are opened on multiple days and in multiple locations in some states, and Internet voting has even been introduced on a limited basis for some elections.

Money and campaigns

Campaigns for all levels of office are expensive in the United States compared with those in most other democratic countries. In an attempt to reduce the influence of money in the political process, reforms were instituted in the 1970s that required public disclosure of contributions and limited the amounts of contributions to candidates for federal office. Individuals were allowed to contribute directly to a candidate no more than $1,000 in so-called �hard money� (i.e., money regulated by federal election law) per candidate per election. The law, however, allowed labour unions, corporations, political advocacy groups, and political parties to raise and spend unregulated �soft money,� so long as funds were not spent specifically to support a candidate for federal office (in practice, this distinction was often blurry). Because there were no limits on such soft money, individuals or groups could contribute to political parties any sum at their disposal or spend limitlessly to advocate policy positions (often to the benefit or detriment of particular candidates). In the 2000 election cycle, it is estimated that more than $1 billion was spent by the Democratic and Republican parties and candidates for office, with more than two-fifths of this total coming from soft money contributions.

Concerns about campaign financing led to the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (popularly called the �McCain-Feingold law� for its two chief sponsors in the Senate, Republican John McCain and Democrat Russell Feingold), which banned national political parties from raising soft money. The law also increased the amount individuals could contribute to candidates (indexing the amount for inflation) and prevented interest groups from broadcasting advertisements that specifically referred to a candidate within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election.

In 2010 the contribution limits imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act were partly invalidated by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that contributions made for independent electioneering communications were a form of constitutionally protected free speech that could not be limited by law. The controversial decision was hailed by some as a resounding victory for freedom of speech, whereas others criticized it as an overreaching attempt to rewrite campaign finance law. The judgment led to the growth of so-called Super PACs, organizations allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money to support or defeat a candidate or an issue so long as those expenditures were made independently from the official campaign.

There are no federal limits on how much an individual may spend on his or her own candidacy. In 1992, for example, Ross Perot spent more than $60 million of his fortune on his unsuccessful bid to become president of the United States, and Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York City in 2001 after spending nearly $70 million of his own funds.

Perot, Ross: campaign buttonButton from Ross Perot's 1996 presidential campaign.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Political parties

The United States has two major national political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Although the parties contest presidential elections every four years and have national party organizations, between elections they are often little more than loose alliances of state and local party organizations. Other parties have occasionally challenged the Democrats and Republicans. Since the Republican Party�s rise to major party status in the 1850s, however, minor parties have had only limited electoral success, generally restricted either to influencing the platforms of the major parties or to siphoning off enough votes from a major party to deprive that party of victory in a presidential election. In the 1912 election, for example, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt challenged Republican President William Howard Taft, splitting the votes of Republicans and allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency with only 42 percent of the vote, and the 2.7 percent of the vote won by Green Party nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 may have tipped the presidency toward Republican George W. Bush by attracting votes that otherwise would have been cast for Democrat Al Gore.

Nixon, Richard M.Richard M. Nixon during a campaign stop in 1968, saluting the crowd with his iconic �V-is-for-Victory� gesture. Oliver F. Atkins�White House Photo/Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/NARA

There are several reasons for the failure of minor parties and the resilience of America�s two-party system. In order to win a national election, a party must appeal to a broad base of voters and a wide spectrum of interests. The two major parties have tended to adopt centrist political programs, and sometimes there are only minor differences between them on major issues, especially those related to foreign affairs. Each party has both conservative and liberal wings, and on some issues (e.g., affirmative action) conservative Democrats have more in common with conservative Republicans than with liberal Democrats. The country�s �winner-take-all� plurality system, in contrast to the proportional representation used in many other countries (whereby a party, for example, that won 5 percent of the vote would be entitled to roughly 5 percent of the seats in the legislature), has penalized minor parties by requiring them to win a plurality of the vote in individual districts in order to gain representation. The Democratic and Republican Party candidates are automatically placed on the general election ballot, while minor parties often have to expend considerable resources collecting enough signatures from registered voters to secure a position on the ballot. Finally, the cost of campaigns, particularly presidential campaigns, often discourages minor parties. Since the 1970s, presidential campaigns (primaries and caucuses, national conventions, and general elections) have been publicly funded through a tax checkoff system, whereby taxpayers can designate whether a portion of their federal taxes (in the early 21st century, $3 for an individual and $6 for a married couple) should be allocated to the presidential campaign fund. Whereas the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates receive full federal financing (nearly $75 million in 2004) for the general election, a minor party is eligible for a portion of the federal funds only if its candidate surpassed 5 percent in the prior presidential election (all parties with at least 25 percent of the national vote in the prior presidential election are entitled to equal funds). A new party contesting the presidential election is entitled to federal funds after the election if it received at least 5 percent of the national vote.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have undergone significant ideological transformations throughout their histories. The modern Democratic Party traditionally supports organized labour, minorities, and progressive reforms. Nationally, it generally espouses a liberal political philosophy, supporting greater governmental intervention in the economy and less governmental regulation of the private lives of citizens. It also generally supports higher taxes (particularly on the wealthy) to finance social welfare benefits that provide assistance to the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, and children. By contrast, the national Republican Party supports limited government regulation of the economy, lower taxes, and more conservative (traditional) social policies. In 2009 the Tea Party movement, a conservative populist social and political movement, emerged and attracted mostly disaffected Republicans.

A Tea Party rally in Sacramento, California, September 12, 2010.Steve Yeater/AP

Security

National security

The September 11 attacks of 2001 precipitated the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which is charged with protecting the United States against terrorist attacks. The legislation establishing the department�the largest government reorganization in 50 years�consolidated much of the country�s security infrastructure, integrating the functions of more than 20 agencies under Homeland Security. The department�s substantive responsibilities are divided into four directorates: border and transportation security, emergency preparedness, information analysis and infrastructure protection, and science and technology. The Secret Service, which protects the president, vice president, and other designated individuals, is also under the department�s jurisdiction.

Domestic law enforcement

Traditionally, law enforcement in the United States has been concentrated in the hands of local police officials, though the number of federal law-enforcement officers began to increase in the late 20th century. The bulk of the work is performed by police and detectives in the cities and by sheriffs and constables in rural areas. Many state governments also have law-enforcement agencies, and all of them have highway-patrol systems for enforcing traffic law.

The investigation of crimes that come under federal jurisdiction (e.g., those committed in more than one state) is the responsibility of the FBI, which also provides assistance with fingerprint identification and technical laboratory services to state and local law-enforcement agencies. In addition, certain federal agencies�such as the Drug Enforcement Administration of the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms of the Department of the Treasury�are empowered to enforce specific federal laws.

Health and welfare

Despite the country�s enormous wealth, poverty remains a reality for many people in the United States, though programs such as Social Security and Medicare have significantly reduced the poverty rate among senior citizens. In the early 21st century, more than one-tenth of the general population�and about one-sixth of children under 18 years of age�lived in poverty. About half the poor live in homes in which the head of the household is a full- or part-time wage earner. Of the others living in poverty, many are too old to work or are disabled, and a large percentage are mothers of young children. The states provide assistance to the poor in varying amounts, and the United States Department of Agriculture subsidizes the distribution of low-cost food and food stamps to the poor through the state and local governments. Unemployment assistance, provided for by the 1935 Social Security Act, is funded through worker and employer contributions.

Johnson, Lyndon B.: MedicareFormer U.S. president Harry S. Truman (right) looking on as Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Medicare bill at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, July 30, 1965.Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum/NARA

Increasing public concern with poverty and welfare led to new federal legislation beginning in the 1960s, especially the Great Society programs of the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Work, training, and rehabilitation programs were established in 1964 for welfare recipients. Between 1964 and 1969 the Office of Economic Opportunity began a number of programs, including the Head Start program for preschool children, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and the Teacher Corps. Responding to allegations of abuse in the country�s welfare system and charges that it encouraged dependency, the federal government introduced reforms in 1996, including limiting long-term benefits, requiring recipients to find work, and devolving much of the decision making to the states.

Johnson, Lady Bird; Project Head StartLady Bird Johnson, the wife of U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, visiting a classroom at the Kemper School in Washington, D.C., for Project Head Start, March 19, 1968. LBJ Library photo by Robert Knudsen

Persons who have been employed are eligible for retirement pensions under the Social Security program, and their surviving spouses and dependent children are generally eligible for survivor benefits. Many employers provide additional retirement benefits, usually funded by worker and employer contributions. In addition, millions of Americans maintain individual retirement accounts, such as the popular 401(k) plan, which is organized by employers and allows workers (sometimes with matching funds from their employer) to contribute part of their earnings on a tax-deferred basis to individual investment accounts.

With total health care spending significantly exceeding $1 trillion annually, the provision of medical and health care is one of the largest industries in the United States. There are, nevertheless, many inadequacies in medical services, particularly in rural and poor areas. At the beginning of the 21st century, some two-thirds of the population was covered by employer-based health insurance plans, and about one-sixth of the population, including members of the armed forces and their families, received medical care paid for or subsidized by the federal government, with that for the poor provided by Medicaid. Approximately one-sixth of the population was not covered by any form of health insurance.

The situation changed markedly with the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), often referred to simply as Obamacare because of its advocacy by Pres. Barack Obama, who signed it into law in March 2010. Considered the most far-reaching health care reform act since the passage of Medicare�but vehemently opposed by most Republicans as an act of government overreach�the PPACA included provisions that required most individuals to secure health insurance or pay fines, made coverage easier and less costly to obtain, cracked down on abusive insurance practices, and attempted to rein in rising costs of health care.

Pres. Barack Obama (centre left) and Vice Pres. Joe Biden (centre right) reacting after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, March 21, 2010.Pete Souza�Official White House Photo

The federal Department of Health and Human Services, through its National Institutes of Health, supports much of the biomedical research in the United States. Grants are also made to researchers in clinics and medical schools.

Housing

About three-fifths of the housing units in the United States are detached single-family homes, and about two-thirds are owner-occupied. Most houses are constructed of wood, and many are covered with shingles or brick veneer. The housing stock is relatively modern; nearly one-third of all units have been constructed since 1980, while about one-fifth of units were built prior to 1940. The average home is relatively large, with more than two-thirds of homes consisting of five or more rooms.

Nineteenth-century town houses in Alexandria, Virginia.Milt and Joan Mann/CameraMann International

Housing has long been considered a private rather than a public concern. The growth of urban slums, however, led many municipal governments to enact stricter building codes and sanitary regulations. In 1934 the Federal Housing Administration was established to make loans to institutions that would build low-rent dwellings. However, efforts to reduce slums in large cities by developing low-cost housing in other areas were frequently resisted by local residents who feared a subsequent decline in property values. For many years the restrictive covenant, by which property owners pledged not to sell to certain racial or religious groups, served to bar those groups from many communities. In 1948 the Supreme Court declared such covenants unenforceable, and in 1962 Pres. John F. Kennedy issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination in housing built with federal aid. Since that time many states and cities have adopted fair-housing laws and set up fair-housing commissions. Nevertheless, there are considerable racial disparities in home ownership; about three-fourths of whites but only about half of Hispanics and African Americans own their housing units.

During the 1950s and �60s large high-rise public housing units were built for low-income families in many large U.S. cities, but these often became centres of crime and unemployment, and minority groups and the poor continued to live in segregated urban ghettos. During the 1990s and the early 21st century, efforts were made to demolish many of the housing projects and to replace them with joint public-private housing communities that would include varying income levels.

Education

The interplay of local, state, and national programs and policies is particularly evident in education. Historically, education has been considered the province of the state and local governments. Of the approximately 4,000 colleges and universities (including branch campuses), the academies of the armed services are among the few federal institutions. (The federal government also administers, among others, the University of the Virgin Islands.) However, since 1862�when public lands were granted to the states to sell to fund the establishment of colleges of agricultural and mechanical arts, called land-grant colleges�the federal government has been involved in education at all levels. Additionally, the federal government supports school lunch programs, administers American Indian education, makes research grants to universities, underwrites loans to college students, and finances education for veterans. It has been widely debated whether the government should also give assistance to private and parochial (religious) schools or tax deductions to parents choosing to send their children to such schools. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that direct assistance to parochial schools is barred by the Constitution�s First Amendment�which states that �Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion��it has allowed the provision of textbooks and so-called supplementary educational centres on the grounds that their primary purpose is educative rather than religious.

San Jose State University, CaliforniaTower Hall and Morris Dailey Auditorium, San Jose State University, San Jose, California.John Pozniak

Public secondary and elementary education is free and provided primarily by local government. Education is compulsory, generally from age 7 through 16, though the age requirements vary somewhat among the states. The literacy rate exceeds 95 percent. In order to address the educational needs of a complex society, governments at all levels have pursued diverse strategies, including preschool programs, classes in the community, summer and night schools, additional facilities for exceptional children, and programs aimed at culturally deprived and disaffected students.

Although primary responsibility for elementary education rests with local government, it is increasingly affected by state and national policies. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, required federal agencies to discontinue financial aid to school districts that were not racially integrated, and in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County (North Carolina) Board of Education (1971) the Supreme Court mandated busing to achieve racially integrated schools, a remedy that often required long commutes for African American children living in largely segregated enclaves. In the late 20th and the early 21st century, busing remained a controversial political issue, and many localities (including Charlotte) ended their busing programs or had them terminated by federal judges. In addition, the No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2002, increased the federal role in elementary and secondary education by requiring states to implement standards of accountability for public elementary and secondary schools. James T. Harris The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Cultural life

The great art historian Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich once wrote that there is really no such thing as �art�; there are only artists. This is a useful reminder to anyone studying, much less setting out to try to define, anything as big and varied as the culture of the United States. For the culture that endures in any country is made not by vast impersonal forces or by unfolding historical necessities but by uniquely talented men and women, one-of-a-kind people doing one thing at a time�doing what they can, or must. In the United States, particularly, where there is no more a truly �established� art than an established religion�no real academies, no real official art�culture is where one finds it, and many of the most gifted artists have chosen to make their art far from the parades and rallies of worldly life.

Some of the keenest students of the American arts have even come to dislike the word culture as a catchall for the plastic and literary arts, since it is a term borrowed from anthropology, with its implication that there is any kind of seamless unity to the things that writers and poets and painters have made. The art of some of the greatest American artists and writers, after all, has been made in deliberate seclusion and has taken as its material the interior life of the mind and heart that shapes and precedes shared �national� experience. It is American art before it is the culture of the United States. Even if it is true that these habits of retreat are, in turn, themselves in part traditions, and culturally shaped, it is also true that the least illuminating way to approach the poems of Emily Dickinson or the paintings of Winslow Homer, to take only two imposing instances, is as the consequence of large-scale mass sociological phenomenon.

Daydreaming, watercolours, pencil, pen, and black ink on paper by Winslow Homer, 1880 and 1882; in a private collection.In a private collection

Still, many, perhaps even most, American culture makers have not only found themselves, as all Americans do, caught in the common life of their country�they have chosen to make the common catch their common subject. Their involvement with the problems they share with their neighbours, near and far, has given their art a common shape and often a common substance. And if one quarrel has absorbed American artists and thinkers more than any other, it has been that one between the values of a mass, democratic, popular culture and those of a refined elite culture accessible only to the few�the quarrel between �low� and �high.� From the very beginnings of American art, the �top down� model of all European civilization, with a fine art made for an elite class of patrons by a specialized class of artists, was in doubt, in part because many Americans did not want that kind of art, in part because, even if they wanted it, the social institutions�a court or a cathedral�just were not there to produce and welcome it. What came in its place was a commercial culture, a marketplace of the arts, which sometimes degraded art into mere commerce and at other times raised the common voice of the people to the level of high art.

In the 20th century, this was, in some part, a problem that science left on the doorstep of the arts. Beginning at the turn of the century, the growth of the technology of mass communications�the movies, the phonograph, radio, and eventually television�created a potential audience for stories and music and theatre larger than anyone could previously have dreamed that made it possible for music and drama and pictures to reach more people than had ever been possible. People in San Francisco could look at the latest pictures or hear the latest music from New York City months, or even moments, after they were made; a great performance demanded a pilgrimage no longer than the path to a corner movie theatre. High culture had come to the American living room.

But, though interest in a �democratic� culture that could compete with traditional high culture has grown in recent times, it is hardly a new preoccupation. One has only to read such 19th-century classics as Mark Twain�s The Innocents Abroad" class="md-crosslink">The Innocents Abroad (1869) to be reminded of just how long, and just how keenly, Americans have asked themselves if all the stained glass and sacred music of European culture is all it is cracked up to be, and if the tall tales and Cigar-Store Indians did not have more juice and life in them for a new people in a new land. Twain�s whole example, after all, was to show that American speech as it was actually spoken was closer to Homer than imported finery was.

Mark Twain, lithograph from Puck, 1885.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LC-USZC4-4294

In this way, the new machines of mass reproduction and diffusion that fill modern times, from the daguerreotype to the World Wide Web, came not simply as a new or threatening force but also as the fulfillment of a standing American dream. Mass culture seemed to promise a democratic culture: a cultural life directed not to an aristocracy but to all men and women. It was not that the new machines produced new ideals but that the new machines made the old dreams seem suddenly a practical possibility.

The practical appearance of this dream began in a spirit of hope. Much American art at the turn of the 20th century and through the 1920s, from the paintings of Charles Sheeler to the poetry of Hart Crane, hymned the power of the new technology and the dream of a common culture. By the middle of the century, however, many people recoiled in dismay at what had happened to the American arts, high and low, and thought that these old dreams of a common, unifying culture had been irrevocably crushed. The new technology of mass communications, for the most part, seemed to have achieved not a generous democratization but a bland homogenization of culture. Many people thought that the control of culture had passed into the hands of advertisers, people who used the means of a common culture just to make a buck. It was not only that most of the new music and drama that had been made for movies and radio, and later for television, seemed shallow; it was also that the high or serious culture that had become available through the means of mass reproduction seemed to have been reduced to a string of popularized hits, which concealed the real complexity of art. Culture, made democratic, had become too easy.

As a consequence, many intellectuals and artists around the end of World War II began to try to construct new kinds of elite �high� culture, art that would be deliberately difficult�and to many people it seemed that this new work was merely difficult. Much of the new art and dance seemed puzzling and deliberately obscure. Difficult art happened, above all, in New York City. During World War II, New York had seen an influx of avant-garde artists escaping Adolf Hitler�s Europe, including the painters Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, and Joan Mir�, as well as the composer Igor Stravinsky. They imported many of the ideals of the European avant-garde, particularly the belief that art should always be difficult and �ahead of its time.� (It is a paradox that the avant-garde movement in Europe had begun, in the late 19th century, in rebellion against what its advocates thought were the oppressive and stifling standards of high, official culture in Europe and that it had often looked to American mass culture for inspiration.) In the United States, however, the practice of avant-garde art became a way for artists and intellectuals to isolate themselves from what they thought was the cheapening of standards.

Piet Mondrian, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1942. � Arnold Newman

And yet this counterculture had, by the 1960s, become in large American cities an official culture of its own. For many intellectuals around 1960, this gloomy situation seemed to be all too permanent. One could choose between an undemanding low culture and an austere but isolated high culture. For much of the century, scholars of culture saw these two worlds�the public world of popular culture and the private world of modern art�as irreconcilable antagonists and thought that American culture was defined by the abyss between them.

As the century and its obsessions closed, however, more and more scholars came to see in the most enduring inventions of American culture patterns of cyclical renewal between high and low. And as scholars have studied particular cases instead of abstract ideas, it has become apparent that the contrast between high and low has often been overdrawn. Instead of a simple opposition between popular culture and elite culture, it is possible to recognize in the prolix and varied forms of popular culture innovations and inspirations that have enlivened the most original high American culture�and to then see how the inventions of high culture circulate back into the street, in a spiraling, creative flow. In the astonishing achievements of the American jazz musicians, who took the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway musical and inflected them with their own improvisational genius; in the works of great choreographers like Paul Taylor and George Balanchine, who found in tap dances and marches and ballroom bebop new kinds of movement that they then incorporated into the language of high dance; in the �dream boxes� of the American avant-garde artist Joseph Cornell, who took for his material the mundane goods of Woolworth�s and the department store and used them as private symbols in surreal dioramas: in the work of all of these artists, and so many more, we see the same kind of inspiring dialogue between the austere discipline of avant-garde art and the enlivening touch of the vernacular.

This argument has been so widely resolved, in fact, that, in the decades bracketing the turn of the 21st century, the old central and shaping American debate between high and low has been in part replaced by a new and, for the moment, still more clamorous argument. It might be said that if the old debate was between high and low, this one is between the �centre� and the �margins.� The argument between high and low was what gave the modern era its special savour. A new generation of critics and artists, defining themselves as �postmodern,� have argued passionately that the real central issue of culture is the �construction� of cultural values, whether high or low, and that these values reflect less enduring truth and beauty, or even authentic popular taste, than the prejudices of professors. Since culture has mostly been made by white males praising dead white males to other white males in classrooms, they argue, the resulting view of American culture has been made unduly pale, masculine, and lifeless. It is not only the art of African Americans and other minorities that has been unfairly excluded from the canon of what is read, seen, and taught, these scholars argue, often with more passion than evidence; it is also the work of anonymous artists, particularly women, that has been �marginalized� or treated as trivial. This argument can conclude with a rational, undeniable demand that more attention be paid to obscure and neglected writers and artists, or it can take the strong and often irrational form that all aesthetic values are merely prejudices enforced by power. If the old debate between high and low asked if real values could rise from humble beginnings, the new debate about American culture asks if true value, as opposed to mere power, exists at all. Adam Gopnik

Literature

Because the most articulate artists are, by definition, writers, most of the arguments about what culture is and ought to do have been about what literature is and ought to do�and this can skew our perception of American culture a little, because the most memorable American art has not always appeared in books and novels and stories and plays. In part, perhaps, this is because writing was the first art form to undergo a revolution of mass technology; books were being printed in thousands of copies, while one still had to make a pilgrimage to hear a symphony or see a painting. The basic dispute between mass experience and individual experience has been therefore perhaps less keenly felt as an everyday fact in writing in the 20th and 21st centuries than it has been in other art forms. Still, writers have seen and recorded this quarrel as a feature of the world around them, and the evolution of American writing in the past 50 years has shown some of the same basic patterns that can be found in painting and dance and the theatre.

In the United States after World War II, many writers, in opposition to what they perceived as the bland flattening out of cultural life, made their subject all the things that set Americans apart from one another. Although for many Americans, ethnic and even religious differences had become increasingly less important as the century moved on�holiday rather than everyday material�many writers after World War II seized on these differences to achieve a detached point of view on American life. Beginning in the 1940s and �50s, three groups in particular seemed to be �outsider-insiders� who could bring a special vision to fiction: Southerners, Jews, and African Americans.

Each group had a sense of uncertainty, mixed emotions, and stifled aspirations that lent a questioning counterpoint to the general chorus of affirmation in American life. The Southerners�William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O�Connor most particularly�thought that a noble tradition of defeat and failure had been part of the fabric of Southern life since the Civil War. At a time when �official� American culture often insisted that the American story was one of endless triumphs and optimism, they told stories of tragic fate. Jewish writers�most prominently Chicago novelist Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in l976, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth�found in the �golden exile� of Jews in the United States a juxtaposition of surface affluence with deeper unease and perplexity that seemed to many of their fellow Americans to offer a common predicament in a heightened form. At the turn of the 21st century, younger Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union such as Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar dealt impressively with the experience of immigrants in the United States.

Among the immigrant writers who explored the intersection of their old and new cultures at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st were Cuban American writer Oscar Hijuelos, Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid, Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon, Indian-born novelist and short-story writer Bharati Mukherjee, and Asian American writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Ha Jin.

Mukherjee, BharatiBharati Mukherjee, 2004.Embassy of the United States, Tel-Aviv, Israel/U.S. Department of State

For African Americans, of course, the promise of American life had in many respects never been fulfilled. �What happens to a dream deferred,� the poet Langston Hughes asked, and many African American writers attempted to answer that question, variously, through stories that mingled pride, perplexity, and rage. African American literature achieved one of the few unquestioned masterpieces of late 20th-century American fiction writing in Ralph Ellison�s Invisible Man" class="md-crosslink">Invisible Man (l952). Later two African American women, Toni Morrison (the first African American female to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; 1993), and Alice Walker, published some of the most important post-World War II American fiction.

The rise of feminism as a political movement gave many women a sense that their experience too is richly and importantly outside the mainstream; since at least the 1960s, there has been an explosion of women�s fiction, including the much-admired work of Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, Ann Beattie, Gail Godwin, and Alison Lurie.

Perhaps precisely because so many novelists sought to make their fiction from experiences that were deliberately imagined as marginal, set aside from the general condition of American life, many other writers had the sense that fiction, and particularly the novel, might not any longer be the best way to try to record American life. For many writers the novel seemed to have become above all a form of private, interior expression and could no longer keep up with the extravagant oddities of the United States. Many gifted writers took up journalism with some of the passion for perfection of style that had once been reserved for fiction. The exemplars of this form of poetic journalism included the masters of The New Yorker magazine, most notably A.J. Liebling, whose books included The Earl of Louisiana (1961), a study of an election in Louisiana, as well as Joseph Mitchell, who in his books The Bottom of the Harbour (1944) and Joe Gould�s Secret (1942) offered dark and perplexing accounts of the life of the American metropolis. The dream of combining real facts and lyrical fire also achieved a masterpiece in the poet James Agee�s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" class="md-crosslink">Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (l941; with photographs by Walker Evans), an account of sharecropper life in the South that is a landmark in the struggle for fact writing that would have the beauty and permanence of poetry.

Let Us Now Praise Famous MenBud Fields and his family, Hale county, Alabama, photograph by Walker Evans, c. 1936�37; from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Evans and James Agee.Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 8c52407u)

As the century continued, this genre of imaginative nonfiction (sometimes called the documentary novel or the nonfiction novel) continued to evolve and took on many different forms. In the writing of Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Neil Sheehan, and Truman Capote, all among Liebling�s and Mitchell�s successors at The New Yorker, this new form continued to seek a tone of subdued and even amused understatement. Tom Wolfe, whose influential books included The Right Stuff (1979), an account of the early days of the American space program, and Norman Mailer, whose books included Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), a ruminative piece about the Republican and Democratic national conventions in l968, deliberately took on huge public subjects and subjected them to the insights (and, many people thought, the idiosyncratic whims) of a personal sensibility. During the 1990s autobiography became the focus for a number of accomplished novelists, including Frank McCourt, Anne Roiphe, and Dave Eggers. At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, massive, ambitious novels were published by David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1996) and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, 2001; Freedom, 2010).

Tom Wolfe.Jim Cooper/AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

As the nonfiction novel often pursued extremes of grandiosity and hyperbole, the American short story assumed a previously unexpected importance in the life of American writing; the short story became the voice of private vision and private lives. The short story, with its natural insistence on the unique moment and the infrangible glimpse of something private and fragile, had a new prominence. The rise of the American short story is bracketed by two remarkable books: J.D. Salinger�s Nine Stories (1953) and Raymond Carver�s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Salinger inspired a generation by imagining that the serious search for a spiritual life could be reconciled with an art of gaiety and charm; Carver confirmed in the next generation their sense of a loss of spirituality in an art of taciturn reserve and cloaked emotions.

cover of The Catcher in the RyeReproduction of the cover of the first edition of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951).Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group USA

Carver, who died in 1988, and the great novelist and man of letters John Updike, who died in 2009, were perhaps the last undisputed masters of literature in the high American sense that emerged with Ernest Hemingway and Faulkner. Yet in no area of the American arts, perhaps, have the claims of the marginal to take their place at the centre of the table been so fruitful, subtle, or varied as in literature. Perhaps because writing is inescapably personal, the trap of turning art into mere ideology has been most deftly avoided in its realm. This can be seen in the dramatically expanded horizons of the feminist and minority writers whose work first appeared in the 1970s and �80s, including the Chinese American Amy Tan. A new freedom to write about human erotic experience previously considered strange or even deviant shaped much new writing, from the comic obsessive novels of Nicholson Baker through the work of those short-story writers and novelists, including Edmund White and David Leavitt, who have made art out of previously repressed and unnarrated areas of homoerotic experience. Literature is above all the narrative medium of the arts, the one that still best relates What Happened to Me, and American literature, at least, has only been enriched by new �mes� and new narratives. (See also American literature.) Adam Gopnik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

The visual arts and postmodernism

Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the loudest, event in American cultural life since World War II was what the critic Irving Sandler has called �The Triumph of American Painting��the emergence of a new form of art that allowed American painting to dominate the world. This dominance lasted for at least 40 years, from the birth of the so-called New York school, or Abstract Expressionism, around l945 until at least the mid-1980s, and it took in many different kinds of art and artists. In its first flowering, in the epic-scaled abstractions of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and the other members of the New York school, this new painting seemed abstract, rarefied, and constructed from a series of negations, from saying �no!� to everything except the purest elements of painting. Abstract Expressionism seemed to stand at the farthest possible remove from the common life of American culture and particularly from the life of American popular culture. Even this painting, however, later came under a new and perhaps less-austere scrutiny; and the art historian Robert Rosenblum has persuasively argued that many of the elements of Abstract Expressionism, for all their apparent hermetic distance from common experience, are inspired by the scale and light of the American landscape and American 19th-century landscape painting�by elements that run deep and centrally in Americans� sense of themselves and their country.

de Kooning, Willem: Woman IIWoman II, oil on canvas by Willem de Kooning, 1952; in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 149.9 � 109.3 cm.Fine Art Images/SuperStock

It is certainly true that the next generation of painters, who throughout the 1950s continued the unparalleled dominance of American influence in the visual arts, made their art aggressively and unmistakably of the dialogue between the studio and the street. Jasper Johns, for instance, took as his subject the most common and even banal of American symbols�maps of the 48 continental states, the flag itself�and depicted the quickly read and immediately identifiable common icons with a slow, meditative, painterly scrutiny. His contemporary and occasional partner Robert Rauschenberg took up the same dialogue in a different form; his art consisted of dreamlike collages of images silk-screened from the mass media, combined with personal artifacts and personal symbols, all brought together in a m�lange of jokes and deliberately perverse associations. In a remarkably similar spirit, the eccentric surrealistJoseph Cornell" class="md-crosslink"> Joseph Cornell made little shoe-box-like dioramas in which images taken from popular culture were made into a dreamlike language of nostalgia and poetic reverie. Although Cornell, like William Blake, whom he in many ways resembled, worked largely in isolation, his sense of the poetry that lurks unseen in even the most absurd everyday objects had a profound effect on other artists.

�Monogram,� combine painting (mixed media) by Robert Rauschenberg, 1959; in the Moderna Museet, StockholmModerna Museet, Stockholm/Photograph: Statens Konstmuseer

By the early 1960s, with the explosion of the new art form called Pop art, the engagement of painting and drawing with popular culture seemed so explicit as to be almost overwhelming and, at times, risked losing any sense of private life and personal inflection at all�it risked becoming all street and no studio. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg took the styles and objects of popular culture�everything from comic books to lipstick tubes�and treated them with the absorption and grave seriousness previously reserved for religious icons. But this art too had its secrets, as well as its strong individual voices and visions. In his series of drawings called Proposals for Monumental Buildings, 1965�69, Oldenburg drew ordinary things�fire hydrants, ice-cream bars, bananas�as though they were as big as skyscrapers. His pictures combined a virtuoso�s gift for drawing with a vision, at once celebratory and satirical, of the P.T. Barnum spirit of American life. Warhol silk-screened images of popular movie stars and Campbell�s soup cans; in replicating them, he suggested that their reiteration by mass production had emptied them of their humanity but also given them a kind of hieratic immortality. Lichtenstein used the techniques of comic-book illustration to paraphrase some of the monuments of modern painting, making a coolly witty art in which Henri Matisse danced with Captain Marvel.

But these artists who self-consciously chose to make their art out of popular materials and images were not the only ones who had something to say about the traffic between mass and elite culture. The so-called Minimalists, who made abstract art out of simple and usually hard-edged geometric forms, from one point of view carried on the tradition of austere abstraction. But it was also the Minimalists, as art historians have pointed out, who carried over the vocabulary of the new International Style of unornamented architecture into the world of the fine arts; Minimalism imagined the dialogue between street and studio in terms of hard edges and simple forms rather than in terms of imagery, but it took part in the same dialogue. In some cases, the play between high and low has been carried out as a dialogue between Pop and Minimalist styles themselves. Frank Stella, thought by many to be the preeminent American painter of the late 20th century, began as a Minimalist, making extremely simple paintings of black chevrons from which everything was banished except the barest minimum of painterly cues. Yet in his subsequent work he became almost extravagantly �maximalist� and, as he began to make bas-reliefs, added to the stark elegance of his early paintings wild, Pop-art elements of outthrusting spirals and Day-Glo colors�even sequins and glitter�that deliberately suggested the invigorating vulgarity of the Las Vegas Strip. Stella�s flamboyant reliefs combine the spare elegance of abstraction with the greedy vitality of the American street.

In the 1980s and �90s, it was in the visual arts, however, that the debates over postmodern marginality and the construction of a fixed canon became, perhaps, most fierce�yet, oddly, were at the same time least eloquent, or least fully realized in emotionally potent works of art. Pictures and objects do not �argue� particularly well, so the tone of much contemporary American art became debased, with the cryptic languages of high abstraction and conceptual art put in the service of narrow ideological arguments. It became a standard practice in American avant-garde art of the 1980s and �90s to experience an installation in which an inarguable social message�for instance, that there should be fewer homeless people in the streets�was encoded in a highly oblique, Surrealist manner, with the duty of the viewer then reduced to decoding the manner back into the message. The long journey of American art in the 20th century away from socially �responsible� art that lacked intense artistic originality seemed to have been short-circuited, without necessarily producing much of a gain in clarity or accessibility.

No subject or idea has been as powerful, or as controversial, in American arts and letters at the end of the 20th century and into the new millennium as the idea of the �postmodern,� and in no sphere has the argument been as lively as in that of the plastic arts. The idea of the postmodern has been powerful in the United States exactly because the idea of the modern was so powerful; where Europe has struggled with the idea of modernity, in the United States it has been largely triumphant, thus leaving the question of �what comes next� all the more problematic. Since the 1960s, the ascendance of postmodern culture has been argued�now it is even sometimes said that a �post-postmodern� epoch has begun, but what exactly that means is remarkably vague.

In some media, what is meant by postmodern is clear and easy enough to point to: it is the rejection of the utopian aspects of modernism, and particularly of the attempt to express that utopianism in ideal or absolute form�the kind experienced in Bauhaus architecture or in Minimalist painting. Postmodernism is an attempt to muddy lines drawn falsely clear. In American architecture, for instance, the meaning of postmodern is reasonably plain. Beginning with the work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Peter Eisenman, postmodern architects deliberately rejected the pure forms and �truth to materials� of the modern architect and put in their place irony, ornament, historical reference, and deliberate paradox. Some American postmodern architecture has been ornamental and cheerfully cosmetic, as in the later work of Philip Johnson and the mid-1980s work of Michael Graves. Some has been demanding and deliberately challenging even to conventional ideas of spatial lucidity, as in Eisenman�s Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. But one can see the difference just by looking.

In painting and sculpture, on the other hand, it is often harder to know where exactly to draw the line�and why the line is drawn. In the paintings of the American artist David Salle or the photographs of Cindy Sherman, for instance, one sees apparently postmodern elements of pastiche, borrowed imagery, and deliberately �impure� collage. But all of these devices are also components of modernism and part of the heritage of Surrealism, though the formal devices of a Rauschenberg or Johns were used in a different emotional key. The true common element among the postmodern perhaps lies in a note of extreme pessimism and melancholy about the possibility of escaping from borrowed imagery into �authentic� experience. It is this emotional tone that gives postmodernism its peculiar register and, one might almost say, its authenticity.

In literature, the postmodern is, once again, hard to separate from the modern, since many of its keynotes�for instance, a love of complicated artifice and obviously literary devices, along with the mixing of realistic and frankly fantastic or magical devices�are at least as old as James Joyce�s founding modernist fictions. But certainly the expansion of possible sources, the liberation from the narrowly white male view of the world, and a broadening of testimony given and testimony taken are part of what postmodern literature has in common with other kinds of postmodern culture. It has been part of the postmodern transformation in American fiction as well to place authors previously marginalized as genre writers at the centre of attention. The African American crime writer Chester Himes, for example, has been given serious critical attention, while the strange visionary science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was ushered, in 2007, from his long exile in paperback into the Library of America.

What is at stake in the debates over modern and postmodern is finally the American idea of the individual. Where modernism in the United States placed its emphasis on the autonomous individual, the heroic artist, postmodernism places its emphasis on the �de-centred� subject, the artist as a prisoner, rueful or miserable, of culture. Art is seen as a social event rather than as communication between persons. If in modernism an individual artist made something that in turn created a community of observers, in the postmodern epoch the opposite is true: the social circumstance, the chain of connections that make seeming opposites unite, key off the artist and make him what he is. In the work of the artist Jeff Koons, for instance�who makes nothing but has things, from kitsch figurines to giant puppies composed of flowers, made for him�this postmodern rejection of the handmade or authentic is given a weirdly comic tone, at once eccentric and humorous. It is the impurities of culture, rather than the purity of the artist�s vision, that haunts contemporary art.

Nonetheless, if the push and charge that had been so unlooked-for in American art since the 1940s seemed diminished, the turn of the 21st century was a rich time for second and even third acts. Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Elizabeth Murray, and Chuck Close were all American artists who continued to produce arresting, original work�most often balanced on that fine knife edge between the blankly literal and the disturbingly metaphoric�without worrying overmuch about theoretical fashions or fashionable theory.

As recently as the 1980s, most surveys of American culture might not have thought photography of much importance. But at the turn of the century, photography began to lay a new claim to attention as a serious art form. For the bulk of the first part of the 20th century, the most remarkable American photographers had, on the whole, tried to make photography into a �fine art� by divorcing it from its ubiquitous presence as a recorder of moments and by splicing it onto older, painterly traditions. A clutch of gifted photographers, however, have, since the end of World War II, been able to transcend the distinction between media image and aesthetic object�between art and photojournalism�to make from a single, pregnant moment a complete and enduring image. Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, and Robert Frank (the latter, like so many artists of the postwar period, an emigrant), for instance, rather than trying to make of photography something as calculated and considered as the traditional fine arts, found in the instantaneous vision of the camera something at once personal and permanent. Frank�s book The Americans (l956), the record of a tour of the United States that combined the sense of accident of a family slide show with a sense of the ominous worthy of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, was the masterpiece of this vision; and no work of the postwar era was more influential in all fields of visual expression. Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, and, above all, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who together dominated both fashion and portrait photography for almost half a century and straddled the lines between museum and magazine, high portraiture and low commercials, all came to seem, in their oscillations between glamour and gloom, exemplary of the predicaments facing the American artist. Adam Gopnik

The theatre

Perhaps more than any other art form, the American theatre suffered from the invention of the new technologies of mass reproduction. Where painting and writing could choose their distance from (or intimacy with) the new mass culture, many of the age-old materials of the theatre had by the 1980s been subsumed by movies and television. What the theatre could do that could not be done elsewhere was not always clear. As a consequence, the Broadway theatre�which in the 1920s had still seemed a vital area of American culture and, in the high period of the playwright Eugene O�Neill, a place of cultural renaissance�had by the end of the 1980s become very nearly defunct. A brief and largely false spring had taken place in the period just after World War II. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, in particular, both wrote movingly and even courageously about the lives of the �left-out� Americans, demanding attention for the outcasts of a relentlessly commercial society. Viewing them from the 21st century, however, both seem more traditional and less profoundly innovative than their contemporaries in the other arts, more profoundly tied to the conventions of European naturalist theatre and less inclined or able to renew and rejuvenate the language of their form.

Also much influenced by European models, though in his case by the absurdist theatre of Eug�ne Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, was Edward Albee, the most prominent American playwright of the 1960s. As Broadway�s dominance of the American stage waned in the 1970s, regional theatre took on new importance, and cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Louisville, Kentucky, provided significant proving grounds for a new generation of playwrights. On those smaller but still potent stages, theatre continues to speak powerfully. An African American renaissance in the theatre has taken place, with its most notable figure being August Wilson, whose 1985 play Fences won the Pulitzer Prize. And, for the renewal and preservation of the American language, there is still nothing to equal the stage: David Mamet, in his plays, among them Glengarry, Glen Ross (1983) and Speed the Plow (1987), both caught and created an American vernacular�verbose, repetitive, obscene, and eloquent�that combined the local colour of Damon Runyon and the bleak truthfulness of Harold Pinter. The one completely original American contribution to the stage, the musical theatre, blossomed in the 1940s and �50s in the works of Frank Loesser (especially Guys and Dolls, which the critic Kenneth Tynan regarded as one of the greatest of American plays) but became heavy-handed and at the beginning of the 21st century existed largely as a revival art and in the brave �holdout� work of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods). As the new century progressed, however, innovation once again found its way to Broadway with productions such as Steve Sater and Duncan Sheik�s Spring Awakening, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman�s Wicked, Jeff Whitty, Jeff Marx, and Robert Lopez�s Avenue Q, Lopez, Matt Stone, and Trey Parker�s The Book of Mormon, and Lin-Manuel Miranda�s Hamilton.

Playwright August WilsonTed S. Warren/AP Images

Motion pictures

In some respects the motion picture is the American art form par excellence, and no area of art has undergone a more dramatic revision in critical appraisal in the recent past. Throughout most of the 1940s and �50s, serious critics, with a few honourable exceptions (notably, James Agee and Manny Farber), even those who took the cinema seriously as a potential artistic medium, took it for granted that (excepting the work of D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles), the commercial Hollywood movie was, judged as art, hopelessly compromised by commerce. In the 1950s in France, however, a generation of critics associated with the magazine Cahiers du cin�ma (many of whom later would become well-known filmmakers themselves, including Fran�ois Truffaut and Claude Lelouch) argued that the American commercial film, precisely because its need to please a mass audience had helped it break out of the limiting gentility of the European cinema, had a vitality and, even more surprisingly, a set of master-makers (auteurs) without equal in the world. New studies and appreciations of such Hollywood filmmakers as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and William Wyler resulted, and, eventually, this new evaluation worked its way back into the United States itself: another demonstration that one country�s low art can become another country�s high art. Imported back into the United States, this reevaluation changed and amended preconceptions that had hardened into prejudices.

(From left) Lauren Bacall, Marcel Dalio, and Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944), directed by Howard Hawks.� 1945 Warner Brothers, Inc.; photograph from a private collection

Television

If the Martian visitor beloved of anthropological storytelling were to visit the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, all of the art forms listed and enumerated here�painting and sculpture and literature, perhaps even motion pictures and popular music�would seem like tiny minority activities compared with the great gaping eye of American life: �the box,� television. Since the mid-1950s, television has been more than just the common language of American culture; it has been a common atmosphere. For many Americans television is not the chief manner of interpreting reality but a substitute for it, a wraparound simulated experience that has come to be more real than reality itself. Indeed, beginning in the 1990s, American television was inundated with a spate of �reality� programs, a wildly popular format that employed documentary techniques to examine �ordinary� people placed in unlikely situations, from the game-show structure of Survivor (marooned contestants struggling for supremacy) to legal dramas such as The People�s Court and Cops, to American Idol, the often caustically judged talent show that made instant stars of some of its contestants. Certainly, no medium�not even motion pictures at the height of their popular appeal in the 1930s�has created so much hostility, fear, and disdain in some �right-thinking� people. Television is chewing gum for the eyes, famously characterized as a vast wasteland in 1961 by Newton Minow, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. When someone in the movies is meant to be shown living a life of meaningless alienation, he is usually shown watching television.

Yet television itself is, of course, no one thing, nor, despite the many efforts since the time of the Canadian philosopher Marshall Mcluhan to define its essence, has it been shown to have a single nature that deforms the things it shows. Television can be everything from Monday Night Football to the Persian Gulf War�s Operation Desert Storm to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The curious thing, perhaps, is that, unlike motion pictures, where unquestioned masters and undoubted masterpieces and a language of criticism had already emerged, television still waits for a way to be appreciated. Television is the dominant contemporary cultural reality, but it is still in many ways the poor relation. (It is not unusual for magazines and newspapers that keep on hand three art critics to have but one part-time television reviewer�in part because the art critic is in large part a cultural broker, a �cultural explainer,� and few think that television needs to be explained.)

When television first appeared in the late 1940s, it threatened to be a �ghastly gelatinous nirvana,� in James Agee�s memorable phrase. Yet the 1950s, the first full decade of television�s impact on American life, was called then, and is still sometimes called, a �Golden Age.� Serious drama, inspired comedy, and high culture all found a place in prime-time programming. From Sid Caesar to Lucille Ball, the performers of this period retain a special place in American affections. Yet in some ways these good things were derivative of other, older media, adaptations of the manner and styles of theatre and radio. It was perhaps only in the 1960s that television came into its own, not just as a way of showing things in a new way but as a way of seeing things in a new way. Events as widely varied in tone and feeling as the broadcast of the Olympic Games and the assassination and burial of Pres. John F. Kennedy�extended events that took place in real time�brought the country together around a set of shared, collective images and narratives that often had neither an �author� nor an intended point or moral. The Vietnam War became known as the �living room war� because images (though still made on film) were broadcast every night into American homes; later conflicts, such as the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War, were actually brought live and on direct video feed from the site of the battles into American homes. Lesser but still compelling live events, from the marriage of Charles, prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer to the pursuit of then murder suspect O.J. Simpson in his white Bronco by the Los Angeles police in 1994, came to have the urgency and shared common currency that had once belonged exclusively to high art. From ordinary television viewers to professors of the new field of cultural studies, many Americans sought in live televised events the kind of meaning and significance that they had once thought it possible to find only in highly wrought and artful myth. Beginning in the late 1960s with CBS�s 60 minutes, this epic quality also informed the TV newsmagazine; presented with an in-depth approach that emphasized narrative drama, the personality of the presenters as well as the subjects, and muckraking and malfeasance, it became one of television�s most popular and enduring formats.

By the turn of the 20th century, however, the blurring of the line between information and entertainment in news and current affairs (that is, between �hard� and �soft� news) had resulted in the ascent of a new style of television program, infotainment. Infotainment came to include daytime talk shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show (later Oprah; 1986�2011), entertainment news programs such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, and talking-head forums such as Hannity & Colmes (1996�2009; featuring Sean Hannity), The O�Reilly Factor (with Bill O�Reilly), and The Rachel Maddow Show, whose hosts and host networks (especially the Fox News Channel and MSNBC) revealed pronounced political biases. Among the most-popular infotainment programs of the first two decades of the 21st century was The Daily Show, a so-called fake news show that satirized media, politics, and pop culture.

Political commentator and TV host Rachel MaddowMSNBC�NBCU Photo Bank/AP

Popular music

Every epoch since the Renaissance has had an art form that seems to become a kind of universal language, one dominant artistic form and language that sweeps the world and becomes the common property of an entire civilization, from one country to another. Italian painting in the 15th century, German music in the 18th century, or French painting in the 19th and early 20th centuries�all of these forms seem to transcend their local sources and become the one essential soundscape or image of their time. Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel, like Claude Monet and �douard Manet, are local and more.

At the beginning of the 21st century, and seen from a worldwide perspective, it is the American popular music that had its origins among African Americans at the end of the 19th century that, in all its many forms�ragtime, jazz, swing, jazz-influenced popular song, blues, rock and roll and its art legacy as rock and later hip-hop�has become America�s greatest contribution to the world�s culture, the one indispensable and unavoidable art form of the 20th century.

The recognition of this fact was a long time coming and has had to battle prejudice and misunderstanding that continues today. Indeed, jazz-inspired American popular music has not always been well served by its own defenders, who have tended to romanticize rather than explain and describe. In broad outlines, the history of American popular music involves the adulteration of a �pure� form of folk music, largely inspired by the work and spiritual and protest music of African Americans. But it involves less the adulteration of those pure forms by commercial motives and commercial sounds than the constant, fruitful hybridization of folk forms by other sounds, other musics�art and avant-garde and purely commercial, Bach and Broadway meeting at Birdland. Most of the watershed years turn out to be permeable; as the man who is by now recognized by many as the greatest of all American musicians, Louis Armstrong, once said, �There ain�t but two kinds of music in this world. Good music and bad music, and good music you tap your toe to.�

Armstrong�s own career is a good model of the nature and evolution of American popular music at its best. Beginning in impossibly hard circumstances, he took up the trumpet at a time when it was the military instrument, filled with the marching sounds of another American original, John Phillip Sousa. On the riverboats and in the brothels of New Orleans, as the prot�g� of King Oliver, Armstrong learned to play a new kind of syncopated ensemble music, decorated with solos. By the time he traveled to Chicago in the mid-1920s, his jazz had become a full-fledged art music, �full of a melancholy and majesty that were new to American music,� as Whitney Balliett has written. The duets he played with the renowned pianist Earl Hines, such as the 1928 version of �Weather Bird,� have never been equaled in surprise and authority. This art music in turn became a kind of commercial or popular music, commercialized by the swing bands that dominated American popular music in the 1930s, one of which Armstrong fronted himself, becoming a popular vocalist, who in turn influenced such white pop vocalists as Bing Crosby. The decline of the big bands led Armstrong back to a revival of his own earlier style, and, at the end, when he was no longer able to play the trumpet, he became, ironically, a still more celebrated straight �pop� performer, making hits out of Broadway tunes, among them the German-born Kurt Weill�s �Mack the Knife� and Jerry Herman�s �Hello, Dolly.� Throughout his career, Armstrong engaged in a constant cycling of creative crossbreeding�Sousa and the blues and Broadway each adding its own element to the mix.

King Oliver (standing, trumpet) and his Creole Jazz Band, Chicago, 1923.Frank Driggs Collection/Archive Photos

By the 1940s, the craze for jazz as a popular music had begun to recede, and it began to become an art music. Duke Ellington, considered by many as the greatest American composer, assembled a matchless band to play his ambitious and inimitable compositions, and by the 1950s jazz had become dominated by such formidable and uncompromising creators as Miles Davis and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

John (Aaron) Lewis with the Modern Jazz Quartet.Frank Driggs Collection

Beginning in the 1940s, it was the singers whom jazz had helped spawn�those who used microphones in place of pure lung power and who adapted the Viennese operetta-inspired songs of the great Broadway composers (who had, in turn, already been changed by jazz)�who became the bearers of the next dominant American style. Simply to list their names is to evoke a social history of the United States since World War II: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Torm�, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Joe Williams, Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, and many others. More than any other single form or sound, it was their voices that created a national soundtrack of longing, fulfillment, and forever-renewed hope that sounded like America to Americans, and then sounded like America to the world.

Doris Day.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

September 1954 is generally credited as the next watershed in the evolution of American popular music, when a recent high-school graduate and truck driver named Elvis Presley went into the Memphis Recording Service and recorded a series of songs for a small label called Sun Records. An easy, swinging mixture of country music, rhythm and blues, and pop ballad singing, these were, if not the first, then the seminal recordings of a new music that, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, would make all other kinds of music in the world a minority taste: rock and roll. What is impressive in retrospect is that, like Armstrong�s leap a quarter century before, this was less the sudden shout of a new generation coming into being than, once again, the self-consciously eclectic manufacture of a hybrid thing. According to Presley�s biographer Peter Guralnick, Presley and Sam Phillips, Sun�s owner, knew exactly what they were doing when they blended country style, white pop singing, and African American rhythm and blues. What was new was the mixture, not the act of mixing.

Sun Records label.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The subsequent evolution of this music into the single musical language of the last quarter of the 20th century hardly needs be told�like jazz, it showed an even more accelerated evolution from folk to pop to art music, though, unlike jazz, this was an evolution that depended on new machines and technologies for the DNA of its growth. Where even the best-selling recording artists of the earlier generations had learned their craft in live performance, Presley was a recording artist before he was a performing one, and the British musicians who would feed on his innovations knew him first and best through records (and, in the case of the Beatles particularly, made their own innovations in the privacy of the recording studio). Yet once again, the lines between the new music and the old�between rock and roll and the pop and jazz that came before it�can be, and often are, much too strongly drawn. Instead, the evolution of American popular music has been an ongoing dialogue between past and present�between the African-derived banjo and bluegrass, Beat poets and bebop�that brought together the most heartfelt interests of poor black and white Americans in ways that Reconstruction could not, its common cause replaced for working-class whites by supremacist diversions. It became, to use Greil Marcus�s phrase, an Invisible Republic, not only where Presley chose to sing Arthur (�Big Boy�) Crudup�s song (�That�s All Right Mama�) but where Chuck Berry, a brown-eyed handsome man (his own segregation-era euphemism), revved up Louis Jordan�s jump blues to turn �Ida Red,� a country-and-western ditty, into �Maybelline,� along the way inventing a telegraphic poetry that finally coupled adolescent love and lust. It was a crossroads where Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, more often channeled as a guitarist and singer, wrote songs that were as much a part of the musical education of Bob Dylan as were those of Woody Guthrie and Weill.

Dance

Serious dance hardly existed in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. One remarkable American, Isadora Duncan, had played as large a role at the turn of the century and after as anyone in the emancipation of dance from the rigid rules of classical ballet into a form of intense and improvisatory personal expression. But most of Duncan�s work was done and her life spent in Europe, and she bequeathed to the American imagination a shining, influential image rather than a set of steps. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, throughout the 1920s, kept dance in America alive; but it was in the work of the choreographer Martha Graham that the tradition of modern dance in the United States that Duncan had invented found its first and most influential master. Graham�s work, like that of her contemporaries among the Abstract Expressionist painters, sought a basic, timeless vocabulary of primal expression; but even after her own work seemed to belong only to a period, in the most direct sense she founded a tradition: a Graham dancer, Paul Taylor, became the most influential modern dance master of the next generation, and a Taylor dancer, Twyla Tharp, in turn the most influential choreographer of the generation after that. Where Graham had deliberately turned her back on popular culture, however, both Taylor and Tharp, typical of their generations, viewed it quizzically, admiringly, and hungrily. Whether the low inspiration comes from music�as in Tharp�s Sinatra Songs, choreographed to recordings by Frank Sinatra and employing and transforming the language of the ballroom dance�or comes directly off the street�as in a famous section of Taylor�s dance Cloven Kingdom, in which the dancer�s movement is inspired by the way Americans walk and strut and fight�both Taylor and Tharp continue to feed upon popular culture without being consumed by it. Perhaps for this reason, their art continues to seem of increasing stature around the world; they are intensely local yet greatly prized elsewhere.

Martha Graham in Appalachian SpringMartha Graham dances in Appalachian Spring in 1954.�Baron�Hulton Archive/Getty Images

A similar arc can be traced from the contributions of African American dance pioneers Katherine Dunham, beginning in the 1930s, and Alvin Ailey, who formed his own company in 1958, to Savion Glover, whose pounding style of tap dancing, know as �hitting,� was the rage of Broadway in the mid-1990s with Bring in�Da Noise, Bring in �Da Funk.

Gregory Hines (left) and Savion Glover facing off at the American Tap Dance Foundation's New York City Tap Festival held on July 12, 2001.Mario Tama/Getty Images

George Balanchine, the choreographer who dominated the greatest of American ballet troupes, the New York City Ballet, from its founding in l946 as the Ballet Society until his death in l983, might be considered outside the bounds of purely �American� culture. Yet this only serves to remind us of how limited and provisional such national groupings must always be. For, though Mr. B., as he was always known, was born and educated in Russia and took his inspiration from a language of dance codified in France in the 19th century, no one has imagined the gestures of American life with more verve, love, or originality. His was an art made with every window in the soul open: to popular music (he choreographed major classical ballets to Sousa marches and George Gershwin songs) as well as to austere and demanding American classical music (as in Ivesiana, his works choreographed to the music of Charles Ives). He created new standards of beauty for both men and women dancers (and, not incidentally, helped spread those new standards of athletic beauty into the culture at large) and invented an audience for dance in the United States where none had existed before. By the end of his life, this Russian-born choreographer, who spoke all his life with a heavy accent, was perhaps the greatest and certainly among the most American of all artists. Adam Gopnik

Sports

In many countries, the inclusion of sports, and particularly spectator sports, as part of �culture,� as opposed to the inclusion of recreation or medicine, would seem strange, even dubious. But no one can make sense of the culture of the United States without recognizing that Americans are crazy about games�playing them, watching them, and thinking about them. In no country have sports, especially commercialized, professional spectator sports, played so central a role as they have in the United States. Italy and England have their football (soccer) fanatics; the World Cups of rugby and cricket attract endless interest from the West Indies to Australia; but only in the United States do spectator sports, from �amateur� college (gridiron) football and basketball to the four major professional leagues�hockey, basketball, football, and baseball�play such a large role as a source of diversion, commerce, and, above all, shared common myth. In watching men (and sometimes women) play ball and comparing it with the way other men have played ball before, Americans have found their "proto-myth," a shared common romantic culture that unites them in ways that merely procedural laws cannot.

Sports are central to American culture in two ways. First, they are themselves a part of the culture, binding, unifying theatrical events that bring together cities, classes, and regions not only in a common cause, however cynically conceived, but in shared experience. They have also provided essential material for culture, the means for writing and movies and poetry. If there is a �Matter of America� in the way that the King Arthur stories were the �Matter of Britain� and La Chanson de Roland the �Matter of France,� then it lies in the lore of professional sports and, perhaps, above all in the lore of baseball.

Baseball, more than any other sport played in the United States, remains the central national pastime and seems to attract mythmakers as Troy attracted poets. Some of the mythmaking has been naive or fatuous�onetime Major League Baseball commissioner Bartlett Giamatti wrote a book called Take Time for Paradise, finding in baseball a powerful metaphor for the time before the Fall. But the myths of baseball remain powerful even when they are not aided, or adulterated, by too-self-conscious appeals to poetry. The rhythm and variety of the game, the way in which its meanings and achievements depend crucially on a context, a learned history�the way that every swing of Hank Aaron was bound by the ghost of every swing by Babe Ruth�have served generations of Americans as their first contact with the nature of aesthetic experience, which, too, always depends on context and a sense of history, on what things mean in relation to other things that have come before. It may not be necessary to understand baseball to understand the United States, as someone once wrote, but it may be that many Americans get their first ideas about the power of the performing arts by seeing the art with which baseball players perform.

Although baseball, with the declining and violent sport of boxing, remains by far the most literary of all American games, in recent decades it has been basketball�a sport invented as a small-town recreation more than a century ago and turned on American city playgrounds into the most spectacular and acrobatic of all team sports�that has attracted the most eager followers and passionate students. If baseball has provided generations of Americans with their first glimpse of the power of aesthetic context to make meaning�of the way that what happened before makes sense out of what happens next�then a new generation of spectators has often gotten its first essential glimpse of the poetry implicit in dance and sculpture, the unlimitable expressive power of the human body in motion, by watching such inimitable performers as Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan�a performer who, at the end of the 20th century, seemed to transcend not merely the boundaries between sport and art but even those between reality and myth, as larger-than-life as Paul Bunyan and as iconic as Bugs Bunny, with whom he even shared the motion picture screen (Space Jam [1996])�and Lebron James, who, as a giant but nimble man-child of age 18, went straight from the court at St. Vincent�St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, into the limelight of the National Basketball Association in 2003, becoming the youngest player in the league to win the Rookie of the Year award and score 10,000 career points on his way to becoming the game�s most dominant player.

By the beginning of the 21st century, the Super Bowl, professional football�s championship game, American sports� gold standard of hype and commercial synergy, and the august �October classic,� Major League Baseball�s World Series, had been surpassed for many as a shared event by college basketball�s national championship. Mirroring a similar phenomenon on the high-school and state level, known popularly as March Madness, this single-elimination tournament whose early rounds feature David versus Goliath matchups and television coverage that shifts between a bevy of regional venues not only has been statistically proved to reduce the productivity of the American workers who monitor the progress of their brackets (predictions of winners and pairings on the way to the Final Four) but for a festive month both reminds the United States of its vanishing regional diversity and transforms the country into one gigantic community. In a similar way, the growth of fantasy baseball and football leagues�in which the participants �draft� real players�has created small communities while offering an escape, at least in fantasy, from the increasingly cynical world of commercial sports. Adam Gopnik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Audiences

Art is made by artists, but it is possible only with audiences; and perhaps the most worrying trait of American culture in the past half century, with high and low dancing their sometimes happy, sometimes challenging dance, has been the threatened disappearance of a broad middlebrow audience for the arts. Many magazines that had helped sustain a sense of community and debate among educated readers�Collier�s, The Saturday Evening Post, Look�had all stopped publishing by the late 20th century or continued only as a newspaper insert (Life). Others, including Harper�s and the Atlantic Monthly, continue principally as philanthropies.

As the elephantine growth and devouring appetite of television has reduced the middle audience, there has also been a concurrent growth in the support of the arts in the university. The public support of higher education in the United States, although its ostensible purposes were often merely pragmatic and intended simply to produce skilled scientific workers for industry, has had the perhaps unintended effect of making the universities into cathedrals of culture. The positive side of this development should never be overlooked; things that began as scholarly pursuits�for instance, the enthusiasm for authentic performances of early music�have, after their incubation in the academy, given pleasure to increasingly larger audiences. The growth of the universities has also, for good or ill, helped decentralize culture; the Guthrie Theaterin Minnesota, for instance, or the regional opera companies of St. Louis, Mo., and Santa Fe, N.M., are difficult to imagine without the support and involvement of local universities. But many people believe that the �academicization� of the arts has also had the negative effect of encouraging art made by college professors for other college professors. In literature, some people believe, for instance, this has led to the development of a literature that is valued less for its engagement with the world than for its engagement with other kinds of writing.

Yet a broad, middle-class audience for the arts, if it is endangered, continues to flourish too. The establishment of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the early 1960s provided a model for subsequent centres across the country, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., which opened in l971. It is sometimes said, sourly, that the audiences who attend concerts and recitals at these centres are mere �consumers� of culture, rather than people engaged passionately in the ongoing life of the arts. But it seems probable that the motives that lead Americans to the concert hall or opera house are just as mixed as they have been in every other historical period: a desire for prestige, a sense of duty, and real love of the form all commingled together.

New York City BalletThe New York City Ballet performing a revival of George Balanchine's 1949 staging of Igor Stravinsky's ballet Firebird, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, 2012.Andrea Mohin�The New York Times/Redux

The deeper problem that has led to one financial crisis after another for theatre companies and dance troupes and museums (the Twyla Tharp dance company, despite its worldwide reputation, for instance, and a popular orientation that included several successful seasons on Broadway, was compelled to survive only by being absorbed into American Ballet Theatre) rests on hard and fixed facts about the economics of the arts, and about the economics of the performing arts in particular. Ballet, opera, symphony, and drama are labour-intensive industries in an era of labour-saving devices. Other industries have remained competitive by substituting automated labour for human labour; but, for all that new stage devices can help cut costs, the basic demands of the old art forms are hard to alter. The corps of a ballet cannot be mechanized or stored on software; voices belong to singers, and singers cannot be replicated. Many Americans, accustomed to the simple connection between popularity and financial success, have had a hard time grasping this fact; perhaps this is one of the reasons for the uniquely impoverished condition of government funding for the arts in the United States.

First the movies, then broadcast television, then cable television, and now the Internet�again and again, some new technology promises to revolutionize the delivery systems of culture and therefore change culture with it. Promising at once a larger audience than ever before (a truly global village) and a smaller one (e.g., tiny groups interested only in Gershwin having their choice today of 50 Gershwin Web sites), the Internet is only the latest of these candidates. Cable television, the most trumpeted of the more recent mass technologies, has so far failed sadly to multiply the opportunities for new experience of the arts open to Americans. The problem of the �lowest common denominator� is not that it is low but that it is common. It is not that there is no audience for music and dance and jazz. It is that a much larger group is interested in sex and violent images and action, and therefore the common interest is so easy to please.

Yet the growing anxiety about the future of the arts reflects, in part, the extraordinary demands Americans have come to make on them. No country has ever before, for good or ill, invested so much in the ideal of a common culture; the arts for most Americans are imagined as therapy, as education, as a common inheritance, as, in some sense, the definition of life itself and the summum bonum. Americans have increasingly asked art to play the role that religious ritual played in older cultures.

The problem of American culture in the end is inseparable from the triumph of liberalism and of the free-market, largely libertarian social model that, at least for a while at the end of the 20th century, seemed entirely ascendant and which much of the world, despite understandable fits and starts, emulated. On the one hand, liberal societies create liberty and prosperity and abundance, and the United States, as the liberal society par excellence, has not only given freedom to its own artists but allowed artists from elsewhere, from John James Audubon to Marcel Duchamp, to exercise their freedom: artists, however marginalized, are free in the United States to create weird forms, new dance steps, strange rhythms, free verse, and inverted novels.

At the same time, however, liberal societies break down the consensus, the commonality, and the shared viewpoint that is part of what is meant by traditional culture, and what is left that is held in common is often common in the wrong way. The division between mass product and art made for small and specific audiences has perhaps never seemed so vast as it does at the dawn of the new millennium, and the odds of leaping past the divisions into common language or even merely a decent commonplace civilization have never seemed greater. Even those who are generally enthusiastic about the democratization of culture in American history are bound to find a catch in their throat of protest or self-doubt as they watch bad television reality shows become still worse or bad comic-book movies become still more dominant. The appeal of the lowest common denominator, after all, does not mean that all the people who are watching something have no other or better interests; it just means that the one thing they can all be interested in at once is this kind of thing.

Liberal societies create freedoms and end commonalities, and that is why they are both praised for their fertility and condemned for their pervasive alienation of audiences from artists, and of art from people. The history of the accompanying longing for authentic community may be a dubious and even comic one, but anyone who has spent a night in front of a screen watching the cynicism and proliferation of gratuitous violence and sexuality at the root of much of what passes for entertainment for most Americans cannot help but feel a little soul-deadened. In this way, as the 21st century began, the cultural paradoxes of American society�the constant oscillation between energy and cynicism, the capacity to make new things and the incapacity to protect the best of tradition�seemed likely not only to become still more evident but also to become the ground for the worldwide debate about the United States itself. Still, if there were not causes of triumph, there were grounds for hope.

It is in the creative life of Americans that all the disparate parts of American culture can, for the length of a story or play or ballet, at least, come together. What is wonderful, and perhaps special, in the culture of the United States is that the marginal and central, like the high and the low, are not in permanent battle but instead always changing places. The sideshow becomes the centre ring of the circus, the thing repressed the thing admired. The world of American culture, at its best, is a circle, not a ladder. High and low link hands. Adam Gopnik

History

The territory represented by the continental United States had, of course, been discovered, perhaps several times, before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. When Columbus arrived, he found the New World inhabited by peoples who in all likelihood had originally come from the continent of Asia. Probably these first inhabitants had arrived 20,000 to 35,000 years before in a series of migrations from Asia to North America by way of the Bering Strait. By the time the first Europeans appeared, the indigenous people (commonly referred to as Indians) had spread and occupied all portions of the New World.

A colour lithograph based on a painting done by American artist Frederic A. Chapman depicting the 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson's ship while Native Americans watch from the nearby shore.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The foods and other resources available in each physiographic region largely determined the type of culture prevailing there. Fish and sea mammals, for example, contributed the bulk of the food supply of coastal peoples, although the acorn was a staple for California Indians; plant life and wild game (especially the American bison, or buffalo) were sources for the Plains Indians; and small-game hunting and fishing (depending again on local resources) provided for Midwestern and Eastern American Indian groups. These foods were supplemented by corn (maize), which was a staple food for the Indians of the Southwest. The procurement of these foods called for the employment of fishing, hunting, plant and berry gathering, and farming techniques, the application of which depended, in turn, upon the food resources utilized in given areas.

Foods and other raw materials likewise conditioned the material culture of the respective regional groups. All Indians transported goods by human carrier; the use of dogs to pull sleds or travois was widespread; and rafts, boats, and canoes were used where water facilities were available. The horse, imported by the Spanish in the early 16th century, was quickly adopted by the Indians once it had made its appearance. Notably, it came to be used widely by the buffalo-hunting Indians of the Great Plains.

American Indian culture groups were distinguished, among other ways, by house types. Dome-shaped ice houses (igloos) were developed by the Eskimos (called Inuit in Canada) in what would become Alaska; rectangular plank houses were produced by the Northwest Coast Indians; earth and skin lodges and tepees, by plains and prairie tribes; flat-roofed and often multistoried houses, by some of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest; and barrel houses, by the Northeast Indians. Clothing, or the lack of it, likewise varied with native groups, as did crafts, weapons, and tribal economic, social, and religious customs.

An Inuit building an igloo at a hunting site on ice in Jones Sound, Nunavut, Canada.� Fred Bruemmer

At the time of Columbus�s arrival there were probably roughly 1.5 million American Indians in what is now the continental United States, although estimates vary greatly. In order to assess the role and the impact of the American Indian upon the subsequent history of the United States in any meaningful way, one must understand the differentiating factors between Native American peoples, such as those mentioned above. Generally speaking, it may be said, however, that the American Indians as a whole exercised an important influence upon the civilization transplanted from Europe to the New World. Indian foods and herbs, articles of manufacture, methods of raising some crops, war techniques, words, a rich folklore, and ethnic infusions are among the more obvious general contributions of the Indians to their European conquerors. The protracted and brutal westward-moving conflict caused by �white� expansionism and Indian resistance constitutes one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the United States. Oscar O. Winther

Colonial America to 1763

The European background

The English colonization of North America was but one chapter in the larger story of European expansion throughout the globe. The Portuguese, beginning with a voyage to Porto Santo off the coast of West Africa in 1418, were the first Europeans to promote overseas exploration and colonization. By 1487 the Portuguese had traveled all the way to the southern tip of Africa, establishing trading stations at Arguin, Sierra Leone, and El Mina. In 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, laying the groundwork for Portugal�s later commercial control of India. By 1500, when Pedro �lvares Cabral stumbled across the coast of Brazil en route to India, Portuguese influence had expanded to the New World as well.

Though initially lagging behind the Portuguese in the arts of navigation and exploration, the Spanish quickly closed that gap in the decades following Columbus�s voyages to America. First in the Caribbean and then in spectacular conquests of New Spain and Peru, they captured the imagination, and the envy, of the European world.

Landing of ColumbusLanding of Columbus, oil on canvas by John Vanderlyn, 1846; in the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.Architect of the Capitol

France, occupied with wars in Europe to preserve its own territorial integrity, was not able to devote as much time or effort to overseas expansion as did Spain and Portugal. Beginning in the early 16th century, however, French fishermen established an outpost in Newfoundland, and in 1534 Jacques Cartier began exploring the Gulf of St. Lawrence. By 1543 the French had ceased their efforts to colonize the northeast portion of the New World. In the last half of the 16th century, France attempted to found colonies in Florida and Brazil, but each of these efforts failed, and by the end of the century Spain and Portugal remained the only two European nations to have established successful colonies in America.

Cartier, JacquesThis map details the first two voyages of Jacques Cartier.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The English, although eager to duplicate the Spanish and Portuguese successes, nevertheless lagged far behind in their colonization efforts. The English possessed a theoretical claim to the North American mainland by dint of the 1497 voyage of John Cabot off the coast of Nova Scotia, but in fact they had neither the means nor the desire to back up that claim during the 16th century. Thus it was that England relied instead on private trading companies, which were interested principally in commercial rather than territorial expansion, to defend its interests in the expanding European world. The first of these commercial ventures began with the formation of the Muscovy Company in 1554. In 1576�78 the English mariner Martin Frobisher undertook three voyages in search of a Northwest Passage to the Far East. In 1577 Sir Francis Drake made his famous voyage around the world, plundering the western coast of South America en route. A year later Sir Humphrey Gilbert, one of the most dedicated of Elizabethan imperialists, began a series of ventures aimed at establishing permanent colonies in North America. All his efforts met with what was, at best, limited success. Finally, in September 1583, Gilbert, with five vessels and 260 men, disappeared in the North Atlantic. With the failure of Gilbert�s voyage, the English turned to a new man, Sir Walter Raleigh, and a new strategy�a southern rather than a northern route to North America�to advance England�s fortunes in the New World. Although Raleigh�s efforts to found a permanent colony off the coast of Virginia did finally fail with the mysterious destruction of the Roanoke Island colony in 1587, they awakened popular interest in a permanent colonizing venture.

John Cabot landing on the shores of Labrador, coloured engraving by an unknown artist, 19th century.� North Wind Picture Archives

During the years separating the failure of the Roanoke attempt and the establishment in 1607 of Jamestown colony, English propagandists worked hard to convince the public that a settlement in America would yield instant and easily exploitable wealth. Even men such as the English geographer Richard Hakluyt were not certain that the Spanish colonization experience could or should be imitated but hoped nevertheless that the English colonies in the New World would prove to be a source of immediate commercial gain. There were, of course, other motives for colonization. Some hoped to discover the much-sought-after route to the Orient (East Asia) in North America. English imperialists thought it necessary to settle in the New World in order to limit Spanish expansion. Once it was proved that America was a suitable place for settlement, some Englishmen would travel to those particular colonies that promised to free them from religious persecution. There were also Englishmen, primarily of lower- and middle-class origin, who hoped the New World would provide them with increased economic opportunity in the form of free or inexpensive land. These last two motives, while they have been given considerable attention by historians, appear not to have been so much original motives for English colonization as they were shifts of attitude once colonization had begun.

Settlement

Virginia

Maryland

The New England colonies

Although lacking a charter, the founders of Plymouth in Massachusetts were, like their counterparts in Virginia, dependent upon private investments from profit-minded backers to finance their colony. The nucleus of that settlement was drawn from an enclave of English �migr�s in Leiden, Holland (now in The Netherlands). These religious Separatists believed that the true church was a voluntary company of the faithful under the �guidance� of a pastor and tended to be exceedingly individualistic in matters of church doctrine. Unlike the settlers of Massachusetts Bay, these Pilgrims chose to �separate� from the Church of England rather than to reform it from within.

The middle colonies

New Netherland, founded in 1624 at Fort Orange (now Albany) by the Dutch West India Company, was but one element in a wider program of Dutch expansion in the first half of the 17th century. In 1664 the English captured the colony of New Netherland, renaming it New York after James, duke of York, brother of Charles II, and placing it under the proprietary control of the duke. In return for an annual gift to the king of 40 beaver skins, the duke of York and his resident board of governors were given extraordinary discretion in the ruling of the colony. Although the grant to the duke of York made mention of a representative assembly, the duke was not legally obliged to summon it and in fact did not summon it until 1683. The duke�s interest in the colony was chiefly economic, not political, but most of his efforts to derive economic gain from New York proved futile. Indians, foreign interlopers (the Dutch actually recaptured New York in 1673 and held it for more than a year), and the success of the colonists in evading taxes made the proprietor�s job a frustrating one.

In February 1685 the duke of York found himself not only proprietor of New York but also king of England, a fact that changed the status of New York from that of a proprietary to a royal colony. The process of royal consolidation was accelerated when in 1688 the colony, along with the New England and New Jersey colonies, was made part of the ill-fated Dominion of New England. In 1691 Jacob Leisler, a German merchant living on Long Island, led a successful revolt against the rule of the deputy governor, Francis Nicholson. The revolt, which was a product of dissatisfaction with a small aristocratic ruling elite and a more general dislike of the consolidated scheme of government of the Dominion of New England, served to hasten the demise of the dominion.

Pennsylvania, in part because of the liberal policies of its founder, William Penn, was destined to become the most diverse, dynamic, and prosperous of all the North American colonies. Penn himself was a liberal, but by no means radical, English Whig. His Quaker (Society of Friends) faith was marked not by the religious extremism of some Quaker leaders of the day but rather by an adherence to certain dominant tenets of the faith�liberty of conscience and pacifism�and by an attachment to some of the basic tenets of Whig doctrine. Penn sought to implement these ideals in his �holy experiment� in the New World.

Penn, WilliamWilliam Penn.� Photos.com/Thinkstock

Penn received his grant of land along the Delaware River in 1681 from Charles II as a reward for his father�s service to the crown. The first �frame of government� proposed by Penn in 1682 provided for a council and an assembly, each to be elected by the freeholders of the colony. The council was to have the sole power of initiating legislation; the lower house could only approve or veto bills submitted by the council. After numerous objections about the �oligarchic� nature of this form of government, Penn issued a second frame of government in 1682 and then a third in 1696, but even these did not wholly satisfy the residents of the colony. Finally, in 1701, a Charter of Privileges, giving the lower house all legislative power and transforming the council into an appointive body with advisory functions only, was approved by the citizens. The Charter of Privileges, like the other three frames of government, continued to guarantee the principle of religious toleration to all Protestants.

Diagram of lots of land in Philadelphia granted to William Penn and his daughter, 1698.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; map division

Pennsylvania prospered from the outset. Although there was some jealousy between the original settlers (who had received the best land and important commercial privileges) and the later arrivals, economic opportunity in Pennsylvania was on the whole greater than in any other colony. Beginning in 1683 with the immigration of Germans into the Delaware valley and continuing with an enormous influx of Irish and Scotch-Irish in the 1720s and �30s, the population of Pennsylvania increased and diversified. The fertile soil of the countryside, in conjunction with a generous government land policy, kept immigration at high levels throughout the 18th century. Ultimately, however, the continuing influx of European settlers hungry for land spelled doom for the pacific Indian policy initially envisioned by Penn. �Economic opportunity� for European settlers often depended on the dislocation, and frequent extermination, of the American Indian residents who had initially occupied the land in Penn�s colony.

Title page from �An accurate description of the recently founded province of Pennsylvania� by Pastorius, who established the first German settlement in the colonies, 1700.Library of Congress, Rare Book Division

New Jersey remained in the shadow of both New York and Pennsylvania throughout most of the colonial period. Part of the territory ceded to the duke of York by the English crown in 1664 lay in what would later become the colony of New Jersey. The duke of York in turn granted that portion of his lands to John Berkeley and George Carteret, two close friends and allies of the king. In 1665 Berkeley and Carteret established a proprietary government under their own direction. Constant clashes, however, developed between the New Jersey and the New York proprietors over the precise nature of the New Jersey grant. The legal status of New Jersey became even more tangled when Berkeley sold his half interest in the colony to two Quakers, who in turn placed the management of the colony in the hands of three trustees, one of whom was Penn. The area was then divided into East Jersey, controlled by Carteret, and West Jersey, controlled by Penn and the other Quaker trustees. In 1682 the Quakers bought East Jersey. A multiplicity of owners and an uncertainty of administration caused both colonists and colonizers to feel dissatisfied with the proprietary arrangement, and in 1702 the crown united the two Jerseys into a single royal province.

Carteret, PhilipPhilip Carteret arriving at the colony of New Jersey in 1665 to serve as its governor, from a 19th-century coloured engraving.The Granger Collection, New York

When the Quakers purchased East Jersey, they also acquired the tract of land that was to become Delaware, in order to protect their water route to Pennsylvania. That territory remained part of the Pennsylvania colony until 1704, when it was given an assembly of its own. It remained under the Pennsylvania governor, however, until the American Revolution.

The Carolinas and Georgia

The English crown had issued grants to the Carolina territory as early as 1629, but it was not until 1663 that a group of eight proprietors�most of them men of extraordinary wealth and power even by English standards�actually began colonizing the area. The proprietors hoped to grow silk in the warm climate of the Carolinas, but all efforts to produce that valuable commodity failed. Moreover, it proved difficult to attract settlers to the Carolinas; it was not until 1718, after a series of violent Indian wars had subsided, that the population began to increase substantially. The pattern of settlement, once begun, followed two paths. North Carolina, which was largely cut off from the European and Caribbean trade by its unpromising coastline, developed into a colony of small to medium farms. South Carolina, with close ties to both the Caribbean and Europe, produced rice and, after 1742, indigo for a world market. The early settlers in both areas came primarily from the West Indian colonies. This pattern of migration was not, however, as distinctive in North Carolina, where many of the residents were part of the spillover from the natural expansion of Virginians southward.

The original framework of government for the Carolinas, the Fundamental Constitutions, drafted in 1669 by Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury) with the help of the philosopher John Locke, was largely ineffective because of its restrictive and feudal nature. The Fundamental Constitutions was abandoned in 1693 and replaced by a frame of government diminishing the powers of the proprietors and increasing the prerogatives of the provincial assembly. In 1729, primarily because of the proprietors� inability to meet the pressing problems of defense, the Carolinas were converted into the two separate royal colonies of North and South Carolina.

The proprietors of Georgia, led by James Oglethorpe, were wealthy philanthropic English gentlemen. It was Oglethorpe�s plan to transport imprisoned debtors to Georgia, where they could rehabilitate themselves by profitable labour and make money for the proprietors in the process. Those who actually settled in Georgia�and by no means all of them were impoverished debtors�encountered a highly restrictive economic and social system. Oglethorpe and his partners limited the size of individual landholdings to 500 acres (about 200 hectares), prohibited slavery, forbade the drinking of rum, and instituted a system of inheritance that further restricted the accumulation of large estates. The regulations, though noble in intention, created considerable tension between some of the more enterprising settlers and the proprietors. Moreover, the economy did not live up to the expectations of the colony�s promoters. The silk industry in Georgia, like that in the Carolinas, failed to produce even one profitable crop.

The settlers were also dissatisfied with the political structure of the colony; the proprietors, concerned primarily with keeping close control over their utopian experiment, failed to provide for local institutions of self-government. As protests against the proprietors� policies mounted, the crown in 1752 assumed control over the colony; subsequently, many of the restrictions that the settlers had complained about, notably those discouraging the institution of slavery, were lifted.

Imperial organization

British policy toward the American colonies was inevitably affected by the domestic politics of England; since the politics of England in the 17th and 18th centuries were never wholly stable, it is not surprising that British colonial policy during those years never developed along clear and consistent lines. During the first half century of colonization, it was even more difficult for England to establish an intelligent colonial policy because of the very disorganization of the colonies themselves. It was nearly impossible for England to predict what role Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island would play in the overall scheme of empire because of the diversity of the aims and governmental structures of those colonies. By 1660, however, England had taken the first steps in reorganizing her empire in a more profitable manner. The Navigation Act of 1660, a modification and amplification of a temporary series of acts passed in 1651, provided that goods bound to England or to English colonies, regardless of origin, had to be shipped only in English vessels; that three-fourths of the personnel of those ships had to be Englishmen; and that certain �enumerated articles,� such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco, were to be shipped only to England, with trade in those items with other countries prohibited. This last provision hit Virginia and Maryland particularly hard; although those two colonies were awarded a monopoly over the English tobacco market at the same time that they were prohibited from marketing their tobacco elsewhere, there was no way that England alone could absorb their tobacco production.

The 1660 act proved inadequate to safeguard the entire British commercial empire, and in subsequent years other navigation acts were passed, strengthening the system. In 1663 Parliament passed an act requiring all vessels with European goods bound for the colonies to pass first through English ports to pay customs duties. In order to prevent merchants from shipping the enumerated articles from colony to colony in the coastal trade and then taking them to a foreign country, in 1673 Parliament required that merchants post bond guaranteeing that those goods would be taken only to England. Finally, in 1696 Parliament established a Board of Trade to oversee Britain�s commercial empire, instituted mechanisms to ensure that the colonial governors aided in the enforcement of trade regulations, and set up vice admiralty courts in America for the prosecution of those who violated the Navigation Acts. On the whole, this attempt at imperial consolidation�what some historians have called the process of Anglicization�was successful in bringing the economic activities of the colonies under closer crown control. While a significant amount of colonial trade continued to evade British regulation, it is nevertheless clear that the British were at least partially successful in imposing greater commercial and political order on the American colonies during the period from the late-17th to the mid-18th century.

In addition to the agencies of royal control in England, there were a number of royal officials in America responsible not only for aiding in the regulation of Britain�s commercial empire but also for overseeing the internal affairs of the colonies. The weaknesses of royal authority in the politics of provincial America were striking, however. In some areas, particularly in the corporate colonies of New England during the 17th century and in the proprietary colonies throughout their entire existence, direct royal authority in the person of a governor responsible to the crown was nonexistent. The absence of a royal governor in those colonies had a particularly deleterious effect on the enforcement of trade regulations. In fact, the lack of royal control over the political and commercial activities of New England prompted the Board of Trade to overturn the Massachusetts Bay charter in 1684 and to consolidate Massachusetts, along with the other New England colonies and New York, into the Dominion of New England. After the colonists, aided by the turmoil of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, succeeded in overthrowing the dominion scheme, the crown installed a royal governor in Massachusetts to protect its interests.

In those colonies with royal governors�the number of those colonies grew from one in 1650 to eight in 1760�the crown possessed a mechanism by which to ensure that royal policy was enforced. The Privy Council issued each royal governor in America a set of instructions carefully defining the limits of provincial authority. The royal governors were to have the power to decide when to call the provincial assemblies together, to prorogue, or dissolve, the assemblies, and to veto any legislation passed by those assemblies. The governor�s power over other aspects of the political structure of the colony was just as great. In most royal colonies he was the one official primarily responsible for the composition of the upper houses of the colonial legislatures and for the appointment of important provincial officials, such as the treasurer, attorney general, and all colonial judges. Moreover, the governor had enormous patronage powers over the local agencies of government. The officials of the county court, who were the principal agents of local government, were appointed by the governor in most of the royal colonies. Thus, the governor had direct or indirect control over every agency of government in America.

The growth of provincial power

Political growth

The distance separating England and America, the powerful pressures exerted on royal officials by Americans, and the inevitable inefficiency of any large bureaucracy all served to weaken royal power and to strengthen the hold of provincial leaders on the affairs of their respective colonies. During the 18th century the colonial legislatures gained control over their own parliamentary prerogatives, achieved primary responsibility for legislation affecting taxation and defense, and ultimately took control over the salaries paid to royal officials. Provincial leaders also made significant inroads into the governor�s patronage powers. Although theoretically the governor continued to control the appointments of local officials, in reality he most often automatically followed the recommendations of the provincial leaders in the localities in question. Similarly, the governor�s councils, theoretically agents of royal authority, came to be dominated by prominent provincial leaders who tended to reflect the interests of the leadership of the lower house of assembly rather than those of the royal government in London.

Thus, by the mid-18th century most political power in America was concentrated in the hands of provincial rather than royal officials. These provincial leaders undoubtedly represented the interests of their constituents more faithfully than any royal official could, but it is clear that the politics of provincial America were hardly democratic by modern standards. In general, both social prestige and political power tended to be determined by economic standing, and the economic resources of colonial America, though not as unevenly distributed as in Europe, were nevertheless controlled by relatively few men.

In the Chesapeake Bay societies of Virginia and Maryland, and particularly in the regions east of the Blue Ridge mountains, a planter class came to dominate nearly every aspect of those colonies� economic life. These same planters, joined by a few prominent merchants and lawyers, dominated the two most important agencies of local government�the county courts and the provincial assemblies. This extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy few occurred in spite of the fact that a large percentage of the free adult male population (some have estimated as high as 80 to 90 percent) was able to participate in the political process. The ordinary citizens of the Chesapeake society, and those of most colonies, nevertheless continued to defer to those whom they considered to be their �betters.� Although the societal ethic that enabled power to be concentrated in the hands of a few was hardly a democratic one, there is little evidence, at least for Virginia and Maryland, that the people of those societies were dissatisfied with their rulers. In general, they believed that their local officials ruled responsively.

In the Carolinas a small group of rice and indigo planters monopolized much of the wealth. As in Virginia and Maryland, the planter class came to constitute a social elite. As a rule, the planter class of the Carolinas did not have the same long tradition of responsible government as did the ruling oligarchies of Virginia and Maryland, and, as a consequence, they tended to be absentee landlords and governors, often passing much of their time in Charleston, away from their plantations and their political responsibilities.

The western regions of both the Chesapeake and Carolina societies displayed distinctive characteristics of their own. Ruling traditions were fewer, accumulations of land and wealth less striking, and the social hierarchy less rigid in the west. In fact, in some western areas antagonism toward the restrictiveness of the east and toward eastern control of the political structure led to actual conflict. In both North and South Carolina armed risings of varying intensity erupted against the unresponsive nature of the eastern ruling elite. As the 18th century progressed, however, and as more men accumulated wealth and social prestige, the societies of the west came more closely to resemble those of the east.

New England society was more diverse and the political system less oligarchic than that of the South. In New England the mechanisms of town government served to broaden popular participation in government beyond the narrow base of the county courts.

The town meetings, which elected the members of the provincial assemblies, were open to nearly all free adult males. Despite this, a relatively small group of men dominated the provincial governments of New England. As in the South, men of high occupational status and social prestige were closely concentrated in leadership positions in their respective colonies; in New England, merchants, lawyers, and to a lesser extent clergymen made up the bulk of the social and political elite.

The social and political structure of the middle colonies was more diverse than that of any other region in America. New York, with its extensive system of manors and manor lords, often displayed genuinely feudal characteristics. The tenants on large manors often found it impossible to escape the influence of their manor lords. The administration of justice, the election of representatives, and the collection of taxes often took place on the manor itself. As a consequence, the large landowning families exercised an inordinate amount of economic and political power. The Great Rebellion of 1766, a short-lived outburst directed against the manor lords, was a symptom of the widespread discontent among the lower and middle classes. By contrast, Pennsylvania�s governmental system was more open and responsive than that of any other colony in America. A unicameral legislature, free from the restraints imposed by a powerful governor�s council, allowed Pennsylvania to be relatively independent of the influence of both the crown and the proprietor. This fact, in combination with the tolerant and relatively egalitarian bent of the early Quaker settlers and the subsequent immigration of large numbers of Europeans, made the social and political structure of Pennsylvania more democratic but more faction-ridden than that of any other colony.

Population growth

Economic growth

Provincial America came to be less dependent upon subsistence agriculture and more on the cultivation and manufacture of products for the world market. Land, which initially served only individual needs, came to be the fundamental source of economic enterprise. The independent yeoman farmer continued to exist, particularly in New England and the middle colonies, but most settled land in North America by 1750 was devoted to the cultivation of a cash crop. New England turned its land over to the raising of meat products for export. The middle colonies were the principal producers of grains. By 1700 Philadelphia exported more than 350,000 bushels of wheat and more than 18,000 tons of flour annually. The Southern colonies were, of course, even more closely tied to the cash crop system. South Carolina, aided by British incentives, turned to the production of rice and indigo. North Carolina, although less oriented toward the market economy than South Carolina, was nevertheless one of the principal suppliers of naval stores. Virginia and Maryland steadily increased their economic dependence on tobacco and on the London merchants who purchased that tobacco, and for the most part they ignored those who recommended that they diversify their economies by turning part of their land over to the cultivation of wheat. Their near-total dependence upon the world tobacco price would ultimately prove disastrous, but for most of the 18th century Virginia and Maryland soil remained productive enough to make a single-crop system reasonably profitable.

Tobacco being transported by boat.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

As America evolved from subsistence to commercial agriculture, an influential commercial class increased its power in nearly every colony. Boston was the centre of the merchant elite of New England, who not only dominated economic life but also wielded social and political power as well. Merchants such as James De Lancey and Philip Livingston in New York and Joseph Galloway, Robert Morris, and Thomas Wharton in Philadelphia exerted an influence far beyond the confines of their occupations. In Charleston the Pinckney, Rutledge, and Lowndes families controlled much of the trade that passed through that port. Even in Virginia, where a strong merchant class was nonexistent, those people with the most economic and political power were those commercial farmers who best combined the occupations of merchant and farmer. And it is clear that the commercial importance of the colonies was increasing. During the years 1700�10, approximately �265,000 sterling was exported annually to Great Britain from the colonies, with roughly the same amount being imported by the Americans from Great Britain. By the decade 1760�70, that figure had risen to more than �1,000,000 sterling of goods exported annually to Great Britain and �1,760,000 annually imported from Great Britain.

Joseph Galloway.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Richard R. Beeman

Land, labour, and independence

Although Frederick Jackson Turner�s 1893 �frontier thesis��that American democracy was the result of an abundance of free land�has long been seriously challenged and modified, it is clear that the plentifulness of virgin acres and the lack of workers to till them did cause a loosening of the constraints of authority in the colonial and early national periods. Once it became clear that the easiest path to success for Britain�s New World �plantations� lay in raising export crops, there was a constant demand for agricultural labour, which in turn spurred practices that�with the notable exception of slavery�compromised a strictly hierarchical social order.

In all the colonies, whether governed directly by the king, by proprietors, or by chartered corporations, it was essential to attract settlers, and what governors had most plentifully to offer was land. Sometimes large grants were made to entire religious communities numbering in the hundreds or more. Sometimes tracts were allotted to wealthy men on the �head rights� (literally �per capita�) system of so many acres for each family member they brought over. Few Englishmen or Europeans had the means to buy farms outright, so the simple sale of homesteads by large-scale grantees was less common than renting. But there was another well-traveled road to individual proprietorship that also provided a workforce: the system of contract labour known as indentured service. Under it, an impecunious new arrival would sign on with a landowner for a period of service�commonly seven years�binding him to work in return for subsistence and sometimes for the repayment of his passage money to the ship captain who had taken him across the Atlantic (such immigrants were called �redemptioners�). At the end of this term, the indentured servant would in many cases be rewarded by the colony itself with �freedom dues,� a title to 50 or more acres of land in a yet-unsettled area. This somewhat biblically inspired precapitalist system of transfer was not unlike apprenticeship, the economic and social tool that added to the supply of skilled labour. The apprentice system called for a prepubescent boy to be �bound out� to a craftsman who would take him into his own home and there teach him his art while serving as a surrogate parent. (Girls were perennially �apprenticed� to their mothers as homemakers.) Both indentured servants and apprentices were subject to the discipline of the master, and their lot varied with his generosity or hard-fistedness. There must have been plenty of the latter type of master, as running away was common. The first Africans taken to Virginia, or at least some of them, appear to have worked as indentured servants. Not until the case of John Punch in the 1640s did it become legally established that black �servants� were to remain such for life. Having escaped, been caught, and brought to trial, Punch, an indentured servant of African descent, and two other indentured servants of European descent received very different sentences, with Punch�s punishment being servitude for the �rest of his natural life� while that for the other two was merely an extension of their service.

The harshness of New England�s climate and topography meant that for most of its people the road to economic independence lay in trade, seafaring, fishing, or craftsmanship. But the craving for an individually owned subsistence farm grew stronger as the first generations of religious settlers who had �planted� by congregation died off. In the process the communal holding of land by townships�with small allotted family garden plots and common grazing and orchard lands, much in the style of medieval communities�yielded gradually to the more conventional privately owned fenced farm. The invitation that available land offered�individual control of one�s life�was irresistible. Property in land also conferred civic privileges, so an unusually large number of male colonists were qualified for suffrage by the Revolution�s eve, even though not all of them exercised the vote freely or without traditional deference to the elite.

Slavery was the backbone of large-scale cultivation of such crops as tobacco and hence took strongest root in the Southern colonies. But thousands of white freeholders of small acreages also lived in those colonies; moreover, slavery on a small scale (mainly in domestic service and unskilled labour) was implanted in the North. The line between a free and a slaveholding America had not yet been sharply drawn.

One truly destabilizing system of acquiring land was simply �squatting.� On the western fringes of settlement, it was not possible for colonial administrators to use police powers to expel those who helped themselves to acres technically owned by proprietors in the seaboard counties. Far from seeing themselves as outlaws, the squatters believed that they were doing civilization�s work in putting new land into production, and they saw themselves as the moral superiors of eastern �owners� for whom land was a mere speculative commodity that they did not, with great danger and hardship, cultivate themselves. Squatting became a regular feature of westward expansion throughout early U.S. history. Bernard A. Weisberger

Cultural and religious development

Colonial culture

From a city on a hill to the Great Awakening

The part played by religion in the shaping of the American mind, while sometimes overstated, remains crucial. Over the first century and a half of colonial life, the strong religious impulses present in the original settlements�particularly those in New England�were somewhat secularized and democratized but kept much of their original power.

When the Pilgrim Fathers signed the Mayflower Compact in 1620, resolving themselves into a �civil body politic,� they were explicitly making religious fellowship the basis of a political community. But even from the start, there were nonmembers of the Leiden Separatist congregation on the passenger list�the �strangers� among the �saints��and they sought steady expansion of their rights in Plymouth colony until its absorption into Massachusetts in 1691.

The Puritans were even more determined that their community be, as John Winthrop called it in his founding sermon, �A Model of Christian Charity,� a �city on a hill,� to which all humankind should look for an example of heaven on earth. This theme, in various guises, resounds in every corner of American history. The traditional image of Massachusetts Puritanism is one of repressive authority, but what is overlooked is the consensus among Winthrop and his followers that they should be bound together by love and shared faith, an expectation that left them �free� to do voluntarily what they all agreed was right. It was a kind of elective theocracy for the insiders.

The theocratic model, however, did not apply to nonmembers of the church, to whom the franchise was not originally extended, and problems soon arose in maintaining membership. Only those who had undergone a personal experience of �conversion� reassuring them of their salvation could be full members of the church and baptize their children. As the first generation died off, however, many of those children could not themselves personally testify to such conversion and so bring their own offspring into the church. They were finally allowed to do so by the Half-Way Covenant of 1662 but did not enjoy all the rights of full membership. Such apparent theological hair-splitting illustrated the power of the colony�s expanding and dispersing population. As congregations hived off to different towns and immigration continued to bring in worshippers of other faiths, the rigidity of Puritan doctrine was forced to bend somewhat before the wind.

Nevertheless, in the first few years of Massachusetts�s history, Puritan disagreements over the proper interpretation of doctrine led to schisms, exilings, and the foundation of new colonies. Only in America could dissenters move into neighbouring �wilderness� and start anew, as they did in Rhode Island and Connecticut. So the American experience encouraged religious diversity from the start. Even the grim practice of punishing dissidents such as the Quakers (and �witches�) fell into disuse by the end of the 17th century.

Toleration was a slow-growing plant, but circumstances sowed its seeds early in the colonial experience. Maryland�s founders, the well-born Catholic Calvert family, extended liberty to their fellow parishioners and other non-Anglicans in the Toleration Act of 1649. Despite the fact that Anglicanism was later established in Maryland, it remained the first locus of American Catholicism, and the first �American� bishop named after the Revolution, John Carroll, was of English stock. Not until the 19th century would significant immigration from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland provide U.S. Catholicism its own �melting pot.� Pennsylvania was not merely a refuge for the oppressed community who shared William Penn�s Quaker faith but by design a model �commonwealth� of brotherly love in general. And Georgia was founded by idealistic and religious gentlemen to provide a second chance in the New World for debtors in a setting where both rum and slavery were banned, though neither prohibition lasted long.

American Protestantism was also diversified by immigration. The arrival of thousands of Germans early in the 18th century brought, especially to western Pennsylvania, islands of German pietism as practiced by Mennonites, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, and others.

Anabaptists, also freshly arrived from the German states, broadened the foundations of the Baptist church in the new land. French Huguenots fleeing fresh persecutions after 1687 (they had already begun arriving in North America in the 1650s) added a Gallic brand of Calvinism to the patchwork quilt of American faith. Jews arrived in what was then Dutch New Amsterdam in 1654 and were granted asylum by the Dutch West India Company, to the dismay of Gov. Peter Stuyvesant, who gloomily foresaw that it would be a precedent for liberality toward Quakers, Lutherans, and �Papists.� By 1763, synagogues had been established in New York, Philadelphia, Newport (Rhode Island), Savannah (Georgia), and other seaport cities where small Jewish mercantile communities existed.

Religious life in the American colonies already had a distinctive stamp in the 1740s. Some of its original zeal had cooled as material prosperity increased and the hardships of the founding era faded in memory. But then came a shake-up. Bernard A. Weisberger

A series of religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening swept over the colonies in the 1730s and �40s. Its impact was first felt in the middle colonies, where Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, began preaching in the 1720s. In New England in the early 1730s, men such as Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most learned theologian of the 18th century, were responsible for a reawakening of religious fervour. By the late 1740s the movement had extended into the Southern colonies, where itinerant preachers such as Samuel Davies and George Whitefield exerted considerable influence, particularly in the backcountry.

Edwards, JonathanJonathan Edwards.� North Wind Picture Archives

The Great Awakening represented a reaction against the increasing secularization of society and against the corporate and materialistic nature of the principal churches of American society. By making conversion the initial step on the road to salvation and by opening up the conversion experience to all who recognized their own sinfulness, the ministers of the Great Awakening, some intentionally and others unwittingly, democratized Calvinist theology. The technique of many of the preachers of the Great Awakening was to inspire in their listeners a fear of the consequences of their sinful lives and a respect for the omnipotence of God. This sense of the ferocity of God was often tempered by the implied promise that a rejection of worldliness and a return to faith would result in a return to grace and an avoidance of the horrible punishments of an angry God. There was a certain contradictory quality about these two strains of Great Awakening theology, however. Predestination, one of the principal tenets of the Calvinist theology of most of the ministers of the Great Awakening, was ultimately incompatible with the promise that man could, by a voluntary act of faith, achieve salvation by his own efforts. Furthermore, the call for a return to complete faith and the emphasis on the omnipotence of God was the very antithesis of Enlightenment thought, which called for a greater questioning of faith and a diminishing role for God in the daily affairs of man. On the other hand, Edwards, one of the principal figures of the Great Awakening in America, explicitly drew on the thought of men such as John Locke and Isaac Newton in an attempt to make religion rational. Perhaps most important, the evangelical styles of religious worship promoted by the Great Awakening helped make the religious doctrines of many of the insurgent church denominations�particularly those of the Baptists and the Methodists�more accessible to a wider cross section of the American population. This expansion in church membership extended to blacks as well as to those of European descent, and the ritual forms of Evangelical Protestantism possessed features that facilitated the syncretism of African and American forms of religious worship.

Colonial America, England, and the wider world

The American colonies, though in many ways isolated from the countries of Europe, were nevertheless continually subject to diplomatic and military pressures from abroad. In particular, Spain and France were always nearby, waiting to exploit any signs of British weakness in America in order to increase their commercial and territorial designs on the North American mainland. The Great War for the Empire�or the French and Indian War, as it is known to Americans�was but another round in a century of warfare between the major European powers. First in King William�s War (1689�97), then in Queen Anne�s War (1702�13), and later in King George�s War (1744�48; the American phase of the War of the Austrian Succession), Englishmen and Frenchmen had vied for control over the Indians, for possession of the territory lying to the north of the North American colonies, for access to the trade in the Northwest, and for commercial superiority in the West Indies. In most of these encounters, France had been aided by Spain. Because of its own holdings immediately south and west of the British colonies and in the Caribbean, Spain realized that it was in its own interest to join with the French in limiting British expansion. The culmination of these struggles came in 1754 with the Great War for the Empire. Whereas previous contests between Great Britain and France in North America had been mostly provincial affairs, with American colonists doing most of the fighting for the British, the Great War for the Empire saw sizable commitments of British troops to America. The strategy of the British under William Pitt was to allow their ally, Prussia, to carry the brunt of the fighting in Europe and thus free Britain to concentrate its troops in America.

The Native American response

The other major players in this struggle for control of North America were, of course, the American Indians. Modern historians no longer see the encounters between Native Americans and Europeans through the old lens in which �discoverers of a New World� find a �wilderness� inhabited by �savages.� Instead they see a story of different cultures interacting, with the better-armed Europeans eventually subduing the local population, but not before each side had borrowed practices and techniques from the other and certainly not according to any uniform plan.

The English significantly differed from the Spanish and French colonizers in North America. Spain�s widespread empire in the Southwest relied on scattered garrisons and missions to keep the Indians under control and �usefully� occupied. The French in Canada dealt with �their� Indians essentially as the gatherers of fur, who could therefore be left in de facto possession of vast forest tracts. English colonies, in what would eventually become their strength, came around to encouraging the immigration of an agricultural population that would require the exclusive use of large land areas to cultivate�which would have to be secured from native possessors.

PocahontasPocahontas�daughter of Chief Powhatan, who presided over the Powhatan empire�painting c. 1800.MPI/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

English colonial officials began by making land purchases, but such transactions worked to the disadvantage of the Indians, to whom the very concept of group or individual �ownership� of natural resources was alien. After a �sale� was concluded with representatives of Indian peoples (who themselves were not always the �proprietors� of what they signed away), the Indians were surprised to learn that they had relinquished their hunting and fishing rights, and settlers assumed an unqualified sovereignty that Native American culture did not recognize.

In time, conflict was inevitable. In the early days of settlement, Indian-European cooperation could and did take place, as with, for example, the assistance rendered by Squanto to the settlers of Plymouth colony or the semidiplomatic marriage of Virginia�s John Rolfe to Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan. The Native Americans taught the newcomers techniques of survival in their new environment and in turn were introduced to and quickly adopted metal utensils, European fabrics, and especially firearms. They were less adept in countering two European advantages�the possession of a common written language and a modern system of exchange�so most purchases of Indian lands by colonial officials often turned into thinly disguised landgrabs. William Penn and Roger Williams made particular efforts to deal fairly with the Native Americans, but they were rare exceptions.

The impact of Indian involvement in the affairs of the colonists was especially evident in the Franco-British struggle over Canada. For furs the French had depended on the Huron people settled around the Great Lakes, but the Iroquois Confederacy, based in western New York and southern Ontario, succeeded in crushing the Hurons and drove Huron allies such as the Susquehannocks and the Delawares southward into Pennsylvania. This action put the British in debt to the Iroquois because it diverted some of the fur trade from French Montreal and Quebec city to British Albany and New York City. European-Indian alliances also affected the way in which Choctaws, influenced by the French in Louisiana, battled with Spanish-supported Apalachees from Florida and with the Cherokees, who were armed by the British in Georgia.

Iroquois ConfederacyMap of the initial nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, from History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York, by Cadwallader Colden, 1755.Library of Congress, Rare Book Division, Washington, D.C.

The French and Indian War not only strengthened the military experience and self-awareness of the colonists but also produced several Indian leaders, such as Red Jacket and Joseph Brant, who were competent in two or three languages and could negotiate deals between their own peoples and the European contestants. But the climactic Franco-British struggle was the beginning of disaster for the Indians. When the steady military success of the British culminated in the expulsion of France from Canada, the Indians no longer could play the diplomatic card of agreeing to support whichever king�the one in London or the one in Paris�would restrain westward settlement. Realizing this led some Indians to consider mounting a united resistance to further encroachments. This was the source of the rebellion led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac in 1763, but, like later efforts at cooperative Indian challenges to European and later U.S. power, it was simply not enough.

Red JacketRed Jacket.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-05086) Bernard A. Weisberger

The American Revolution and the early federal republic

Prelude to revolution

Britain�s victory over France in the Great War for the Empire had been won at very great cost. British government expenditures, which had amounted to nearly �6.5 million annually before the war, rose to about �14.5 million annually during the war. As a result, the burden of taxation in England was probably the highest in the country�s history, much of it borne by the politically influential landed classes. Furthermore, with the acquisition of the vast domain of Canada and the prospect of holding British territories both against the various nations of Indians and against the Spaniards to the south and west, the costs of colonial defense could be expected to continue indefinitely. Parliament, moreover, had voted to give Massachusetts a generous sum in compensation for its war expenses. It therefore seemed reasonable to British opinion that some of the future burden of payment should be shifted to the colonists themselves�who until then had been lightly taxed and indeed lightly governed.

The prolonged wars had also revealed the need to tighten the administration of the loosely run and widely scattered elements of the British Empire. If the course of the war had confirmed the necessity, the end of the war presented the opportunity. The acquisition of Canada required officials in London to take responsibility for the unsettled western territories, now freed from the threat of French occupation. The British soon moved to take charge of the whole field of Indian relations. By the royal Proclamation of 1763, a line was drawn down the Appalachians marking the limit of settlement from the British colonies, beyond which Indian trade was to be conducted strictly through British-appointed commissioners. The proclamation sprang in part from a respect for Indian rights (though it did not come in time to prevent the uprising led by Pontiac). From London�s viewpoint, leaving a lightly garrisoned West to the fur-gathering Indians also made economic and imperial sense. The proclamation, however, caused consternation among British colonists for two reasons. It meant that limits were being set to the prospects of settlement and speculation in western lands, and it took control of the west out of colonial hands. The most ambitious men in the colonies thus saw the proclamation as a loss of power to control their own fortunes. Indeed, the British government�s huge underestimation of how deeply the halt in westward expansion would be resented by the colonists was one of the factors in sparking the 12-year crisis that led to the American Revolution. Indian efforts to preserve a terrain for themselves in the continental interior might still have had a chance with British policy makers, but they would be totally ineffective when the time came to deal with a triumphant United States of America.

PontiacPontiac, chief of the Ottawa tribe, hand-coloured engraving.� North Wind Picture Archives

The tax controversy

George Grenville, who was named prime minister in 1763, was soon looking to meet the costs of defense by raising revenue in the colonies. The first measure was the Plantation Act of 1764, usually called the Revenue, or Sugar, Act, which reduced to a mere threepence the duty on imported foreign molasses but linked with this a high duty on refined sugar and a prohibition on foreign rum (the needs of the British treasury were carefully balanced with those of West Indies planters and New England distillers). The last measure of this kind (1733) had not been enforced, but this time the government set up a system of customs houses, staffed by British officers, and even established a vice-admiralty court. The court sat at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and heard very few cases, but in principle it appeared to threaten the cherished British privilege of trials by local juries. Boston further objected to the tax�s revenue-raising aspect on constitutional grounds, but, despite some expressions of anxiety, the colonies in general acquiesced.

Parliament next affected colonial economic prospects by passing a Currency Act (1764) to withdraw paper currencies, many of them surviving from the war period, from circulation. This was not done to restrict economic growth so much as to take out currency that was thought to be unsound, but it did severely reduce the circulating medium during the difficult postwar period and further indicated that such matters were subject to British control.

Stamp ActProcession in New York opposing the Stamp Act, depicted in a hand-coloured woodcut. � North Wind Picture Archives

Grenville�s next move was a stamp duty, to be raised on a wide variety of transactions, including legal writs, newspaper advertisements, and ships� bills of lading. The colonies were duly consulted and offered no alternative suggestions. The feeling in London, shared by Benjamin Franklin, was that, after making formal objections, the colonies would accept the new taxes as they had the earlier ones. But the Stamp Act (1765) hit harder and deeper than any previous parliamentary measure. As some agents had already pointed out, because of postwar economic difficulties the colonies were short of ready funds. (In Virginia this shortage was so serious that the province�s treasurer, John Robinson, who was also speaker of the assembly, manipulated and redistributed paper money that had been officially withdrawn from circulation by the Currency Act; a large proportion of the landed gentry benefited from this largesse.) The Stamp Act struck at vital points of colonial economic operations, affecting transactions in trade. It also affected many of the most articulate and influential people in the colonies (lawyers, journalists, bankers). It was, moreover, the first �internal� tax levied directly on the colonies by Parliament. Previous colonial taxes had been levied by local authorities or had been �external� import duties whose primary aim could be viewed as regulating trade for the benefit of the empire as a whole rather than raising revenue. Yet no one, either in Britain or in the colonies, fully anticipated the uproar that followed the imposition of these duties. Mobs in Boston and other towns rioted and forced appointed stamp distributors to renounce their posts; legal business was largely halted. Several colonies sent delegations to a Congress in New York in the summer of 1765, where the Stamp Act was denounced as a violation of the Englishman�s right to be taxed only through elected representatives, and plans were adopted to impose a nonimportation embargo on British goods.

A change of ministry facilitated a change of British policy on taxation. Parliamentary opinion was angered by what it perceived as colonial lawlessness, but British merchants were worried about the embargo on British imports. The marquis of Rockingham, succeeding Grenville, was persuaded to repeal the Stamp Act�for domestic reasons rather than out of any sympathy with colonial protests�and in 1766 the repeal was passed. On the same day, however, Parliament also passed the Declaratory Act, which declared that Parliament had the power to bind or legislate the colonies �in all cases whatsoever.� Parliament would not have voted the repeal without this assertion of its authority.

Charles Watson Wentworth, 2nd marquess of RockinghamMary Evans Picture Library

The colonists, jubilant at the repeal of the Stamp Act, drank innumerable toasts, sounded peals of cannon, and were prepared to ignore the Declaratory Act as face-saving window dressing. John Adams, however, warned in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law that Parliament, armed with this view of its powers, would try to tax the colonies again; and this happened in 1767 when Charles Townshend became chancellor of the Exchequer in a ministry formed by Pitt, now earl of Chatham. The problem was that Britain�s financial burden had not been lifted. Townshend, claiming to take literally the colonial distinction between external and internal taxes, imposed external duties on a wide range of necessities, including lead, glass, paint, paper, and tea, the principal domestic beverage. One ominous result was that colonists now began to believe that the British were developing a long-term plan to reduce the colonies to a subservient position, which they were soon calling �slavery.� This view was ill-informed, however. Grenville�s measures had been designed as a carefully considered package; apart from some tidying-up legislation, Grenville had had no further plans for the colonies after the Stamp Act. His successors developed further measures, not as extensions of an original plan but because the Stamp Act had been repealed.

A notice to the public from Simeon Coley regarding the duties imposed by Lord Townshend.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Nevertheless, the colonists were outraged. In Pennsylvania the lawyer and legislator John Dickinson wrote a series of essays that, appearing in 1767 and 1768 as Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, were widely reprinted and exerted great influence in forming a united colonial opposition. Dickinson agreed that Parliament had supreme power where the whole empire was concerned, but he denied that it had power over internal colonial affairs; he quietly implied that the basis of colonial loyalty lay in its utility among equals rather than in obedience owed to a superior.

John Dickinson, portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1782; in Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.Courtesy of the Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia

It proved easier to unite on opinion than on action. Gradually, after much maneuvering and negotiation, a wide-ranging nonimportation policy against British goods was brought into operation. Agreement had not been easy to reach, and the tensions sometimes broke out in acrimonious charges of noncooperation. In addition, the policy had to be enforced by newly created local committees, a process that put a new disciplinary power in the hands of local men who had not had much previous experience in public affairs. There were, as a result, many signs of discontent with the ordering of domestic affairs in some of the colonies�a development that had obvious implications for the future of colonial politics if more action was needed later.

Constitutional differences with Britain

Very few colonists wanted or even envisaged independence at this stage. (Dickinson had hinted at such a possibility with expressions of pain that were obviously sincere.) The colonial struggle for power, although charged with intense feeling, was not an attempt to change government structure but an argument over legal interpretation. The core of the colonial case was that, as British subjects, they were entitled to the same privileges as their fellow subjects in Britain. They could not constitutionally be taxed without their own consent; and, because they were unrepresented in the Parliament that voted the taxes, they had not given this consent. James Otis, in two long pamphlets, ceded all sovereign power to Parliament with this proviso. Others, however, began to question whether Parliament did have lawful power to legislate over the colonies. These doubts were expressed by the late 1760s, when James Wilson, a Scottish immigrant lawyer living in Philadelphia, wrote an essay on the subject. Because of the withdrawal of the Townshend round of duties in 1770, Wilson kept this essay private until new troubles arose in 1774, when he published it as Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament. In this he fully articulated a view that had been gathering force in the colonies (it was also the opinion of Franklin) that Parliament�s lawful sovereignty stopped at the shores of Britain.

James Otis, portrait by J. Blackburn, 1755; in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The official British reply to the colonial case on representation was that the colonies were �virtually� represented in Parliament in the same sense that the large voteless majority of the British public was represented by those who did vote. To this Otis snorted that, if the majority of the British people did not have the vote, they ought to have it. The idea of colonial members of Parliament, several times suggested, was never a likely solution because of problems of time and distance and because, from the colonists� point of view, colonial members would not have adequate influence.

The standpoints of the two sides to the controversy could be traced in the language used. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty was expressed in the language of paternalistic authority; the British referred to themselves as parents and to the colonists as children. Colonial Tories, who accepted Parliament�s case in the interests of social stability, also used this terminology. From this point of view, colonial insubordination was �unnatural,� just as the revolt of children against parents was unnatural. The colonists replied to all this in the language of rights. They held that Parliament could do nothing in the colonies that it could not do in Britain because the Americans were protected by all the common-law rights of the British. (When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, one of its first acts was to affirm that the colonies were entitled to the common law of England.)

Rights, as Richard Bland of Virginia insisted in The Colonel Dismounted (as early as 1764), implied equality. And here he touched on the underlying source of colonial grievance. Americans were being treated as unequals, which they not only resented but also feared would lead to a loss of control of their own affairs. Colonists perceived legal inequality when writs of assistance�essentially, general search warrants�were authorized in Boston in 1761 while closely related �general warrants� were outlawed in two celebrated cases in Britain. Townshend specifically legalized writs of assistance in the colonies in 1767. Dickinson devoted one of his Letters from a Farmer to this issue.

The Continental Congress

There was widespread agreement that this intervention in colonial government could threaten other provinces and could be countered only by collective action. After much intercolonial correspondence, a Continental Congress came into existence, meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774. Every colonial assembly except that of Georgia appointed and sent a delegation. The Virginia delegation�s instructions were drafted by Thomas Jefferson and were later published as A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). Jefferson insisted on the autonomy of colonial legislative power and set forth a highly individualistic view of the basis of American rights. This belief that the American colonies and other members of the British Empire were distinct states united under the king and thus subject only to the king and not to Parliament was shared by several other delegates, notably James Wilson and John Adams, and strongly influenced the Congress.

George Washington (middle) surrounded by members of the Continental Congress, lithograph by Currier & Ives, c. 1876.Currier & Ives Collection, Library of Congress, Neg. No. LC-USZC2-3154

The Congress�s first important decision was one on procedure: whether to vote by colony, each having one vote, or by wealth calculated on a ratio with population. The decision to vote by colony was made on practical grounds�neither wealth nor population could be satisfactorily ascertained�but it had important consequences. Individual colonies, no matter what their size, retained a degree of autonomy that translated immediately into the language and prerogatives of sovereignty. Under Massachusetts�s influence, the Congress next adopted the Suffolk Resolves, recently voted in Suffolk county, Massachusetts, which for the first time put natural rights into the official colonial argument (hitherto all remonstrances had been based on common law and constitutional rights). Apart from this, however, the prevailing mood was cautious.

The Congress�s aim was to put such pressure on the British government that it would redress all colonial grievances and restore the harmony that had once prevailed. The Congress thus adopted an Association that committed the colonies to a carefully phased plan of economic pressure, beginning with nonimportation, moving to nonconsumption, and finishing the following September (after the rice harvest had been exported) with nonexportation. A few New England and Virginia delegates were looking toward independence, but the majority went home hoping that these steps, together with new appeals to the king and to the British people, would avert the need for any further such meetings. If these measures failed, however, a second Congress would convene the following spring.

Behind the unity achieved by the Congress lay deep divisions in colonial society. In the mid-1760s upriver New York was disrupted by land riots, which also broke out in parts of New Jersey; much worse disorder ravaged the backcountry of both North and South Carolina, where frontier people were left unprotected by legislatures that taxed them but in which they felt themselves unrepresented. A pitched battle at Alamance Creek in North Carolina in 1771 ended that rising, known as the Regulator Insurrection, and was followed by executions for treason. Although without such serious disorder, the cities also revealed acute social tensions and resentments of inequalities of economic opportunity and visible status. New York provincial politics were riven by intense rivalry between two great family-based factions, the DeLanceys, who benefited from royal government connections, and their rivals, the Livingstons. (The politics of the quarrel with Britain affected the domestic standing of these groups and eventually eclipsed the DeLanceys.) Another phenomenon was the rapid rise of dissenting religious sects, notably the Baptists; although they carried no political program, their style of preaching suggested a strong undercurrent of social as well as religious dissent. There was no inherent unity to these disturbances, but many leaders of colonial society were reluctant to ally themselves with these disruptive elements even in protest against Britain. They were concerned about the domestic consequences of letting the protests take a revolutionary turn; power shared with these elements might never be recovered.

When British Gen. Thomas Gage sent a force from Boston to destroy American rebel military stores at Concord, Massachusetts, fighting broke out between militia and British troops at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Reports of these clashes reached the Second Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia in May. Although most colonial leaders still hoped for reconciliation with Britain, the news stirred the delegates to more radical action. Steps were taken to put the continent on a war footing. While a further appeal was addressed to the British people (mainly at Dickinson�s insistence), the Congress raised an army, adopted a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, and appointed committees to deal with domestic supply and foreign affairs. In August 1775 the king declared a state of rebellion; by the end of the year, all colonial trade had been banned. Even yet, Gen. George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, still referred to the British troops as �ministerial� forces, indicating a civil war, not a war looking to separate national identity.

A statue in Lexington, Mass., honouring the minutemen who fought against the British in 1775.� Americanspirit/Dreamstime.com

Then in January 1776 the publication of Thomas Paine�s irreverent pamphlet Common Sense abruptly shattered this hopeful complacency and put independence on the agenda. Paine�s eloquent, direct language spoke people�s unspoken thoughts; no pamphlet had ever made such an impact on colonial opinion. While the Congress negotiated urgently, but secretly, for a French alliance, power struggles erupted in provinces where conservatives still hoped for relief. The only form relief could take, however, was British concessions; as public opinion hardened in Britain, where a general election in November 1774 had returned a strong majority for Lord North, the hope for reconciliation faded. In the face of British intransigence, men committed to their definition of colonial rights were left with no alternative, and the substantial portion of colonists�about one-third according to John Adams, although contemporary historians believe the number to have been much smaller�who preferred loyalty to the crown, with all its disadvantages, were localized and outflanked. Where the British armies massed, they found plenty of loyalist support, but, when they moved on, they left the loyalists feeble and exposed.

Title page from Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, 1776.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The most dramatic internal revolution occurred in Pennsylvania, where a strong radical party, based mainly in Philadelphia but with allies in the country, seized power in the course of the controversy over independence itself. Opinion for independence swept the colonies in the spring of 1776. The Congress recommended that colonies form their own governments and assigned a committee to draft a declaration of independence.

This document, written by Thomas Jefferson but revised in committee, consisted of two parts. The preamble set the claims of the United States on a basis of natural rights, with a dedication to the principle of equality; the second was a long list of grievances against the crown�not Parliament now, since the argument was that Parliament had no lawful power in the colonies. On July 2 the Congress itself voted for independence; on July 4 it adopted the Declaration of Independence. (See also Founding Fathers.)

Trumbull, John: Declaration of IndependenceDeclaration of Independence, oil on canvas by John Trumbull, 1818; in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C.Architect of the Capitol J.R. Pole

The American Revolutionary War

Treaty of Paris

The military verdict in North America was reflected in the preliminary Anglo-American peace treaty of 1782, which was included in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens served as the American commissioners. By its terms Britain recognized the independence of the United States with generous boundaries, including the Mississippi River on the west. Britain retained Canada but ceded East and West Florida to Spain. Provisions were inserted calling for the payment of American private debts to British citizens, for American access to the Newfoundland fisheries, and for a recommendation by the Continental Congress to the states in favour of fair treatment of the loyalists.

Paris, Peace ofSigning the Preliminary Treaty of Peace at Paris, November 30, 1782, print reproduction of a painting by Carl Seiler. John Jay (far left) and Benjamin Franklin are depicted standing.U.S. Diplomacy Center

Most of the loyalists remained in the new country; however, perhaps as many as 80,000 Tories migrated to Canada, England, and the British West Indies. Many of these had served as British soldiers, and many had been banished by the American states. The loyalists were harshly treated as dangerous enemies by the American states during the war and immediately afterward. They were commonly deprived of civil rights, often fined, and frequently relieved of their property. The more conspicuous were usually banished upon pain of death. The British government compensated more than 4,000 of the exiles for property losses, paying out almost �3.3 million. It also gave them land grants, pensions, and appointments to enable them to reestablish themselves. The less ardent and more cautious Tories, staying in the United States, accepted the separation from Britain as final and, after the passage of a generation, could not be distinguished from the patriots.

Etching showing atrocities against Loyalists.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Foundations of the American republic

It had been far from certain that the Americans could fight a successful war against the might of Britain. The scattered colonies had little inherent unity; their experience of collective action was limited; an army had to be created and maintained; they had no common institutions other than the Continental Congress; and they had almost no experience of continental public finance. The Americans could not have hoped to win the war without French help, and the French monarchy�whose interests were anti-British but not pro-American�had waited watchfully to see what the Americans could do in the field. Although the French began supplying arms, clothing, and loans surreptitiously soon after the Americans declared independence, it was not until 1778 that a formal alliance was forged.

Most of these problems lasted beyond the achievement of independence and continued to vex American politics for many years, even for generations. Meanwhile, however, the colonies had valuable, though less visible, sources of strength. Practically all farmers had their own arms and could form into militia companies overnight. More fundamentally, Americans had for many years been receiving basically the same information, mainly from the English press, reprinted in identical form in colonial newspapers. The effect of this was to form a singularly wide body of agreed opinion about major public issues. Another force of incalculable importance was the fact that for several generations Americans had to a large extent been governing themselves through elected assemblies, which in turn had developed sophisticated experience in committee politics.

This factor of �institutional memory� was of great importance in the forming of a mentality of self-government. Men became attached to their habitual ways, especially when these were habitual ways of running their own affairs, and these habits formed the basis of an ideology just as pervasive and important to the people concerned as republican theories published in Britain and the European continent. Moreover, colonial self-government seemed, from a colonial point of view, to be continuous and consistent with the principles of English government�principles for which Parliament had fought the Civil Wars in the mid-17th century and which colonists believed to have been reestablished by the Glorious Revolution of 1688�89. It was equally important that experience of self-government had taught colonial leaders how to get things done. When the Continental Congress met in 1774, members did not have to debate procedure (except on voting); they already knew it. Finally, the Congress�s authority was rooted in traditions of legitimacy. The old election laws were used. Voters could transfer their allegiance with minimal difficulty from the dying colonial assemblies to the new assemblies and conventions of the states.

Problems before the Second Continental Congress

When the Second Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia in May 1775, revolution was not a certainty. The Congress had to prepare for that contingency nevertheless and thus was confronted by two parallel sets of problems. The first was how to organize for war; the second, which proved less urgent but could not be set aside forever, was how to define the legal relationship between the Congress and the states.

In June 1775, in addition to appointing Washington (who had made a point of turning up in uniform) commander in chief, the Congress provided for the enlistment of an army. It then turned to the vexatious problems of finance. An aversion to taxation being one of the unities of American sentiment, the Congress began by trying to raise a domestic loan. It did not have much success, however, for the excellent reason that the outcome of the operation appeared highly dubious. At the same time, authority was taken for issuing a paper currency. This proved to be the most important method of domestic war finance, and, as the war years passed, Congress resorted to issuing more and more Continental currency, which depreciated rapidly and had to compete with currencies issued by state governments. (People were inclined to prefer local currencies.) The Continental Army was a further source of a form of currency because its commission agents issued certificates in exchange for goods; these certificates bore an official promise of redemption and could be used in personal transactions. Loans raised overseas, notably in France and the Netherlands, were another important source of revenue.

General George Washington (riding white horse) and his staff welcoming a provision train of supplies for the Continental Army.The Granger Collection, New York

In 1780 Congress decided to call in all former issues of currency and replace them with a new issue on a 40-to-1 ratio. The Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, who was appointed superintendent of finance in 1781 and came to be known as �the Financier,� guided the United States through its complex fiscal difficulties. Morris�s personal finances were inextricably tangled up with those of the country, and he became the object of much hostile comment, but he also used his own resources to secure urgently needed loans from abroad. In 1781 Morris secured a charter for the first Bank of North America, an institution that owed much to the example of the Bank of England. Although the bank was attacked by radical egalitarians as an unrepublican manifestation of privilege, it gave the United States a firmer financial foundation.

Washington, George; Morris, Robert; Salomon, HaymA bronze sculpture that stands in Chicago, Illinois, showing George Washington (centre), Robert Morris (left), and Haym Salomon (right). � elesi/Shutterstock.com

The problem of financing and organizing the war sometimes overlapped with Congress�s other major problem, that of defining its relations with the states. The Congress, being only an association of states, had no power to tax individuals. The Articles of Confederation, a plan of government organization adopted and put into practice by Congress in 1777, although not officially ratified by all the states until 1781, gave Congress the right to make requisitions on the states proportionate to their ability to pay. The states in turn had to raise these sums by their own domestic powers to tax, a method that state legislators looking for reelection were reluctant to employ. The result was that many states were constantly in heavy arrears, and, particularly after the urgency of the war years had subsided, the Congress�s ability to meet expenses and repay its war debts was crippled.

John Dickinson's draft of the Articles of Confederation.National Archives, Washington, D.C.

The Congress lacked power to enforce its requisitions and fell badly behind in repaying its wartime creditors. When individual states (Maryland as early as 1782, Pennsylvania in 1785) passed legislation providing for repayment of the debt owed to their own citizens by the Continental Congress, one of the reasons for the Congress�s existence had begun to crumble. Two attempts were made to get the states to agree to grant the Congress the power it needed to raise revenue by levying an impost on imports. Each failed for want of unanimous consent. Essentially, an impost would have been collected at ports, which belonged to individual states�there was no �national� territory�and therefore cut across the concept of state sovereignty. Agreement was nearly obtained on each occasion, and, if it had been, the Constitutional Convention might never have been called. But the failure sharply pointed up the weakness of the Congress and of the union between the states under the Articles of Confederation.

The Articles of Confederation reflected strong preconceptions of state sovereignty. Article II expressly reserved sovereignty to the states individually, and another article even envisaged the possibility that one state might go to war without the others. Fundamental revisions could be made only with unanimous consent, because the Articles represented a treaty between sovereigns, not the creation of a new nation-state. Other major revisions required the consent of nine states. Yet state sovereignty principles rested on artificial foundations. The states could never have achieved independence on their own, and in fact the Congress had taken the first step both in recommending that the states form their own governments and in declaring their collective independence. Most important of its domestic responsibilities, by 1787 the Congress had enacted several ordinances establishing procedures for incorporating new territories. (It had been conflicts over western land claims that had held up ratification of the Articles. Eventually the states with western claims, principally New York and Virginia, ceded them to the United States.) The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided for the phased settlement and government of territories in the Ohio valley, leading to eventual admission as new states. It also excluded the introduction of slavery�though it did not exclude the retention of existing slaves.

The states had constantly looked to the Congress for leadership in the difficulties of war; now that the danger was past, however, disunity began to threaten to turn into disintegration. The Congress was largely discredited in the eyes of a wide range of influential men, representing both old and new interests. The states were setting up their own tariff barriers against each other and quarreling among themselves; virtual war had broken out between competing settlers from Pennsylvania and Connecticut claiming the same lands. By 1786, well-informed men were discussing a probable breakup of the confederation into three or more new groups, which could have led to wars between the American republics.

State politics

The problems of forming a new government affected the states individually as well as in confederation. Most of them established their own constitutions�formulated either in conventions or in the existing assemblies. The most democratic of these constitutions was the product of a virtual revolution in Pennsylvania, where a highly organized radical party seized the opportunity of the revolutionary crisis to gain power. Suffrage was put on a taxpayer basis, with nearly all adult males paying some tax; representation was reformed to bring in the populations of western counties; and a single-chamber legislature was established. An oath of loyalty to the constitution for some time excluded political opponents and particularly Quakers (who could not take oaths) from participation. The constitutions of the other states reflected the firm political ascendancy of the traditional ruling elite. Power ascended from a broad base in the elective franchise and representation through a narrowing hierarchy of offices restricted by property qualifications. State governors had in some cases to be men of great wealth. Senators were either wealthy or elected by the wealthy sector of the electorate. (These conditions were not invariable; Virginia, which had a powerful landed elite, dispensed with such restrictions.) Several states retained religious qualifications for office; the separation of church and state was not a popular concept, and minorities such as Baptists and Quakers were subjected to indignities that amounted in some places (notably Massachusetts and Connecticut) to forms of persecution.

Elite power provided a lever for one of the most significant transformations of the era, one that took place almost without being either noticed or intended. This was the acceptance of the principle of giving representation in legislative bodies in proportion to population. It was made not only possible but attractive when the larger aggregations of population broadly coincided with the highest concentrations of property: great merchants and landowners from populous areas could continue to exert political ascendancy so long as they retained some sort of hold on the political process. The principle reemerged to dominate the distribution of voters in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college under the new federal Constitution.

Relatively conservative constitutions did little to stem a tide of increasingly democratic politics. The old elites had to wrestle with new political forces (and in the process they learned how to organize in the new regime). Executive power was weakened. Many elections were held annually, and terms were limited. Legislatures quickly admitted new representatives from recent settlements, many with little previous political experience.

The new state governments, moreover, had to tackle major issues that affected all classes. The needs of public finance led to emissions of paper money. In several states these were resumed after the war, and, since they tended (though not invariably) to depreciate, they led directly to fierce controversies. The treatment of loyalists was also a theme of intense political dispute after the war. Despite the protests of men such as Alexander Hamilton, who urged restoration of property and rights, in many states loyalists were driven out and their estates seized and redistributed in forms of auction, providing opportunities for speculation rather than personal occupation. Many states were depressed economically. In Massachusetts, which remained under orthodox control, stiff taxation under conditions of postwar depression trapped many farmers into debt. Unable to meet their obligations, they rose late in 1786 under a Revolutionary War officer, Capt. Daniel Shays, in a movement to prevent the court sessions. Shays�s Rebellion was crushed early in 1787 by an army raised in the state. The action caused only a few casualties, but the episode sent a shiver of fear throughout the country�s propertied classes. It also seemed to justify the classical thesis that republics were unstable. It thus provided a potent stimulus to state legislatures to send delegates to the convention called (following a preliminary meeting in Annapolis) to meet at Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation.

The Constitutional Convention

The Philadelphia Convention, which met in May 1787, was officially called for by the old Congress solely to remedy defects in the Articles of Confederation. But the Virginia Plan presented by the Virginia delegates went beyond revision and boldly proposed to introduce a new, national government in place of the existing confederation. The convention thus immediately faced the question of whether the United States was to be a country in the modern sense or would continue as a weak federation of autonomous and equal states represented in a single chamber, which was the principle embodied in the New Jersey Plan presented by several small states. This decision was effectively made when a compromise plan for a bicameral legislature�one house with representation based on population and one with equal representation for all states�was approved in mid-July. Though neither plan prevailed, the new national government in its final form was endowed with broad powers that made it indisputably national and superior.

U.S. ConstitutionThe signing of the U.S. Constitution by 39 members of the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787; painting by Howard Chandler Christy.Architect of the Capitol

The Constitution, as it emerged after a summer of debate, embodied a much stronger principle of separation of powers than was generally to be found in the state constitutions. The chief executive was to be a single figure (a composite executive was discussed and rejected) and was to be elected by an electoral college, meeting in the states. This followed much debate over the Virginia Plan�s preference for legislative election. The principal control on the chief executive, or president, against violation of the Constitution was the rather remote threat of impeachment (to which James Madison attached great importance). The Virginia Plan�s proposal that representation be proportional to population in both houses was severely modified by the retention of equal representation for each state in the Senate. But the question of whether to count slaves in the population was abrasive. After some contention, antislavery forces gave way to a compromise by which three-fifths of the slaves would be counted as population for purposes of representation (and direct taxation). Slave states would thus be perpetually overrepresented in national politics; provision was also added for a law permitting the recapture of fugitive slaves, though in deference to republican scruples the word slaves was not used. (See also Sidebar: The Founding Fathers and Slavery.)

Original copy of the U.S. Constitution, housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Contemporary theory expected the legislature to be the most powerful branch of government. Thus, to balance the system, the executive was given a veto, and a judicial system with powers of review was established. It was also implicit in the structure that the new federal judiciary would have power to veto any state laws that conflicted either with the Constitution or with federal statutes. States were forbidden to pass laws impairing obligations of contract�a measure aimed at encouraging capital�and the Congress could pass no ex post facto law. But the Congress was endowed with the basic powers of a modern�and sovereign�government. This was a republic, and the United States could confer no aristocratic titles of honour. The prospect of eventual enlargement of federal power appeared in the clause giving the Congress powers to pass legislation �necessary and proper� for implementing the general purposes of the Constitution.

The states retained their civil jurisdiction, but there was an emphatic shift of the political centre of gravity to the federal government, of which the most fundamental indication was the universal understanding that this government would act directly on citizens, as individuals, throughout all the states, regardless of state authority. The language of the Constitution told of the new style: it began, �We the people of the United States,� rather than �We the people of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.�

Cartoon depicting attacks on the Pennsylvania state constitution by self-interest groups.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The draft Constitution aroused widespread opposition. Anti-Federalists�so called because their opponents deftly seized the appellation of �Federalists,� though they were really nationalists�were strong in states such as Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts, where the economy was relatively successful and many people saw little need for such extreme remedies. Anti-Federalists also expressed fears�here touches of class conflict certainly arose�that the new government would fall into the hands of merchants and men of money. Many good republicans detected oligarchy in the structure of the Senate, with its six-year terms. The absence of a bill of rights aroused deep fears of central power. The Federalists, however, had the advantages of communications, the press, organization, and, generally, the better of the argument. Anti-Federalists also suffered the disadvantage of having no internal coherence or unified purpose.

The social revolution

The American Revolution was a great social upheaval but one that was widely diffused, often gradual, and different in different regions. The principles of liberty and equality stood in stark conflict with the institution of African slavery, which had built much of the country�s wealth. One gradual effect of this conflict was the decline of slavery in all the Northern states; another was a spate of manumissions by liberal slave owners in Virginia. But with most slave owners, especially in South Carolina and Georgia, ideals counted for nothing. Throughout the slave states, the institution of slavery came to be reinforced by a white supremacist doctrine of racial inferiority. The manumissions did result in the development of new communities of free blacks, who enjoyed considerable freedom of movement for a few years and who produced some outstanding figures, such as the astronomer Benjamin Banneker and the religious leader Richard Allen, a founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion. But in the 1790s and after, the condition of free blacks deteriorated as states adopted laws restricting their activities, residences, and economic choices. In general they came to occupy poor neighbourhoods and grew into a permanent underclass, denied education and opportunity.

Sale of Estates, Pictures, and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans, 1842. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The American Revolution also dramatized the economic importance of women. Women had always contributed indispensably to the operation of farms and often businesses, while they seldom acquired independent status; but, when war removed men from the locality, women often had to take full charge, which they proved they could do. Republican ideas spread among women, influencing discussion of women�s rights, education, and role in society. Some states modified their inheritance and property laws to permit women to inherit a share of estates and to exercise limited control of property after marriage. On the whole, however, the Revolution itself had only very gradual and diffused effects on women�s ultimate status. Such changes as took place amounted to a fuller recognition of the importance of women as mothers of republican citizens rather than making them into independent citizens of equal political and civil status with men. Willard M. Wallace

Americans had fought for independence to protect common-law rights; they had no program for legal reform. Gradually, however, some customary practices came to seem out of keeping with republican principles. The outstanding example was the law of inheritance. The new states took steps, where necessary, to remove the old rule of primogeniture in favour of equal partition of intestate estates; this conformed to both the egalitarian and the individualist principles preferred by American society. Humanization of the penal codes, however, occurred only gradually, in the 19th century, inspired as much by European example as by American sentiment.

Religious revivalism

Religion played a central role in the emergence of a distinctively �American� society in the first years of independence. Several key developments took place. One was the creation of American denominations independent of their British and European origins and leadership. By 1789 American Anglicans (renaming themselves Episcopalians), Methodists (formerly Wesleyans), Roman Catholics, and members of various Baptist, Lutheran, and Dutch Reformed congregations had established organizations and chosen leaders who were born in or full-time residents of what had become the United States of America. Another pivotal postindependence development was a rekindling of religious enthusiasm, especially on the frontier, that opened the gates of religious activism to the laity. Still another was the disestablishment of tax-supported churches in those states most deeply feeling the impact of democratic diversity. And finally, this period saw the birth of a liberal and socially aware version of Christianity uniting Enlightenment values with American activism.

Between 1798 and 1800 a sudden burst of revitalization shook frontier Protestant congregations, beginning with a great revival in Logan county, Kentucky, under the leadership of men such as James McGready and the brothers John and William McGee. This was followed by a gigantic camp meeting at Cane Ridge, where thousands were �converted.� The essence of the frontier revival was that this conversion from mere formal Christianity to a full conviction in God�s mercy for the sinner was a deeply emotional experience accessible even to those with much faith and little learning. So exhorters who were barely literate themselves could preach brimstone and fire and showers of grace, bringing repentant listeners to a state of excitement in which they would weep and groan, writhe and faint, and undergo physical transports in full public view.

Early 19th-century Methodist camp meeting. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

�Heart religion� supplanted �head religion.� For the largely Scotch-Irish Presbyterian ministers in the West, this led to dangerous territory, because the official church leadership preferred more decorum and biblical scholarship from its pastors. Moreover, the idea of winning salvation by noisy penitence undercut Calvinist predestination. In fact, the fracture along fault lines of class and geography led to several schisms. Methodism had fewer problems of this kind. It never embraced predestination, and, more to the point, its structure was democratic, with rudimentarily educated lay preachers able to rise from leading individual congregations to presiding over districts and regional �conferences,� eventually embracing the entire church membership. Methodism fitted very neatly into frontier conditions through its use of traveling ministers, or circuit riders, who rode from isolated settlement to settlement, saving souls and mightily liberalizing the word of God.

The revival spirit rolled back eastward to inspire a �Second Great Awakening,� especially in New England, that emphasized gatherings that were less uninhibited than camp meetings but warmer than conventional Congregational and Presbyterian services. Ordained and college-educated ministers such as Lyman Beecher made it their mission to promote revivalism as a counterweight to the Deism of some of the Founding Fathers and the atheism of the French Revolution. (See Sidebar: The Founding Fathers, Deism, and Christianity.) Revivals also gave churches a new grasp on the loyalties of their congregations through lay participation in spreading the good word of salvation. This voluntarism more than offset the gradual state-by-state cancellation of taxpayer support for individual denominations.

Lyman Beecher, detail of an oil painting by Chester Harding; in the Yale University Art GalleryCourtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, gift of W.T.R. Marvin

The era of the early republic also saw the growth, especially among the urban educated elite of Boston, of a gentler form of Christianity embodied in Unitarianism, which rested on the notion of an essentially benevolent God who made his will known to humankind through their exercise of the reasoning powers bestowed on them. In the Unitarian view, Jesus Christ was simply a great moral teacher. Many Christians of the �middling� sort viewed Unitarianism as excessively concerned with ideas and social reform and far too indulgent or indifferent to the existence of sin and Satan. By 1815, then, the social structure of American Protestantism, firmly embedded in many activist forms in the national culture, had taken shape. Bernard A. Weisberger

The United States from 1789 to 1816

The Federalist administration and the formation of parties

The Jeffersonian Republicans in power

Jefferson began his presidency with a plea for reconciliation: �We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.� (See First Inaugural original text.) He had no plans for a permanent two-party system of government. He also began with a strong commitment to limited government and strict construction of the Constitution. All these commitments were soon to be tested by the exigencies of war, diplomacy, and political contingency.

Thomas Jefferson, portrait by an anonymous artist, 19th century; in the National Museum of Franco-American Cooperation, Bl�rancourt, France.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

Madison as president and the War of 1812

The Indian-American problem

The young United States believed that it had inherited an �Indian problem,� but it would be equally fair to say that the victory at Yorktown confronted the Indians with an insoluble �American problem.� Whereas they had earlier dealt with representatives of Europe-based empires seeking only access to selected resources from a distant continent, now they faced a resident, united people yearly swelling in numbers, determined to make every acre of the West their own and culturally convinced of their absolute title under the laws of God and history. There was no room for compromise. Even before 1776, each step toward American independence reduced the Indians� control over their own future. The Proclamation Line of 1763 was almost immediately violated by men like Daniel Boone on the Kentucky frontier. In the western parts of Pennsylvania and New York, however, despite extensive Indian land concessions in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, they still had enough power to bar an advance toward the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes.

For armed resistance to have had any hope of success, unity would be required between all the Indians from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. This unity simply could not be achieved. The Shawnee leaders known as Tenskatawa, or the Prophet, and his brother Tecumseh attempted this kind of rallying movement, much as Pontiac had done some 40 years earlier, with equal lack of success. Some help was forthcoming in the form of arms from British traders remaining in the Northwest Territory in violation of the peace treaty, but the Indians failed to secure victory in a clash with American militia and regulars at the Battle of Tippecanoe Creek (near present-day West Lafayette, Indiana) in 1811.

Battle of Tippecanoe, lithograph by Kurz and Allison c. 1889.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-01891)

The outbreak of the War of 1812 sparked renewed Indian hopes of protection by the crown, should the British win. Tecumseh himself was actually commissioned as a general in the royal forces, but, at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, he was killed, and his dismembered body parts, according to legend, were divided between his conquerors as gruesome souvenirs.

An American cartoon attacking the alliance between the �Humane British� and the Indians during the War of 1812.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, in 1814, U.S. Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British-supported Creeks in the Southwest in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The war itself ended in a draw that left American territory intact. Thereafter, with minor exceptions, there was no major Indian resistance east of the Mississippi. After the lusty first quarter century of American nationhood, all roads left open to Native Americans ran downhill.

The United States from 1816 to 1850

The Era of Mixed Feelings

Effects of the War of 1812

Later scholars have questioned the strategy and tactics of the United States in the War of 1812, the war�s tangible results, and even the wisdom of commencing it in the first place. To contemporary Americans, however, the striking naval victories and Jackson�s victory over the British at New Orleans created a reservoir of �good feeling� on which Monroe was able to draw.

Abetting the mood of nationalism was the foreign policy of the United States after the war. Florida was acquired from Spain (1819) in negotiations, the success of which owed more to Jackson�s indifference to such niceties as the inviolability of foreign borders and to the country�s evident readiness to back him up than it did to diplomatic finesse. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), actually a few phrases inserted in a long presidential message (see original text), declared that the United States would not become involved in European affairs and would not accept European interference in the Americas; its immediate effect on other nations was slight, and that on its own citizenry was impossible to gauge, yet its self-assured tone in warning off the Old World from the New reflected well the nationalist mood that swept the country.

Note from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison commenting on the Monroe Doctrine, October 1823.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Internally, the decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Marshall in such cases as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) promoted nationalism by strengthening Congress and national power at the expense of the states. The congressional decision to charter the second Bank of the United States (1816) was explained in part by the country�s financial weaknesses, exposed by the War of 1812, and in part by the intrigues of financial interests. The readiness of Southern Jeffersonians�former strict constructionists�to support such a measure indicates, too, an amazing degree of nationalist feeling. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sense of national unity was the victorious Republican Party, standing in solitary splendour on the national political horizon, its long-time foes the Federalists vanished without a trace (on the national level) and Monroe, the Republican standard-bearer, reelected so overwhelmingly in 1820 that it was long believed that the one electoral vote denied him had been held back only in order to preserve Washington�s record of unanimous selection.

National disunity

For all the signs of national unity and feelings of oneness, equally convincing evidence points in the opposite direction. The very Supreme Court decisions that delighted friends of strong national government infuriated its opponents, while Marshall�s defense of the rights of private property was construed by critics as betraying a predilection for one kind of property over another. The growth of the West, encouraged by the conquest of Indian lands during the War of 1812, was by no means regarded as an unmixed blessing. Eastern conservatives sought to keep land prices high; speculative interests opposed a policy that would be advantageous to poor squatters; politicians feared a change in the sectional balance of power; and businessmen were wary of a new section with interests unlike their own. European visitors testified that, even during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, Americans characteristically expressed scorn for their countrymen in sections other than their own.

Economic hardship, especially the financial panic of 1819, also created disunity. The causes of the panic were complex, but its greatest effect was clearly the tendency of its victims to blame it on one or another hostile or malevolent interest�whether the second Bank of the United States, Eastern capitalists, selfish speculators, or perfidious politicians�each charge expressing the bad feeling that existed side by side with the good.

If harmony seemed to reign on the level of national political parties, disharmony prevailed within the states. In the early 19th-century United States, local and state politics were typically waged less on behalf of great issues than for petty gain. That the goals of politics were often sordid did not mean that political contests were bland. In every section, state factions led by shrewd men waged bitter political warfare to attain or entrench themselves in power.

The most dramatic manifestation of national division was the political struggle over slavery, particularly over its spread into new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 eased the threat of further disunity, at least for the time being. The sectional balance between the states was preserved: in the Louisiana Purchase, with the exception of the Missouri Territory, slavery was to be confined to the area south of the 36�30′ line. Yet this compromise did not end the crisis but only postponed it. The determination by Northern and Southern senators not to be outnumbered by one another suggests that the people continued to believe in the conflicting interests of the various great geographic sections. The weight of evidence indicates that the decade after the Battle of New Orleans was not an era of good feelings so much as one of mixed feelings.

The economy

The American economy expanded and matured at a remarkable rate in the decades after the War of 1812. The rapid growth of the West created a great new centre for the production of grains and pork, permitting the country�s older sections to specialize in other crops. New processes of manufacture, particularly in textiles, not only accelerated an �industrial revolution� in the Northeast but also, by drastically enlarging the Northern market for raw materials, helped account for a boom in Southern cotton production. If by midcentury Southerners of European descent had come to regard slavery�on which the cotton economy relied�as a �positive good� rather than the �necessary evil� that they had earlier held the system to be, it was largely because of the increasingly central role played by cotton in earning profits for the region. Industrial workers organized the country�s first trade unions and even workingmen�s political parties early in the period. The corporate form thrived in an era of booming capital requirements, and older and simpler forms of attracting investment capital were rendered obsolete. Commerce became increasingly specialized, the division of labour in the disposal of goods for sale matching the increasingly sophisticated division of labour that had come to characterize production. Edward Pessen

The management of the growing economy was inseparable from political conflict in the emerging United States. At the start the issue was between agrarians (represented by Jeffersonian Republicans) wanting a decentralized system of easy credit and an investing community looking for stability and profit in financial markets. This latter group, championed by Hamilton and the Federalists, won the first round with the establishment of the first Bank of the United States (1791), jointly owned by the government and private stockholders. It was the government�s fiscal agent, and it put the centre of gravity of the credit system in Philadelphia, its headquarters. Its charter expired in 1811, and the financial chaos that hindered procurement and mobilization during the ensuing War of 1812 demonstrated the importance of such centralization. Hence, even Jeffersonian Republicans were converted to acceptance of a second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816.

The second Bank of the United States faced constant political fire, but the conflict now was not merely between farming and mercantile interests but also between local bankers who wanted access to the profits of an expanding credit system and those who, like the president of the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, wanted more regularity and predictability in banking through top-down control. The Constitution gave the United States exclusive power to coin money but allowed for the chartering of banks by individual states, and these banks were permitted to issue notes that also served as currency. The state banks, whose charters were often political plums, lacked coordinated inspection and safeguards against risky loans usually collateralized by land, whose value fluctuated wildly, as did the value of the banknotes. Overspeculation, bankruptcies, contraction, and panics were the inevitable result.

Nicholas BiddleCourtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Biddle�s hope was that the large deposits of government funds in the Bank of the United States would allow it to become the major lender to local banks, and from that position of strength it could squeeze the unsound ones into either responsibility or extinction. But this notion ran afoul of the growing democratic spirit that insisted that the right to extend credit and choose its recipients was too precious to be confined to a wealthy elite. This difference of views produced the classic battle between Biddle and Jackson, culminating in Biddle�s attempt to win recharter for the Bank of the United States, Jackson�s veto and transfer of the government funds to pet banks, and the Panic of 1837. Not until the 1840s did the federal government place its funds in an independent treasury, and not until the Civil War was there legislation creating a national banking system. The country was strong enough to survive, but the politicization of fiscal policy making continued to be a major theme of American economic history.

Wood engraving relating to the financial setback experienced on the U.S. frontier following the Panic of 1837.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Transportation revolution

Improvements in transportation, a key to the advance of industrialization everywhere, were especially vital in the United States. A fundamental problem of the developing American economy was the great geographic extent of the country and the appallingly poor state of its roads. The broad challenge to weave the Great Lakes, Mississippi Valley, and Gulf and Atlantic coasts into a single national market was first met by putting steam to work on the rich network of navigable rivers. As early as 1787, John Fitch had demonstrated a workable steamboat to onlookers in Philadelphia; some years later, he repeated the feat in New York City. But it is characteristic of American history that, in the absence of governmental encouragement, private backing was needed to bring an invention into full play. As a result, popular credit for the first steamboat goes to Robert Fulton, who found the financing to make his initial Hudson River run of the Clermont in 1807 more than a onetime feat. From that point forward, on inland waters, steam was king, and its most spectacular manifestation was the Mississippi River paddle wheeler, a unique creation of unsung marine engineers challenged to make a craft that could �work� in shallow swift-running waters. Their solution was to put cargo, engines, and passengers on a flat open deck above the waterline, which was possible in the mild climate of large parts of the drainage basin of the Father of Waters. The Mississippi River steamboat not only became an instantly recognizable American icon but also had an impact on the law. In the case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Chief Justice Marshall affirmed the exclusive right of the federal government to regulate traffic on rivers flowing between states.

Illustration of an early version of John Fitch's steamboat.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Canals and railroads were not as distinctively American in origin as the paddle wheeler, but, whereas 18th-century canals in England and continental Europe were simple conveniences for moving bulky loads cheaply at low speed, Americans integrated the country�s water transport system by connecting rivers flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi River valleys. The best-known conduit, the Erie Canal, connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, linking the West to the port of New York City. Other major canals in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio joined Philadelphia and Baltimore to the West via the Ohio River and its tributaries. Canal building was increasingly popular throughout the 1820s and �30s, sometimes financed by states or by a combination of state and private effort. But many overbuilt or unwisely begun canal projects collapsed, and states that were �burned� in the process became more wary of such ventures.

Barge near the western end of the Erie Canal, New York, mid-1800s.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Beginnings of industrialization

Economic, social, and cultural history cannot easily be separated. The creation of the �factory system� in the United States was the outcome of interaction between several characteristically American forces: faith in the future, a generally welcoming attitude toward immigrants, an abundance of resources linked to a shortage of labour, and a hospitable view of innovation. The pioneering textile industry, for example, sprang from an alliance of invention, investment, and philanthropy. Moses Brown (later benefactor of the College of Rhode Island, renamed Brown University in honour of his nephew Nicholas) was looking to invest some of his family�s mercantile fortune in the textile business. New England wool and southern cotton were readily available, as was water power from Rhode Island�s swiftly flowing rivers. All that was lacking to convert a handcraft industry into one that was machine-based was machinery itself; however, the new devices for spinning and weaving that were coming into use in England were jealously guarded there. But Samuel Slater, a young English mechanic who immigrated to the United States in 1790 carrying the designs for the necessary machinery in his prodigious memory, became aware of Brown�s ambitions and of the problems he was having with his machinery. Slater formed a partnership with Brown and others to reproduce the crucial equipment and build prosperous Rhode Island fabric factories.

Social developments

In the decades before the American Civil War (1861�65), the civilization of the United States exerted an irresistible pull on visitors, hundreds of whom were assigned to report back to European audiences that were fascinated by the new society and insatiable for information on every facet of the �fabled republic.� What appeared to intrigue the travelers above all was the uniqueness of American society. In contrast to the relatively static and well-ordered civilization of the Old World, America seemed turbulent, dynamic, and in constant flux, its people crude but vital, awesomely ambitious, optimistic, and independent. Many well-bred Europeans were evidently taken aback by the self-assurance of lightly educated American common folk. Ordinary Americans seemed unwilling to defer to anyone on the basis of rank or status.

Birth of American Culture

�In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?� asked an English satirist early in the 1800s. Had he looked beyond the limits of �high culture,� he would have found plenty of answers. As a matter of fact, the period between 1815 and 1860 produced an outpouring of traditional literary works now known to students of English-language prose and poetry everywhere�the verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, as well as the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson�all expressing distinctively American themes and depicting distinctly American characters such as Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, and Captain Ahab who now belong to the world.

Melville, HermanHerman Melville, etching after a portrait by Joseph O. Eaton.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph 3c35949)

The people

American society was rapidly changing. Population grew at what to Europeans was an amazing rate�although it was the normal pace of American population growth for the antebellum decades�of between three-tenths and one-third per decade. After 1820 the rate of growth was not uniform throughout the country. New England and the Southern Atlantic states languished�the former region because it was losing settlers to the superior farmlands of the Western Reserve, the latter because its economy offered too few places to newcomers.

The special feature of the population increase of the 1830s and �40s was the extent to which it was composed of immigrants. Whereas about 250,000 Europeans had arrived in the first three decades of the 19th century, there were 10 times as many between 1830 and 1850. The newcomers were overwhelmingly Irish and German. Traveling in family groups rather than as individuals, they were attracted by the dazzling opportunities of American life: abundant work, land, food, and freedom on the one hand and the absence of compulsory military service on the other. Edward Pessen

The mere statistics of immigration do not, however, tell the whole story of its vital role in pre-Civil War America. The intermingling of technology, politics, and accident produced yet another �great migration.� By the 1840s the beginnings of steam transportation on the Atlantic and improvements in the sailing speed of the last generation of windjammers made oceanic passages more frequent and regular. It became easier for hungry Europeans to answer the call of America to take up the farmlands and build the cities. Irish migration would have taken place in any case, but the catastrophe of the Great Famine (Irish Potato Famine) of 1845�49 turned a stream into a torrent. Meanwhile, the steady growth of the democratic idea in Europe produced the Revolutions of 1848 in France, Italy, Hungary, and Germany. The uprisings in the last three countries were brutally suppressed, creating a wave of political refugees. Hence, many of the Germans who traveled over in the wake of the revolutions�the Forty-Eighters�were refugees who took liberal ideals, professional educations, and other intellectual capital to the American West. Overall German contributions to American musical, educational, and business life simply cannot be measured in statistics. Neither can one quantify the impact of the Irish politicians, policemen, and priests on American urban life or the impact of the Irish in general on Roman Catholicism in the United States.

Irish emigrants departing for the United States.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproducution no. LC-USZ62-2022)

Besides the Irish and Germans, there were thousands of Norwegians and Swedes who immigrated, driven by agricultural depression in the 1850s, to take up new land on the yet-unbroken Great Plains. And there was a much smaller migration to California in the 1850s of Chinese seeking to exchange hard times for new opportunities in the gold fields. These people too indelibly flavoured the culture of the United States.

Swedish immigrants en route to the western United States in the mid-19th century.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Cities

Cities, both old and new, thrived during the era, their growth in population outstripping the spectacular growth rate of the country as a whole and their importance and influence far transcending the relatively small proportions of citizens living in them. Whether on the �urban frontier� or in the older seaboard region, antebellum cities were the centres of wealth and political influence for their outlying hinterlands. New York City, with a population approaching 500,000 by midcentury, faced problems of a different order of magnitude from those confronting such cities as Poughkeepsie, New York, and Newark, New Jersey. Yet the pattern of change during the era was amazingly similar for eastern cities or western, old cities or new, great cities or small. The lifeblood of them all was commerce. Old ideals of economy in town government were grudgingly abandoned by the merchant, professional, and landowning elites who typically ruled. Taxes were increased in order to deal with pressing new problems and to enable the urban community of midcentury to realize new opportunities. Harbours were improved, police forces professionalized, services expanded, waste more reliably removed, streets improved, and welfare activities broadened, all as the result of the statesmanship and the self-interest of property owners who were convinced that amelioration was socially beneficial.

New York City in the 1850s.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Edward Pessen

Education and the role of women

Wealth

The brilliant French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, in common with most contemporary observers, believed American society to be remarkably egalitarian. Most rich American men were thought to have been born poor; �self-made� was the term Henry Clay popularized for them. The society was allegedly a very fluid one, marked by the rapid rise and fall of fortunes, with room at the top accessible to all but the most humble; opportunity for success seemed freely available to all, and, although material possessions were not distributed perfectly equally, they were, in theory, dispersed so fairly that only a few poor and a few rich men existed at either end of the social spectrum.

Alexis de Tocqueville, detail of an oil painting by T. Chass�riau; in the Versailles Museum.H. Roger-Viollet

The actuality, however, was far different. While the rich were inevitably not numerous, America by 1850 had more millionaires than all of Europe. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia each had perhaps1,000 individuals admitting to assets of $100,000 or more, at a time when wealthy taxpayers kept secret from assessors the bulk of their wealth. Because an annual income of $4,000 or $5,000 enabled a person to live luxuriously, these were great fortunes indeed. Typically, the wealthiest 1 percent of urban citizens owned approximately one-half the wealth of the great cities of the Northeast, while the great bulk of their populations possessed little or nothing. In what has long been called the �Age of the Common Man,� rich men were almost invariably born not into humble or poor families but into wealthy and prestigious ones. In western cities too, class lines increasingly hardened after 1830. The common man lived in the age, but he did not dominate it. It appears that contemporaries, overimpressed with the absence of a titled aristocracy and with the democratic tone and manner of American life, failed to see the extent to which money, family, and status exerted power in the New World even as they did in the Old.

Jacksonian democracy

The democratization of politics

Nevertheless, American politics became increasingly democratic during the 1820s and �30s. Local and state offices that had earlier been appointive became elective. Suffrage was expanded as property and other restrictions on voting were reduced or abandoned in most states. The freehold requirement that had denied voting to all but holders of real estate was almost everywhere discarded before 1820, while the taxpaying qualification was also removed, if more slowly and gradually. In many states a printed ballot replaced the earlier system of voice voting, while the secret ballot also grew in favour. Whereas in 1800 only two states provided for the popular choice of presidential electors, by 1832 only South Carolina still left the decision to the legislature. Conventions of elected delegates increasingly replaced legislative or congressional caucuses as the agencies for making party nominations. By the latter change, a system for nominating candidates by self-appointed cliques meeting in secret was replaced by a system of open selection of candidates by democratically elected bodies.

These democratic changes were not engineered by Andrew Jackson and his followers, as was once believed. Most of them antedated the emergence of Jackson�s Democratic Party, and in New York, Mississippi, and other states some of the reforms were accomplished over the objections of the Jacksonians. There were men in all sections who feared the spread of political democracy, but by the 1830s few were willing to voice such misgivings publicly. Jacksonians effectively sought to fix the impression that they alone were champions of democracy, engaged in mortal struggle against aristocratic opponents. The accuracy of such propaganda varied according to local circumstances. The great political reforms of the early 19th century in actuality were conceived by no one faction or party. The real question about these reforms concerns the extent to which they truly represented the victory of democracy in the United States.

Jackson, AndrewAndrew Jackson, oil on canvas by Asher B. Durand, c. 1800; in the collection of the New-York Historical Society.Bettmann/Corbis

Small cliques or entrenched �machines� dominated democratically elected nominating conventions as earlier they had controlled caucuses. While by the 1830s the common man�of European descent�had come into possession of the vote in most states, the nomination process continued to be outside his control. More important, the policies adopted by competing factions and parties in the states owed little to ordinary voters. The legislative programs of the �regencies� and juntos that effectively ran state politics were designed primarily to reward the party faithful and to keep them in power. State parties extolled the common people in grandiloquent terms but characteristically focused on prosaic legislation that awarded bank charters or monopoly rights to construct transportation projects to favoured insiders. That American parties would be pragmatic vote-getting coalitions, rather than organizations devoted to high political principles, was due largely to another series of reforms enacted during the era. Electoral changes that rewarded winners or plurality gatherers in small districts, in contrast to a previous system that divided a state�s offices among the several leading vote getters, worked against the chances of �single issue� or �ideological� parties while strengthening parties that tried to be many things to many people.

The Jacksonians

To his army of followers, Jackson was the embodiment of popular democracy. A truly self-made man of strong will and courage, he personified for many citizens the vast power of nature and Providence, on the one hand, and the majesty of the people, on the other. His very weaknesses, such as a nearly uncontrollable temper, were political strengths. Opponents who branded him an enemy of property and order only gave credence to the claim of Jackson�s supporters that he stood for the poor against the rich, the plain people against the interests.

Jackson, like most of his leading antagonists, was in fact a wealthy man of conservative social beliefs. In his many volumes of correspondence he rarely referred to labour. As a lawyer and man of affairs in Tennessee prior to his accession to the presidency, he aligned himself not with have-nots but with the influential, not with the debtor but with the creditor. His reputation was created largely by astute men who propagated the belief that his party was the people�s party and that the policies of his administrations were in the popular interest. Savage attacks on those policies by some wealthy critics only fortified the belief that the Jacksonian movement was radical as well as democratic.

The major parties

The great parties of the era were thus created to attain victory for men rather than measures. Once the parties were in being, their leaders understandably sought to convince the electorate of the primacy of principles. It is noteworthy, however, that former Federalists at first flocked to the new parties in largely equal numbers and that men on opposite sides of such issues as internal improvements or a national bank could unite behind Jackson. With the passage of time, the parties did come increasingly to be identified with distinctive, and opposing, political policies.

By the 1840s, Whig and Democratic congressmen voted as rival blocs. Whigs supported and Democrats opposed a weak executive, a new Bank of the United States, a high tariff, distribution of land revenues to the states, relief legislation to mitigate the effects of the depression, and federal reapportionment of House seats. Whigs voted against and Democrats approved an independent treasury, an aggressive foreign policy, and expansionism. These were important issues, capable of dividing the electorate just as they divided the major parties in Congress. Certainly it was significant that Jacksonians were more ready than their opponents to take punitive measures against African Americans or abolitionists or to banish and use other forceful measures against the southern Indian tribes, brushing aside treaties protecting Native American rights. But these differences do not substantiate the belief that the Democrats and Whigs were divided ideologically, with only the former somehow representing the interests of the propertyless.

Party lines earlier had been more easily broken, as during the crisis that erupted over South Carolina�s bitter objections to the high Tariff of 1828. Jackson�s firm opposition to Calhoun�s policy of nullification (i.e., the right of a state to nullify a federal law, in this case the tariff) had commanded wide support within and outside the Democratic Party. Clay�s solution to the crisis, a compromise tariff, represented not an ideological split with Jackson but Clay�s ability to conciliate and to draw political advantage from astute tactical maneuvering.

Cartoon drawn during the nullification controversy showing the manufacturing North getting fat at Southern expense. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Jacksonians depicted their war on the second Bank of the United States as a struggle against an alleged aristocratic monster that oppressed the West, debtor farmers, and poor people generally. Jackson�s decisive reelection in 1832 was once interpreted as a sign of popular agreement with the Democratic interpretation of the Bank War, but more recent evidence discloses that Jackson�s margin was hardly unprecedented and that Democratic success may have been due to other considerations. The second Bank was evidently well thought of by many Westerners, many farmers, and even Democratic politicians who admitted to opposing it primarily not to incur the wrath of Jackson.

Jackson�s reasons for detesting the second Bank and its president (Biddle) were complex. Anticapitalist ideology would not explain a Jacksonian policy that replaced a quasi-national bank as repository of government funds with dozens of state and private banks, equally controlled by capitalists and even more dedicated than was Biddle to profit making. The saving virtue of these �pet banks� appeared to be the Democratic political affiliations of their directors. Perhaps the pragmatism as well as the large degree of similarity between the Democrats and Whigs is best indicated by their frank adoption of the �spoils system.� The Whigs, while out of office, denounced the vile Democratic policy for turning lucrative customhouse and other posts over to supporters, but once in office they resorted to similar practices. It is of interest that the Jacksonian appointees were hardly more plebeian than were their so-called aristocratic predecessors.

Minor parties

The politics of principle was represented during the era not by the major parties but by the minor ones. The Anti-Masons aimed to stamp out an alleged aristocratic conspiracy. The Workingmen�s Party called for �social justice.� The Locofocos (so named after the matches they used to light up their first meeting in a hall darkened by their opponents) denounced monopolists in the Democratic Party and out. The variously named nativist parties accused the Roman Catholic Church of all manner of evil. The Liberty Party opposed the spread of slavery. All these parties were ephemeral because they proved incapable of mounting a broad appeal that attracted masses of voters in addition to their original constituencies. The Democratic and Whig parties thrived not in spite of their opportunism but because of it, reflecting well the practical spirit that animated most American voters.

An age of reform

Abolitionism

Finally and fatally there was abolitionism, the antislavery movement. Passionately advocated and resisted with equal intensity, it appeared as late as the 1850s to be a failure in politics. Yet by 1865 it had succeeded in embedding its goal in the Constitution by amendment, though at the cost of a civil war. At its core lay the issue of �race,� over which Americans have shown their best and worst faces for more than three centuries. When it became entangled in this period with the dynamics of American sectional conflict, its full explosive potential was released. If the reform impulse was a common one uniting the American people in the mid-19th century, its manifestation in abolitionism finally split them apart for four bloody years

Support of reform movements

The existence of many reform movements did not mean that a vast number of Americans supported them. Abolition did poorly at the polls. Some reforms were more popular than others, but by and large none of the major movements had mass followings. The evidence indicates that few persons actually participated in these activities. Utopian communities such as Brook Farm and those in New Harmony, Indiana, and Oneida, New York, did not succeed in winning over many followers or in inspiring many other groups to imitate their example. The importance of these and the other movements derived neither from their size nor from their achievements. Reform reflected the sensitivity of a small number of persons to imperfections in American life. In a sense, the reformers were �voices of conscience,� reminding their materialistic fellow citizens that the American Dream was not yet a reality, pointing to the gulf between the ideal and the actuality.

Recruit arriving at the utopian community in Oneida, N.Y.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Religious-inspired reform

Notwithstanding the wide impact of the American version of secular perfectionism, it was the reform inspired by religious zeal that was most apparent in the antebellum United States. Not that religious enthusiasm was invariably identified with social uplift; many reformers were more concerned with saving souls than with curing social ills. The merchant princes who played active roles in�and donated large sums of money to�the Sunday school unions, home missionary societies, and Bible and tract societies did so in part out of altruism and in part because the latter organizations stressed spiritual rather than social improvement while teaching the doctrine of the �contented poor.� In effect, conservatives who were strongly religious found no difficulty in using religious institutions to fortify their social predilections. Radicals, on the other hand, interpreted Christianity as a call to social action, convinced that true Christian rectitude could be achieved only in struggles that infuriated the smug and the greedy. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an example of the American reformer�s insistence on the primacy of the individual. The great goal according to him was the regeneration of the human spirit, rather than a mere improvement in material conditions. Emerson and reformers like him, however, acted on the premise that a foolish consistency was indeed the hobgoblin of little minds, for they saw no contradiction in uniting with like-minded idealists to act out or argue for a new social model. The spirit was to be revived and strengthened through forthright social action undertaken by similarly independent individuals.

Expansionism and political crisis at midcentury

Throughout the 19th century, eastern settlers kept spilling over into the Mississippi valley and beyond, pushing the frontier farther westward. The Louisiana Purchase territory offered ample room to pioneers and those who came after. American wanderlust, however, was not confined to that area. Throughout the era Americans in varying numbers moved into regions south, west, and north of the Louisiana Territory. Because Mexico and Great Britain held or claimed most of these lands, dispute inevitably broke out between these governments and the United States.

Westward expansion

Attitudes toward expansionism

Public attitudes toward expansion into Mexican territories were very much affected by the issue of slavery. Those opposed to the spread of slavery or simply not in favour of the institution joined abolitionists in discerning a proslavery policy in the Mexican-American War. The great political issue of the postwar years concerned slavery in the territories. Calhoun and spokesmen for the slave-owning South argued that slavery could not be constitutionally prohibited in the Mexican cession. �Free Soilers� supported the Wilmot Proviso idea�that slavery should not be permitted in the new territory. Others supported the proposal that popular sovereignty (called �squatter sovereignty� by its detractors) should prevail�that is, that settlers in the territories should decide the issue. Still others called for the extension westward of the 36�30′ line of demarcation for slavery that had resolved the Missouri controversy in 1820. Now, 30 years later, Clay again pressed a compromise on the country, supported dramatically by the aging Daniel Webster and by moderates in and out of the Congress. As the events in the California gold fields showed (beginning in 1849), many people had things other than political principles on their minds. The Compromise of 1850, as the separate resolutions resolving the controversy came to be known, infuriated those of high principle on both sides of the issue�Southerners resented that the compromise admitted California as a free state, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and gave territories the theoretical right to deny existence to their �peculiar institution,� while antislavery men deplored the same theoretical right of territories to permit the institution and abhorred the new, more-stringent federal fugitive-slave law. That Southern political leaders ceased talking secession shortly after the enactment of the compromise indicates who truly won the political skirmish. The people probably approved the settlement�but as subsequent events were to show, the issues had not been met but had been only deferred.

Compromise of 1850: Clay, HenryU.S. Senator Henry Clay, in a speech before the Senate, outlining the principal features of what would become the Compromise of 1850, coloured engraving, 19th century.� North Wind Picture Archives Edward Pessen

The Civil War

Prelude to war, 1850�60

Before the Civil War the United States experienced a whole generation of nearly unremitting political crisis. Underlying the problem was the fact that America in the early 19th century had been a country, not a nation. The major functions of government�those relating to education, transportation, health, and public order�were performed on the state or local level, and little more than a loose allegiance to the government in Washington, D.C., a few national institutions such as churches and political parties, and a shared memory of the Founding Fathers of the republic tied the country together. Within this loosely structured society every section, every state, every locality, every group could pretty much go its own way.

Gradually, however, changes in technology and in the economy were bringing all the elements of the country into steady and close contact. Improvements in transportation�first canals, then toll roads, and especially railroads�broke down isolation and encouraged the boy from the country to wander to the city, the farmer from New Hampshire to migrate to Iowa. Improvements in the printing press, which permitted the publication of penny newspapers, and the development of the telegraph system broke through the barriers of intellectual provincialism and made everybody almost instantaneously aware of what was going on throughout the country. As the railroad network proliferated, it had to have central direction and control; and national railroad corporations�the first true �big businesses� in the United States�emerged to provide order and stability.

For many Americans the wrench from a largely rural, slow-moving, fragmented society in the early 1800s to a bustling, integrated, national social order in the mid-century was an abrupt and painful one, and they often resisted it. Sometimes resentment against change manifested itself in harsh attacks upon those who appeared to be the agents of change�especially immigrants, who seemed to personify the forces that were altering the older America. Vigorous nativist movements appeared in most cities during the 1840s; but not until the 1850s, when the huge numbers of Irish and German immigrants of the previous decade became eligible to vote, did the antiforeign fever reach its peak. Directed both against immigrants and against the Roman Catholic church, to which so many of them belonged, the so-called Know-Nothings emerged as a powerful political force in 1854 and increased the resistance to change.

Sectionalism and slavery

A more enduring manifestation of hostility toward the nationalizing tendencies in American life was the reassertion of strong feelings of sectional loyalty. New Englanders felt threatened by the West, which drained off the ablest and most vigorous members of the labour force and also, once the railroad network was complete, produced wool and grain that undersold the products of the poor New England hill country. The West, too, developed a strong sectional feeling, blending its sense of its uniqueness, its feeling of being looked down upon as raw and uncultured, and its awareness that it was being exploited by the businessmen of the East.

The most conspicuous and distinctive section, however, was the South�an area set apart by climate, by a plantation system designed for the production of such staple crops as cotton, tobacco, and sugar, and, especially, by the persistence of slavery, which had been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States. It should not be thought that all or even most white Southerners were directly involved in the section�s �peculiar institution.� Indeed, in 1850 there were only 347,525 slaveholders in a total white population of about 6,000,000 in the slave states. Half of these owned four slaves or fewer and could not be considered planters. In the entire South there were fewer than 1,800 persons who owned more than 100 slaves.

Atlanta: Whitehall Street, 1864Whitehall Street, Atlanta, Georgia. A typical commercial street in the American South during the mid-19th century. The store in the centre sold furnishings and slaves. Photograph by George N. Barnard, 1864.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-B8171-3608 LC)

Nevertheless, slavery did give a distinctive tone to the whole pattern of Southern life. If the large planters were few, they were also wealthy, prestigious, and powerful; often they were the political as well as the economic leaders of their section; and their values pervaded every stratum of Southern society. Far from opposing slavery, small farmers thought only of the possibility that they too might, with hard work and good fortune, some day join the ranks of the planter class�to which they were closely connected by ties of blood, marriage, and friendship. Behind this virtually unanimous support of slavery lay the universal belief�shared by many whites in the North and West as well�that blacks were an innately inferior people who had risen only to a state of barbarism in their native Africa and who could live in a civilized society only if disciplined through slavery. Though by 1860 there were in fact about 250,000 free blacks in the South, most Southern whites resolutely refused to believe that the slaves, if freed, could ever coexist peacefully with their former masters. With shuddering horror, they pointed to an insurrection of blacks that had occurred in Santo Domingo, to a brief slave rebellion led by the African American Gabriel in Virginia in 1800, to a plot of Charleston, South Carolina, blacks headed by Denmark Vesey in 1822, and, especially, to a bloody and determined Virginia insurrection led by Nat Turner in 1831 as evidence that African Americans had to be kept under iron control. Facing increasing opposition to slavery outside their section, Southerners developed an elaborate proslavery argument, defending the institution on biblical, economic, and sociological grounds.

Nat Turner.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

A decade of political crises

In the early years of the republic, sectional differences had existed, but it had been possible to reconcile or ignore them because distances were great, communication was difficult, and the powerless national government had almost nothing to do. The revolution in transportation and communication, however, eliminated much of the isolation, and the victory of the United States in its brief war with Mexico left the national government with problems that required action.

Popular sovereignty

The Compromise of 1850 was an uneasy patchwork of concessions to all sides that began to fall apart as soon as it was enacted. In the long run the principle of popular sovereignty proved to be most unsatisfactory of all, making each territory a battleground where the supporters of the South contended with the defenders of the North and West.

United States: areas affected by Missouri Compromise, Compromise of 1850, and Kansas-Nebraska ActCompromises over extension of slavery into the U.S. territories.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The seriousness of those conflicts became clear in 1854, when Stephen A. Douglas introduced his Kansas bill in Congress, establishing a territorial government for the vast region that lay between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. In the Senate the bill was amended to create not one but two territories�Kansas and Nebraska�from the part of the Louisiana Purchase from which the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had forever excluded slavery. Douglas, who was unconcerned over the moral issue of slavery and desirous of getting on with the settling of the West and the construction of a transcontinental railroad, knew that the Southern senators would block the organization of Kansas as a free territory.

Douglas, Stephen A.Stephen A. Douglas.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Recognizing that the North and West had outstripped their section in population and hence in the House of Representatives, Southerners clung desperately to an equality of votes in the Senate and were not disposed to welcome any new free territories, which would inevitably become additional free states (as California had done through the Compromise of 1850). Accordingly, Douglas thought that the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which had been applied to the territories gained from Mexico, would avoid a political contest over the Kansas territory: it would permit Southern slaveholders to move into the area, but, since the region was unsuited for plantation slavery, it would inevitably result in the formation of additional free states. His bill therefore allowed the inhabitants of the territory self-government in all matters of domestic importance, including the slavery issue. This provision in effect allowed the territorial legislatures to mandate slavery in their areas and was directly contrary to the Missouri Compromise. With the backing of Pres.Franklin Pierce (served 1853�57), Douglas bullied, wheedled, and bluffed congressmen into passing his bill.

Pierce, FranklinFranklin Pierce. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, 1942; Frame conserved with funds from the Smithsonian Women's Committee

Polarization over slavery

Northern sensibilities were outraged. Although disliking slavery, Northerners had made few efforts to change the South�s �peculiar institution� so long as the republic was loosely articulated. (Indeed, when William Lloyd Garrison began his Liberator in 1831, urging the immediate and unconditional emancipation of all slaves, he had only a tiny following; and a few years later he had actually been mobbed in Boston.) But with the sections, perforce, being drawn closely together, Northerners could no longer profess indifference to the South and its institutions. Sectional differences, centring on the issue of slavery, began to appear in every American institution. During the 1840s the major national religious denominations, such as the Methodists and the Presbyterians, split over the slavery question. The Whig Party, which had once allied the conservative businessmen of the North and West with the planters of the South, divided and virtually disappeared after the election of 1852. When Douglas�s bill opened up to slavery Kansas and Nebraska�land that had long been reserved for the westward expansion of the free states�Northerners began to organize into an antislavery political party, called in some states the Anti-Nebraska Democratic Party, in others the People�s Party, but in most places, the Republican Party.

Events of 1855 and 1856 further exacerbated relations between the sections and strengthened this new party. Kansas, once organized by Congress, became the field of battle between the free and the slave states in a contest in which concern over slavery was mixed with land speculation and office seeking. A virtual civil war broke out, with rival free- and slave-state legislatures both claiming legitimacy (see also Bleeding Kansas). Disputes between individual settlers sometimes erupted into violence. A proslavery mob sacked the town of Lawrence, an antislavery stronghold, on May 21, 1856. On May 24�25 John Brown, a free-state partisan, led a small party in a raid upon some proslavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek, murdered five men in cold blood, and left their gashed and mutilated bodies as a warning to the slaveholders. Not even the U.S. Capitol was safe from the violence. On May 22 Preston S. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, brutally attacked Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts at his desk in the Senate chamber because he had presumably insulted the Carolinian�s �honour� in a speech he had given in support of Kansas abolitionists. The 1856 presidential election made it clear that voting was becoming polarized along sectional lines. Though James Buchanan, the Democratic nominee, was elected, John C. Fr�mont, the Republican candidate, received a majority of the votes in the free states.

Sumner, Charles: attackEngraving showing the attack on Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, 1856; from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The following year the Supreme Court of the United States tried to solve the sectional conflicts that had baffled both the Congress and the president. Hearing the case of Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who claimed freedom on the ground that his master had taken him to live in free territory, the majority of the court, headed by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, found that African Americans were not citizens of the United States and that Scott hence had no right to bring suit before the court. Taney also concluded that the U.S. laws prohibiting slavery in the territory were unconstitutional. Two Northern antislavery judges on the court bitterly attacked Taney�s logic and his conclusions. Acclaimed in the South, the Dred Scott decision was condemned and repudiated throughout the North.

Newspaper notice for a pamphlet on the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision.Library of Congress, ng. No. LC-USZ62-132561

By this point many Americans, North and South, had come to the conclusion that slavery and freedom could not much longer coexist in the United States. For Southerners the answer was withdrawal from a Union that no longer protected their rights and interests; they had talked of it as early as the Nashville Convention of 1850, when the compromise measures were under consideration, and now more and more Southerners favoured secession. For Northerners the remedy was to change the social institutions of the South; few advocated immediate or complete emancipation of the slaves, but many felt that the South�s �peculiar institution� must be contained. In 1858 William H. Seward, the leading Republican of New York, spoke of an �irrepressible conflict� between freedom and slavery; and in Illinois a rising Republican politician, Abraham Lincoln, who unsuccessfully contested Douglas for a seat in the Senate, announced that �this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.�

William H. Seward; photo by Mathew Brady.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

That it was not possible to end the agitation over slavery became further apparent in 1859 when on the night of October 16, John Brown, who had escaped punishment for the Pottawatomie massacre, staged a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), designed to free the slaves and, apparently, to help them begin a guerrilla war against the Southern whites. Even though Brown was promptly captured and Virginia slaves gave no heed to his appeals, Southerners feared that this was the beginning of organized Northern efforts to undermine their social system. The fact that Brown was a fanatic and an inept strategist whose actions were considered questionable even by abolitionists did not lessen Northern admiration for him.

Harpers FerryView of the town of Harpers Ferry, now in West Virginia, and railroad bridge.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-B8171-7187 DLC)

The presidential election of 1860 occurred, therefore, in an atmosphere of great tension. Southerners, determined that their rights should be guaranteed by law, insisted upon a Democratic candidate willing to protect slavery in the territories; and they rejected Stephen A. Douglas, whose popular-sovereignty doctrine left the question in doubt, in favour of John C. Breckinridge. Douglas, backed by most of the Northern and border-state Democrats, ran on a separate Democratic ticket. Elderly conservatives, who deplored all agitation of the sectional questions but advanced no solutions, offered John Bell as candidate of the Constitutional Union Party. Republicans, confident of success, passed over the claims of Seward, who had accumulated too many liabilities in his long public career, and nominated Lincoln instead. Voting in the subsequent election was along markedly sectional patterns, with Republican strength confined almost completely to the North and West. Though Lincoln received only a plurality of the popular vote, he was an easy winner in the electoral college.

�The Undecided Political Prize Fight,� a lithograph depicting the presidential campaign of 1860 and featuring Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-7877)

Secession and the politics of the Civil War, 1860�65

The coming of the war

In the South, Lincoln�s election was taken as the signal for secession, and on December 20 South Carolina became the first state to withdraw from the Union. Promptly the other states of the lower South followed. Feeble efforts on the part of Buchanan�s administration to check secession failed, and one by one most of the federal forts in the Southern states were taken over by secessionists. Meanwhile, strenuous efforts in Washington to work out another compromise failed. (The most promising plan was John J. Crittenden�s proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line, dividing free from slave states, to the Pacific.)

Neither extreme Southerners, now intent upon secession, nor Republicans, intent upon reaping the rewards of their hard-won election victory, were really interested in compromise. On February 4, 1861�a month before Lincoln could be inaugurated in Washington�six Southern states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana) sent representatives to Montgomery, Alabama, to set up a new independent government. Delegates from Texas soon joined them. With Jefferson Davis of Mississippi at its head, the Confederate States of America came into being, set up its own bureaus and offices, issued its own money, raised its own taxes, and flew its own flag. Not until May 1861, after hostilities had broken out and Virginia had seceded, did the new government transfer its capital to Richmond.

Davis, Jefferson: inaugurationInauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States of America, in front of the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 18, 1861. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-pga-01584)

Faced with a fait accompli, Lincoln when inaugurated was prepared to conciliate the South in every way but one: he would not recognize that the Union could be divided. The test of his determination came early in his administration, when he learned that the Federal troops under Maj. Robert Anderson in Fort Sumter, South Carolina�then one of the few military installations in the South still in Federal hands�had to be promptly supplied or withdrawn. After agonized consultation with his cabinet, Lincoln determined that supplies must be sent even if doing so provoked the Confederates into firing the first shot. On April 12, 1861, just before Federal supply ships could reach the beleaguered Anderson, Confederate guns in Charleston opened fire upon Fort Sumter, and the war began.

Fort Sumter, 1861Interior view of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, under the Confederate flag, April 15, 1861.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-ppmsca-32284)

The political course of the war

For the next four years the Union and the Confederacy were locked in conflict�by far the most titanic waged in the Western Hemisphere.

The policies pursued by the governments of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were astonishingly similar. Both presidents at first relied upon volunteers to man the armies, and both administrations were poorly prepared to arm and equip the hordes of young men who flocked to the colours in the initial stages of the war. As the fighting progressed, both governments reluctantly resorted to conscription�the Confederates first, in early 1862, and the Federal government more slowly, with an ineffective measure of late 1862 followed by a more stringent law in 1863. Both governments pursued an essentially laissez-faire policy in economic matters, with little effort to control prices, wages, or profits. Only the railroads were subject to close government regulation in both regions; and the Confederacy, in constructing some of its own powder mills, made a few experiments in �state socialism.� Neither Lincoln�s nor Davis�s administration knew how to cope with financing the war; neither developed an effective system of taxation until late in the conflict, and both relied heavily upon borrowing. Faced with a shortage of funds, both governments were obliged to turn to the printing press and to issue fiat money; the U.S. government issued $432,000,000 in �greenbacks� (as this irredeemable, non-interest-bearing paper money was called), while the Confederacy printed over $1,554,000,000 in such paper currency. In consequence, both sections experienced runaway inflation, which was much more drastic in the South, where, by the end of the war, flour sold at $1,000 a barrel.

Even toward slavery, the root cause of the war, the policies of the two warring governments were surprisingly similar. The Confederate constitution, which was in most other ways similar to that of the United States, expressly guaranteed the institution of slavery. Despite pressure from abolitionists, Lincoln�s administration was not initially disposed to disturb the �peculiar institution,� if only because any move toward emancipation would upset the loyalty of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri�the four slave states that remained in the Union.

Moves toward emancipation

Gradually, however, under the pressure of war, both governments moved to end slavery. Lincoln came to see that emancipation of African Americans would favourably influence European opinion toward the Northern cause, might deprive the Confederates of their productive labour force on the farms, and would add much-needed recruits to the Federal armies. In September 1862 he issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, promising to free all slaves in rebel territory by January 1, 1863, unless those states returned to the Union; and when the Confederates remained obdurate, he followed it with his promised final proclamation. A natural accompaniment of emancipation was the use of African American troops, and by the end of the war the number of blacks who served in the Federal armies totaled 178,895. Uncertain of the constitutionality of his Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln urged Congress to abolish slavery by constitutional amendment; but this was not done until January 31, 1865, with the Thirteenth Amendment, and the actual ratification did not take place until after the war.

Meanwhile the Confederacy, though much more slowly, was also inexorably drifting in the direction of emancipation. The South�s desperate need for troops caused many military men, including Robert E. Lee, to demand the recruitment of blacks; finally, in March 1865 the Confederate congress authorized the raising of African American regiments. Though a few blacks were recruited for the Confederate armies, none actually served in battle because surrender was at hand. In yet another way Davis�s government showed its awareness of slavery�s inevitable end when, in a belated diplomatic mission to seek assistance from Europe, the Confederacy in March 1865 promised to emancipate the slaves in return for diplomatic recognition. Nothing came of the proposal, but it is further evidence that by the end of the war both North and South realized that slavery was doomed.

Sectional dissatisfaction

As war leaders, both Lincoln and Davis came under severe attack in their own sections. Both had to face problems of disloyalty. In Lincoln�s case, the Irish immigrants to the eastern cities and the Southern-born settlers of the northwestern states were especially hostile to African Americans and, therefore, to emancipation, while many other Northerners became tired and disaffected as the war dragged on interminably. Residents of the Southern hill country, where slavery never had much of a foothold, were similarly hostile toward Davis. Furthermore, in order to wage war, both presidents had to strengthen the powers of central government, thus further accelerating the process of national integration that had brought on the war. Both administrations were, in consequence, vigorously attacked by state governors, who resented the encroachment upon their authority and who strongly favoured local autonomy.

The extent of Northern dissatisfaction was indicated in the congressional elections of 1862, when Lincoln and his party sustained a severe rebuff at the polls and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives was drastically reduced. Similarly in the Confederacy the congressional elections of 1863 went so strongly against the administration that Davis was able to command a majority for his measures only through the continued support of representatives and senators from the states of the upper South, which were under control of the Federal army and consequently unable to hold new elections.

As late as August 1864, Lincoln despaired of his reelection to the presidency and fully expected that the Democratic candidate, Gen. George B. McClellan, would defeat him. Davis, at about the same time, was openly attacked by Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. But Federal military victories, especially William Tecumseh Sherman�s capture of Atlanta, greatly strengthened Lincoln; and, as the war came to a triumphant close for the North, he attained new heights of popularity. Davis�s administration, on the other hand, lost support with each successive defeat, and in January 1865 the Confederate congress insisted that Davis make Robert E. Lee the supreme commander of all Southern forces. (Some, it is clear, would have preferred to make the general dictator.)

Antietam, Battle of: Lincoln and McClellan meet in the general's tentPresident Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan in the general's tent, Antietam, Maryland, October 3, 1862. Photograph by Alexander Gardner.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-B8171-0602 DLC) David Herbert Donald

Fighting the Civil War

Following the capture of Fort Sumter, both sides quickly began raising and organizing armies. On July 21, 1861, some 30,000 Union troops marching toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, were stopped at Bull Run (Manassas) and then driven back to Washington, D.C., by Confederates under Gen. Thomas J. �Stonewall� Jackson and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. The shock of defeat galvanized the Union, which called for 500,000 more recruits. Gen. George B. McClellan was given the job of training the Union�s Army of the Potomac.

Foreign affairs

Davis and many Confederates expected recognition of their independence and direct intervention in the war on their behalf by Great Britain and possibly France. But they were cruelly disappointed, in part through the skillful diplomacy of Lincoln, Secretary of State Seward, and the Union ambassador to England, Charles Francis Adams, and in part through Confederate military failure at a crucial stage of the war.

Adams, Charles FrancisCharles Francis AdamsLibrary of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Union�s first trouble with Britain came when Capt. Charles Wilkes halted the British steamer Trent" class="md-crosslink">Trent on November 8, 1861, and forcibly removed two Confederate envoys, James M. Mason and John Slidell, bound for Europe. Only the eventual release of the two men prevented a diplomatic rupture with Lord Palmerston�s government in London. Another crisis erupted between the Union and England when the Alabama, built in the British Isles, was permitted upon completion to sail and join the Confederate navy, despite Adams�s protestations. And when word reached the Lincoln government that two powerful rams were being constructed in Britain for the Confederacy, Adams reputedly sent his famous �this is war� note to Palmerston, and the rams were seized by the British government at the last moment.

The diplomatic crisis of the Civil War came after Lee�s striking victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August 1862 and subsequent invasion of Maryland. The British government was set to offer mediation of the war and, if this was refused by the Lincoln administration (as it would have been), forceful intervention on behalf of the Confederacy. Only a victory by Lee on Northern soil was needed, but he was stopped by McClellan in September at Antietam, the Union�s most needed success. The Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the following summer ensured the continuing neutrality of Britain and France, especially when Russia seemed inclined to favour the Northern cause. Even the growing British shortage of cotton from the Southern states did not force Palmerston�s government into Davis�s camp, particularly when British consuls in the Confederacy were more closely restricted toward the close of the war. In the final act, even the Confederate offer to abolish slavery in early 1865 in return for British recognition fell on deaf ears.

Aftermath

The war was horribly costly for both sides. The Federal forces sustained more than a half million casualties (including nearly 360,000 deaths); the Confederate armies suffered about 483,000 casualties (approximately 258,000 deaths). Both governments, after strenuous attempts to finance loans, were obliged to resort to the printing press to make fiat money. While separate Confederate figures are lacking, the war finally cost the United States more than $15 billion. The South, especially, where most of the war was fought and which lost its labour system, was physically and economically devastated. In sum, although the Union was preserved and restored, the cost in physical and moral suffering was incalculable, and some spiritual wounds caused by the war still have not been healed. Warren W. Hassler The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Reconstruction and the New South, 1865�1900

Reconstruction, 1865�77

Reconstruction under Abraham Lincoln

The original Northern objective in the Civil War was the preservation of the Union�a war aim with which virtually everybody in the free states agreed. As the fighting progressed, the Lincoln government concluded that emancipation of the slaves was necessary in order to secure military victory; and thereafter freedom became a second war aim for the members of the Republican Party. The more radical members of that party�men like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens�believed that emancipation would prove a sham unless the government guaranteed the civil and political rights of the freedmen; thus, equality of all citizens before the law became a third war aim for this powerful faction. The fierce controversies of the Reconstruction era raged over which of these objectives should be insisted upon and how these goals should be secured.

United States: After 1861The United States after 1861.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Lincoln�s plan

Lincoln himself had a flexible and pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, insisting only that the Southerners, when defeated, pledge future loyalty to the Union and emancipate their slaves. As the Southern states were subdued, he appointed military governors to supervise their restoration. The most vigorous and effective of these appointees was Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat whose success in reconstituting a loyal government in Tennessee led to his nomination as vice president on the Republican ticket with Lincoln in 1864. In December 1863 Lincoln announced a general plan for the orderly Reconstruction of the Southern states, promising to recognize the government of any state that pledged to support the Constitution and the Union and to emancipate the slaves if it was backed by at least 10 percent of the number of voters in the 1860 presidential election. In Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee loyal governments were formed under Lincoln�s plan; and they sought readmission to the Union with the seating of their senators and representatives in Congress.

Lincoln-Johnson campaign bannerCampaign banner for 1864 Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln and running mate Andrew Johnson, lithograph, 1864.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Radicals� plan

Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson

At first it seemed that Johnson might be able to work more cooperatively with Congress in the process of Reconstruction. A former representative and a former senator, he understood congressmen. A loyal Unionist who had stood by his country even at the risk of his life when Tennessee seceded, he was certain not to compromise with secession; and his experience as military governor of that state showed him to be politically shrewd and tough toward the slaveholders. �Johnson, we have faith in you,� Radical Benjamin F. Wade assured the new president on the day he took the oath of office. �By the gods, there will be no trouble running the government.�

Johnson, Andrew: oath of officeAndrew Johnson taking the oath of office in the parlour of the Kirkwood House, Washington, D.C., April 15, 1865. Newsprint from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1866.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Johnson�s policy

Such Radical trust in Johnson proved misplaced. The new president was, first of all, himself a Southerner. He was a Democrat who looked for the restoration of his old party partly as a step toward his own reelection to the presidency in 1868. Most important of all, Johnson shared the white Southerners� attitude toward African Americans, considering black men innately inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights. On May 29, 1865, Johnson made his policy clear when he issued a general proclamation of pardon and amnesty for most Confederates and authorized the provisional governor of North Carolina to proceed with the reorganization of that state. Shortly afterward he issued similar proclamations for the other former Confederate states. In each case a state constitutional convention was to be chosen by the voters who pledged future loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. The conventions were expected to repeal the ordinances of secession, to repudiate the Confederate debt, and to accept the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. The president did not, however, require them to enfranchise African Americans.

Johnson, AndrewAndrew Johnson pardoning Confederate soldiers at the White House, Washington, D.C.; Harper's Weekly, 1865.Harper's Weekly V. 9, No. 459, October 1865

�Black Codes�

Given little guidance from Washington, Southern whites turned to the traditional political leaders of their section for guidance in reorganizing their governments; and the new regimes in the South were suspiciously like those of the antebellum period. To be sure, slavery was abolished; but each reconstructed Southern state government proceeded to adopt a �Black Code,� regulating the rights and privileges of freedmen. Varying from state to state, these codes in general treated African Americans as inferiors, relegated to a secondary and subordinate position in society. Their right to own land was restricted, they could not bear arms, and they might be bound out in servitude for vagrancy and other offenses. The conduct of white Southerners indicated that they were not prepared to guarantee even minimal protection of African American rights. In riots in Memphis (May 1866) and New Orleans (July 1866), African Americans were brutally assaulted and promiscuously killed.

Civil rights legislation

Watching these developments with forebodings, Northern Republicans during the congressional session of 1865�66 inevitably drifted into conflict with the president. Congress attempted to protect the rights of African Americans by extending the life of the Freedmen�s Bureau, a welfare agency established in March 1865 to ease the transition from slavery to freedom; but Johnson vetoed the bill. An act to define and guarantee African Americans� basic civil rights met a similar fate, but Republicans succeeded in passing it over the president�s veto. While the president, from the porch of the White House, denounced the leaders of the Republican Party as �traitors,� Republicans in Congress tried to formulate their own plan to reconstruct the South. Their first effort was the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the basic civil rights of all citizens, regardless of colour, and which tried to persuade the Southern states to enfranchise African Americans by threatening to reduce their representation in Congress.

Andrew Johnson; photo from the Brady-Handy Collection.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The president, the Northern Democrats, and the Southern whites spurned this Republican plan of Reconstruction. Johnson tried to organize his own political party in the National Union Convention, which met in Philadelphia in August 1866; and in August and September he visited many Northern and Western cities in order to defend his policies and to attack the Republican leaders. At the president�s urging, every Southern state except Tennessee overwhelmingly rejected the Fourteenth Amendment.

Victorious in the fall elections, congressional Republicans moved during the 1866�67 session to devise a second, more stringent program for reconstructing the South. After long and acrimonious quarrels between Radical and moderate Republicans, the party leaders finally produced a compromise plan in the First Reconstruction Act of 1867. Expanded and clarified in three supplementary Reconstruction acts, this legislation swept away the regimes the president had set up in the South, put the former Confederacy back under military control, called for the election of new constitutional conventions, and required the constitutions adopted by these bodies to include both African American suffrage and the disqualification of former Confederate leaders from officeholding. Under this legislation, new governments were established in all the former Confederate states (except Tennessee, which had already been readmitted); and by July 1868 Congress agreed to seat senators and representatives from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By July 1870 the remaining Southern states had been similarly reorganized and readmitted.

Suspicious of Andrew Johnson, Republicans in Congress did not trust the president to enforce the Reconstruction legislation they passed over his repeated vetoes, and they tried to deprive him of as much power as possible. Congress limited the president�s control over the army by requiring that all his military orders be issued through the general of the army, Ulysses S. Grant, who was believed loyal to the Radical cause; and in the Tenure of Office Act (1867) they limited the president�s right to remove appointive officers. When Johnson continued to do all he could to block the enforcement of Radical legislation in the South, the more extreme members of the Republican Party demanded his impeachment. The president�s decision in February 1868 to remove the Radical secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton from the Cabinet, in apparent defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, provided a pretext for impeachment proceedings. The House of Representatives voted to impeach the president, and after a protracted trial the Senate acquitted him by the margin of only one vote.

Johnson, Andrew: impeachment trialThe impeachment trial of Pres. Andrew Johnson, illustration from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, March 28, 1868.U.S. Senate

The South during Reconstruction

In the South the Reconstruction period was a time of readjustment accompanied by disorder. Southern whites wished to keep African Americans in a condition of quasi-servitude, extending few civil rights and firmly rejecting social equality. African Americans, on the other hand, wanted full freedom and, above all, land of their own. Inevitably, there were frequent clashes. Some erupted into race riots, but acts of terrorism against individual African American leaders were more common.

During this turmoil, Southern whites and blacks began to work out ways of getting their farms back into operation and of making a living. Indeed, the most important developments of the Reconstruction era were not the highly publicized political contests but the slow, almost imperceptible changes that occurred in Southern society. African Americans could now legally marry, and they set up conventional and usually stable family units; they quietly seceded from the white churches and formed their own religious organizations, which became centres for the African American community. Without land or money, most freedmen had to continue working for white masters; but they were now unwilling to labour in gangs or to live in the old slave quarters under the eye of the plantation owner.

Sharecropping gradually became the accepted labour system in most of the South�planters, short of capital, favoured the system because it did not require them to pay cash wages; African Americans preferred it because they could live in individual cabins on the tracts they rented and because they had a degree of independence in choosing what to plant and how to cultivate. The section as a whole, however, was desperately poor throughout the Reconstruction era; and a series of disastrously bad crops in the late 1860s, followed by the general agricultural depression of the 1870s, hurt both whites and blacks.

The governments set up in the Southern states under the congressional program of Reconstruction were, contrary to traditional clich�s, fairly honest and effective. Though the period has sometimes been labeled �Black Reconstruction,� the Radical governments in the South were never dominated by African Americans. There were no black governors, only two black senators and a handful of congressmen, and only one legislature controlled by blacks. Those African Americans who did hold office appear to have been similar in competence and honesty to the whites. It is true that these Radical governments were expensive, but large state expenditures were necessary to rebuild after the war and to establish�for the first time in most Southern states�a system of common schools. Corruption there certainly was, though nowhere on the scale of the Tweed Ring, which at that time was busily looting New York City; but it is not possible to show that Republicans were more guilty than Democrats, or blacks than whites, in the scandals that did occur.

Though some Southern whites in the mountainous regions and some planters in the rich bottomlands were willing to cooperate with the African Americans and their Northern-born �carpetbagger� allies in these new governments, there were relatively few such �scalawags�; the mass of Southern whites remained fiercely opposed to African American political, civil, and social equality. Sometimes their hostility was expressed through such terrorist organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to punish so-called �uppity Negroes� and to drive their white collaborators from the South. More frequently it was manifested through support of the Democratic Party, which gradually regained its strength in the South and waited for the time when the North would tire of supporting the Radical regimes and would withdraw federal troops from the South.

The Ulysses S. Grant administrations, 1869�77

The New South, 1877�90

The era of conservative domination, 1877�90

The Republican regimes in the Southern states began to fall as early as 1870; by 1877 they had all collapsed. For the next 13 years the South was under the leadership of white Democrats whom their critics called Bourbons because, like the French royal family, they supposedly had learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the revolution they had experienced. For the South as a whole, the characterization is neither quite accurate nor quite fair. In most Southern states the new political leaders represented not only the planters but also the rising Southern business community, interested in railroads, cotton textiles, and urban land speculation.

Even on racial questions the new Southern political leaders were not so reactionary as the label Bourbon might suggest. Though whites were in the majority in all but two of the Southern states, the conservative regimes did not attempt to disfranchise African Americans. Partly their restraint was caused by fear of further federal intervention; chiefly, however, it stemmed from a conviction on the part of conservative leaders that they could control African American voters, whether through fraud, intimidation, or manipulation.

Indeed, African American votes were sometimes of great value to these regimes, which favoured the businessmen and planters of the South at the expense of the small white farmers. These �Redeemer� governments sharply reduced or even eliminated the programs of the state governments that benefited poor people. The public school system was starved for money; in 1890 the per capita expenditure in the South for public education was only 97 cents, as compared with $2.24 in the country as a whole. The care of state prisoners, the insane, and the blind was also neglected; and measures to safeguard the public health were rejected. At the same time these conservative regimes were often astonishingly corrupt, and embezzlement and defalcation on the part of public officials were even greater than during the Reconstruction years.

The small white farmers resentful of planter dominance, residents of the hill country outvoted by Black Belt constituencies, and politicians excluded from the ruling cabals tried repeatedly to overthrow the conservative regimes in the South. During the 1870s they supported Independent or Greenback Labor candidates, but without notable success. In 1879 the Readjuster Party in Virginia�so named because its supporters sought to readjust the huge funded debt of that state so as to lessen the tax burden on small farmers�gained control of the legislature and secured in 1880 the election of its leader, Gen. William Mahone, to the U.S. Senate. Not until 1890, however, when the powerful Farmers� Alliance, hitherto devoted exclusively to the promotion of agricultural reforms, dropped its ban on politics, was there an effective challenge to conservative hegemony. In that year, with Alliance backing, Benjamin R. Tillman was chosen governor of South Carolina and James S. Hogg was elected governor of Texas; the heyday of Southern populism was at hand.

William MahoneCourtesy Meserve-Kunhardt Collection

Jim Crow legislation

African American voting in the South was a casualty of the conflict between Redeemers and Populists. Although some Populist leaders, such as Tom Watson in Georgia, saw that poor whites and poor blacks in the South had a community of interest in the struggle against the planters and the businessmen, most small white farmers exhibited vindictive hatred toward African Americans, whose votes had so often been instrumental in upholding conservative regimes. Beginning in 1890, when Mississippi held a new constitutional convention, and continuing through 1908, when Georgia amended its constitution, every state of the former Confederacy moved to disfranchise African Americans. Because the U.S. Constitution forbade outright racial discrimination, the Southern states excluded African Americans by requiring that potential voters be able to read or to interpret any section of the Constitution�a requirement that local registrars waived for whites but rigorously insisted upon when an audacious black wanted to vote. Louisiana, more ingenious, added the �grandfather clause� to its constitution, which exempted from this literacy test all of those who had been entitled to vote on January 1, 1867�i.e., before Congress imposed African American suffrage upon the South�together with their sons and grandsons. Other states imposed stringent property qualifications for voting or enacted complex poll taxes.

Socially as well as politically, race relations in the South deteriorated as farmers� movements rose to challenge the conservative regimes. By 1890, with the triumph of Southern populism, the African American�s place was clearly defined by law; he was relegated to a subordinate and entirely segregated position. Not only were legal sanctions (some reminiscent of the �Black Codes�) being imposed upon African Americans, but informal, extralegal, and often brutal steps were also being taken to keep them in their �place.� (See Jim Crow law.) From 1889 to 1899, lynchings in the South averaged 187.5 per year.

Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise

Faced with implacable and growing hostility from Southern whites, many African Americans during the 1880s and �90s felt that their only sensible course was to avoid open conflict and to work out some pattern of accommodation. The most influential African American spokesman for this policy was Booker T. Washington, the head of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who urged his fellow African Americans to forget about politics and college education in the classical languages and to learn how to be better farmers and artisans. With thrift, industry, and abstention from politics, he thought that African Americans could gradually win the respect of their white neighbours. In 1895, in a speech at the opening of the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, Washington most fully elaborated his position, which became known as the Atlanta Compromise. Abjuring hopes of federal intervention in behalf of African Americans, Washington argued that reform in the South would have to come from within. Change could best be brought about if blacks and whites recognized that �the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly�; in the social life the races in the South could be as separate as the fingers, but in economic progress as united as the hand.

Booker T. Washington, first principal and chief developer of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Enthusiastically received by Southern whites, Washington�s program also found many adherents among Southern blacks, who saw in his doctrine a way to avoid head-on, disastrous confrontations with overwhelming white force. Whether or not Washington�s plan would have produced a generation of orderly, industrious, frugal African Americans slowly working themselves into middle-class status is not known because of the intervention of a profound economic depression throughout the South during most of the post-Reconstruction period. Neither poor whites nor poor blacks had much opportunity to rise in a region that was desperately impoverished. By 1890 the South ranked lowest in every index that compared the sections of the United States�lowest in per capita income, lowest in public health, lowest in education. In short, by the 1890s the South, a poor and backward region, had yet to recover from the ravages of the Civil War or to reconcile itself to the readjustments required by the Reconstruction era. David Herbert Donald

The transformation of American society, 1865�1900

National expansion

Growth of the nation

The population of the continental United States in 1880 was slightly above 50,000,000. In 1900 it was just under 76,000,000, a gain of more than 50 percent, but still the smallest rate of population increase for any 20-year period of the 19th century. The rate of growth was unevenly distributed, ranging from less than 10 percent in northern New England to more than 125 percent in the 11 states and territories of the Far West. Most of the states east of the Mississippi reported gains slightly below the national average.

Immigration

Much of the population increase was due to the more than 9,000,000 immigrants who entered the United States in the last 20 years of the century, the largest number to arrive in any comparable period up to that time. From the earliest days of the republic until 1895, the majority of immigrants had always come from northern or western Europe. Beginning in 1896, however, the great majority of the immigrants were from southern or eastern Europe. Nervous Americans, already convinced that immigrants wielded too much political power or were responsible for violence and industrial strife, found new cause for alarm, fearing that the new immigrants could not easily be assimilated into American society. Those fears gave added stimulus to agitation for legislation to limit the number of immigrants eligible for admission to the United States and led, in the early 20th century, to quota laws favouring immigrants from northern and western Europe.

Until that time, the only major restriction against immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, prohibiting for a period of 10 years the immigration of Chinese labourers into the United States. This act was both the culmination of more than a decade of agitation on the West Coast for the exclusion of the Chinese and an early sign of the coming change in the traditional U.S. philosophy of welcoming virtually all immigrants. In response to pressure from California, Congress had passed an exclusion act in 1879, but it had been vetoed by President Hayes on the ground that it abrogated rights guaranteed to the Chinese by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. In 1880 these treaty provisions were revised to permit the United States to suspend the immigration of Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 for another 10-year period, and in 1902 the suspension of Chinese immigration was made indefinite.

Westward migration

The United States completed its North American expansion in 1867, when Secretary of State Seward persuaded Congress to purchase Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000. Thereafter, the development of the West progressed rapidly, with the percentage of American citizens living west of the Mississippi increasing from about 22 percent in 1880 to 27 percent in 1900. New states were added to the Union throughout the century, and by 1900 there were only three territories still awaiting statehood in the continental United States: Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Urban growth

In 1890 the Bureau of the Census discovered that a continuous line could no longer be drawn across the West to define the farthest advance of settlement. Despite the continuing westward movement of population, the frontier had become a symbol of the past. The movement of people from farms to cities more accurately predicted the trends of the future. In 1880 about 28 percent of the American people lived in communities designated by the Bureau of the Census as urban; by 1900 that figure had risen to 40 percent. In those statistics could be read the beginning of the decline of rural power in America and the emergence of a society built upon a burgeoning industrial complex.

The West

Abraham Lincoln once described the West as the �treasure house of the nation.� In the 30 years after the discovery of gold in California, prospectors found gold or silver in every state and territory of the Far West.

The mineral empire

There were few truly rich �strikes� in the post-Civil War years. Of those few, the most important were the fabulously rich Comstock Lode of silver in western Nevada (first discovered in 1859 but developed more extensively later) and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota (1874) and at Cripple Creek, Colorado (1891).

Black Hills; immigrantImmigrants bound for the goldfields in the Black Hills of South Dakota filling the waiting room of the Union Pacific Railroad in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1877.Rare Book and Special Collections Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Each new discovery of gold or silver produced an instant mining town to supply the needs and pleasures of the prospectors. If most of the ore was close to the surface, the prospectors would soon extract it and depart, leaving behind a ghost town�empty of people but a reminder of a romantic moment in the past. If the veins ran deep, organized groups with the capital to buy the needed machinery would move in to mine the subsoil wealth, and the mining town would gain some stability as the centre of a local industry. In a few instances, those towns gained permanent status as the commercial centres of agricultural areas that first developed to meet the needs of the miners but later expanded to produce a surplus that they exported to other parts of the West.

The open range

At the close of the Civil War, the price of beef in the Northern states was abnormally high. At the same time, millions of cattle grazed aimlessly on the plains of Texas. A few shrewd Texans concluded that there might be greater profits in cattle than in cotton, especially because it required little capital to enter the cattle business�only enough to employ a few cowboys to tend the cattle during the year and to drive them to market in the spring. No one owned the cattle, and they grazed without charge upon the public domain.

The one serious problem was the shipment of the cattle to market. The Kansas Pacific resolved that problem when it completed a rail line that ran as far west as Abilene, Kansas, in 1867. Abilene was 200 miles (300 kilometres) from the nearest point in Texas where the cattle grazed during the year, but Texas cattlemen almost immediately instituted the annual practice of driving that portion of their herds that was ready for market overland to Abilene in the spring. There they met representatives of Eastern packinghouses, to whom they sold their cattle.

The open-range cattle industry prospered beyond expectations and even attracted capital from conservative investors in the British Isles. By the 1880s the industry had expanded along the plains as far north as the Dakotas. In the meantime, a new menace had appeared in the form of the advancing frontier of population, but the construction of the Santa Fe Railway through Dodge City, Kansas, to La Junta, Colorado, permitted the cattlemen to move their operations westward ahead of the settlers; Dodge City replaced Abilene as the principal centre for the annual meeting of cattlemen and buyers. Despite sporadic conflicts with settlers encroaching upon the high plains, the open range survived until a series of savage blizzards struck the plains with unprecedented fury in the winter of 1886�87, killing hundreds of thousands of cattle and forcing many owners into bankruptcy. Those who still had some cattle and some capital abandoned the open range, gained title to lands farther west, where they could provide shelter for their livestock, and revived a cattle industry on land that would be immune to further advances of the frontier of settlement. Their removal to these new lands had been made possible in part by the construction of other railroads connecting the region with Chicago and the Pacific coast.

cowboy; roundupCowboys at �mess� during a roundup before a cattle drive in 1887; photo by J.C.H. Grabil.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The expansion of the railroads

In 1862 Congress authorized the construction of two railroads that together would provide the first railroad link between the Mississippi valley and the Pacific coast. One was the Union Pacific, to run westward from Council Bluffs, Iowa; the other was the Central Pacific, to run eastward from Sacramento, California. To encourage the rapid completion of those roads, Congress provided generous subsidies in the form of land grants and loans. Construction was slower than Congress had anticipated, but the two lines met, with elaborate ceremonies, on May 10, 1869, at Promontory, Utah.

Promontory PointThe completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. Copyright � 2008 by Dover Publications, Inc. Electronic image � 2008 Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

In the meantime, other railroads had begun construction westward, but the panic of 1873 and the ensuing depression halted or delayed progress on many of those lines. With the return of prosperity after 1877, some railroads resumed or accelerated construction; and by 1883 three more rail connections between the Mississippi valley and the West Coast had been completed�the Northern Pacific, from St. Paul to Portland; the Santa Fe, from Chicago to Los Angeles; and the Southern Pacific, from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The Southern Pacific had also acquired, by purchase or construction, lines from Portland to San Francisco and from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

The construction of the railroads from the Midwest to the Pacific coast was the railroad builders� most spectacular achievement in the quarter century after the Civil War. No less important, in terms of the national economy, was the development in the same period of an adequate rail network in the Southern states and the building of other railroads that connected virtually every important community west of the Mississippi with Chicago.

railroad bridge over the Ohio RiverRailroad bridge over the Ohio River, Bellaire, Ohio, 1872.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The West developed simultaneously with the building of the Western railroads, and in no part of the nation was the importance of railroads more generally recognized. The railroad gave vitality to the regions it served, but, by withholding service, it could doom a community to stagnation. The railroads appeared to be ruthless in exploiting their powerful position: they fixed prices to suit their convenience; they discriminated among their customers; they attempted to gain a monopoly of transportation wherever possible; and they interfered in state and local politics to elect favourites to office, to block unfriendly legislation, and even to influence the decisions of the courts.

Indian policy

Large tracts of land in the West were reserved by law for the exclusive use of specified Indian tribes. By 1870, however, the invasion of these lands by hordes of prospectors, by cattlemen and farmers, and by the transcontinental railroads had resulted in the outbreak of a series of savage Indian wars and had raised serious questions about the government�s Indian policies. Many agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs were lax in their responsibility for dealing directly with the tribes, and some were corrupt in the discharge of their duties. Most Westerners and some army officers contended that the only satisfactory resolution of the Indian question was the removal of the tribes from all lands coveted by the whites.

In the immediate postwar years, reformers advocated adoption of programs designed to prepare the Indians for ultimate assimilation into American society. In 1869 the reformers persuaded President Grant and Congress to establish a nonpolitical Board of Indian Commissioners to supervise the administration of relations between the government and the Indians. The board, however, encountered so much political opposition that it accomplished little. The reformers then proposed legislation to grant title for specific acreages of land to the head of each family in those tribes thought to be ready to adopt a sedentary life as farmers. Congress resisted that proposal until land-hungry Westerners discovered that, if the land were thus distributed, a vast surplus of land would result that could be added to the public domain. When land speculators joined the reformers in support of the proposed legislation, Congress in 1887 enacted the Dawes Act, which empowered the president to grant title to 160 acres (65 hectares) to the head of each family, with smaller allotments to single members of the tribe, in those tribes believed ready to accept a new way of life as farmers. With the grant of land, which could not be alienated by the Indians for 25 years, they were to be granted U.S. citizenship. Reformers rejoiced that they had finally given the Indians an opportunity to have a dignified role in U.S. society, overlooking the possibility that there might be values in Indian culture worthy of preservation. Meanwhile, the land promoters placed successive presidents under great pressure to accelerate the application of the Dawes Act in order to open more land for occupation or speculation.

Industrialization of the U.S. economy

The growth of industry

By 1878 the United States had reentered a period of prosperity after the long depression of the mid-1870s. In the ensuing 20 years the volume of industrial production, the number of workers employed in industry, and the number of manufacturing plants all more than doubled. A more accurate index to the scope of this industrial advance may be found in the aggregate annual value of all manufactured goods, which increased from about $5,400,000,000 in 1879 to perhaps $13,000,000,000 in 1899. The expansion of the iron and steel industry, always a key factor in any industrial economy, was even more impressive: from 1880 to 1900 the annual production of steel in the United States went from about 1,400,000 to more than 11,000,000 tons. Before the end of the century, the United States surpassed Great Britain in the production of iron and steel and was providing more than one-quarter of the world�s supply of pig iron.

The dispersion of industry

The period was notable also for the wide geographic distribution of industry. The Eastern Seaboard from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania continued to be the most heavily industrialized section of the United States, but there was a substantial development of manufacturing in the states adjacent to the Great Lakes and in certain sections of the South.

The experience of the steel industry reflected this new pattern of diffusion. Two-thirds of the iron and steel industry was concentrated in the area of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. After 1880, however, the development of iron mines in northern Minnesota (the Vermilion Range in 1884 and the Mesabi Range in 1892) and in Tennessee and northern Alabama was followed by the expansion of the iron and steel industry in the Chicago area and by the establishment of steel mills in northern Alabama and in Tennessee.

Pillsbury Mine in the Mesabi Range, near Hibbing, Minnesota.Milt and Joan Mann/CameraMann International

Most manufacturing in the Midwest was in enterprises closely associated with agriculture and represented expansion of industries that had first been established before 1860. Meat-packing, which in the years after 1875 became one of the major industries of the nation in terms of the value of its products, was almost a Midwestern monopoly, with a large part of the industry concentrated in Chicago. Flour milling, brewing, and the manufacture of farm machinery and lumber products were other important Midwestern industries.

flouring millC.C. Washburn's flouring mills, by the Falls of St. Anthony in the historical milling district, Minneapolis, Minnesota.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital. id. pga 01523)

The industrial invasion of the South was spearheaded by textiles. Cotton mills became the symbol of the New South, and mills and mill towns sprang up in the Piedmont region from Virginia to Georgia and into Alabama. By 1900 almost one-quarter of all the cotton spindles in the United States were in the South, and Southern mills were expanding their operations more rapidly than were their well-established competitors in New England. The development of lumbering in the South was even more impressive, though less publicized; by the end of the century the South led the nation in lumber production, contributing almost one-third of the annual supply.

cotton mill: weaving roomWeaving room in a cotton mill, Augusta, Georgia, late 19th century.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Industrial combinations

The geographic dispersal of industry was part of a movement that was converting the United States into an industrial nation. It attracted less attention, however, than the trend toward the consolidation of competing firms into large units capable of dominating an entire industry. The movement toward consolidation received special attention in 1882 when Rockefeller and his associates organized the Standard Oil Trust under the laws of Ohio. A trust was a new type of industrial organization, in which the voting rights of a controlling number of shares of competing firms were entrusted to a small group of men, or trustees, who thus were able to prevent competition among the companies they controlled. The stockholders presumably benefited through the larger dividends they received. For a few years the trust was a popular vehicle for the creation of monopolies, and by 1890 there were trusts in whiskey, lead, cottonseed oil, and salt.

In 1892 the courts of Ohio ruled that the trust violated that state�s antimonopoly laws. Standard Oil then reincorporated as a holding company under the more hospitable laws of New Jersey. Thereafter, holding companies or outright mergers became the favourite forms for the creation of monopolies, though the term trust remained in the popular vocabulary as a common description of any monopoly. The best-known mergers of the period were those leading to the formation of the American Tobacco Company (1890) and the American Sugar Refining Company (1891). The latter was especially successful in stifling competition, for it quickly gained control of most of the sugar refined in the United States.

Foreign commerce

The foreign trade of the United States, if judged by the value of exports, kept pace with the growth of domestic industry. Exclusive of gold, silver, and reexports, the annual value of exports from the United States in 1877 was about $590,000,000; by 1900 it had increased to approximately $1,371,000,000. The value of imports also rose, though at a slower rate. When gold and silver are included, there was only one year in the entire period in which the United States had an unfavourable balance of trade; and, as the century drew to a close, the excess of exports over imports increased perceptibly.

Agriculture continued to furnish the bulk of U.S. exports. Cotton, wheat, flour, and meat products were consistently the items with the greatest annual value among exports. Of the nonagricultural products sent abroad, petroleum was the most important, though by the end of the century its position on the list of exports was being challenged by machinery.

Despite the expansion of foreign trade, the U.S. merchant marine was a major casualty of the period. While the aggregate tonnage of all shipping flying the U.S. flag remained remarkably constant, the tonnage engaged in foreign trade declined sharply, dropping from more than 2,400,000 tons on the eve of the Civil War to a low point of only 726,000 tons in 1898. The decline began during the Civil War when hundreds of ships were transferred to foreign registries to avoid destruction. Later, cost disadvantages in shipbuilding and repair and the American policy of registering only American-built ships hindered growth until World War I.

Labour

The expansion of industry was accompanied by increased tensions between employers and workers and by the appearance, for the first time in the United States, of national labour unions.

Formation of unions

The first effective labour organization that was more than regional in membership and influence was the Knights of Labor, organized in 1869. The Knights believed in the unity of the interests of all producing groups and sought to enlist in their ranks not only all labourers but everyone who could be truly classified as a producer. They championed a variety of causes, many of them more political than industrial, and they hoped to gain their ends through politics and education rather than through economic coercion.

Knights of Labor"Puck" cartoon attacking James Cardinal Gibbons's support of the Knights of Labor.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The hardships suffered by many workers during the depression of 1873�78 and the failure of a nationwide railroad strike, which was broken when President Hayes sent federal troops to suppress disorders in Pittsburgh and St. Louis (see Great Railroad Strike of 1877), caused much discontent in the ranks of the Knights. In 1879 Terence V. Powderly, a railroad worker and mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was elected grand master workman of the national organization. He favoured cooperation over a program of aggressive action, but the effective control of the Knights shifted to regional leaders who were willing to initiate strikes or other forms of economic pressure to gain their objectives. The Knights reached the peak of their influence in 1884�85, when much-publicized strikes against the Union Pacific, Southwest System, and Wabash railroads attracted substantial public sympathy and succeeded in preventing a reduction in wages. At that time they claimed a national membership of nearly 700,000. In 1885 Congress, taking note of the apparently increasing power of labour, acceded to union demands to prohibit the entry into the United States of immigrants who had signed contracts to work for specific employers.

The year 1886 was a troubled one in labour relations. There were nearly 1,600 strikes, involving about 600,000 workers, with the eight-hour day the most prominent item in the demands of labour. About half of these strikes were called for May Day; some of them were successful, but the failure of others and internal conflicts between skilled and unskilled members led to a decline in the Knights� popularity and influence.

The Haymarket Riot

The most serious blow to the unions came from a tragic occurrence with which they were only indirectly associated. One of the strikes called for May Day in 1886 was against the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago. Fighting broke out along the picket lines on May 3, and, when police intervened to restore order, several strikers were injured or killed. Union leaders called a protest meeting at Haymarket Square for the evening of May 4; but, as the meeting was breaking up, a group of anarchists took over and began to make inflammatory speeches. The police quickly intervened, and a bomb exploded, killing seven policemen and injuring many others. Eight of the anarchists were arrested, tried, and convicted of murder. Four of them were hanged, and one committed suicide. The remaining three were pardoned in 1893 by Gov. John P. Altgeld, who was persuaded that they had been convicted in such an atmosphere of prejudice that it was impossible to be certain that they were guilty.

Haymarket RiotWood engraving of the Haymarket Riot by Thure de Thulstrup, published in Harper's Weekly on May 15, 1886.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The public tended to blame organized labour for the Haymarket tragedy, and many persons had become convinced that the activities of unions were likely to be attended by violence. The Knights never regained the ground they lost in 1886, and, until after the turn of the century, organized labour seldom gained any measure of public sympathy. Aggregate union membership did not again reach its 1885�86 figure until 1900. Unions, however, continued to be active; and in each year from 1889 through the end of the century there were more than 1,000 strikes.

As the power of the Knights declined, the leadership in the trade union movement passed to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). This was a loose federation of local and craft unions, organized first in 1881 and reorganized in 1886. For a few years there was some nominal cooperation between the Knights and the AFL, but the basic organization and philosophy of the two groups made cooperation difficult. The AFL appealed only to skilled workers, and its objectives were those of immediate concern to its members: hours, wages, working conditions, and the recognition of the union. It relied on economic weapons, chiefly the strike and boycott, and it eschewed political activity, except for state and local election campaigns. The central figure in the AFL was Samuel Gompers, a New York cigar maker, who was its president from 1886 to his death in 1924.

Samuel Gompers, 1911.Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

National politics

The dominant forces in American life in the last quarter of the 19th century were economic and social rather than political. This fact was reflected in the ineffectiveness of political leadership and in the absence of deeply divisive issues in politics, except perhaps for the continuing agrarian agitation for inflation. There were colourful political personalities, but they gained their following on a personal basis rather than as spokesmen for a program of political action. No president of the period was truly the leader of his party, and none apparently aspired to that status except Grover Cleveland during his second term (1893�97). Such shrewd observers of U.S. politics as Woodrow Wilson and James Bryce agreed that great men did not become presidents; and it was clear that the nominating conventions of both major parties commonly selected candidates who were �available� in the sense that they had few enemies.

Grover Cleveland.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Congress had been steadily increasing in power since the Johnson administration and, in the absence of leadership from the White House, was largely responsible for formulating public policy. As a result, public policy commonly represented a compromise among the views of many congressional leaders�a situation made the more essential because of the fact that in only four of the 20 years from 1877 to 1897 did the same party control the White House, the Senate, and the House.

The Republicans appeared to be the majority party in national politics. From the Civil War to the end of the century, they won every presidential election save those of 1884 and 1892, and they had a majority in the Senate in all but three Congresses during that same period. The Democrats, however, won a majority in the House in eight of the 10 Congresses from 1875 to 1895. The success of the Republicans was achieved in the face of bitter intraparty schisms that plagued Republican leaders from 1870 until after 1890 and despite the fact that, in every election campaign after 1876, they were forced to concede the entire South to the opposition. The Republicans had the advantage of having been the party that had defended the Union against secession and had freed the slaves. When all other appeals failed, Republican leaders could salvage votes in the North and West by reviving memories of the war. A less tangible but equally valuable advantage was the widespread belief that the continued industrial development of the nation would be more secure under a Republican than under a Democratic administration. Except in years of economic adversity, the memory of the war and confidence in the economic program of the Republican Party were normally enough to ensure Republican success in most of the Northern and Western states.

The Rutherford B. Hayes administration

President Hayes (served 1877�81) willingly carried out the commitments made by his friends to secure the disputed Southern votes needed for his election. He withdrew the federal troops still in the South, and he appointed former senator David M. Key of Tennessee to his Cabinet as postmaster general. Hayes hoped that these conciliatory gestures would encourage many Southern conservatives to support the Republican Party in the future. But the Southerners� primary concern was the maintenance of white supremacy; this, they believed, required a monopoly of political power in the South by the Democratic Party. As a result, the policies of Hayes led to the virtual extinction rather than the revival of the Republican Party in the South.

Hayes, Rutherford B.Rutherford B. Hayes, 1877.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Hayes�s efforts to woo the South irritated some Republicans, but his attitude toward patronage in the federal civil service was a more immediate challenge to his party. In June 1877 he issued an executive order prohibiting political activity by those who held federal appointments. When two friends of Sen. Roscoe Conkling defied this order, Hayes removed them from their posts in the administration of the Port of New York. Conkling and his associates showed their contempt for Hayes by bringing about the election of one of the men (Alonzo B. Cornell) as governor of New York in 1879 and by nominating the other (Chester A. Arthur) as Republican candidate for the vice presidency in 1880.

One of the most serious issues facing Hayes was that of inflation. Hayes and many other Republicans were staunch supporters of a sound-money policy, but the issues were sectional rather than partisan. In general, sentiment in the agricultural South and West was favourable to inflation, while industrial and financial groups in the Northeast opposed any move to inflate the currency, holding that this would benefit debtors at the expense of creditors.

In 1873 Congress had discontinued the minting of silver dollars, an action later stigmatized by friends of silver as the Crime of �73. As the depression deepened, inflationists began campaigns to persuade Congress to resume coinage of silver dollars and to repeal the act providing for the redemption of Civil War greenbacks in gold after January 1, 1879. By 1878 the sentiment for silver and inflation was so strong that Congress passed, over the president�s veto, the Bland�Allison Act, which renewed the coinage of silver dollars and, more significantly, included a mandate to the secretary of the treasury to purchase silver bullion at the market price in amounts of not less than $2,000,000 and not more than $4,000,000 each month.

Opponents of inflation were somewhat reassured by the care with which Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman was making preparation to have an adequate gold reserve to meet any demands on the Treasury for the redemption of greenbacks. Equally reassuring were indications that the nation had at last recovered from the long period of depression. These factors reestablished confidence in the financial stability of the government; and, when the date for the redemption of greenbacks arrived, there was no appreciable demand upon the Treasury to exchange them for gold.

Hayes chose not to run for reelection. Had he sought a second term, he would almost certainly have been denied renomination by the Republican leaders, many of whom he had alienated through his policies of patronage reform and Southern conciliation. Three prominent candidates contended for the Republican nomination in 1880: Grant, the choice of the �Stalwart� faction led by Senator Conkling; James G. Blaine, the leader of the rival �Half-Breed� faction; and Secretary of the Treasury Sherman. Grant had a substantial and loyal bloc of delegates in the convention, but their number was short of a majority. Neither of the other candidates could command a majority, and on the 36th ballot the weary delegates nominated a compromise candidate, Congressman James A. Garfield of Ohio. To placate the Stalwart faction, the convention nominated Chester A. Arthur of New York for vice president.

The Democrats probably would have renominated Samuel J. Tilden in 1880, hoping thereby to gain votes from those who believed Tilden had lost in 1876 through fraud. But Tilden declined to become a candidate again, and the Democratic convention nominated Gen.Winfield S. Hancock. Hancock had been a Federal general during the Civil War, but he had no political record and little familiarity with questions of public policy.

Hancock, Winfield ScottWinfield Scott HancockLibrary of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-USZ62-53819)

The campaign failed to generate any unusual excitement and produced no novel issues. As in every national election of the period, the Republicans stressed their role as the party of the protective tariff and asserted that Democratic opposition to the tariff would impede the growth of domestic industry. Actually, the Democrats were badly divided on the tariff, and Hancock surprised political leaders of both parties by declaring that the tariff was an issue of only local interest.

Garfield won the election with an electoral margin of 214 to 155, but his plurality in the popular vote was a slim 9,644 (see U.S. presidential election of 1880). The election revealed the existence of a new �solid South,� for Hancock carried all the former Confederate states and three of the former slave states that had remained loyal to the Union.

The administrations of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur

Garfield had not been closely identified with either the Stalwarts or the Half-Breeds, the two major factions within the Republican Party, but, upon becoming president, he upset the Stalwarts by naming the Half-Breed Blaine secretary of state. He gave even more serious offense to the Stalwart faction by appointing as collector of customs at New York a man who was unacceptable to the two senators from that state, Conkling and Thomas Platt, who showed their displeasure by resigning their Senate seats, expecting to be reelected triumphantly by the legislature of New York; but in this they were disappointed.

James A. Garfield.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The tragic climax to this intraparty strife came on July 2, 1881, when Garfield was shot in Washington, D.C., by a disappointed and mentally deranged office seeker and Stalwart supporter. For two months the president lingered between life and death. He died on September 19 and was succeeded by Vice President Arthur.

Print showing the attempted assassination of President James A. Garfield in July 1881.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cph 3a10265)

Arthur�s accession to the presidency caused widespread concern. He had held no elective office before becoming vice president, and he had been closely associated with the Stalwart wing of the party. It was assumed that, like others in that group, he would be hostile to civil service reform, and his nomination for the vice presidency had been generally regarded as a deliberate rebuke to President Hayes. The members of Garfield�s Cabinet immediately tendered their resignations, but Arthur asked them to continue in office for a time. By mid-April 1882, however, all but one of the Cabinet officers had been replaced.

Arthur, Chester A.Chester A. Arthur taking the presidential oath after the death of Pres. James Garfield, 1881.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (file no. LC-USZ62-7615)

Arthur soon surprised his critics and the country by demonstrating an unexpected independence of his former political friends. In his first annual message to Congress, in December 1881, he announced his qualified approval of legislation that would remove appointments to the federal civil service from partisan control. In January 1883 Congress passed and Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which established the Civil Service Commission and provided that appointments to certain categories of offices should be made on the basis of examinations and the appointees given an indefinite tenure in their positions.

Political cartoon of Chester A. Arthur by Joseph Keppler.Drawing by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (file no. LC-DIG-ppmsca-15781)

By 1884, when the next presidential election was held, Arthur�s administration had won the respect of many who had viewed his accession to office with misgivings. It had not, however, gained him any strong following among the leaders of his party. The foremost candidate for the Republican nomination was the perennially powerful Blaine, who, despite opposition from those who believed he was too partisan in spirit or that he was vulnerable to charges of corrupt actions while speaker of the house many years before, was nominated on the fourth ballot.

The Democratic candidate, Gov. Grover Cleveland of New York, was in many respects the antithesis of Blaine. He was a relative newcomer to politics. He had been elected mayor of Buffalo in 1881 and governor of New York in 1882. In both positions he had earned a reputation for political independence, inflexible honesty, and an industrious and conservative administration. His record made him an attractive candidate for persons who accepted the dictum that �a public office is a public trust.� This was, in 1884, a valuable asset; and it won for Cleveland the support of a few outstanding Republicans and some journals of national circulation that usually favoured Republican nominees for office.

Grover ClevelandLibrary of Congress, Washington, D.C.

As in 1880, the campaign was almost devoid of issues of public policy: only the perennial question of the tariff appeared to separate the two parties. Cleveland had not served in the army during the Civil War, and Republicans made an effort to use this fact, together with the power of the South in the Democratic Party, to arouse sectional prejudices against Cleveland. During the campaign it was revealed that Cleveland, a bachelor, was the father of an illegitimate son, an indiscretion that gave the Republicans a moral issue with which to counteract charges of corruption against their own candidate.

The election was very close. On the evening of the voting it was apparent that the result depended upon the vote in New York state, but not until the end of the week was it certain that Cleveland had carried New York by the narrow margin of some 1,100 votes (out of more than one million) and been elected president.

Grover Cleveland�s first term

Cleveland was the first Democratic president since James Buchanan a quarter of a century earlier. More than two-thirds of the electoral votes he received came from Southern or border states, so that it appeared that his election marked the close of one epoch and the beginning of a new political era in which the South could again hope to have a major voice in the conduct of national affairs. Because of his brief career in politics, Cleveland had only a limited acquaintance with leaders of his own party. He accepted literally the constitutional principle of the separation of powers, and he opened his first annual message to Congress, in December 1885, with an affirmation of his devotion to �the partitions of power between our respective departments.� This appeared to be a disavowal of presidential leadership, but it quickly became apparent that Cleveland intended to defend vigorously the prerogatives that he believed belonged to the executive.

During his first term (1885�89) Cleveland was confronted with a divided Congress�a Republican Senate and a Democratic House. This added to the complexities of administration, especially in the matter of appointments. Cleveland was a firm believer in a civil service based on merit rather than on partisan considerations, but, as the first Democratic president in a quarter of a century, he was under great pressure to replace Republicans in appointive offices with Democrats. He followed a line of compromise. In his first two years he removed the incumbents from about two-thirds of the offices subject to his control, but he scrutinized the qualifications of Democrats recommended for appointment and in a number of instances refused to abide by the recommendations of his party leaders. He thus offended both the reformers, who wished no partisan removals, and his fellow Democrats, whose nominees he rejected. Although his handling of the patronage alienated some powerful Democrats, he scored a personal triumph when he persuaded Congress to repeal the obsolete Tenure of Office Act of 1867, which Republican senators had threatened to revive in order to embarrass him.

Cleveland was a conservative on all matters relating to money, and he was inflexibly opposed to wasteful expenditure of public funds. This caused him to investigate as many as possible of the hundreds of private bills passed by Congress to compensate private individuals, usually Federal veterans, for claims against the federal government. When, as was frequently the case, he judged these claims to be ill-founded, he vetoed the bill. He was the first president to use the veto power extensively to block the enactment of this type of private legislation.

The surplus and the tariff

The flurry of private pension bills had been stimulated, in part, by a growing surplus in the Treasury. In every year since the Civil War, there had been an excess of revenue over expenditures, a circumstance that encouraged suggestions for appropriations of public funds for a variety of purposes. The surplus also focused attention upon the tariff, the principal source of this excess revenue. In 1883 Congress had reviewed the tariff and made numerous changes in the rates, increasing the tariff on some items and reducing it on others, without materially decreasing the revenue received. Cleveland believed that the surplus presented a very real problem. It hoarded in the Treasury money that could have been in circulation, and it encouraged reckless spending by the government. Like many other Democrats, he disliked the high protective tariff. After waiting in vain for two years for Congress to meet this issue boldly, Cleveland adopted the extraordinary tactic of devoting his entire annual message in 1887 to a discussion of this question and to an appeal for a lowering of the tariff. The House then passed a bill generally conforming to Cleveland�s views on the tariff; but the Senate rejected it, and the tariff became a leading issue in the presidential campaign of 1888.

The public domain

After 1877 hundreds of thousands of agricultural settlers went westward to the Plains, where they came into competition for control of the land with the cattlemen, who hitherto had dominated the open range. The pressure of population as it moved into the Plains called attention to the diminishing supply of good arable land still open to settlement, thus presaging the day when there would no longer be a vast reservoir of land in the West awaiting the farmer. It also drew attention to the fact that millions of acres of Western land were being held for speculative purposes and that other millions of acres had been acquired by questionable means or were still in the possession of railroads that failed to fulfill the obligations they had assumed when the land was granted to them. Upon assuming office, Cleveland was confronted with evidence that some of these claims had been fraudulently obtained by railroads, speculators, cattlemen, or lumbering interests. He ordered an investigation, and for more than a year agents of the Land Office roamed over the West uncovering evidence of irregularities and neglected obligations. Cleveland acted firmly. By executive orders and court action he succeeded in restoring more than 81,000,000 acres (33,000,000 hectares) to the public domain.

The Interstate Commerce Act

The railroads were vital to the nation�s economy, but, because in so many regions a single company enjoyed a monopoly of rail transportation, many of the railroads adopted policies that large numbers of their customers felt to be unfair and discriminatory. Before 1884 it was clear that the Granger laws of the preceding decade (state laws prohibiting various abuses by the railroads) were ineffective, and pressure groups turned to the federal government for relief. In this, Western farm organizations were joined by influential Eastern businessmen who believed that they, too, were the victims of discrimination by the railroads. This powerful political alliance persuaded both parties to include regulation of the railroads in their national platforms in 1884 and induced Congress to enact the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887.

This law, designed to prevent unjust discrimination by the railroads, prohibited the pooling of traffic and profits, made it illegal for a railroad to charge more for a short haul than for a longer one, required that the roads publicize their rates, and established the Interstate Commerce Commission to supervise the enforcement of the law. The rulings of the commission were subject to review by the federal courts, the decisions of which tended to narrow the scope of the act. The commission was less effective than the sponsors of the act had hoped, but the act in itself was an indication of the growing realization that only the federal government could cope with the new economic problems of the day.

The election of 1888

Cleveland�s plea for a reduction of the tariff in his annual message of 1887 made it certain that the tariff would be the central issue in the presidential campaign of 1888. The Democrats renominated Cleveland, although it was thought that he had endangered his chances of reelection by his outspoken advocacy of tariff reduction. The Republicans had their usual difficulty in selecting a candidate. Blaine refused to enter the race, and no other person in the party commanded substantial support. From among the many who were willing to accept the nomination, the Republicans selected Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, a Federal general in the Civil War and the grandson of Pres. William Henry Harrison.

Harrison, Benjamin Benjamin Harrison.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-73640)

Cleveland had won respect as a man of integrity and courage, but neither he nor Harrison aroused any great enthusiasm among the voters. One feature of the campaign noted by observers was the extensive use of money to influence the outcome; this was not a new phenomenon, but the spending of money to carry doubtful states and the apparent alliance between business and political bosses had never before been so open.

The results were again close. Cleveland had a plurality of about 100,000 popular votes, but the Republicans carried two states, New York and Indiana, which they had lost in 1884, and in the electoral college Harrison won by a margin of 233 to 168.

The Benjamin Harrison administration

The Republicans also gained control of both houses of the 51st Congress. Their margin in the House of Representatives, however, was so small that it seemed uncertain whether they could carry controversial legislation through it. This obstacle was overcome by the speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed of Maine. Reed refused to recognize dilatory motions, and, contrary to precedent, he counted as present all members who were in the chamber. Using that tactic, he ruled, on occasion, that a quorum was present even though fewer than a majority had actually answered a roll call. His iron rule of the House earned him the sobriquet Czar Reed, but only through his firm control of the House could the Republicans pass three controversial bills in the summer and early autumn of 1890. One dealt with monopolies, another with silver, and the third with the tariff.

Reed, Thomas B.Thomas B. Reed, detail of a portrait by John Singer Sargent; in the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Sherman Antitrust Act

The first of these major measures declared illegal all combinations that restrained trade between states or with foreign nations. This law, known as the Sherman Antitrust Act (taking its name from its author, John Sherman) was passed by Congress early in July. It was the congressional response to evidence of growing public dissatisfaction with the development of industrial monopolies, which had been so notable a feature of the preceding decade.

Sherman, JohnJohn ShermanCourtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

More than 10 years passed before the Sherman Act was used to break up any industrial monopoly. It was invoked by the federal government in 1894 to obtain an injunction against a striking railroad union accused of restraint of interstate commerce, and the use of the injunction was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1895. Indeed, it is unlikely that the Senate would have passed the bill in 1890 had not the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, George F. Edmunds of Vermont, felt certain that unions were combinations in restraint of trade within the meaning of the law. To those who hoped that the Sherman Act would inhibit the growth of monopoly, the results were disappointing. The passage of the act only three years after the Interstate Commerce Act was, however, another sign that the public was turning from state capitals to Washington for effective regulation of industrial giants.

Harrison, Benjamin: cabinetU.S. Pres. Benjamin Harrison with his cabinet. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-09650)

The silver issue

Less than two weeks after Congress passed the antitrust law, it enacted the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which required the secretary of the treasury to purchase each month 4,500,000 ounces (130,000 kilograms) of silver at the market price. This act superseded the Bland�Allison Act of 1878, effectively increasing the government�s monthly purchase of silver by more than 50 percent. It was adopted in response to pressure from mineowners, who were alarmed by the falling price of silver, and from Western farmers, who were always favourable to inflationary measures and who, in 1890, were also suffering from the depressed prices of their products.

The McKinley tariff

Most Republican leaders had been lukewarm to the proposal to increase the purchase of silver and had accepted it only to assure Western votes for the measure in which they were most interested�upward revision of the protective tariff. This was accomplished in the McKinley Tariff Act of October 1890, passed by Congress one month before the midterm elections of that year. The tariff was designed to appeal to the farmers because some agricultural products were added to the protected list. A few items, notably sugar, were placed on the free list, and domestic sugar planters were to be compensated by a subsidy of two cents a pound. The central feature of the act, however, was a general increase in tariff schedules, with many of these increases applying to items of general consumption.

The new tariff immediately became an issue in the congressional elections. It failed to halt the downward spiral of farm prices, but there was an almost immediate increase in the cost of many items purchased by the farmers. With discontent already rife in the agricultural regions of the West and South, the McKinley tariff added to the agrarian resentment. The outcome of the elections was a major defeat for the Republicans, whose strength in the House of Representatives was reduced by almost half.

The agrarian revolt

Political disaster befell the Republicans in the trans-Mississippi West, resulting from an economic and psychological depression that enveloped the region after widespread crop failures and the collapse of inflated land prices in the summer of 1887. The Western boom had begun in the late 1870s, when the tide of migration into the unoccupied farmlands beyond the Mississippi quickly led to the settlement of hitherto unoccupied parts of Iowa and Minnesota and to the pushing of the frontier westward across the Plains almost literally to the shadows of the Rocky Mountains.

Westward expansion was encouraged by the railroads that served the region. It was supported by the satisfactory price and encouraging foreign market for wheat, the money crop of the Plains. For 10 years, from 1877 through 1886, the farmers on the Plains had the benefit of an abnormally generous rainfall, leading many to assume that climatic conditions had changed and that the rain belt had moved westward to provide adequate rainfall for the Plains. Confidence was followed by unrestrained optimism that engendered wild speculation and a rise in land prices. Lured on by these illusions, the settlers went into debt to make improvements on their farms while small-town leaders dreamed of prodigious growth and authorized bond issues to construct the public improvements they felt certain would soon be needed.

The collapse of these dreams came in 1887. The year opened ominously when the Plains were swept by a catastrophic blizzard in January that killed thousands of head of cattle and virtually destroyed the cattle industry of the open range. The following summer was dry and hot; crops were poor; and, to compound the woes of the farmers, the price of wheat began to slide downward. The dry summer of 1887 was the beginning of a 10-year cycle of little rainfall and searingly hot summers. By the autumn of 1887 the exodus from the Plains had begun; five years later, areas of western Kansas and Nebraska that had once been thriving agricultural centres were almost depopulated. The agricultural regions east of the Plains were less directly affected, though there the farmers suffered from the general decline in farm prices.

Although the disaster on the Plains bred a sense of distress and frustration, the lure of good land was still strong. When the central portion of the present state of Oklahoma was opened to settlement in April 1889, an army of eager settlers, estimated to have numbered 100,000, rushed into the district to claim homesteads and build homes.

Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, days after the land rush of April 22, 1889.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Populists

The collapse of the boom and the falling prices of agricultural products forced many farmers to seek relief through political action. In 1888 and again in 1890 this discontent was expressed through local political groups, commonly known as Farmers� Alliances, which quickly spread through parts of the West and in the South, where economic problems had been aggravated by the shift following the Civil War from a plantation system to sharecrop and crop-lien systems. The alliances won some local victories and contributed to the discomfiture of the Republicans in 1890. They were not, however, an effective vehicle for concerted political action; and in 1891 the leaders of the alliances formed the People�s (Populist) Party.

The Populists aspired to become a national party and hoped to attract support from labour and from reform groups generally. In practice, however, they continued through their brief career to be almost wholly a party of Western farmers. (Southern farmers, afraid of splitting the white vote and thereby allowing blacks into power, largely remained loyal to the Democratic Party.) The Populists demanded an increase in the circulating currency, to be achieved by the unlimited coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads, a tariff for revenue only, the direct election of U.S. senators, and other measures designed to strengthen political democracy and give the farmers economic parity with business and industry. In 1892 the Populists nominated Gen. James B. Weaver of Iowa for president.

Weaver, James B.James B. WeaverCourtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The election of 1892

The nominees of the two major parties for president in 1892 were the same as in the election of 1888: Harrison and Cleveland (see U.S. presidential election of 1892. The unpopularity of the McKinley tariff gave Cleveland an advantage, as did the discontent in the West, which was directed largely against the Republican Party. From the beginning of the campaign it appeared probable that the Democrats would be successful, and Cleveland carried not only the Southern states but also such key Northern states as New York and Illinois. His electoral vote was 277 to 145 for Harrison. Weaver carried only four Western states, three of them states with important silver mines, and received 22 electoral votes.

Cleveland�s second term

When Cleveland was inaugurated for his second term in March 1893, the country hovered on the brink of financial panic. Six years of depression in the trans-Mississippi West, the decline of foreign trade after the enactment of the McKinley tariff, and an abnormally high burden of private debt were disquieting features of the situation. Most attention was centred, however, on the gold reserve in the federal Treasury. It was assumed that a minimum reserve of $100,000,000 was necessary to assure redemption of government obligations in gold. When on April 21, 1893, the reserve fell below that amount, the psychological impact was far-reaching. Investors hastened to convert their holdings into gold; banks and brokerage houses were hard-pressed; and many business houses and financial institutions failed. Prices dropped, employment was curtailed, and the nation entered a period of severe economic depression that continued for more than three years.

Cleveland, GroverGrover Cleveland; undated portrait.� Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com

The causes of this disaster were numerous and complex, but the attention that focused on the gold reserve tended to concentrate concern upon a single factor�the restoration of the Treasury�s supply of gold. It was widely believed that the principal cause of the drain on the Treasury was the obligation to purchase large amounts of silver. To those who held this view, the obvious remedy was the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.

The issue was political as well as economic. It divided both major parties, but most of the leading advocates of existing silver policies were Democrats. Cleveland, however, had long been opposed to the silver-purchase policy, and in the crisis he resolved upon repeal as an essential step in protecting the Treasury. He therefore called Congress to meet in special session on August 7, 1893.

The new Congress had Democratic majorities in both houses, and, if it had any mandate, it was to repeal the McKinley tariff. It had no mandate on the silver issue, and more than half of its Democratic members came from constituencies that favoured an increase in the coinage of silver. Cleveland faced a herculean task in forcing repeal through Congress, but, by the use of every power at his command, he gained his objective. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed at the end of October by a bill that made no compensating provision for the coinage of silver. Cleveland had won a personal triumph, but he had irrevocably divided his party; and in some sections of the nation he had become the most unpopular president of his generation.

The extent to which Cleveland had lost control of his party became apparent when Congress turned from silver to the tariff. The House passed a bill that would have revised tariff rates downward in accordance with the president�s views. In the Senate, however, the bill was so altered that it bore little resemblance to the original measure, and on some items it imposed higher duties than had the McKinley Tariff Act. It was finally passed in August 1894, but Cleveland was so dissatisfied that he refused to sign it; and it became law without his signature. The act contained a provision for an income tax, but this feature was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1895.

In the midterm elections of 1894 the Republicans recaptured control of both houses of Congress. This indicated the discontent produced by the continuing depression. It also guaranteed that, with a Democratic president and Republican Congress, there would be inaction in domestic legislation while both parties looked forward to the election of 1896.

At their convention in St. Louis the Republicans selected Gov. William McKinley of Ohio as their presidential nominee. He had served in the Federal army during the Civil War, and his record as governor of Ohio tended to offset his association with the unpopular tariff of 1890. His most effective support in winning the nomination, however, was provided by Mark Hanna, a wealthy Cleveland businessman who was McKinley�s closest friend.

Hanna, MarkMark Hanna, 1900Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Democratic convention in Chicago was unusually exciting. It was controlled by groups hostile to Cleveland�s financial policies, and it took the unprecedented step of rejecting a resolution commending the administration of a president of its own party. The debate on the party platform featured an eloquent defense of silver and agrarian interests by William Jennings Bryan, which won him not only a prolonged ovation but also his party�s presidential nomination. Bryan was a former congressman from Nebraska, and at 36 he was the youngest man ever to be the nominee for president of a major party. By experience and conviction he shared the outlook of the agrarian elements that dominated the convention and whose principal spokesman he became.

Bryan conducted a vigorous campaign. For the first time a presidential candidate carried his case to the people in all parts of the country, and for a time it appeared that he might win. The worried conservatives charged that Bryan was a dangerous demagogue, and they interpreted the campaign as a conflict between defenders of a sound economic system that would produce prosperity and dishonest radicals who championed reckless innovations that would undermine the financial security of the nation. On this interpretation they succeeded in raising large campaign funds from industrialists who feared their interests were threatened. With this money, the Republicans were able to turn the tide and win a decisive victory. Outside the South, Bryan carried only the Western silver states and Kansas and Nebraska.

Presidential campaign ribbon for William McKinley, c. 1896.Americana/Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Economic recovery

Soon after taking office on March 4, 1897, McKinley called Congress into special session to revise the tariff once again. Congress responded by passing the Dingley Tariff Act, which eliminated many items from the free list and generally raised duties on imports to the highest level they had yet reached.

U.S. President Grover Cleveland (centre left) and President-elect William McKinley en route to the inauguration ceremony, 1897. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Although the preservation of the gold standard had been the chief appeal of the Republicans in 1896, it was not until March 1900 that Congress enacted the Gold Standard Act, which required the Treasury to maintain a minimum gold reserve of $150,000,000 and authorized the issuance of bonds, if necessary, to protect that minimum. In 1900 such a measure was almost anticlimactic, for an adequate gold supply had ceased to be a practical problem. Beginning in 1893, the production of gold in the United States had increased steadily; by 1899 the annual value of gold added to the American supply was double that of any year between 1881 and 1892. The chief source of the new supply of gold was the Klondike, where important deposits of gold had been discovered during the summer of 1896.

Klondike Gold RushMiner panning for gold in a stream during the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada.George G. Murdoch/Library and Archives Canada, Accession No. c005389

By 1898 the depression had run its course; farm prices and the volume of farm exports were again rising steadily, and Western farmers appeared to forget their recent troubles and to regain confidence in their economic prospects. In industry, the return of prosperity was marked by a resumption of the move toward more industrial combinations, despite the antitrust law; and great banking houses, such as J.P. Morgan and Company of New York, played a key role in many of the most important of these combinations by providing the necessary capital and receiving, in return, an influential voice in the management of the companies created by this capital. Harold Whitman Bradley The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Imperialism, the Progressive era, and the rise to world power, 1896�1920

American imperialism

The Spanish-American War

Militarily speaking, the Spanish-American War of 1898 was so brief and relatively bloodless as to have been a mere passing episode in the history of modern warfare. Its political and diplomatic consequences, however, were enormous: it catapulted the United States into the arena of world politics and set it, at least briefly, on the new road of imperialism. To be sure, specific events drove the United States to hostilities in 1898, but the stage had already been set by profound changes in thought about the nation�s mission and its destiny.

Rough RidersRough Riders, including Theodore Roosevelt (centre), at San Juan Heights, Santiago, Cuba, 1898.National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Before the 1890s, roughly speaking, most Americans had adhered stubbornly to the belief, as old as the Revolution itself, that their country should remain aloof from European affairs and offer an example of democracy and peace to the rest of the world, but slowly in the 1880s, and more rapidly in the 1890s, new currents of thought eroded this historic conviction. The United States had become a great power by virtue of its prodigious economic growth since the Civil War; numerous publicists said that it ought to begin to act like one. Propagandists of sea power, above all, Capt. Alfred T. Mahan, argued that future national security and greatness depended upon a large navy supported by bases throughout the world. After the disappearance of the American frontier in 1890, the conviction grew that the United States would have to find new outlets for an ever-increasing population and agricultural and industrial production; this belief was particularly rife among farmers in dire distress in the 1890s. Social Darwinists said that the world is a jungle, with international rivalries inevitable, and that only strong nations could survive. Added to these arguments were those of idealists and religious leaders that Americans had a duty to �take up the white man�s burden� and to carry their assertedly superior culture and the blessings of Christianity to the backward peoples of the world.

Alfred Thayer Mahan, 1897Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

It was against this background that the events of 1898 propelled the United States along the road to war and empire. Cuban rebels had begun a violent revolution against Spanish rule in 1895, set off by a depression caused by a decline in U.S. sugar purchases from Cuba. Rebel violence led progressively to more repressive Spanish countermeasures. Cuban refugees in the United States spread exaggerated tales of Spanish atrocities, and these and numerous others were reprinted widely (particularly by William Randolph Hearst�s New York American and Joseph Pulitzer�s New York World, then engaged in a fierce battle for circulation). President Cleveland resisted the rising public demand for intervention, but by early 1898 the pressure, then on his successor, McKinley, was too great to be defied. When an explosion�caused by a submarine mine, according to a U.S. naval court of inquiry�sank the USS Maine with large loss of life in Havana harbour on February 15, 1898, events moved beyond the president�s control. Though Spain was willing to make large concessions to avoid war, it adamantly resisted what had become the minimum public and official U.S. demand�Spanish withdrawal from Cuba and recognition of the island�s independence. Hence Congress in mid-April authorized McKinley to use the armed forces to expel the Spanish from Cuba.

For Americans it was, as Secretary of State John Hay put it in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, �a splendid little war.� An American expeditionary force, after quickly overcoming the Spaniards in Cuba, turned against Spain�s last island in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, on May 1, 1898, the American commodore George Dewey, with his Asiatic squadron, destroyed a decrepit Spanish flotilla in the harbour of Manila in the Philippines.

Roosevelt, Theodore; Rough RidersTheodore Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, 1898; print created by Kurz & Allison. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-pga-01946)

The fighting was over by August 12, when the United States and Spain signed a preliminary peace treaty in Washington, D.C. Negotiators met in Paris in October to draw up a definitive agreement. Spain recognized the independence of Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, but the disposition of the Philippines was another matter. Business interests in the United States, which had been noticeably cool about a war over Cuba, demanded the acquisition of the entire Philippine archipelago in the hope that Manila would become the entrep�t for a great Far Eastern trade; chauvinists declaimed against lowering the flag under Spanish pressure. Concluding that he had no alternative, McKinley forced the Spanish to �sell� the Philippines to the United States for $20,000,000.

But a strong reaction in the United States against acquisition of the Philippines had already set in by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed on December 10, 1898, and anti-imperialists declared that the control and governance of distant alien peoples violated all American traditions of self-determination and would even threaten the very fabric of the republic. Though there were more than enough votes in the Senate to defeat the treaty, that body gave its consent to ratification largely because William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic leader, wanted Democrats to approve the treaty and then make imperialism the chief issue of the 1900 presidential campaign.

The new American empire

McKinley easily defeated Bryan in 1900. The victory, however, was hardly a mandate for imperialism, and, as events were soon to disclose, the American people were perhaps the most reluctant imperialists in history. No sooner had they acquired an overseas empire than they set in motion the process of its dissolution or transformation.

By the so-called Teller Amendment to the war resolution, Congress had declared that the United States would not annex Cuba. This pledge was kept, although Cuba was forced in 1903 to sign a treaty making it virtually a protectorate of the United States. The Hawaiian Islands, annexed by Congress on July 7, 1898, were made a territory in 1900 and were hence, technically, only briefly part of the American empire. Puerto Rico was given limited self-government in 1900, and the Jones Act of 1917 conferred full territorial status on the island, gave U.S. citizenship to its inhabitants, and limited its self-government only by the veto of a governor appointed by the president of the United States. Establishing any kind of government in the Philippines was much more difficult because a large band of Filipinos resisted American rule as bravely as they had fought the Spanish. The Philippine insurrection was over by 1901, however, and the Philippine Government Act of 1902 inaugurated the beginning of partial self-government, which was transformed into almost complete home rule by the Jones Act of 1916.

LiliuokalaniLiliuokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Open Door in the Far East

Although Americans were reluctant imperialists, the United States was an important Pacific power after 1898, and American businessmen had inflated ambitions to tap what they thought was the huge Chinese market. The doors to that market were being rapidly closed in the 1890s, however, as Britain, France, Russia, and Japan carved out large so-called spheres of influence all the way from Manchuria to southern China. With Britain�s support (the British stood to gain the most from equal trade opportunities), on September 6, 1899, Secretary of State Hay addressed the first so-called Open Door note to the powers with interests in China; it asked them to accord equal trade and investment opportunities to all nationals in their spheres of interest and leased territories. With considerable bravado, Hay announced that all the powers had agreed to respect the Open Door, even though the Russians had declined to give any pledges. On July 3, 1900, after the Boxer Rebellion�an uprising in China against foreign influence�Hay circulated a second Open Door note announcing that it was American policy to preserve Chinese territorial and political integrity.

Hay, JohnJohn HayNational Archives, Washington, D.C.

Such pronouncements had little effect because the United States was not prepared to support the Open Door policy with force; successive administrations to the 1940s, however, considered it the cornerstone of their Far Eastern policy. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt reluctantly mediated the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 in part to protect the Open Door as well as to maintain a balance of power in the Far East. When Japan attempted in 1915 to force a virtual protectorate on China, Pres. Woodrow Wilson intervened sternly and in some measure successfully to protect Chinese independence. Victory for American policy seemed to come with the Nine-Power Treaty of Washington of 1922, when all nations with interests in China promised to respect the Open Door.

Russo-Japanese WarAn American cartoon (�Let Us Have Peace�) hailing the peacemaking efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt, who mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, 1905.The Granger Collection, New York

Building the Panama Canal and American domination in the Caribbean

Strategic necessity and the desire of Eastern businessmen to have easy access to Pacific markets combined in the late 1890s to convince the president, Congress, and a vast majority of Americans that an isthmian canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was vital to national security and prosperity. In the Hay�Pauncefote Treaty of 1901, the British government gave up the rights to joint construction with the United States that it had gained under the Clayton�Bulwer Treaty of 1850. A French company, which had tried unsuccessfully to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, was eager to sell its right-of-way to the United States. Thus, the only obstacle to the project was the government of Colombia, which owned Panama. When Colombia was slow to cooperate, Roosevelt, in 1903, covertly supported a Panamanian revolution engineered by officials of the French company. A treaty was quickly negotiated between the United States and the new Republic of Panama; construction began, and the canal was opened to shipping on August 15, 1914.

Panama Canal: Gaillard (Culebra) Cut constructionWorkers on the Panama Canal dug by hand through the 1907 Cucaracha landslide in Gaillard (Culebra) Cut.Corbis

Concern over what Americans regarded increasingly as their �lifeline� increased in proportion to progress in the construction of the canal. An early manifestation of that concern came in 1902�03, when Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuela to force the payment of debts, and particularly when the Germans bombarded and destroyed a Venezuelan town; so agitated was American opinion that Roosevelt used a veiled threat to force Germany to accept arbitration of the debt question by the Hague Court. When the Dominican Republic defaulted on its foreign debt to several European countries in 1904, Roosevelt quickly established an American receivership of the Dominican customs in order to collect the revenues to meet the country�s debt payments. Moreover, in his annual message to Congress of 1904, the president announced a new Latin-American policy, soon called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine�because the Monroe Doctrine forbade European use of force in the New World, the United States would itself take whatever action necessary to guarantee that Latin-American states gave no cause for such European intervention. It was, in fact, a considerable extension of the Monroe Doctrine, not a correct historical interpretation of it, but it remained the cornerstone of American policy in the Caribbean at least until 1928.

Actually, Roosevelt was reluctant to interfere in the domestic affairs of neighbouring states; his one significant intervention after 1904�the administration of the Cuban government from 1906 to 1909�was undertaken in order to prevent civil war and at the insistence of Cuban authorities. Roosevelt�s successor, however, William Howard Taft (see U.S. presidential election of 1908), had more ambitious plans to guarantee American hegemony in the approaches to the Panama Canal. Adopting a policy called Dollar Diplomacy, Taft hoped to persuade American private bankers to displace European creditors in the Caribbean area and thereby to increase American influence and encourage stability in countries prone to revolution. Dollar Diplomacy was a total failure; its one result was to involve the United States in a civil war in Nicaragua with the effect of perpetuating a reactionary and unpopular regime. (Similar initiatives by the Taft administration in the Far East�most notably a plan for the internationalization of the railroads of Manchuria�also failed.)

Taft, William Howard: inspection of Panama CanalWilliam Howard Taft (centre) at an inspection during construction of the Panama Canal.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The accession of Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (see U.S. presidential election of 1912) seemed to augur the beginning of a new era in Latin-American relations; the new president and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, were idealists who had strongly condemned interventions and Dollar Diplomacy. But, although Wilson did negotiate a treaty with Colombia to make reparation for U.S. complicity in the Panamanian revolution, it was defeated by the Senate. Wilson also tried hard to promote a Pan-American nonaggression pact, but it foundered on the opposition of Chile, which had a long-standing border dispute with Peru.

Wilson, Woodrow: first inauguration Pres. Woodrow Wilson speaking at his first inauguration on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol, March 4, 1913, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cph 3a16546)

When crises threatened the domestic stability of the Caribbean area, however, Wilson revealed that he was just as determined to protect American security as Roosevelt and Taft had been and that he was perhaps even more willing to use force. Frequent revolutions and the fear of European intervention led Wilson to impose a protectorate and a puppet government upon Haiti in 1915 and a military occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916. He concluded a treaty with Nicaragua making that country a protectorate of the United States. Moreover, he purchased the Danish Virgin Islands in 1916 at the inflated price of $25,000,000 in order to prevent their possible transfer from Denmark to Germany.

The Progressive era

The character and variety of the Progressive movement

The inauguration of Pres. McKinley" class="md-crosslink">William McKinley in 1897 had seemed to mark the end of an era of domestic turmoil and the beginning of a new period of unparalleled tranquility. Prosperity was returning after the devastating panic of 1893. The agrarian uprising led by Bryan in the election of 1896 had been turned back, and the national government was securely in the hands of friends of big business. The Dingley Tariff Act of 1897 greatly increased tariff rates; the Gold Standard Act of 1897 dashed the hopes of advocates of the free coinage of silver; and McKinley did nothing to stop a series of industrial combinations in defiance of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Origins of progressivism

Never were superficial signs more deceiving. Actually, the United States already was in the first stages of what historians came to call the Progressive movement. Generally speaking, progressivism was the response of various groups to problems raised by the rapid industrialization and urbanization that followed the Civil War. These problems included the spread of slums and poverty; the exploitation of labour; the breakdown of democratic government in the cities and states caused by the emergence of political organizations, or machines, allied with business interests; and a rapid movement toward financial and industrial concentration. Many Americans feared that their historic traditions of responsible democratic government and free economic opportunity for all were being destroyed by gigantic combinations of economic and political power.

Actually there was not, either in the 1890s or later, any single Progressive movement. The numerous movements for reform on the local, state, and national levels were too diverse, and sometimes too mutually antagonistic, ever to coalesce into a national crusade. But they were generally motivated by common assumptions and goals�e.g., the repudiation of individualism and laissez-faire, concern for the underprivileged and downtrodden, the control of government by the rank and file, and the enlargement of governmental power in order to bring industry and finance under a measure of popular control.

The origins of progressivism were as complex and are as difficult to describe as the movement itself. In the vanguard were various agrarian crusaders, such as the Grangers and the Populists and Democrats under Bryan, with their demands for stringent railroad regulation and national control of banks and the money supply. At the same time, a new generation of economists, sociologists, and political scientists was undermining the philosophical foundations of the laissez-faire state and constructing a new ideology to justify democratic collectivism, and a new school of social workers was establishing settlement houses and going into the slums to discover the extent of human degradation. Allied with them was a growing body of ministers, priests, and rabbis�proponents of what was called the Social Gospel�who struggled to arouse the social concerns and consciences of their parishioners. Finally, journalists called �muckrakers� probed into all the dark corners of American life and carried their message of reform through mass-circulation newspapers and magazines.

Granger movementThe Granger movement; lithograph published in 1873. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Two specific catalytic agents set off the Progressive movement�the agrarian depression of the early 1890s and the financial and industrial depression that began in 1893. Low prices drove farmers by the hundreds of thousands into the People�s Party of 1892. Widespread suffering in the cities beginning in 1893 caused a breakdown of many social services and dramatized for the increasing number of urban middle-class Americans the gross inefficiency of most municipal governments.

Urban reforms

A movement already begun, to wrest control of city governments from corrupt political machines, was given tremendous impetus by the panic of 1893. The National Municipal League, organized in 1894, united various city reform groups throughout the country; corrupt local governments were overthrown in such cities as New York in 1894, Baltimore in 1895, and Chicago in 1896�97. And so it went all over the country well into the 20th century.

Despite initial differences among urban reformers, by the early 1900s the vast majority of them were fighting for and winning much the same objectives�more equitable taxation of railroad and corporate property, tenement house reform, better schools, and expanded social services for the poor. Even big-city machines like Tammany Hall became increasingly sensitive to the social and economic needs of their constituents. Reformers also devised new forms of city government to replace the old mayor�city-council arrangement that had proved to be so susceptible to corrupt influences. One was the commission form, which vested all responsibility in a small group of commissioners, each responsible for a single department; another was the city-manager form, which provided administration by a professionally trained expert, responsible to a popularly elected council (these two forms were in widespread use in small and medium-sized cities by 1920).

Tammany Hall politicsTammany Hall politics; political cartoon by Thomas Nast.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Reform in state governments

The reform movement spread almost at once to the state level, for it was in state capitals that important decisions affecting the cities were made. Entrenched and very professional political organizations, generously financed by officeholders and businessmen wanting special privileges, controlled most state governments in the late 1890s; everywhere, these organizations were challenged by a rising generation of young and idealistic antiorganization leaders, ambitious for power. They were most successful in the Midwest, under such leaders as Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, but they had counterparts all over the country�e.g., Charles Evans Hughes of New York, Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, Andrew J. Montague of Virginia, and Hiram W. Johnson of California.

La Follette, Robert M.Robert M. La Follette, 1906.Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

These young leaders revolutionized the art and practice of politics in the United States, not only by exercising strong leadership but also by effecting institutional changes such as the direct primary, direct election of senators (rather than by state legislatures), the initiative, referendum, and recall�which helped restore and revitalize political democracy. More important, perhaps, progressives to a large degree achieved their economic and social objectives�among them, strict regulation of intrastate railroads and public utilities, legislation to prevent child labour and to protect women workers, penal reform, expanded charitable services to the poor, and accident insurance systems to provide compensation to workers and their families.

Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive movement

By 1901 the reform upheaval was too strong to be contained within state boundaries. Moreover, certain problems with which only the federal government was apparently competent to deal cried out for solution. McKinley might have succeeded in ignoring the rising tide of public opinion had he served out his second term, but McKinley�s assassination in September 1901 brought to the presidency an entirely different kind of man�Theodore Roosevelt, at age 42 the youngest man yet to enter the White House. Roosevelt had broad democratic sympathies; moreover, thanks to his experience as police commissioner of New York City and governor of New York state, he was the first president to have an intimate knowledge of modern urban problems. Because Congress was securely controlled by a group of archconservative Republicans, the new president had to feel his way cautiously in legislative matters, but he emerged full-grown as a tribune of the people after his triumph in the presidential election of 1904. By 1906 he was the undisputed spokesman of national progressivism and by far its best publicity agent. (The White House was, he said, �a bully pulpit.�) Meanwhile, by his leadership of public opinion and by acting as a spur on Congress, he had revived the presidency and made it incomparably the most powerful force in national politics.

McKinley, William: assassinationLeon Czolgosz assassinating U.S. Pres. William McKinley, 1901.Photos.com/Thinkstock

In 1901, Americans were perhaps most alarmed about the spread of so-called trusts, or industrial combinations, which they thought were responsible for the steady price increases that had occurred each year since 1897. Ever alert to the winds of public opinion, Roosevelt responded by activating the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which had lain dormant because of Cleveland�s and McKinley�s refusal to enforce it and also because of the Supreme Court�s ruling of 1895 that the measure did not apply to combinations in manufacturing. Beginning in 1902 with a suit to dissolve a northwestern railroad monopoly, Roosevelt moved next against the so-called Beef Trust, then against the oil, tobacco, and other monopolies. In every case the Supreme Court supported the administration, going so far in the oil and tobacco decisions of 1911 as to reverse its 1895 decision. In addition, in 1903 Roosevelt persuaded a reluctant Congress to establish a Bureau of Corporations with sweeping power to investigate business practices; the bureau�s thoroughgoing reports were of immense assistance in antitrust cases. While establishing the supremacy of the federal government in the industrial field, Roosevelt in 1902 also took action unprecedented in the history of the presidency by intervening on labour�s behalf to force the arbitration of a strike by the United Mine Workers of America against the Pennsylvania anthracite coal operators.

Roosevelt moved much more aggressively after his 1904 election. Public demand for effective national regulation of interstate railroad rates had been growing since the Supreme Court had emasculated the Interstate Commerce Commission�s (ICC) rate-making authority in the 1890s. Determined to bring the railroads�the country�s single greatest private economic interest�under effective national control, Roosevelt waged an unrelenting battle with Congress in 1905�06. The outcome�the Hepburn Act of 1906�was his own personal triumph; it greatly enlarged the ICC�s jurisdiction and forbade railroads to increase rates without its approval. By using the same tactics of aggressive leadership, Roosevelt in 1906 also obtained passage of a Meat Inspection Act and a Pure Food and Drug Act. Passage of the former was aided by the publication of Upton Sinclair�s famous novel, The Jungle" class="md-crosslink">The Jungle (1906), which revealed in gory detail the unsanitary conditions of the Chicago stockyards and meat-packing plants.

Union Stock Yards: beef processingBeef processing as conducted at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, c. 1900.Geo. R. Lawrence Co./Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-52728-9)

Meanwhile, almost from his accession to the presidency, Roosevelt had been carrying on a crusade, often independent of Congress, to conserve the nation�s fast-dwindling natural resources and to make them available for exploitation under rigorous national supervision. He withdrew from the public domain some 148,000,000 acres of forest lands, 80,000,000 acres of mineral lands, and 1,500,000 acres of water-power sites. Moreover, adoption of the National Reclamation Act of 1902 made possible the beginning of an ambitious federal program of irrigation and hydroelectric development in the West.

Muir, John; Glacier Point, Yosemite ValleyU.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley, California, U.S.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Republican troubles under William Howard Taft

Roosevelt was so much the idol of the masses of 1908 that he could have easily gained the Republican nomination in that year. After his election in 1904 (see U.S. presidential election of 1904), however, he had announced that he would not be a candidate four years later (see U.S. presidential election of 1908); adhering stubbornly to his pledge, he arranged the nomination of his secretary of war, William Howard Taft of Ohio, who easily defeated Bryan.

Taft might have made an ideal president during a time of domestic tranquility, but his tenure in the White House was far from peaceful. National progressivism was nearly at high tide, and a large group of Republican progressives, called �insurgents,� sat in both houses of Congress.

The Republican insurgents

These Republicans, like a majority of Americans, demanded such reforms as tariff reductions, an income tax, the direct election of senators, and even stricter railroad and corporation regulations. Taft, who had strongly supported Roosevelt�s policies, thought of himself as a progressive. Actually he was temperamentally and philosophically a conservative; moreover, he lacked the qualities of a dynamic popular leader. In the circumstances, his ineptness, indecision, and failure to lead could only spell disaster for his party.

Taft�s troubles began when he called Congress into special session in 1909 to take up the first item on his agenda�tariff reform. The measure that emerged from Congress actually increased rates. Republican insurgents and a majority of Americans were outraged, but Taft signed the bill and called it the best tariff law the Republicans had ever enacted. Conflicts and misunderstandings over conservation and legislative procedure caused the rift between Taft Republicans and the insurgents to grow. By 1910 the Republican insurgents were clearly in the ascendancy in the Congress. Taking control of the president�s railroad-regulation measure, they added new provisions that greatly enlarged the ICC�s authority. The following year they bitterly opposed Taft�s measure for tariff reciprocity with Canada; it passed with Democratic support in Congress, only to go down to defeat at the hands of the Canadian electorate.

The 1912 election

Republican insurgents were determined to prevent Taft�s renomination in 1912. They found their leader in Roosevelt, who had become increasingly alienated from Taft and who made a whirlwind campaign for the presidential nomination in the winter and spring of 1912. Roosevelt swept the presidential primaries, even in Taft�s own state of Ohio, but Taft and conservative Republicans controlled the powerful state organizations and the Republican National Committee and were able to nominate Taft by a narrow margin. Convinced that the bosses had stolen the nomination from him, Roosevelt led his followers out of the Republican convention. In August they organized the Progressive (�Bull Moose�) Party and named Roosevelt to lead the third-party cause. Hiram Johnson, the reform Republican governor of California, became Roosevelt�s running mate.

Democrats had swept the 1910 congressional and gubernatorial elections, and, after the disruption of the Republican Party in the spring of 1912, it was obvious that almost any passable Democrat could win the presidency in that year. Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University, who had made a brilliant progressive record as governor of New Jersey, was nominated by the Democrats on the 46th ballot.

Taft�s single objective in the 1912 campaign was to defeat Roosevelt. The real contest was between Roosevelt and Wilson for control of the Progressive majority. Campaigning strenuously on a platform that he called the New Nationalism, Roosevelt demanded effective control of big business through a strong federal commission, radical tax reform, and a whole series of measures to put the federal government squarely into the business of social and economic reform. By contrast Wilson seemed conservative with a program he called the New Freedom; it envisaged a concerted effort to destroy monopoly and to open the doors of economic opportunity to small businessmen through drastic tariff reduction, banking reform, and severe tightening of the antitrust laws. Roosevelt outpolled Taft in the election, but he failed to win many Democratic Progressives away from Wilson, who won by a huge majority of electoral votes, though receiving only about 42 percent of the popular vote.

The New Freedom and its transformation

A trained political scientist and historian, Wilson believed that the president should be the leader of public opinion, the chief formulator of legislative policy, and virtually sovereign in the conduct of foreign relations. With the support of an aroused public opinion and a compliant Democratic majority, he was able to put his theories of leadership into effect with spectacular success.

Wilson, Woodrow and EdithU.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson and first lady Edith Wilson, 1919.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital photo no. 3b12597u)

The first item in Wilson�s program was tariff reform, a perennial Democratic objective since the Civil War; the president�s measure, the Underwood Tariff Act of 1913, reduced average rates from 40 percent to 25 percent, greatly enlarged the free list, and included a modest income tax. Next came adoption of the president�s measure for banking and monetary reform, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created a federal reserve system to mobilize banking reserves and issue a flexible new currency�federal reserve notes�based on gold and commercial paper; uniting and supervising the entire system was a federal reserve board of presidential appointees.

The third, and Wilson thought the last, part of the New Freedom program was antitrust reform. In his first significant movement toward Roosevelt�s New Nationalism, Wilson reversed his position that merely strengthening the Sherman Antitrust Act would suffice to prevent monopoly. Instead, he took up and pushed through Congress the Progressive-sponsored Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. It established an agency�the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)�with sweeping authority to prevent business practices that would lead to monopoly. Meanwhile, Wilson had abandoned his original measure, the Clayton Antitrust Act passed by Congress in 1914; its severe provisions against interlocking directorates and practices tending toward monopoly had been gravely weakened by the time the president signed it. The Clayton Act included a declaration that labour unions, as such, were not to be construed as conspiracies in restraint of trade in violation of the antitrust laws, but what organized labour wanted, and did not get, was immunity from prosecution for such measures as the sympathetic strike and the secondary boycott, which the courts had proscribed as violations of the Sherman Act.

In a public letter in November 1914, the president announced that his reform program was complete. But various groups were still demanding the advanced kind of social and economic legislation that Roosevelt had advocated in 1912; also, by early 1916 the Progressive Party had largely disintegrated, and Wilson knew that he could win reelection only with the support of a substantial minority of Roosevelt�s former followers. Consequently�and also because his own political thinking had been moving toward a more advanced Progressive position�Wilson struck out upon a new political course in 1916. He began by appointing Louis D. Brandeis, the leading critic of big business and finance, to the Supreme Court. Then in quick succession he obtained passage of a rural-credits measure to supply cheap long-term credit to farmers; anti-child-labour and federal workmen�s-compensation legislation; the Adamson Act, establishing the eight-hour day for interstate railroad workers; and measures for federal aid to education and highway construction. With such a program behind him, Wilson was able to rally a new coalition of Democrats, former Progressives, independents, social workers, and a large minority of Socialists, and he narrowly defeated his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, in the 1916 presidential election.

Brandeis, LouisLouis Brandeis.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The rise to world power

Woodrow Wilson and the Mexican Revolution

Although Wilson�s consuming interest was in domestic politics, he had to deal primarily with foreign affairs while in the White House, and before the end of his presidency he had developed into a diplomatist of great skill as well as one of the commanding figures in world affairs. He was a �strong� president in the conduct of foreign policy, writing most of the important diplomatic correspondence of his government and making all important decisions himself. He usually worked well with his secretaries of state, Bryan and Robert Lansing, and often relied for advice upon his confidential counselor, Col. Edward M. House of Texas.

Wilson served his apprenticeship by having to deal at the outset of his administration with an uprising in Mexico, set off when a military usurper, Victoriano Huerta, murdered liberal president Francisco Madero and seized the executive power in February 1913. It was difficult for the United States to remain aloof because Americans had invested heavily in Mexico and 40,000 U.S. citizens resided there.

Mexican Pres. Victoriano Huerta (seated centre) with his cabinet, c. 1910�15. Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ggbain-14712)

If Wilson had followed conventional policy and the urgings of Americans with interests in Mexico, he would have recognized Huerta (as most European governments did), who promised to respect and protect all foreign investments and concessions. But Wilson was revolted by Huerta�s bloody rise to power; moreover, he believed that the revolution begun by Madero in 1910 was a glorious episode in the history of human liberty. Wilson thus not only refused to recognize Huerta but also tried to persuade the dictator to step down from office and permit the holding of free elections for a new democratic government. When Huerta refused to cooperate, Wilson gave open support to the Constitutionalists�Huerta�s opponents under Madero�s successor, Venustiano Carranza�and, when it seemed that the Constitutionalists could not themselves drive Huerta from power, Wilson seized the port of Veracruz in April 1914 to cut off Huerta�s supplies and revenues. This stratagem succeeded, and Carranza and his army occupied Mexico City in August.

Venustiano Carranza, c. 1910.Archivo Casasola

The revolutionary forces then divided between Carranza�s followers and those of his chief rival and most colorful general, Pancho Villa, and civil war raged for another year. Wilson refused to interfere. Carranza emerged victorious by the summer of 1915, and Wilson accorded him de facto recognition in October. In January 1916, however, Villa executed about 17 U.S. citizens at Santa Isabel to demonstrate Carranza�s lack of control in northern Mexico. Then, seeking to provoke war between the United States and Mexico, he raided Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, burning the town and killing some 17 inhabitants. Wilson sent a punitive expedition under Gen. John J. Pershing into Mexico in hot pursuit of Villa, but the wily guerrilla eluded Pershing, and, the deeper the U.S. forces penetrated into Mexican territory, the more agitated the Carranza government became. There were two serious skirmishes between regular Mexican and U.S. troops in the spring, and full-scale war was averted only when Wilson withdrew Pershing�s column some months later. Relations between the two governments were greatly improved when Wilson extended de jure recognition to Carranza�s new Constitutional regime in April 1917. Thereafter, Wilson adamantly rejected all further foreign and American suggestions for intervention in Mexico.

Pershing, John J.Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing (centre) inspecting a camp during the U.S. Army expedition into Mexico in search of Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, 1916.Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-89220)

The struggle for neutrality

The outbreak of general war in Europe in August 1914 raised grave challenges to Wilson�s skill and leadership in foreign affairs. In spite of the appeals of propagandists for the rival Allies and Central Powers, the great majority of Americans were doggedly neutral and determined to avoid involvement unless American rights and interests were grossly violated. This, too, was Wilson�s own feeling, and in August he issued an official proclamation of neutrality and two weeks later appealed to Americans to be �impartial in thought as well as in action.�

Loans and supplies for the Allies

Difficulties arose first with the British government, which at once used its vast fleet to establish a long-range blockade of Germany. The U.S. State Department sent several strong protests to London, particularly against British suppression of American exports of food and raw materials to Germany. Anglo-American blockade controversies were not acute, however, because the British put their blockade controls into effect gradually, always paid for goods seized, argued persuasively that in a total war food and raw materials were as essential as guns and ammunition, and pointed out that they, the British, were simply following blockade precedents established by the United States itself during the American Civil War. As a result of a tacit Anglo-American agreement, the United States soon became the chief external source of supply for the food, raw materials, and munitions that fed the British and French war machines. In addition, and in accordance with the strict rules of neutrality, the Wilson administration permitted the Allied governments to borrow more than $2,000,000,000 in the United States in order to finance the war trade. At the same time, the president resisted all efforts by German Americans for an arms embargo on the ground that such a measure would be grossly un-neutral toward the Allies.

German submarine warfare

There was no possibility of conflict between Germany and the United States so long as the former confined its warfare to the continent of Europe; a new situation full of potential danger arose, however, when the German authorities decided to use their new weapon, the submarine, to challenge British control of the seas. The German admiralty announced in February 1915 that all Allied vessels would be torpedoed without warning in a broad area and that even neutral vessels were not safe. Wilson replied at once that he would hold Germany to �strict accountability� (a conventional diplomatic term) if submarines destroyed American ships and lives without warning. The Germans soon gave broad guarantees concerning American ships, and their safety against illegal submarine attacks was not an issue between the two countries before 1917.

An issue much more fraught with danger was the safety of Americans traveling and working on Allied ships. A German submarine sank the unarmed British liner Lusitania" class="md-crosslink">Lusitania without warning on May 7, 1915, killing, among others, 128 Americans. Wilson at first appealed to the Germans on broad grounds of humanity to abandon submarine warfare, but in the subsequent negotiations he narrowed the issue to one of safety for unarmed passenger liners against violent underseas attack. Momentary resolution came when a submarine sank the unarmed British liner Arabic in August. Wilson warned that he would break diplomatic relations if such attacks continued, and the Germans grudgingly promised not to attack unarmed passenger ships without warning. The controversy escalated to a more dangerous level when a submarine torpedoed the packet steamer Sussex in the English Channel with heavy loss of life in March 1916. In an ultimatum to Berlin, Wilson threatened to break diplomatic relations if the Germans did not cease attacking liners and merchantmen without warning; once again the Germans capitulated, but they threatened to resume unrestricted submarine warfare if the United States failed to force the British to observe international law in their blockade practices.

The New York Herald reporting the sinking of the Lusitania, a British ocean liner, by a German submarine on May 7, 1915.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Allies complicated the submarine controversy in late 1915 by arming many of their liners and merchantmen sailing to American ports. Wilson tried to arrange a compromise by which the Allies would disarm their ships in return for a German promise not to sink them without warning. When the British rejected the proposal, the president gave the impression that he would hold Germany accountable for American lives lost on armed ships, setting off a rebellion in Congress and the near passage of resolutions forbidding American citizens to travel on armed ships. Actually, the president had no intention of permitting armed ships to become a serious issue; their status was never a subject of serious controversy between the United States and Germany.

Arming for war

Meanwhile, the increasingly perilous state of relations with Germany had prompted Wilson, in December 1915, to call for a considerable expansion in the country�s armed forces. A violent controversy over preparedness ensued, both in Congress and in the country at large. The army legislation of 1916 was a compromise, with Wilson obtaining only a modest increase in the army and a strengthening of the National Guard, but the Naval Appropriations Act of 1916 provided for more ships than the administration had requested.

The United States enters the Great War

Wilson�s most passionate desire, aside from avoiding belligerency, was to bring an end to the war through his personal mediation. He sent Colonel House to Europe in early 1915 to explore the possibilities of peace and again early in 1916 to press for a plan of Anglo-American cooperation for peace. The British refused to cooperate, and the president, more than ever eager to avoid a final confrontation with Germany on the submarine issue, decided to press forward with independent mediation. He was by this time also angered by the intensification of British blockade practices and convinced that both sides were fighting for world domination and spoils. On December 18, 1916, Wilson asked the belligerents to state the terms upon which they would be willing to make peace. Soon afterward, in secret, high-level negotiations, he appealed to Britain and Germany to hold an early peace conference under his leadership.

Break with Germany

Chances for peace were blasted by a decision of the German leaders, made at an imperial conference on January 9, 1917, to inaugurate an all-out submarine war against all commerce, neutral as well as belligerent. The Germans knew that such a campaign would bring the United States into the war, but they were confident that their augmented submarine fleet could starve Britain into submission before the United States could mobilize and participate effectively.

The announcement of the new submarine blockade in January left the president no alternative but to break diplomatic relations with Germany, which he did on February 3. At the same time, and in subsequent addresses, the president made it clear that he would accept unrestricted submarine warfare against belligerent merchantmen and would act only if American ships were sunk. In early March he put arms on American ships in the hope that this would deter submarine attacks. The Germans began to sink American ships indiscriminately in mid-March, and on April 2 Wilson asked Congress to recognize that a state of war existed between the United States and the German Empire. Congress approved the war resolution quickly, and Wilson signed it on April 6. (For U.S. military involvement in World War I, see the article World War I.)

Mobilization

Generally speaking, the efforts at mobilization went through two stages. During the first, lasting roughly from April to December 1917, the administration relied mainly on voluntary and cooperative efforts. During the second stage, after December 1917, the government moved rapidly to establish complete control over every important phase of economic life. Railroads were nationalized; a war industries board established ironclad controls over industry; food and fuel were strictly rationed; an emergency-fleet corporation began construction of a vast merchant fleet; and a war labour board used coercive measures to prevent strikes. Opposition to the war was sternly suppressed under the Espionage Act of 1917. At the same time, the Committee on Public Information, headed by the progressive journalist George Creel, mobilized publicists, scholars, and others in a vast prowar propaganda effort. By the spring of 1918, the American people and their economy had been harnessed for total war (a near miracle, considering the lack of preparedness only a year before).

ration cardSugar ration card used during World War I, 1917. Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

America�s role in the war

The American military contribution, while small compared to that of the Allies during the entire war, was in two respects decisive in the outcome. The U.S. Navy, fully prepared at the outset, provided the ships that helped the British overcome the submarine threat by the autumn of 1917. The U.S. Army, some 4,000,000 men strong, was raised mainly by conscription under the Selective Service Act of 1917; the American Expeditionary Force of more than 1,200,000 men under General Pershing reached France by September 1918, and this huge infusion of manpower tipped the balance on the Western Front and helped to end the war in November 1918, a year earlier than military planners had anticipated.

World War I: �Wake Up� paradeMarchers in a �Wake Up� parade, 1917, during World War I.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Wilson�s vision of a new world order

The Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty

With their armies reeling under the weight of a combined Allied and American assault, the Germans appealed to Wilson in October 1918 for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points and other presidential pronouncements. The Allies agreed to conclude peace on this basis, except that the British entered a reservation about freedom of the seas, and Wilson agreed to an Anglo-French demand that the Germans be required to make reparation for damages to civilian property.

U.S. 27th Infantry Division; end of World War IThe U.S. 27th Infantry Division passing through the Victory Arch in New York City in celebration of the end of World War I, March 25, 1919.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The fight over the treaty and the election of 1920

Public opinion in the United States seemed strongly in favour of quick ratification of the Versailles Treaty when the president presented that document to the Senate in July 1919. Traditional isolationist sentiment was beginning to revive, however, and a small minority of 16 senators, irreconcilably opposed to U.S. membership in the League, vowed to oppose the treaty to the bitter end. In addition, a crucial controversy developed between the president and a majority of the Republican senators, led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Lodge insisted upon adding 14 reservations to the treaty. The second reservation declared that the United States assumed no obligations under Article X of the Covenant, which guaranteed the integrity and independence of members of the League; moreover it said that the president could not use the armed forces to support the Covenant without the explicit consent of Congress.

Lodge, Henry CabotHenry Cabot Lodge, c. 1898.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph.3b25369)

Calling this reservation a nullification of the treaty, Wilson in September made a long speaking tour of the West to build up public support for unconditional ratification. He suffered a breakdown at the end of his tour and a serious stroke on October 2. The president�s illness, which incapacitated him for several months, increased his intransigence against the Lodge reservations; with equal stubbornness, the Massachusetts senator refused to consent to any compromise. The result was failure to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority for ratification, with or without reservations, when the Senate voted on November 19, 1919, and again on March 19, 1920.

Wilson had suggested that the ensuing presidential campaign and election should be a �great and solemn referendum� on the League. The Democratic candidate, James M. Cox of Ohio, fought hard to make it the leading issue, but the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding of Ohio, was evasive on the subject, and a group of 31 leading Republican internationalists assured the country that Harding�s election would be the best guarantee of U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Harding swamped Cox (see U.S. presidential election of 1920), and his victory ended all hopes for U.S. membership. In his inaugural Harding announced that the United States would not be entangled in European affairs; he emphasized this determination by concluding a separate peace with Germany in 1921.

Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson leaving his home in 1921, his health broken.� Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com Arthur S. Link

The United States from 1920 to 1945

The postwar Republican administrations

Postwar conservatism

After the end of World War I, many Americans were left with a feeling of distrust toward foreigners and radicals, whom they held responsible for the war. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the founding of the communists� Third International in 1919 further fanned American fears of radicalism. Race riots and labour unrest added to the tension. Thus, when a series of strikes and indiscriminate bombings began in 1919, the unrelated incidents were all assumed�incorrectly in most cases�to be communist-inspired. During the ensuing Red Scare, civil liberties were sometimes grossly violated and many innocent aliens were deported. The Red Scare was over within a year, but a general distrust of foreigners, liberal reform movements, and organized labour remained throughout the 1920s. In fact, many viewed Warren G. Harding�s landslide victory in 1920 (see U.S. presidential election of 1920) as a repudiation of Woodrow Wilson�s internationalism and of the reforms of the Progressive era.

Peace and prosperity

Harding took office with a clear mandate to restore business as usual, a condition he termed �normalcy.� Americans wished to put reminders of the Great War behind them, as well as the brutal strikes, the Red Scare, and the sharp recession of Wilson�s last years in office. Peace and prosperity were what people desired, and these would be achieved under Harding.

Harding, Warren G.Warren G. Harding.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg no. LC-USZ62-91485)

As part of his policy of returning America to prewar conditions, Harding pardoned many individuals who had been convicted of antiwar activities or for being radicals. His main concern, however, was business. Reversing progressive and wartime trends, the Harding administration strove to establish probusiness policies. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty obtained injunctions against striking workers. The Supreme Court sided with management in disputes over unions, minimum wage laws, child labour, and other issues. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover expanded the size of his department fourfold during the next eight years in attempts to foster business growth and efficiency and to encourage trade associations and business�labour cooperation. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, one of the country�s richest men, drastically cut taxes, especially on the wealthy; he also cut federal spending to reduce the national debt.

Mellon, Andrew W.Andrew W. Mellon, c. 1921.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-56407)

In foreign affairs the Harding administration tried to ensure peace by urging disarmament, and at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes negotiated the first effective arms-reduction agreement in history. On the whole, however, the policies of the United States were narrow and nationalistic. It did not cooperate with the League of Nations. It insisted that Europeans pay their American debts but in 1922 passed the Fordney�McCumber Tariff, which raised duties so high that foreigners had great difficulty earning the necessary dollars. When immigration reached prewar levels (some 800,000 people entered the country between June 1920 and June 1921), Congress gave in to the protests of organized labour, which believed immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens, and to the objections of business leaders and patriotic organizations, who feared that some of the immigrants might be radicals. Reversing traditional American policy, Congress passed first an emergency restriction bill and then in 1924 the National Origins Act. The act set a quota limiting the number of immigrants to 164,000 annually (150,000 after July 1, 1927); it discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and barred Asians completely. The quota did not pertain to North Americans, however.

Hughes, Charles EvansCharles Evans Hughes, 1916.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Harding�s policies, his genial nature, and the return of prosperity made the president extremely popular. His sudden death, of a cerebral embolism, in the summer of 1923 resulted in a national outpouring of grief. Yet it soon became evident that his administration had been the most corrupt since Ulysses S. Grant�s. Harding had appointed venal mediocrities, many of them old cronies, to office, and they had betrayed his trust. The most publicized scandal was the illegal leasing of naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, which led to the conviction of Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall for accepting a bribe.

Calvin Coolidge, Harding�s vice president and successor, was a taciturn, parsimonious New Englander who restored honesty to government. His administration suffered none of the stigma of the Harding scandals, and Coolidge, thanks to a buoyant economy and a divided Democratic Party, easily defeated the conservative Democrat John W. Davis in the election of 1924. Even though an independent campaign by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin drew off insurgent Republicans, Coolidge received more popular, and electoral, votes than his opponents combined.

Coolidge, CalvinCalvin Coolidge taking the oath of office as U.S. president, 1925.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Coolidge followed Harding�s policies, and prosperity continued for most of the decade. From 1922 to 1929, stock dividends rose by 108 percent, corporate profits by 76 percent, and wages by 33 percent. In 1929, 4,455,100 passenger cars were sold by American factories, one for every 27 members of the population, a record that was not broken until 1950. Productivity was the key to America�s economic growth. Because of improvements in technology, overall labour costs declined by nearly 10 percent, even though the wages of individual workers rose.

The prosperity was not solidly based, however. The wealthy benefited most, and agriculture and several industries, such as textiles and bituminous coal mining, were seriously depressed; after 1926 construction declined.

New social trends

For millions of Americans, the sober-minded Coolidge was a more appropriate symbol for the era than the journalistic terms Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties. These terms were exaggerations, but they did have some basis in fact. Many young men and women who had been disillusioned by their experiences in World War I rebelled against what they viewed as unsuccessful, outmoded prewar conventions and attitudes. Women who had been forced to work outside the home because of labour shortages during the war were unwilling to give up their social and economic independence after the war had ended. Having won the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, the new �emancipated� woman, the flapper, demanded to be recognized as man�s equal in all areas. She adopted a masculine look, bobbing her hair and abandoning corsets; she drank and smoked in public; and she was more open about sex.

Social changes were not limited to the young. Productivity gains brought most Americans up to at least a modest level of comfort. People were working fewer hours a week and earning more money than ever before. New consumer goods�radios, telephones, refrigerators, and above all the motor car�made life better, and they were easier to buy thanks to a vastly expanded consumer credit system. Leisure activities became more important, professional sports boomed, and the rapid growth of tabloid newspapers, magazines, movies, and radios enabled millions to share in the exciting world of speakeasies, flappers, and jazz music, even if only vicariously.

Joe (�King�) Oliver's Creole Jazz Band performing in Chicago, 1923.Pictorial Press/Alamy

The Great Depression

In October 1929, only months after Hoover took office, the stock market crashed, the average value of 50 leading stocks falling by almost half in two months. Despite occasional rallies, the slide persisted until 1932, when stock averages were barely a fourth of what they had been in 1929. Industrial production soon followed the stock market, giving rise to the worst unemployment the country had ever seen. By 1933 at least a quarter of the work force was unemployed. Adjusted for deflation, salaries had fallen by 40 percent and industrial wages by 60 percent.

People gathering on the steps of the building across from the New York Stock Exchange on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the start of the stock market crash in the United States.AP

The causes of the Great Depression were many and various. Agriculture had collapsed in 1919 and was a continuing source of weakness. Because of poor regulatory policies, many banks were overextended. Wages had not kept up with profits, and by the late 1920s consumers were reaching the limits of their ability to borrow and spend. Production had already begun to decline and unemployment to rise before the crash. The crash, which was inevitable since stock prices were much in excess of real value, greatly accelerated every bad tendency, destroying the confidence of investors and consumers alike.

Great Depression: apple sellerMan selling apples during the Great Depression.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Hoover met the crisis energetically, in contrast to earlier administrations, which had done little to cope with panics except reduce government spending. He extracted promises from manufacturers to maintain production. He signed legislation providing generous additional sums for public works. He also signed the infamous Smoot�Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which raised duties to an average level of 50 percent. These steps failed to ease the depression, however, while the tariff helped to export it. International trade had never recovered from World War I. Europe still depended on American sales and investments for income and on American loans to maintain the complicated structure of debt payments and reparations erected in the 1920s. After the crash Americans stopped investing in Europe, and the tariff deprived foreigners of their American markets. Foreign nations struck back with tariffs of their own, and all suffered from the resulting anarchy.

In the 1930 elections the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives and, in combination with liberal Republicans, the Senate as well. Soon afterward a slight rise in production and employment made it seem that the worst of the depression was over. Then, in the spring of 1931, another crisis erupted. The weakening western European economy brought down a major bank in Vienna, and Germany defaulted on its reparations payments. Hoover proposed a one-year moratorium on reparations and war-debt payments, but, even though the moratorium was adopted, it was too little too late. In the resulting financial panic most European governments went off the gold standard and devalued their currencies, thus destroying the exchange system, with devastating effects upon trade. Europeans withdrew gold from American banks, leading the banks to call in their loans to American businesses. A cascade of bankruptcies ensued, bank customers collapsing first and after them the banks.

Hoover tried hard to stabilize the economy. He persuaded Congress to establish a Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend funds to banks, railroads, insurance companies, and other institutions. At the same time, in January 1932, new capital was arranged for federal land banks. The Glass�Steagall Act provided gold to meet foreign withdrawals and liberalized Federal Reserve credit. The Federal Home Loan Bank Act sought to prop up threatened building and loan associations. But these measures failed to promote recovery or to arrest the rising tide of unemployment. Hoover, whose administrative abilities had masked severe political shortcomings, made things worse by offering negative leadership to the nation. His public addresses were conspicuously lacking in candor. He vetoed measures for direct federal relief, despite the fact that local governments and private charities, the traditional sources for welfare, were clearly incapable of providing adequate aid for the ever-rising numbers of homeless and hungry. When unemployed veterans refused to leave Washington after their request for immediate payment of approved bonuses was denied, Hoover sent out the army, which dispersed the protesters at bayonet point and burned down their makeshift quarters.

Great Depression; breadlineDetail of a sculpture depicting unemployed men in a breadline during the Great Depression, by George Segal, part of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, D.C.� Zack Frank/Fotolia

Hoover�s failures and mistakes guaranteed that whoever the Democrats nominated in 1932 would become the next president. Their candidate was Gov. Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York. He won the election by a large margin, and the Democrats won majorities in both branches of Congress.

Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal pin, 1932.Collection of David J. and Janice L. Frent

The New Deal

The first New Deal

Roosevelt took office amid a terrifying bank crisis that had forced many states to suspend banking activities. He acted quickly to restore public confidence. On Inaugural Day, March 4, 1933, he declared that �the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.� The next day he halted trading in gold and declared a national �bank holiday.� On March 9 he submitted to Congress an Emergency Banking Bill authorizing government to strengthen, reorganize, and reopen solvent banks. The House passed the bill by acclamation, sight unseen, after only 38 minutes of debate. That night the Senate passed it unamended, 73 votes to 7. On March 12 Roosevelt announced that, on the following day, sound banks would begin to reopen. On March 13, deposits exceeded withdrawals in the first reopened banks. �Capitalism was saved in eight days,� Raymond Moley, a member of the president�s famous �brain trust,� later observed.

In fact, the legal basis for the bank holiday was doubtful. The term itself was a misnomer, intended to give a festive air to what was actually a desperate last resort. Most of the reopened banks were not audited to establish their solvency; instead the public was asked to trust the president. Nevertheless, the bank holiday exemplified brilliant leadership at work. It restored confidence where all had been lost and saved the financial system. Roosevelt followed it up with legislation that did actually put the banking structure on a solid footing. The Glass�Steagall Act of 1933 separated commercial from investment banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to guarantee small deposits. The Banking Act of 1935 strengthened the Federal Reserve System, the first major improvement since its birth in 1913.

With the country enthusiastically behind him, Roosevelt kept Congress in special session and piece by piece sent it recommendations that formed the basic recovery program of his first 100 days in office. From March 9 to June 16, 1933, Congress enacted all of Roosevelt�s proposals. Among the bills passed was one creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, which would build dams and power plants and in many other ways salvage a vast, impoverished region. The Securities Exchange Act gave the Federal Trade Commission broad new regulatory powers, which in 1934 were passed on to the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission. The Home Owners Loan Act established a corporation that refinanced one of every five mortgages on urban private residences. Other bills passed during the Hundred Days, as well as subsequent legislation, provided aid for the unemployed and the working poor and attacked the problems of agriculture and business.

U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a farm-relief bill, 1933. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace is standing second from right.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Relief

Nothing required more urgent attention than the masses of unemployed workers who, with their families, had soon overwhelmed the miserably underfinanced bodies that provided direct relief. On May 12, 1933, Congress established a Federal Emergency Relief Administration to distribute half a billion dollars to state and local agencies. Roosevelt also created the Civil Works Administration, which by January 1934 was employing more than 4,000,000 men and women. Alarmed by rising costs, Roosevelt dismantled the CWA in 1934, but the persistence of high unemployment led him to make another about-face. In 1935 the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act provided almost $5,000,000,000 to create work for some 3,500,000 persons. The Public Works Administration (PWA), established in 1933, provided jobs on long-term construction projects, and the Civilian Conservation Corps put 2,500,000 young men to work planting or otherwise improving huge tracts of forestland. For homeowners, the Federal Housing Administration began insuring private home-improvement loans to middle-income families in 1934; in 1938 it became a home-building agency as well.

Agricultural recovery

Hoover�s Federal Farm Board had tried to end the long-standing agricultural depression by raising prices without limiting production. Roosevelt�s Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 was designed to correct the imbalance. Farmers who agreed to limit production would receive �parity� payments to balance prices between farm and nonfarm products, based on prewar income levels. Farmers benefited also from numerous other measures, such as the Farm Credit Act of 1933, which refinanced a fifth of all farm mortgages in a period of 18 months, and the creation in 1935 of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), which did more to bring farmers into the 20th century than any other single act. Thanks to the REA, nine out of 10 farms were electrified by 1950, compared to one out of 10 in 1935.

Civilian Conservation CorpsNew members of the Civilian Conservation Corps waiting to be fitted for shoes at Camp Dix, New Jersey, 1935.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

These additional measures were made all the more important by the limited success of the AAA. Production did fall as intended, aided by the severe drought of 1933�36, and prices rose in consequence; but many, perhaps a majority, of farmers did not prosper as a result. The AAA was of more value to big operators than to small family farmers, who often could not meet their expenses if they restricted their output and therefore could not qualify for parity payments. The farm corporation, however, was able to slash its labour costs by cutting acreage and could cut costs further by using government subsidies to purchase machinery. Thus, even before the Supreme Court invalidated the AAA in 1936, support for it had diminished.

Business recovery

As the economic crisis was above all an industrial depression, business recovery headed the New Deal�s list of priorities. Working toward that goal, the administration drafted the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which, among other things, created a National Recovery Administration to help business leaders draw up and enforce codes governing prices, wages, and other matters (coded industries would be exempt from the antitrust laws). Labour was offered protection from unfair practices and given the right to bargain collectively. A large-scale public works appropriation, administered through the PWA, was intended to pour sufficient money into the economy to increase consumer buying power while prices and wages went up.

Despite great initial enthusiasm for the NRA program, it was a failure. The codes became too numerous and complex for proper enforcement, and they were resented because they tended to favour the leading producers in each regulated industry. The protections afforded labour proved illusory, while the PWA, despite an impressive building record that included not only dams, bridges, and schools but also aircraft carriers, was too slow and too small to have much effect on the economy as a whole.

Yet, even if the NRA had overcome its technical problems, failure would probably still have resulted. What the country needed was economic growth, but the NRA assumed that the United States had a mature economic structure incapable of further expansion. Accordingly, it worked to stabilize the economy, eliminate wasteful or predatory competition, and protect the rights of labour. Encouraging growth was not on its agenda.

The second New Deal and the Supreme Court

In reaction to pressures from the left and hostility from the right, the New Deal shifted more toward reform in 1935�36. Popular leaders, promising more than Roosevelt, threatened to pull sufficient votes from him in the 1936 election to bring Republican victory. Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana was building a national following with a �Share the Wealth� program. The poor in Northern cities were attracted to the Roman Catholic priest Charles E. Coughlin, who later switched from a program of nationalization and currency inflation to an antidemocratic, anti-Semitic emphasis. Many older people supported Francis E. Townsend�s plan to provide $200 per month for everyone over age 60. At the same time, conservatives, including such groups as the American Liberty League, founded in 1934, attacked the New Deal as a threat to states� rights, free enterprise, and the open shop.

Huey LongUPI/Bettmann Archive

Roosevelt�s response in 1935 was to propose greater aid to the underprivileged and extensive reforms. Congress created the Works Progress Administration, which replaced direct relief with work relief; between 1935 and 1941 the WPA employed an annual average of 2,100,000 workers, including artists and writers, who built or improved schools, hospitals, airports, and other facilities by the tens of thousands. The National Youth Administration created part-time jobs for millions of college students, high-school students, and other youngsters. Of long-range significance was the Social Security Act of 1935, which provided federal aid for the aged, retirement annuities, unemployment insurance, aid for persons who were blind or crippled, and aid to dependent children; the original act suffered from various inadequacies, but it was the beginning of a permanent, expanding national program. A tax reform law fell heavily upon corporations and well-to-do people. The National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, gave organized labour federal protection in collective bargaining; it prohibited a number of �unfair practices� on the part of employers and created the strong National Labor Relations Board to enforce the law.

A poster by Vera Bock for the Works Progress Administration, c. 1936�41. Work Projects Administration Poster Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital file no. cph 3b48737)

In the 1936 elections Roosevelt, aided by his reform program, formed a coalition that included liberals, urban ethnics, farmers, trade unionists, and the elderly. He easily defeated the Republican nominee for president, Gov. Alfred (�Alf�) M. Landon of Kansas, receiving more than 60 percent of the popular vote and the electoral votes of every state except Maine and Vermont. The Democratic majorities in the House and Senate were also strengthened. Viewing his decisive victory as an electoral mandate for continued reform, Roosevelt sought to neutralize the Supreme Court, which in 1935 had invalidated several early New Deal reform measures and now seemed about to strike down the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act. In February 1937 Roosevelt created a furor by proposing a reorganization of the court system that would have included giving him the power to appoint up to six new justices, thus giving the court a liberal majority. Some Democrats and a few liberal Republicans in Congress supported the proposal, but a strong coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, backed by much public support, fought the so-called court-packing plan.

Landon, Alfred M.Alf Landon.Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society

Meanwhile the court itself in a new series of decisions began upholding as constitutional measures involving both state and federal economic regulation. These decisions, which began an extensive revision of constitutional law concerning governmental regulation, made the reorganization plan unnecessary; the Senate defeated it in July 1937 by a vote of 70 to 22. Roosevelt had suffered a stinging political defeat, even though he no longer had to fear the court. Turnover on the court was rapid as older members retired or died; by 1942 all but two of the justices were Roosevelt appointees.

The culmination of the New Deal

Roosevelt lost further prestige in the summer of 1937, when the nation plunged into a sharp recession. Economists had feared an inflationary boom as industrial production moved up to within 7.5 percent of 1929. Other indices were high except for a lag in capital investment and continued heavy unemployment. Roosevelt, fearing a boom and eager to balance the budget, cut government spending, which most economists felt had brought the recovery. The new Social Security taxes removed an additional $2,000,000,000 from circulation. Between August 1937 and May 1938 the index of production fell from 117 to 76 (on a 1929 base of 100), and unemployment increased by perhaps 4,000,000 persons. Congress voted an emergency appropriation of $5,000,000,000 for work relief and public works, and by June 1938 recovery once more was under way, although unemployment remained higher than before the recession.

Roosevelt�s loss of power became evident in 1938, when his attempts to defeat conservative congressional Democrats in the primaries failed. In the fall Republicans gained 80 seats in the House and seven in the Senate. The Democratic Party retained nominal control of Congress, but conservative Democrats and Republicans voting together defeated many of Roosevelt�s proposals. A few last bills slipped through. The U.S. Housing Authority was created in 1937 to provide low-cost public housing. In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act established a minimum wage and a maximum work week. Otherwise, the president seldom got what he asked for.

Apart from the New Deal itself, no development in the 1930s was more important than the rise of organized labour. This too had negative, or at least mixed, effects upon Roosevelt�s political power. When the depression struck, only 5 percent of the work force was unionized, compared to 12 percent in 1920. The great change began in 1935 when the American Federation of Labor�s Committee for Industrial Organization broke away from its timid parent and, as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (after 1938), began unionizing the mass production industries. The CIO had a unique tool, the sit-down strike. Instead of picketing a plant, CIO strikers closed it down from inside, taking the factory hostage and preventing management from operating with nonunion workers. This, together with the new reluctance of authorities, many of them Roosevelt Democrats, to act against labour, made sit-down strikes highly successful. On February 11, 1937, after a long sit-down strike, General Motors, the country�s mightiest corporation, recognized the United Auto Workers. The United States Steel Corporation caved in less than a month later, and by 1941 some 10,500,000 workers were unionized, three times as many as a decade before. The CIO became a mainstay of the New Deal coalition, yet it also aroused great resentment among middle-class Americans, who opposed strikes in general but the CIO�s tactics especially. This further narrowed Roosevelt�s political base.

An assessment of the New Deal

The New Deal established federal responsibility for the welfare of the economy and the American people. At the time, conservative critics charged it was bringing statism or even socialism. Left-wing critics of a later generation charged just the reverse�that it bolstered the old order and prevented significant reform. Others suggested that the New Deal was no more than the extension and culmination of progressivism. In its early stages, the New Deal did perhaps begin where progressivism left off and built upon the Hoover program for fighting the depression. But Roosevelt soon took the New Deal well beyond Hoover and progressivism, establishing a precedent for large-scale social programs and for government participation in economic activities. Despite the importance of this growth of federal responsibility, the New Deal�s greatest achievement was to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism. Its greatest failure was its inability to bring about complete economic recovery. Some economists, notably John Maynard Keynes of Great Britain, were calling for massive deficit spending to promote recovery; and by 1937 the New Deal�s own experience proved that pump priming worked, whereas spending cutbacks only hurt the economy. Roosevelt remained unpersuaded, however, and the depression lingered on until U.S. entry into World War II brought full employment.

World War II

The road to war

After World War I most Americans concluded that participating in international affairs had been a mistake. They sought peace through isolation and throughout the 1920s advocated a policy of disarmament and nonintervention. As a result, relations with Latin-American nations improved substantially under Hoover, an anti-imperialist. This enabled Roosevelt to establish what became known as the Good Neighbor Policy, which repudiated altogether the right of intervention in Latin America. By exercising restraint in the region as a whole and by withdrawing American occupation forces from the Caribbean, Roosevelt increased the prestige of the United States in Latin America to its highest level in memory.

As the European situation became more tense, the United States continued to hold to its isolationist policy. Congress, with the approval of Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, enacted a series of neutrality laws that legislated against the factors that supposedly had taken the United States into World War I. As Italy prepared to invade Ethiopia, Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, embargoing shipment of arms to either aggressor or victim. Stronger legislation followed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, in effect penalizing the Spanish government, whose fascist enemies were receiving strong support from Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

Cordell Hull, 1933.National Archives, Washington, D.C.

In the Pacific Roosevelt continued Hoover�s policy of nonrecognition of Japan�s conquests in Asia. When Japan invaded China in 1937, however, he seemed to begin moving away from isolationism. He did not invoke the Neutrality Act, which had just been revised, and in October he warned that war was like a disease and suggested that it might be desirable for peace-loving nations to �quarantine� aggressor nations. He then quickly denied that his statement had any policy implications, and by December, when Japanese aircraft sank a U.S. gunboat in the Yangtze River, thoughts of reprisal were stifled by public apathy and by Japan�s offer of apologies and indemnities. With strong public opposition to foreign intervention, Roosevelt concentrated on regional defense, continuing to build up the navy and signing mutual security agreements with other governments in North and South America.

When Germany�s invasion of Poland in 1939 touched off World War II, Roosevelt called Congress into special session to revise the Neutrality Act to allow belligerents (in reality only Great Britain and France, both on the Allied side) to purchase munitions on a cash-and-carry basis. With the fall of France to Germany in June 1940, Roosevelt, with heavy public support, threw the resources of the United States behind the British. He ordered the War and Navy departments to resupply British divisions that had been rescued at Dunkirk minus their weaponry, and in September he agreed to exchange 50 obsolescent destroyers for 99-year leases on eight British naval and air bases in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States at war

Although isolationism died at Pearl Harbor, its legacy of unpreparedness lived on. Anticipating war, Roosevelt and his advisers had been able to develop and execute some plans for military expansion, but public opinion prohibited large-scale appropriations for armament and defense. Thus, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the United States had some 2,200,000 men under arms, but most were ill-trained and poorly equipped. Barely a handful of army divisions even approached a state of readiness. The Army Air Corps possessed only 1,100 combat planes, many of which were outdated. The navy was better prepared, but it was too small to fight a two-ocean war and had barely been able to provide enough ships for convoy duty in the North Atlantic. Eventually more than 15,000,000 men and women would serve in the armed forces, but not until 1943 would the United States be strong enough to undertake large-scale offensive operations. (For U.S. military involvement in World War II, see the article World War II.)

War production

Financing the war

The total cost of the war to the federal government between 1941 and 1945 was about $321,000,000,000 (10 times as much as World War I). Taxes paid 41 percent of the cost, less than Roosevelt requested but more than the World War I figure of 33 percent. The remainder was financed by borrowing from financial institutions, an expensive method but one that Congress preferred over the alternatives of raising taxes even higher or making war bond purchases compulsory. In consequence the national debt increased fivefold, amounting to $259,000,000,000 in 1945. The Revenue Act of 1942 revolutionized the tax structure by increasing the number who paid income taxes from 13,000,000 to 50,000,000. At the same time, through taxes on excess profits and other sources of income, the rich were made to bear a larger part of the burden, making this the only period in modern history when wealth was significantly redistributed.

Social consequences of the war

Despite the vast number of men and women in uniform, civilian employment rose from 46,000,000 in 1940 to more than 53,000,000 in 1945. The pool of unemployed men dried up in 1943, and further employment increases consisted of women, minorities, and over- or underage males. These were not enough to meet all needs, and by the end of the year a manpower shortage had developed.

One result of this shortage was that blacks made significant social and economic progress. Although the armed forces continued to practice segregation, as did Red Cross blood banks, Roosevelt, under pressure from blacks, who were outraged by the refusal of defense industries to integrate their labour forces, signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It prohibited racial discrimination in job training programs and by defense contractors and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to insure compliance. By the end of 1944 nearly 2,000,000 blacks were at work in defense industries. As black contributions to the military and industry increased, so did their demands for equality. This sometimes led to racial hostilities, as on June 20, 1943, when mobs of whites invaded the black section of Detroit. Nevertheless, the gains offset the losses. Lynching virtually died out, several states outlawed discriminatory voting practices, and others adopted fair employment laws.

Full employment also resulted in raised income levels, which, through a mixture of price and wage controls, were kept ahead of inflation. Despite both this increase in income and a no-strike pledge given by trade union leaders after Pearl Harbor, there were numerous labour actions. Workers resented wage ceilings because much of their increased income went to pay taxes and was earned by working overtime rather than through higher hourly rates. In consequence, there were almost 15,000 labour stoppages during the war at a cost of some 36,000,000 man-days. Strikes were greatly resented, particularly by the armed forces, but their effects were more symbolic than harmful. The time lost amounted to only one-ninth of 1 percent of all hours worked.

Because Pearl Harbor had united the nation, few people were prosecuted for disloyalty or sedition, unlike during World War I. The one glaring exception to this policy was the scandalous treatment of Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent. In 1942, on the basis of groundless racial fears and suspicions, virtually the entire Japanese-American population of the West Coast, amounting to 110,000 persons, was rounded up and imprisoned in �relocation� centres, which the inmates regarded as concentration camps. The Japanese-Americans lost their liberty, and in most cases their property as well, despite the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had already arrested those individuals it considered security risks, had verified their loyalty.

A row of barracks at the Minidoka Relocation Center, an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Hunt, Idaho, 1942�45.Records of the War Relocation Authority, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

The 1944 election

Roosevelt soundly defeated Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York in the 1944 election, but his margin of victory was smaller than it had been previously. His running mate, chosen by leaders who disliked former vice president Henry A. Wallace for his extreme liberalism, was Sen. Harry S. Truman of Missouri, a party Democrat who had distinguished himself by investigating fraud and waste among war contractors.

Thomas E. Dewey, 1944.UPI/Bettmann Archive

The new U.S. role in world affairs

The U.S. entry into World War II had brought an end to isolation, and President Roosevelt was determined to prevent a retreat into isolationism once the war was over. After a series of conferences in December 1941, Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill announced the formation of the United Nations, a wartime alliance of 26 nations. In 1943 Roosevelt began planning the organization of a postwar United Nations, meeting with congressional leaders to assure bipartisan support. The public supported Roosevelt�s efforts, and that fall Congress passed resolutions committing the United States to membership in an international body �with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace.� Finally, in the spring of 1945, delegates from 50 nations signed the charter for a permanent United Nations. In addition to political harmony, Roosevelt promoted economic cooperation, and, with his full support, in 1944 the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created to bar a return of the cutthroat economic nationalism that had prevailed before the war.

Throughout the war Roosevelt met with Churchill and Stalin to plan military strategy and postwar policy. His last great conference with them took place at Yalta in Crimea in February 1945. There policies were agreed upon to enforce the unconditional surrender of Germany, to divide it into zones for occupation and policing by the respective Allied forces, and to provide democratic regimes in eastern European nations. A series of secret agreements were also made at Yalta; chief among these was the Soviet pledge to enter the war against Japan after the German surrender, in return for concessions in East Asia.

Yalta ConferencePrime Minister Winston Churchill, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Premier Joseph Stalin meeting at the Yalta Conference, 1945.U.S. Army Photo

Roosevelt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12 and was succeeded by Truman. In the following months the German armed forces collapsed, and on May 7 all German forces surrendered. In the Pacific the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in early 1945 brought Japan under a state of siege. In the summer, before an invasion could take place, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On September 2 the surrender of Japan was signed in Tokyo harbour on the battleship Missouri. Frank Freidel William L. O'Neill

The United States since 1945

The peak Cold War years, 1945�60

The Truman Doctrine and containment

Truman, who had been chosen as vice president for domestic political reasons, was poorly prepared to assume the presidency. He had no experience of foreign affairs, knew little about Roosevelt�s intentions, and was intimidated by the giant shoes he now had to fill. His first decisions were dictated by events or plans already laid. In July, two months after the German forces surrendered, he met at Potsdam, Germany, with Stalin and Churchill (who was succeeded at the conference by Clement Attlee) to discuss future operations against Japan and a peace settlement for Europe. Little was accomplished, and there would not be another meeting between Soviet and American heads of state for 10 years.

Potsdam Conference; Truman, Harry S.; Churchill, Winston; Stalin, JosephPotsdam Conference, with U.S. President Harry S. Truman (centre), flanked by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (left) and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (right), near Berlin, Germany, July 1945.U.S. Army Photo

Hopes that good relations between the superpowers would ensure world peace soon faded as a result of the Stalinization of eastern Europe and Soviet support of communist insurgencies in various parts of the globe. Events came to a head in 1947 when Britain, weakened by a failing economy, decided to pull out of the eastern Mediterranean. This would leave both Greece, where a communist-inspired civil war was raging, and Turkey to the mercies of the Soviet Union. Truman now came into his own as a national leader, asking Congress to appropriate aid to Greece and Turkey and asserting, in effect, that henceforth the United States must help free peoples in general to resist communist aggression. This policy, known as the Truman Doctrine, has been criticized for committing the United States to the support of unworthy regimes and for taking on greater burdens than it was safe to assume. At first, however, the Truman Doctrine was narrowly applied. Congress appropriated $400 million for Greece and Turkey, saving both from falling into unfriendly hands, and thereafter the United States relied mainly on economic assistance to support its foreign policy.

The keystone of this policy, and its greatest success, was the European Recovery Program, usually called the Marshall Plan. Europe�s economy had failed to recover after the war, its paralysis being worsened by the exceptionally severe winter of 1946�47. Thus, in June 1947 Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed the greatest foreign-aid program in world history in order to bring Europe back to economic health. In 1948 Congress created the Economic Cooperation Administration and over the next five years poured some $13 billion worth of aid into western Europe. (Assistance was offered to Eastern-bloc countries also, but they were forced by Stalin to decline.) The plan restored economic vitality and confidence to the region, while undermining the local communist parties. In 1949 Truman proposed extending similar aid to underdeveloped nations throughout the world, but the resulting Point Four Program was less successful than the Marshall Plan. Experience showed that it was easier to rebuild a modern industrial economy than to develop one from scratch.

U.S. policy for limiting Soviet expansion had developed with remarkable speed. Soon after the collapse of hopes for world peace in 1945 and 1946, the Truman administration had accepted the danger posed by Soviet aggression and resolved to shore up noncommunist defenses at their most critical points. This policy, known as containment, a term suggested by its principal framer, George Kennan, resulted in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as in the decision to make the western zones of Germany (later West Germany) a pillar of strength. When the Soviet Union countered this development in June 1948 by blocking all surface routes into the western-occupied zones of Berlin, Britain and the United States supplied the sectors by air for almost a year until the Soviet Union called off the blockade. A logical culmination of U.S. policy was the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance among 12 (later 16) nations to resist Soviet aggression.

U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson signs the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, as U.S. President Harry S. Truman (second from left) and Vice President Alben W. Barkley (left) look on.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

Containment worked less well in Asia. In December 1945 Truman sent General Marshall to China with instructions to work out an agreement between the communist rebels and the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. This was an impossible task, and in the subsequent fighting Mao Zedong�s communist forces prevailed. The Nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949, and the United States then decided to concentrate its East Asian policy upon strengthening occupied Japan, with much better results.

Postwar domestic reorganization

After the end of World War II the vast U.S. military establishment was dismantled, its strength falling from 12 million men and women to about 1.5 million in 1947. The navy and army air forces remained the world�s strongest, however, and the U.S. monopoly of atomic weapons seemed to ensure security. In 1946 the United States formed an Atomic Energy Commission for purposes of research and development. The armed forces were reorganized under a secretary of defense by the National Security Act of 1947, which also created the U.S. Air Force as an independent service. In 1949 the services were brought together in a single Department of Defense, though each retained considerable autonomy. In that same year the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic device, opening an era of intense nuclear, and soon thermonuclear, competition.

Peace brought with it new fears. Demobilizing the armed forces might result in massive unemployment and another depression. Or, conversely, the huge savings accumulated during the war could promote runaway inflation. The first anxiety proved groundless, even though government did little to ease the transition to a peacetime economy. War contracts were canceled, war agencies diminished or dissolved, and government-owned war plants sold to private parties. But, after laying off defense workers, manufacturers rapidly tooled up and began producing consumer goods in volume. The housing industry grew too, despite shortages of every kind, thanks to mass construction techniques pioneered by the firm of Levitt and Sons, Inc., and other developers. All this activity created millions of new jobs. The Serviceman�s Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, also helped ease military personnel back into civilian life. It provided veterans with loans, educational subsidies, and other benefits.

Inflation was more troublesome. Congress lacked enthusiasm for wartime price controls and in June 1946 passed a bill preserving only limited controls. Truman vetoed the bill as inadequate, controls expired, and prices immediately soared. Congress then passed an even weaker price-control bill, which Truman signed. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, most price and wage controls had been lifted. In December the Office of Price Administration began to close down. As a result, the consumer price index did not stabilize until 1948, when prices were more than a third above the 1945 level, while wage and salary income had risen by only about 15 percent.

Truman�s difficulties with Congress had begun in September 1945 when he submitted a 21-point domestic program, including proposals for an expansion of social security and public housing and for the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act banning discrimination. These and subsequent liberal initiatives, later known as the Fair Deal, were rejected by Congress, which passed only the Employment Act of 1946. This clearly stated the government�s responsibility for maintaining full employment and established a Council of Economic Advisers to advise the president.

Truman�s relations with Congress worsened after the 1946 elections. Voters, who were angered by the price-control debacle, a wave of strikes, and Truman�s seeming inability to lead or govern, gave control of both houses of Congress to Republicans for the first time since 1928. The president and the extremely conservative 80th Congress battled from beginning to end, not over foreign policy, where bipartisanship prevailed, but over domestic matters. Congress passed two tax reductions over Truman�s vetoes and in 1947, again over Truman�s veto, passed the Taft�Hartley Act, which restricted unions while extending the rights of management. Congress also rejected various liberal measures submitted by Truman, who did not expect the proposals to pass but wanted Congress on record as having opposed important social legislation.

By 1948, Truman had won support for his foreign policy, but he was expected to lose the presidential election that year because of his poor domestic record. Polls showed him lagging behind Dewey, again the Republican nominee, and to make matters worse the Democratic Party splintered. Former vice president Henry A. Wallace headed the Progressive Party ticket, which pledged to improve Soviet-American relations whatever the cost. Southerners, known as Dixiecrats, who were alienated by the Democratic Party�s strong civil rights plank, formed the States� Rights Democratic Party and nominated Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. These defections appeared to ensure Truman�s defeat. Instead Truman won handily, receiving almost as many votes as his opponents combined. His support came largely from labour, which was upset by the Republican passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, from blacks, who strongly supported the Democrats� civil rights provisions, and from farmers, who preferred the higher agricultural subsidies promised by the Democrats, especially at a time when commodity prices were falling.

Truman, Harry S.: Campaign buttonButton from Harry S. Truman's 1948 U.S. presidential campaign.Americana/Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The Democrats regained control of Congress in 1948, but Truman�s relations with that body continued to be troubled. In January 1949 he asked for a broad range of Fair Deal measures, with uneven results. Congress did approve a higher minimum wage, the extension of social security to 10 million additional persons, more public works, larger sums for the TVA and for rural electrification, and the Housing Act of 1949, which authorized construction of 810,000 units for low-income families. Truman failed, however, to persuade Congress to repeal Taft-Hartley, to reform the agricultural subsidy system, to secure federal aid to education, to adopt his civil rights program, or, most importantly, to accept his proposal for national health insurance. He succeeded nevertheless in protecting the New Deal principle of federal responsibility for social welfare, and he helped form the Democratic agenda for the 1960s.

The Red Scare

Truman�s last years in office were marred by charges that his administration was lax about, or even condoned, subversion and disloyalty and that communists, called �reds,� had infiltrated the government. These accusations were made despite Truman�s strongly anticommunist foreign policy and his creation, in 1947, of an elaborate Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which resulted in hundreds of federal workers being fired and in several thousand more being forced to resign.

The excessive fear of communist subversion was fed by numerous sources. China�s fall to communism and the announcement of a Soviet atomic explosion in 1949 alarmed many, and fighting between communist and U.S.-supported factions in Korea heightened political emotions as well. Real cases of disloyalty and espionage also contributed, notably the theft of atomic secrets, for which Soviet agent Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel were convicted in 1951 and executed two years later. Republicans had much to gain from exploiting these and related issues.

Rosenberg, Julius; Rosenberg, EthelJulius and Ethel Rosenberg during their 1951 trial for espionage.AP Images

Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin stood out among those who held that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations amounted to �20 years of treason.� In February 1950 McCarthy claimed that he had a list (whose number varied) of State Department employees who were loyal only to the Soviet Union. McCarthy offered no evidence to support his charges and revealed only a single name, that of Owen Lattimore, who was not in the State Department and would never be convicted of a single offense. Nevertheless, McCarthy enjoyed a highly successful career, and won a large personal following, by making charges of disloyalty that, though mostly undocumented, badly hurt the Democrats. Many others promoted the scare in various ways, leading to few convictions but much loss of employment by government employees, teachers, scholars, and people in the mass media.

McCarthy, Joseph; Red ScareU.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (covering microphones) during an investigation into communist infiltration of the government.Byron Rollins/AP

The Korean War

On June 25, 1950, a powerful invading force from the Soviet-supported Democratic People�s Republic of Korea (North Korea) swept south of the 38th parallel into the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Within days, President Truman resolved to defend South Korea, even though there were few Americans in Korea and few troops ready for combat. The UN Security Council, acting during a Soviet boycott, quickly passed a resolution calling upon UN members to resist North Korean aggression.

After almost being driven into the sea, UN forces, made up largely of U.S. troops and commanded by U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, counterattacked successfully and in September pushed the North Korean forces back across the border. Not content with this victory, the United States attempted to unify Korea by force, advancing almost to the borders of China and the Soviet Union. China, after its warnings were ignored, then entered the war, driving the UN forces back into South Korea. The battle line was soon stabilized along the 38th parallel, and armistice talks began on July 10, 1951, three months after Truman had relieved MacArthur for openly challenging U.S. policies. The talks dragged on fruitlessly, interrupted by outbreaks of fighting, until Eisenhower became president. The United States sustained some 142,000 casualties in this limited war, most of them occurring after China�s entry.

U.S. troops preparing for the assault on Inch'ŏn during the Korean War, September 1950.Bert Harey�� Hulton Deutsch/PNI

In addition to militarizing the Cold War, the Korean conflict widened its field. The United States assumed responsibility for protecting Taiwan against invasion from mainland China. Additional military aid was extended to the French in Indochina. In December 1950 Truman called for a crash program of rearmament, not just to support the forces in Korea but especially to expand the U.S. presence in Europe. As a result, defense expenditures rose to $53.6 billion in 1953, four times the pre-Korean level, and would decline only modestly after the armistice.

Peace, growth, and prosperity

Eisenhower�s second term

Despite suffering a heart attack in 1955 and a case of ileitis that required surgery the next year, Eisenhower stood for reelection in 1956. His opponent was once again Stevenson. Two world crises dominated the campaign. On October 23, Hungarians revolted against communist rule, an uprising that was swiftly crushed by Red Army tanks. On October 29, Israel invaded Egypt, supported by British and French forces looking to regain control of the Suez Canal and, perhaps, to destroy Egypt�s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had nationalized the canal in July. Eisenhower handled both crises deftly, forcing the invaders to withdraw from Egypt and preventing events in Hungary from triggering a confrontation between the superpowers. Owing in part to these crises, Eisenhower carried all but seven states in the election. It was a purely personal victory, however, for the Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.

Lebanon; United States ArmyAmerican soldiers patrolling streets of a village in Lebanon, July 1958.U.S. Army Photo

Domestic issues

Although the Eisenhower administration can, in general, be characterized as a period of growth and prosperity, some problems did begin to arise during the second term. In 1957�58 an economic recession hit and unemployment rose to its highest level since 1941. Labour problems increased in intensity, with some 500,000 steelworkers going on strike for 116 days in 1959. There was even evidence of corruption on the Eisenhower staff. The president remained personally popular, but public discontent was demonstrated in the large majorities gained by the Democrats in the congressional elections of 1958.

Problems associated with postwar population trends also began to be recognized. The U.S. population, which had grown markedly throughout the 1950s, passed 179 million in 1960. Growth was concentrated in the West, and the country became increasingly urbanized as the middle class moved from the cities to new suburban developments. The migration left cities without their tax base but with responsibility for an increasing number of poor residents. It also resulted in a huge increase in commuters, which in turn led to continuing problems of traffic and pollution.

During Eisenhower�s second term, race became a central national concern for the first time since Reconstruction. Some civil rights advances had been made in previous years. In 1954 the Supreme Court had ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. The decision provoked intense resistance in the South but was followed by a chain of rulings and orders that continually narrowed the right to discriminate. In 1955 Martin Luther King, Jr., led a boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, giving rise to the nonviolent civil rights movement. But neither the president nor Congress became involved in the race issue until 1957, when the segregationist governor of Arkansas blocked the integration of a high school in Little Rock. Eisenhower then sent federal troops to enforce the court�s order for integration. Congress was similarly prompted to pass the first civil rights law in 82 years, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which set the stage for the more far-reaching legislation that would follow in the 1960s.

Little Rock, ArkansasAfrican American students walking onto the campus of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, escorted by the National Guard, September 1957.AP Images

World affairs

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union orbited the first artificial satellite, arousing fears that the United States was falling behind the Soviets technologically. This prompted Eisenhower, who generally held the line on spending, to sign the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which provided extensive aid to schools and students in order to bring American education up to what were regarded as Soviet levels of achievement. The event also strengthened demands for the acceleration of the arms and space races, which eventually led to the U.S. Moon landing on July 20, 1969, and to a remarkable expansion of scientific knowledge. In 1958, threatened and actual conflicts between governments friendly to Western powers and unfriendly or communist forces in Lebanon, the islands of Quemoy and Matsu offshore of China, Berlin, and Cuba caused additional concern. Only a minority believed that the United States was still ahead in military and space technology, though in fact this was true.

Explorer I(From left) William H. Pickering, James Van Allen, and Wernher von Braun raising a model of the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, at a press conference; Explorer I was launched January 31, 1958.NASA/JPL

The illness of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in March 1959, and his subsequent resignation, led the president to increase his own activity in foreign affairs. He now traveled more and met more often with heads of state. The most important meeting was to be a summit in 1960 with Khrushchev and Western leaders to discuss such matters as Berlin, German reunification, and arms control. But two weeks before the scheduled date an American U-2 spy plane was shot down deep inside the Soviet Union. Wrangling over this incident destroyed both the Paris summit and any hopes of bettering U.S.-Soviet relations.

An assessment of the postwar era

Despite great differences in style and emphasis, the administrations of Truman and Eisenhower were notable for their continuity. Both were essentially periods of reconstruction. After 15 years of depression and war, people were not interested in social reform but in rebuilding and expanding the educational and transportation systems, achieving stable economic growth, and, in the case of the younger generation whose lives had been most disrupted by World War II, in marrying and having children. Thus, the postwar era was the age of the housing boom, the television boom, and the baby boom, of high birth and comparatively low divorce rates, of proliferating suburbs and a self-conscious emphasis upon family �togetherness.� Though frustrating to social reformers, this was probably a necessary phase of development. Once the country had been physically rebuilt, the practical needs of a rapidly growing population had been met, and standards of living had risen, there would come another age of reform.

The arrival of this new age was indicated in 1960 by the comparative youth of the presidential candidates chosen by the two major parties. The Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, was 43; the Republican, Vice Pres. Nixon, was 47. They both were ardent cold warriors and political moderates. Kennedy�s relative inexperience and his religion (he was the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee since Al Smith) placed him at an initial disadvantage. But the favourable impression he created during a series of televised debates with Nixon and the support he received from blacks after he helped the imprisoned black leader Martin Luther King, Jr., enabled him to defeat Nixon in a closely contested election. Edgar Eugene Robinson William L. O'Neill

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations

The New Frontier

The Great Society

Johnson�s first job in office was to secure enactment of New Frontier bills that had been languishing in Congress. By far the most important of these was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Johnson pushed through despite a filibuster by Southern senators that lasted 57 days. The act provided machinery to secure equal access to accommodations, to prevent discrimination in employment by federal contractors, and to cut off funds to segregated school districts. It also authorized the Justice Department to take a more active role in civil rights cases. Johnson went beyond the New Frontier in 1964 by declaring war on poverty. His Economic Opportunity Act provided funds for vocational training, created a Job Corps to train youths in conservation camps and urban centres, encouraged community action programs, extended loans to small businessmen and farmers, and established a domestic peace corps, the counterpart of a popular foreign program created by President Kennedy.

Civil Rights Act; Johnson, Lyndon B.U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson preparing to sign the Civil Rights Act during a ceremony at the White House on July 2, 1964.� Bettmann/Corbis

Johnson provided dynamic and successful leadership at a time of national trauma, and in the election of 1964 he won a landslide victory over his Republican opponent, the conservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. More importantly, the Democrats gained 38 seats in the House of Representatives that year, enough to override the conservative bloc and enact a body of liberal social legislation.

With this clear mandate, Johnson submitted the most sweeping legislative program to Congress since the New Deal. He outlined his plan for achieving a �Great Society� in his 1965 State of the Union address, and over the next two years he persuaded Congress to approve most of his proposals. The Appalachian Regional Development Act provided aid for that economically depressed area. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 established a Cabinet-level department to coordinate federal housing programs. Johnson�s Medicare bill fulfilled President Truman�s dream of providing health care for the aged. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 provided federal funding for public and private education below the college level. The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided scholarships for more than 140,000 needy students and authorized a National Teachers Corps. The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the discriminatory national-origins quota system. The minimum wage was raised and its coverage extended in 1966. In 1967, social security pensions were raised and coverage expanded. The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Area Redevelopment Act of 1966 provided aid to cities rebuilding blighted areas. Other measures dealt with mass transit, truth in packaging and lending, beautification, conservation, water and air quality, safety, and support for the arts.

Lyndon B. Johnson.� Bettmann/Corbis William L. O'Neill

The civil rights movement

The American civil rights movement came to a head under the Johnson administration. Many had seen the March on Washington in August 1963 as the apotheosis of the nonviolent struggle for civil rights. Some 200,000 people had come from all over the country to gather at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his �I Have a Dream� speech. Earlier in the decade, black and white Freedom Riders had been violently attacked when they rode through the South together on buses, hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing its bans on segregation in interstate bus travel and in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel. With passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil rights movement saw many of its goals embodied in federal law.

Freedom Riders preparing to board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, May 24, 1961.Perry Aycock/AP Images

Despite the Civil Rights Act, however, most African Americans in the South found it difficult to exercise their voting rights. In the summer of 1964, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which both had been instrumental in the Freedom Rides�and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose history reached back to W.E.B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement�organized a massive effort to register voters in Mississippi. They also conducted �Freedom Schools� in which the philosophy of the civil rights movement, African American history, and leadership development were taught. A large number of white student activists from the North had joined this �Freedom Summer� effort, and, when one black and two white volunteers were killed, it made headlines nationally and greatly heightened awareness of the movement. These murders echoed, on a small scale, the violence visited upon countless African Americans�those who had participated in demonstrations and many who had not�during the previous decade, in forms that ranged from beatings by police to bombings of residences and black institutions. In 1965, mass demonstrations were held to protest the violence and other means used to prevent black voter registration. After a peaceful protest march was halted by police violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Johnson responded with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which abolished literacy tests and other voter restrictions and authorized federal intervention against voter discrimination. The subsequent rise in black voter registration ultimately transformed politics in the South.

Selma MarchSelma March.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski

These gains were considerable, but many African Americans remained dissatisfied by the slow progress. The nonviolent civil rights movement was challenged by �black power� advocates, such as Stokely Carmichael, who called for a freedom struggle that sought political, economic, and cultural objectives beyond narrowly defined civil rights reform. By the late 1960s not just King�s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP but also SNCC and CORE were challenged by militant organizations, such as the Black Panther Party, whose leaders dismissed nonviolent principles, often quoting black nationalist Malcolm X�s imperative: �by any means necessary.� Race riots broke out in most of the country�s large cities, notably in 1965 in the Watts district of Los Angeles, which left 34 dead, and two years later in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit. Four summers of violence resulted in many deaths and property losses that left whole neighbourhoods ruined and their residents more distressed than ever. After a final round provoked by the assassination of King in April 1968, the rioting abated. Yet the activist pursuit of political and economic empowerment for African Americans continued, reflected culturally in the Black Arts movement�which pursued populist art that promoted the ideas of black separatism�and in the politicized soul music that replaced gospel and folk music as the sound track of the freedom struggle.

Latino and Native American activism

In September 1965 Cesar Chavez, who had founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers of America) in 1962, began leading what became a five-year strike by California grape pickers and a nationwide boycott of California grapes that attracted liberal support from throughout the country. Many of those farmworkers were, like Chavez, Latino, and the 1960s�particularly during the strike and boycott�arguably marked the first time the Latino population in the United States drew sustained attention. People of Hispanic origin had lived in the United States since the country�s origin, and their presence increased after huge portions of Mexico became part of the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846�48) and following the acquisition of Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War (1898). Large-scale Hispanic immigration to the United States began in the 20th century as Mexicans sought economic opportunity or to escape the Mexican Revolution (1910�20).

Chavez, CesarCesar Chavez.National Archives, Washington, D.C. (544069)

In 1954, in Hernandez v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the conviction of an agricultural labourer, Pete Hernandez, for murder should be overturned because Mexican Americans had been barred from participating in both the jury that indicted him and the jury that convicted him. In this landmark ruling, the court recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment�s guarantee of equal protection under the law extended to Mexican Americans. The Chicano (Mexican American) civil rights movement of the 1960s encompassed not only the Chavez-led efforts of agricultural workers in California but also the land grant movement in New Mexico spearheaded by Reies Lopez Tijerina as well as the struggle for equal education in Los Angeles. Yet it would not be until the 1980s that Latinos�such as Henry Cisneros, who was elected mayor of San Antonio, Texas, in 1981�began to hold prominent political office in the United States. By that point Hispanic servicemen had already racked up scores of medals in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. And by 2010 the 50 million Latinos living in all 50 states constituted 16 percent of the U.S. population.

Activism on behalf of Native Americans also grew substantially during the 1960s. In 1968 the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded by Russell Means and others to help Native Americans in urban ghettos who had been displaced by government programs that had the effect of forcing them from their reservations. AIM�s goals eventually encompassed the entire spectrum of Indian demands�economic independence, revitalization of traditional culture, protection of legal rights, and, most especially, autonomy over tribal areas and the restoration of lands that they believed had been illegally seized. AIM was involved in many highly publicized protests. It was one of the American Indian groups involved in the occupation (1969�71) of Alcatraz Island, the march (1972) on Washington, D.C., to protest violations of treaties (in which AIM members occupied the office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs), and the takeover (1973) of a site at Wounded Knee to protest the government�s Indian policy.

Means, RussellRussell Means.Marcy Nighswander/AP The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Social changes

The 1960s were marked by the greatest changes in morals and manners since the 1920s. Young people, college students in particular, rebelled against what they viewed as the repressed conformist society of their parents. They advocated a sexual revolution, aided by the birth control pill and later by Roe v. Wade (1973), a Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. �Recreational� drugs such as marijuana and LSD were increasingly used. Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam promoted the rise of a New Left, which was anticapitalist as well as antiwar. The political activists of the New Left drew on the theories of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sociologist C. Wright Mills, and psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm, among others. A �counterculture� sprang up that legitimized radical standards of taste and behaviour in the arts as well as in life. Feminism was reborn and joined the ranks of radical causes.

Except for feminism, most organized expressions of the counterculture and the New Left, including the influential Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), did not long survive the sixties. Nevertheless, they changed American life. Recreational drug taking, previously confined largely to impoverished inner cities, became part of middle-class life. The sexual revolution reduced government censorship, changed attitudes toward traditional sexual roles, and enabled homosexuals to organize and acknowledge their identities as never before. Although there had been earlier protests by gay groups, the Stonewall riots�a series of violent confrontations between police and gay rights activists outside the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City, in the summer of 1969�was perhaps the first time lesbians, gays, and transvestites saw the value in uniting behind a common cause. Unrestrained individualism played havoc with family values. People began marrying later and having fewer children. The divorce rate accelerated to the point that the number of divorces per year was roughly half the number of marriages. The number of abortions rose, as did the illegitimacy rate. By the 1980s one in six families was headed by a single woman, and over half of all people living in poverty, including some 12 million children, belonged to such families. Because inflation and recession made it hard to support even intact families on a single income, a majority of mothers entered the workforce. Thus, the stable family-oriented society of the 1950s became a thing of the past.

The Vietnam War

U.S. involvement in Vietnam dated to the Truman administration, when economic and military aid was provided to deter a communist takeover of French Indochina. When France withdrew and Vietnam was divided in two in 1954, the United States continued to support anticommunist forces in South Vietnam. By 1964, communist insurgents were winning their struggle against the government of South Vietnam, which a decade of American aid had failed to strengthen or reform. In August, following an allegedly unprovoked attack on U.S. warships patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin, a resolution pledging complete support for American action in Vietnam was passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.

Vietnam WarU.S. paratroopers carrying a wounded soldier to an ambulance helicopter during the Vietnam War, 1965.AP Images

After the fall elections, Johnson began deploying a huge force in Vietnam (more than half a million troops in 1968, together with strong air and naval units). This power was directed not only against the Viet Cong insurgents but also against North Vietnam, which increased its efforts as American participation escalated. Despite massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the communists refused to yield. On January 30, 1968, disregarding a truce called for the Tet (lunar new year) holiday, the communists launched an offensive against every major urban area in South Vietnam. Although the Tet Offensive was a military failure, it proved to be a political victory for the communists because it persuaded many Americans that the war could not be ended at a bearable price. Opposition to U.S. involvement became the major issue of the 1968 election. After Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a leading critic of the war, ran strongly against him in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced that he would not seek or accept renomination. He also curtailed bombing operations, opened peace talks with the North Vietnamese, and on November 1 ended the bombing of North Vietnam.

While war efforts were being reduced, violence within the United States seemed to be growing. Just two months after King�s assassination, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, was assassinated. President Johnson then secured the nomination of Vice Pres. Hubert H. Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention at Chicago, where violence again erupted as antiwar demonstrators were manhandled by local police. Humphrey lost the election to the Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon. The narrowness of Nixon�s margin resulted from a third-party campaign by the former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who attracted conservative votes that would otherwise have gone to Nixon. Democrats retained large majorities in both houses of Congress.

1968 Democratic National Convention, ChicagoA Chicago police officer squirting mace at demonstrators during a protest outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.Everett Collection/age fotostock

The 1970s

The Richard M. Nixon administration

Foreign affairs

Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed that American power relative to that of other nations had declined to the point where a fundamental reorientation was necessary. They sought improved relations with the Soviet Union to make possible reductions in military strength while at the same time enhancing American security. In 1969 the Nixon Doctrine called for allied nations, especially in Asia, to take more responsibility for their own defense. Nixon�s policy of d�tente led to Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which resulted in a treaty with the Soviet Union all but terminating antiballistic missile systems. In 1972 Nixon and Kissinger negotiated an Interim Agreement that limited the number of strategic offensive missiles each side could deploy in the future. Nixon also dramatically reversed Sino-American relations with a secret visit by Kissinger to Beijing in July 1971. This led to a presidential visit the following year and to the establishment of strong ties between the two nations. Nixon then visited Moscow as well, showing that d�tente with the rival communist powers did not mean that he would play them off against one another.

Nixon, Richard M.; Ford, Gerald R.Richard M. Nixon (right) accepting the Republican Party's U.S. presidential nomination in 1968. At left is Gerald R. Ford, then Republican leader of the House of Representatives.AP Images

The limits of d�tente were tested by the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War of October 1973, in which the United States supported Israel and the Soviet Union the Arabs. Nixon managed the crisis well, preventing the confrontation with the Soviets from getting out of hand and negotiating a cease-fire that made possible later improvements in Israeli-Egyptian relations. Nixon and Kissinger dramatically altered U.S. foreign relations, modifying containment, reducing the importance of alliances, and making the balance of power and the dual relationship with the Soviet Union and China keystones of national policy.

Meanwhile, inconclusive fighting continued in Vietnam, and unproductive peace talks continued in Paris. Although in 1969 Nixon announced his policy of �Vietnamization,� according to which more and more of the fighting was to be assumed by South Vietnam itself, he began by expanding the fighting in Southeast Asia with a 1970 �incursion� into Cambodia. This incident aroused strong protest; student demonstrations at Kent State University in Ohio led on May 4 to a confrontation with troops of the Ohio National Guard, who fired on the students without orders, killing four and wounding several others. National revulsion at this act led to serious disorders at many universities and forced some of them to close for the remainder of the term. Further antiwar demonstrations followed the 1971 U.S. invasion of Laos and Nixon�s decision to resume intensive bombing of North Vietnam in 1972.

Kent State shootingsOhio National Guardsmen moving across the Commons toward Taylor Hall at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, May 4, 1970.May 4 Collection, Kent State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives

Peace negotiations with North Vietnam slowly progressed, and a cease-fire agreement was finally signed on January 27, 1973. The agreement, which provided for exchange of prisoners of war and for U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam without any similar commitment from the North Vietnamese, ended 12 years of U.S. military effort that had taken some 58,000 American lives.

Henry Kissinger (right) shaking hands with Le Duc Tho in Paris after their agreement on the cease-fire terms of the Vietnam War, 1973.AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

Domestic affairs

When Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had presided over the most liberal Supreme Court in history, retired in 1969, Nixon replaced him with the conservative Warren Burger. Three other retirements enabled Nixon to appoint a total of four moderate or conservative justices. The Burger court, though it was expected to, did not reverse the policies laid down by its predecessor.

Congress enacted Nixon�s revenue-sharing program, which provided direct grants to state and local governments. Congress also expanded social security and federally subsidized housing. In 1972 the Congress, with the support of the president, adopted a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women. Despite widespread support, the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, as it was called, failed to secure ratification in a sufficient number of states. (Subsequent legislation and court decisions, however, gave women in substance what the ERA had been designed to secure.)

The cost of living continued to rise, until by June 1970 it was 30 percent above the 1960 level. Industrial production declined, as did the stock market. By mid-1971 unemployment reached a 10-year peak of 6 percent, and inflation continued. Wage and price controls were instituted, the dollar was devalued, and the limitation on the national debt was raised three times in 1972 alone. The U.S. trade deficit improved, but inflation remained unchecked.

The Watergate scandal

A scandal surfaced in June 1972, when five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate office-apartment building in Washington. When it was learned that the burglars had been hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP), John Mitchell, a former U.S. attorney general, resigned as director of CRP. These events, however, had no effect on the election that fall. Even though the Democrats retained majorities in both the Senate and the House, Nixon won a landslide victory over Democratic nominee Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, who won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

In 1973, however, it was revealed that an attempt to suppress knowledge of the connection between the Watergate affair and CRP involved highly placed members of the White House staff. In response, a Senate select committee was formed and opened hearings in May, and Nixon appointed Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the scandal. Amid conflicting testimony, almost daily disclosures of further scandals, and continuing resignations of administrative personnel, a battle developed between the legislative and executive branches of government. Nixon attempted to stop the investigation by firing Cox, leading Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus to resign. This �Saturday night massacre� of Justice Department officials did not, however, stem the flow of damaging revelations, confessions, and indictments.

Watergate ScandalWhite House reporters watching the televised Watergate address by U.S. President Richard M. Nixon on April 30, 1973.� Archive Photos

The Watergate affair itself was further complicated by the revelation of other irregularities. It became known that a security unit in the White House had engaged in illegal activities under the cloak of national security. Nixon�s personal finances were questioned, and Vice Pres. Spiro T. Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to charges of income tax evasion. On December 6, 1973, Nixon�s nominee, Congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, was approved by Congress as the new vice president.

On May 9, 1974, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives began hearing evidence relating to a possible impeachment proceeding. On July 27�30 it voted to recommend that Nixon be impeached on three charges. On August 5 Nixon obeyed a Supreme Court order to release transcripts of three tape-recorded conversations, and he admitted that, as evidenced in the recordings, he had taken steps to direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation away from the White House when its inquiries into the Watergate burglary were leading it toward his staff.

Nixon�s support in Congress vanished, and it seemed probable that he would be impeached. On the evening of August 8, in a television address, Nixon announced his resignation, effective the next day. At noon on August 9, Vice Pres. Ford was sworn in as his successor, the first president not elected either to the office or to the vice presidency.

The Gerald R. Ford administration

Ford�s was essentially a caretaker government. He had no mandate and no broad political base, his party was tainted by Watergate, and he angered many when he granted Nixon an unconditional pardon on September 8, 1974. Henry Kissinger remained secretary of state and conducted foreign policy along the lines previously laid down by Nixon and himself. Ford�s principal concern was the economy, which had begun to show signs of weakness. A brief Arab oil embargo during the Yom Kippur War had led to a quadrupling of oil prices, and the oil shock produced both galloping inflation and a recession. Prices rose more than 10 percent in 1974 and unemployment reached 9.2 percent in May 1974. Ford was no more able than Nixon to deal with the combination of inflation and recession, called �stagflation,� and Congress had no remedies either. For the most part Congress and the president were at odds. Ford vetoed no fewer than 50 bills during his short term in office.

Ford, Gerald R.Gerald R. Ford being sworn in as U.S. president, August 9, 1974.Robert L. Knudsen �White House Photo/Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library

In the election of 1976 Ford won the nomination of his party, fighting off a strong challenge by Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California. In a crowded field of contenders, the little-known ex-governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, won the Democratic nomination by starting early and making a virtue of his inexperience. Ford, despite Watergate and stagflation, nearly won the election, Carter receiving the smallest electoral margin since 1916.

Carter, Jimmy; Ford, GeraldJimmy Carter (left) and U.S. President Gerald Ford meeting in the first of three televised debates during the 1976 presidential campaign.AP Images

The Jimmy Carter administration

Foreign affairs

More than any other president, Carter used diplomacy to promote human rights, especially with regard to the governments of South Korea, Iran, Argentina, South Africa, and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Efforts to continue the d�tente with the U.S.S.R. foundered as the Soviets supported revolutions in Africa, deployed medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe, and occupied Afghanistan. Relations with the People�s Republic of China, on the other hand, improved, and full diplomatic recognition of the communist government took effect on January 1, 1979. In September 1977 the United States and Panama signed two treaties giving control of the Panama Canal to Panama in the year 2000 and providing for the neutrality of the waterway.

Carter�s most noted achievement was to sponsor a great step toward peace in the Middle East. In September 1978 he met with Egyptian Pres. Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at a two-week negotiating session at Camp David, Maryland, and on September 17 Carter announced that two accords had been signed establishing the terms for a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Further torturous negotiations followed before the peace treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 1979.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter (centre), Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (left), and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sādāt (right) clasping hands on the White House lawn after the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, March 26, 1979.� Bettmann/Corbis

Carter�s greatest defeat was administered by Iran. In that country, following the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had been supported by the United States, the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed on February 1, 1979, under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In November militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and held its occupants hostage. An attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980 failed, and the hostages were not released until Carter left office in January 1981. Carter�s inability to either resolve the hostage crisis or to manage American perceptions of it disabled him as a leader.

Blindfolded American hostage with his Iranian captors outside the U.S. embassy in Tehrān, November 9, 1979.AP

Domestic policy

Carter�s effectiveness in domestic affairs was generally hampered by his failure to establish good relations with Congress, his frequent changes of course, the distractions caused by foreign problems, and his inability to inspire public confidence. His major domestic effort was directed against the energy crisis, though with indifferent results. Inflation continued to rise, and in the summer of 1979 Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker raised interest rates to unprecedented levels, which resulted in a severe recession but brought inflation under control.

In the election of 1980 Ronald Reagan was the Republican nominee, while Republican John B. Anderson of Illinois headed a third ticket and received 5.6 million votes. Reagan easily defeated the discredited Carter, and the Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since 1954. William L. O'Neill

The late 20th century

The Ronald Reagan administration

Reagan took office and pledged to reverse the trend toward big government and to rejuvenate the economy, based on the theory that cutting taxes would stimulate so much growth that tax revenues would actually rise. In May 1981, two months after there had been an assassination attempt on Reagan, Congress approved his program, which would reduce income taxes by 25 percent over a three-year period, cut federal spending on social programs, and greatly accelerate a military buildup that had begun under Carter. The recession that had resulted from Volcker�s policy of ending inflation through high interest rates deepened in 1981, but by 1984 it was clearly waning, without a resurgence of inflation. The U.S. economy experienced a strong recovery.

President Ronald Reagan (left) and Vice President George Bush.White House photo

In foreign affairs Reagan often took bold action, but the results were usually disappointing. His effort to unseat the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua through aid to the Contras, a rebel force seeking to overthrow the government, was unpopular and unsuccessful. U.S.-Soviet relations were the chilliest they had been since the height of the Cold War. Reagan�s decision to send a battalion of U.S. marines to Lebanon in support of a cease-fire resulted in a terrorist attack in 1983, in which some 260 marines were killed. On October 21, 1983, he launched an invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada, where Cuban influence was growing. U.S. forces prevailed, despite much bungling. Popular at home, the invasion was criticized almost everywhere else. Relations with China worsened at first but improved in 1984 with an exchange of state visits.

Reagan benefited in the election of 1984 from a high degree of personal popularity, from the reduction in inflation, and from the beginnings of economic recovery. This combination proved too much for the Democratic nominee, former vice president Walter Mondale of Minnesota, and his running mate, Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of New York, the first female vice presidential candidate ever to be named by a major party.

Reagan�s second term was more successful than his first in regard to foreign affairs. In 1987 he negotiated an intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty with the Soviet Union, eliminating two classes of weapon systems that each nation had deployed in Europe. This was the first arms-limitation agreement ever to result in the actual destruction of existing weapons. Relations between the superpowers had improved radically by 1988, owing primarily to the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reforms at home were matched by equally great changes in foreign policy. An exchange of unusually warm state visits in 1988 was followed by Soviet promises of substantial force reductions, especially in Europe.

Gorbachev, Mikhail; Reagan, RonaldU.S. President Ronald Reagan (left) and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev shaking hands during a summit in Reykjav�k, Iceland, October 1986.Ron Edmonds/AP Images

Reagan�s domestic policies were unchanged. His popularity remained consistently high, dipping only briefly in 1987 after it was learned that his administration had secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages and then had illegally used the profits to subsidize the Contras. In the short run his economic measures succeeded. Inflation remained low, as did unemployment, while economic growth continued. Nonetheless, while spending for domestic programs fell, military spending continued to rise, and revenues did not increase as had been predicted. The result was a staggering growth in the budget deficit. The United States, which had been a creditor nation in 1980, was by the late 1980s the world�s largest debtor nation.

Furthermore, although economic recovery had been strong, individual income in constant dollars was still lower than in the early 1970s, and family income remained constant only because many more married women were in the labour force. Savings were at an all-time low, and productivity gains were averaging only about 1 percent a year. Reagan had solved the short-term problems of inflation and recession, but he did so with borrowed money and without touching the deeper sources of America�s economic decline. In 1988 Vice Pres. George Bush of Texas defeated the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts.

The George Bush administration

In foreign affairs Bush continued the key policies of the Reagan administration, especially by retaining cordial relations with the Soviet Union and its successor states. In December 1989 Bush ordered U.S. troops to seize control of Panama and arrest its de facto ruler, Gen. Manuel Noriega, who faced drug-trafficking and racketeering charges in the United States.

U.S. Marines entering Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War, February 1991.� Christopher Morris�Black Star/PNI

Bush�s leadership and diplomatic skills were severely tested by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which began on August 2, 1990. At risk was not only the sovereignty of this small sheikhdom but also U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf, including access to the region�s vast oil supplies. Fearing that Iraqi aggression would spill over into Saudi Arabia, Bush swiftly organized a multinational coalition composed mostly of NATO and Arab countries. Under the auspices of the United Nations, some 500,000 U.S. troops (the largest mobilization of U.S. military personnel since the Vietnam War) were brought together with other coalition forces in Saudi Arabia. Lasting from January 16 to February 28, the war was easily won by the coalition at only slight material and human cost, but its sophisticated weapons caused heavy damage to Iraq�s military and civilian infrastructure and left many Iraqi soldiers dead. With the declining power (and subsequent collapse in 1991) of the Soviet Union, the war also emphasized the role of the United States as the world�s single military superpower.

This short and relatively inexpensive war, paid for largely by U.S. allies, was popular while it lasted but stimulated a recession that ruined Bush�s approval rating. The immense national debt ruled out large federal expenditures, the usual cure for recessions. The modest bills Bush supported failed in Congress, which was controlled by the Democrats. Apart from a budget agreement with Congress in 1990, which broke Bush�s promise not to raise taxes, little was done to control the annual deficits, made worse by the recession.

In the 1992 presidential election, Democrat Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, defeated Bush in a race in which independent candidate Ross Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote�more than any third candidate had received since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. William L. O'Neill The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Bill Clinton administration

The beginning of the 1990s was a difficult time for the United States. The country was plagued not only by a sluggish economy but by violent crime (much of it drug-related), poverty, welfare dependency, problematic race relations, and spiraling health costs. Although Clinton promised to boost both the economy and the quality of life, his administration got off to a shaky start, the victim of what some critics have called ineptitude and bad judgment. One of Clinton�s first acts was to attempt to fulfill a campaign promise to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military. After encountering strong criticism from conservatives and some military leaders�including Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff�Clinton was eventually forced to support a compromise policy�summed up by the phrase �Don�t ask, don�t tell��that was viewed as being at once ambiguous, unsatisfactory to either side of the issue, and possibly unconstitutional. (The practical effect of the policy was actually to increase the number of men and women discharged from the military for homosexuality.) His first two nominees for attorney general withdrew over ethics questions, and two major pieces of legislation�an economic stimulus package and a campaign finance reform bill�were blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. In the hope that he could avoid a major confrontation with Congress, he set aside any further attempts at campaign finance reform. During the presidential campaign, Clinton promised to institute a system of universal health insurance. His appointment of his wife, Hillary Clinton, to chair a task force on health care reform drew stark criticism from Republicans, who objected both to the propriety of the arrangement and to what they considered her outspoken feminism. They campaigned fiercely against the task force�s eventual proposal, and none of the numerous recommendations were formally submitted to Congress.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking on health care reform in the United States, 1993.� Wally McNamee/Corbis

Despite these early missteps, the Clinton administration had numerous policy and personnel successes. Although Perot had spoken vividly of the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he said would produce a �giant sucking sound� as American jobs were lost to Mexico, Congress passed the measure and Clinton signed it into law, thereby creating a generally successful free-trade zone between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. During Clinton�s first term, Congress enacted with Clinton�s support a deficit reduction package to reverse the spiraling debt that had been accrued during the 1980s and �90s, and he signed some 30 major bills related to women and family issues, including the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. Clinton also changed the face of the federal government, appointing women and minorities to significant posts throughout his administration, including Janet Reno as the first woman attorney general, Donna Shalala as secretary of Health and Human Services, Joycelyn Elders as surgeon general, Madeleine Albright as the first woman secretary of state, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a justice on the Supreme Court.

With Clinton�s popularity sagging after the health care debacle, the 1994 elections resulted in the opposition Republican Party winning a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. This historic victory was viewed by many�especially the House Republicans led by Speaker Newt Gingrich�as the voters� repudiation of the Clinton presidency. A chastened Clinton subsequently accommodated some of the Republican proposals�offering a more aggressive deficit reduction plan and a massive overhaul of the nation�s welfare system�while opposing Republican efforts to slow the growth of government spending on popular programs such as Medicare. Ultimately the uncompromising and confrontational behaviour of the congressional Republicans produced the opposite of what they intended, and after a budget impasse between the Republicans and Clinton in 1995 and 1996�which forced two partial government shutdowns, including one for 22 days (the longest closure of government operations to date)�Clinton won considerable public support for his more moderate approach.

Clinton�s foreign policy ventures included a successful effort in 1994 to reinstate Haitian Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted by a military coup in 1991; a commitment of U.S. forces to a peacekeeping initiative in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and a leading role in the ongoing initiatives to bring a permanent resolution to the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis. In 1993 he invited Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who was later assassinated by a Jewish extremist opposed to territorial concessions to the Palestinians) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat to Washington to sign a historic agreement that granted limited Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

During the Clinton administration the United States remained a target for international terrorists with bomb attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City (1993), on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and on the U.S. Navy in Yemen (2000). The domestic front, though, was the site of unexpected antigovernment violence when on April 19, 1995, an American, Timothy McVeigh, detonated a bomb in a terrorist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 and injuring more than 500.

The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S., in the wake of the terrorist bombing on April 19, 1995.David Glass/AP

Although scandal was never far from the White House�a fellow Arkansan who had been part of the administration committed suicide; there were rumours of financial irregularities that had occurred while Clinton was governor of Arkansas; opponents charged that the first lady engineered the firing of staff in the White House travel office (�Travelgate�); former associates were indicted and convicted of crimes; and rumours of sexual impropriety persisted�the economy made a slow but steady recovery after 1991, marked by dramatic gains in the stock market in the mid-1990s. Buoyed by the economic growth, Clinton was easily reelected in 1996, capturing 49 percent of the popular vote to 41 percent for Republican challenger Bob Dole and 8 percent for Perot. In the electoral college Clinton won 379 votes to Dole�s 159.

Economic growth continued during Clinton�s second term, eventually setting a record for the nation�s longest peacetime economic expansion. After enormous budget deficits throughout the 1980s and early 1990s�including a $290 billion deficit in 1992�by 1998 the Clinton administration oversaw the first balanced budget and budget surpluses since 1969. The vibrant economy produced a tripling in the value of the stock market, historically high levels of home ownership, and the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 30 years.

During Clinton�s first term Attorney General Reno approved an investigation into Clinton�s business dealings in Arkansas. The resulting inquiry, known as Whitewater�the name of the housing development corporation at the centre of the controversy�was led from 1994 by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Although the investigation lasted several years and cost more than $50 million, Starr was unable to find conclusive evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. When a three-judge panel allowed him to expand the scope of his investigation, however, he uncovered evidence of an affair between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Clinton repeatedly and publicly denied that the affair had taken place. After conclusive evidence of the affair surfaced, Clinton admitted the affair and apologized to his family and to the American public. On the basis of Starr�s 445-page report and supporting evidence, hearings conducted before the 1998 midterm elections resulted in Clinton�s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice by a lame-duck session of the House of Representatives after the election. Clinton was acquitted of the charges by the Senate in 1999. During the impeachment proceedings, foreign policy also dominated the headlines. In December 1998 Clinton, citing Iraqi noncompliance with UN resolutions and weapons inspectors, ordered a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq; the military action prompted Iraq to halt further weapons inspections.

When the dust had settled, the Clinton administration was damaged but not broken. Bill Clinton�s job approval rating remained high during the final years of his presidency, and in 1999 Hillary Clinton launched a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York, thereby becoming the first first lady to win elective office. During the final year of his presidency, Clinton invited Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to the United States in an attempt to broker a final settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The eventual breakdown of the talks, along with subsequent events in Jerusalem and elsewhere, resulted in some of the deadliest conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians in more than a decade. Clinton also became the first American president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War.

Despite continued economic growth, the 2000 presidential election between Vice Pres. Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the former president�s eldest son, was one of the closest and most controversial in the republic�s history. Although Gore won the nationwide popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, the presidency hinged on the outcome in Florida, whose 25 electoral votes would give the winner of that state a narrow majority in the electoral college. With Bush leading in Florida by fewer than 1,000 votes after a mandatory statewide recount, the presidency remained undecided for five weeks as Florida state courts and federal courts heard numerous legal challenges. After a divided Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount of the approximately 45,000 �undervotes� (i.e., ballots that machines recorded as not clearly expressing a presidential vote) and the inclusion of hand-counted ballots in two counties that had not been previously certified by Florida�s secretary of state�which reduced Bush�s margin to under 200 votes before the manual recounting began�the Bush campaign quickly filed an appeal to halt the manual recount, which the U.S. Supreme Court granted by a 5�4 vote pending oral arguments. Concluding (7�2) that a quick statewide recount could not be performed fairly unless elaborate ground rules were established, the court issued a controversial 5-to-4 decision to reverse the Florida Supreme Court�s recount order, effectively awarding the presidency to Bush (seeBush v. Gore). With his 271-to-266 victory in the electoral college, Bush became the first president since 1888 to win the election despite losing the nationwide popular vote.

United States: 2000 presidential electionEncyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

The 21st century

The George W. Bush administration

Bush became the first Republican president since the 1950s to enjoy a majority in both houses of Congress. Among the initial domestic challenges that faced the Bush administration were a weakening national economy and an energy crisis in California. Bush, who had campaigned as a �compassionate conservative,� promoted traditionally conservative policies in domestic affairs, the centrepiece of which was a $1.35 trillion tax-cut bill he signed into law in June 2001. That month, however, Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords became an independent, giving the Democrats control of the Senate. Subsequently Bush encountered strong congressional resistance to some of his initiatives, such as an educational voucher program that would provide subsidies to parents who send their children to private schools, the creation of a nuclear missile defense system, and federal funding for selected social programs of religious groups. In foreign affairs, the administration attempted to liberalize U.S. immigration policy with regard to Mexico, with which it struck closer ties. But it faced sharp criticism from China for its outspoken support of Taiwan and from Europe and elsewhere for its abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty aimed at reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, and for its declared intention to withdraw from the 1972 Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (it formally withdrew from the treaty in 2002).

Bush, George W.George W. Bush at a campaign rally in Melbourne, Florida, 2000.Paul J. Richards�AFP/Getty Images

The Barack Obama administration

First term

Election and inauguration

The crisis worked against McCain, whom many voters associated with the unpopular policies of the administration, and worked for the highly charismatic Obama, whose campaign from its outset had been based on the theme of sweeping political change. Obama defeated McCain, becoming the first African American elected to the presidency. He captured nearly 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes�defending those states that had gone Democratic in the 2004 election, taking the lion�s share of battleground states, and winning several states that had been reliably Republican in recent presidential elections.

In the interim between the election and Obama�s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, the Bush administration�s handling of the distribution of the first half of the TARP funds came under considerable criticism. There were accusations that it had infused too much money into large banks without placing adequate conditions on them, rather than purchasing �toxic� assets as it had promised. In the lead-up to the inauguration, Obama and his transition team, working with Bush, persuaded the Senate to release the last half of the TARP funds, promising that they would be targeted at relief for home owners and at stimulating the credit markets. Because authorization to block the release of the funds required assent by both houses of Congress, a vote by the House of Representatives was unnecessary. (See Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.)

Tackling the �Great Recession,� the �Party of No,� and the emergence of the Tea Party movement

The economic downturn, widely referred to as the �Great Recession� (which officially dated from December 2007 to June 2009 in the United States), included the most dismal two-quarter period for the U.S. economy in more than 60 years: GDP contracted by 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 and by 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Efforts to stabilize the economy included extending $80 billion to automakers Chrysler and General Motors, with the government assuming ownership of 8 percent and 61 percent of each, respectively; the Federal Reserve pumping well over $1 trillion into the economy by purchasing Treasury bonds; and the passage of a $787 billion stimulus spending measure. In the third quarter of 2009, GDP finally turned positive, gaining 2.2 percent on an annualized basis. However, unemployment, which had stood at 7.2 percent at the beginning of the year, hovered around 10 percent in early 2010. Moreover, the stimulative policies had helped balloon the U.S. federal deficit to $1.42 trillion, earning widespread criticism from Republicans.

economic recessionStore closings, one of the consequences of an economic recession, 2009.� Carolyn Franks�Whitestar1955/Dreamstime.com

Obama had entered office vowing to reduce partisanship in Washington, but he made little progress in that direction in his first year; indeed, the $787 billion stimulus package had been passed in the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote. With Democrats holding substantial majorities in both houses, Obama allowed congressional leaders to shape important legislation, and Republicans, claiming that they were being largely excluded from substantive negotiations on key bills, took what most Democrats saw as an obstructionist approach, earning the nickname the �Party of No� from liberal commentators.

In the meantime, a populist reaction emerged among libertarian-minded conservatives that was generally opposed to what they considered excessive taxation, to illegal immigration, and to government intervention in the private sector. This �Tea Party� movement gained steam during the summer of 2009, when town hall meetings were held across the country to debate proposed health care insurance reform, the signature issue of the Obama presidential campaign.

Negotiating health care reform

Republicans presented a united front in opposition to Democratic proposals for health care reform, branding them a �government takeover� of health care and protesting that the price tag would be devastatingly high. Some Republicans also claimed�falsely�that the Democratic plan would establish �death panels� that would deny coverage to seniors. Although there was also strong opposition to various aspects of the plan within the Democratic Party, the House of Representatives passed a sweeping reform bill in November 2009. The Senate was more circumspect, with Obama seemingly ceding the initiative to the so-called �Group of Six,� a group of three Republican and three Democratic senators led by conservative Democrat Sen. Max Baucus. The bill that was ultimately passed in the Senate called for considerably less change than the House bill (most notably excluding the �public option� through which a government-run program would have provided lower-cost competition for private insurance companies). It just barely survived a filibuster attempt by Republicans, holding all 58 Democrats plus the Senate�s two independents, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Before the two houses could attempt to bridge the differences in their bills, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate as a result of the victory of Republican Scott Brown in January 2010 in the special election in Massachusetts held to replace interim senator Paul Kirk (a Democrat), who had been appointed to the seat following the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy�who, ironically, had committed much of his career in government to health care reform. Although the prospects for passage dimmed, the president and the Democratic leadership, especially Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, pushed on, with Obama convening a special summit of Democrats and Republicans to debate the merits of the bills.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)

In March 2010, having secured the support of a sufficient number of House Democrats who had been opposed to aspects of the Senate plan (most notably pro-life advocates led by Rep. Bart Stupak, whose fears that the plan would loosen limits on abortion funding were allayed by Obama�s promise of an executive order), Pelosi engineered passage of the Senate bill in a 219�212 vote (with all Republicans and 34 Democrats in opposition) on Sunday night March 21. A subsequent bill, proposing �fixes� to the Senate bill, was then passed and sent to the Senate, where Democrats hoped to obtain passage through the use of a relatively seldom-used procedure known as reconciliation, which requires a simple majority for passage. With the outcome of reconciliation still in the balance, on March 23 Obama signed into law the historic legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Senate passage of the bill of proposed fixes proved arduous, as Republicans introduced more than 40 amendments in an attempt to force another vote in the House. All those amendments were defeated in votes along party lines, and on March 25 the bill was passed by a 56�43 vote; however, because of procedural violations in some of its language, the bill went back to the House. There it passed by a 220�207 vote. No Republicans in either house voted for the bill.

In its final form, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would�once all its elements had taken effect over the next nine years�extend health care to some 32 million previously uninsured Americans and prohibit insurers from denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions. The bill, which required that all citizens obtain health care insurance, also provided subsidies for premium payments for families earning less than $88,000 per year, with the funding to come largely from a tax increase for the wealthiest Americans. It also promised a tax credit to small businesses that provide coverage for their employees.

Deepwater Horizon oil spill

In the spring of 2010, one of the Obama administration�s big economic initiatives, the financial rescue of General Motors, bore fruit as the automaker recorded its first profits in three years. In general, the U.S. economy seemed to be rebounding�if slowly. However, as the summer approached, unemployment stagnated at near 10 percent. Although the Republicans and some economists criticized the economic stimulus as ineffective and predicted the onset of another recession, others argued that it may have added more than three million new jobs.

Responding to the banking and finance meltdown that had precipitated the economic downturn, Congress in July enacted comprehensive financial regulations. However, the headlines in spring and summer were dominated by another event, a massive oil spill some 40 miles (60 km) off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico (see Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010). The spill, which dragged on for months, began in April with an explosion and fire on a deepwater drilling platform that then collapsed, spewing oil that endangered marine life, fouled beaches, and brought a halt to fishing in a huge area. Something of a national malaise set in as the ongoing efforts by BP, the well�s owner, to contain the spill proved largely futile, and the disaster escalated to become the worst marine oil spill on record. By the time the well was capped and the spill brought under control in July 2010, an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had been released into the water.

Military de-escalation in Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan

A hallmark of Obama�s campaign had been his contention that the Bush administration�s preoccupation with Iraq had been to the detriment of the situation in Afghanistan; Obama argued that Afghanistan should have been the focus of U.S. military efforts. As security conditions in Iraq continued to improve, the new administration began slowly removing U.S. military personnel, with an announced goal of ending U.S. combat operations by mid-2010 and exiting the country entirely by late 2011. Meanwhile, in response to the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, in February 2009 Obama raised the total troop commitment there to 68,000 and began three months of deliberations on the military�s request for another 40,000 troops, ultimately deciding to deploy an additional 30,000 troops over the objections of many Democrats. The issue of national security took centre stage on Christmas Day, 2009, when a bombing was thwarted on an airliner bound for Detroit. The perpetrator, a young Nigerian, had been trained for his mission by extremists in Yemen.

In June 2010 Obama confronted a different kind of criticism when the commander of NATO-U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and members of his staff impugned top Obama administration officials in interviews with a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine. Obama relieved McChrystal of command and replaced him with Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the surge strategy in Iraq. Although the bulk of U.S. forces were withdrawn from Iraq in August with the official on-time end of the combat mission in the country, some 50,000 U.S. troops remained on duty there.

McChrystal, Stanley: resignationPres. Barack Obama announcing the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal while surrounded by (left to right) Adm. Mike Mullen, Vice Pres. Joe Biden, Gen. David Petraeus, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, June 24, 2010.Official White House Video

The 2010 midterm elections

As the economy continued to struggle and as high levels of unemployment and underemployment persisted, much of the American electorate was commonly characterized as angry. The groundswell of opposition to the policies of the Obama administration and to �big government� that had given birth to the Tea Party movement took on an anti-Washington, anti-incumbent cast. This had an impact not only on Democrats but on Republicans too, as a raft of conservative candidates with Tea Party associations triumphed over candidates favoured by the Republican Party establishment in primary contests for the November 2010 midterm congressional election. In the 2010 general election, however, Tea Party candidates had mixed success, but the Republican Party as a whole experienced a dramatic resurgence, recapturing leadership of the House with a gain of some 60 seats (the biggest swing since 1948) and reducing but not overturning the Democrats� Senate majority.

The weekend before voters went to the polls, the election had been replaced in the headlines by the foiling of another terrorist bombing attempt, this time involving explosive devices that were intercepted en route via air from Yemen to two Chicago-area synagogues. It was believed that the devices may have been intended to explode while still in flight.

WikiLeaks, the �Afghan War Diary,� and the �Iraq War Log�

Later in November 2010, the administration was stung by the third major release that year of classified documents by the Web site WikiLeaks. In July and October several periodicals, including The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian, had published secret documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, collectively known as the �Afghan War Diary� and the �Iraq War Log,� respectively. In both cases, the material was mainly in the form of raw intelligence gathered between 2004 and 2009. In general, the information added detail but few new revelations to what was already known and did not radically change the public understanding of either war. Nevertheless, the Obama administration condemned its release as a security breach that would set back U.S. efforts in the region and endanger the lives of military personnel and the lives of Iraqis and Afghans who had cooperated with the U.S. military. The administration was also quick to criticize WikiLeaks� November release of documents, this time comprising some 250,000 diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies and consulates throughout the world, dating mostly from 2007 to 2010 but including some dating back as far as 1966. Among the wide-ranging topics covered in these secret documents were behind-the-scenes U.S. efforts to politically and economically isolate Iran, primarily in response to fears of Iran�s development of nuclear weapons�fears that were revealed to encompass Saudi Arabia�s and Bahrain�s emphatic opposition to a nuclear-armed Iran.

WikiLeaks; Assange, JulianWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference, 2010.Andrew Winning�Reuters/Landov

The repeal of �Don�t Ask, Don�t Tell,� the ratification of START, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords

Against this backdrop, the lame-duck Congress looked ready to move toward the end of its session with legislative gridlock firmly in place. However, the Obama administration and the Republicans were able to forge compromises on several significant pieces of legislation. When the administration proposed extending the Bush tax cuts for another two years, Republicans responded by supporting an extension of unemployment benefits. Several Senate Republicans also joined Democrats to enable the repeal of the �Don�t Ask, Don�t Tell� policy that had prohibited gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, and legislation was enacted that extended medical benefits to first responders to the September 11 attacks. The Senate also ratified a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaty with Russia, capping what was one of the most productive legislative periods in recent memory and in the process helping boost Obama�s popularity. When a gunman killed six people and critically wounded Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, as she met with constituents in Tucson, Arizona, on January 8, 2011, however, there was a renewed national discussion about the vehemence of political polarization in the United States.

U.S. President Barack Obama signing the repeal of �Don't Ask, Don't Tell,� December 22, 2010.Chuck Kennedy�Official White House Photo

Budget compromise

That polarization remained at the fore as the new Republican majority in the House locked heads with the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Obama administration over the federal budget for fiscal year 2011. Unable to agree on that budget, the previous Congress, in October 2010, had passed the first in a series of stopgap measures to keep the federal government operating until agreement could be reached on a long-term budget. Both Republicans and Democrats believed that reductions to the budget were necessary in response to the federal government�s soaring deficit; however, they disagreed vehemently on the extent, targets, and timing of budget cuts. House Republicans upped the political ante when they announced that they would not vote for another temporary budget and demanded deep reductions. The threat of a shutdown of all but essential services of the federal government came within a few hours of being realized, but on April 8, 2011, an agreement was reached that resulted in passage a week later by both the House (260�167) and the Senate (81�19) of a compromise budget for the remainder of the fiscal year that cut $38 billion in federal spending. Neither side was completely satisfied, and a large number of Republicans, many of whom had come into office as part of the wave of Tea Party opposition to big government, chose not to vote with the majority of their party in support of the compromise. Democrats and Republicans were also engaged in dramatic ideological battle on the state level, perhaps most notably in Wisconsin and Indiana, where collective bargaining for state employees and the role of unions were at issue.

The Arab Spring, intervention in Libya, and the killing of Osama bin Laden

American foreign policy was tested by the huge changes that were taking place early in 2011 in the Middle East, where popular uprisings led to regime change in Tunisia (see Jasmine Revolution) and Egypt (see Egypt Uprising of 2011) and to widespread demonstrations aimed at achieving government reform throughout the region. Collectively, these events would become known as the �Arab Spring.� When Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi brutally turned the considerable forces of his military on those rebelling against his rule (see Libya Revolt of 2011), a coalition of U.S. and European forces sought to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe by intervening militarily with warplanes and cruise missiles. On March 27, as the conflict continued, the United States handed over the primary leadership of the effort to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The debt ceiling debate

In the spring and summer of 2011, the national government faced the possibility of default on the public debt and a downgrading of its credit rating unless Democrats and Republicans could agree on whether and how to increase the congressionally mandated national debt ceiling. That ceiling of $14.29 trillion was reached in mid-May, but, by shifting funds, the Treasury Department was able to push out the anticipated deadline for default until August 2. Although the debt ceiling had been raised more than three dozen times since 1980, House Republicans, responding in large measure to Tea Party initiatives, insisted that the ceiling not be raised unless there were commensurate cuts in government spending. Republican proposals called for from $4 trillion to $6.2 trillion in spending cuts, especially to entitlement programs, including radical overhauls of Medicare and Medicaid. While Democrats also advocated spending cuts, they insisted that Medicare and Medicaid be protected, and they proposed tax increases for the wealthiest Americans as well as an end to tax breaks for some corporations, especially oil companies.

The failed �grand bargain�

Efforts at compromise by the leadership of both parties�including closed-door negotiations led by Vice President Biden and a bipartisan attempt by the �Gang of Six� (three senators from each party)�repeatedly collapsed in partisan rancor. In July Obama and Republican Speaker of the House John A. Boehner, meeting privately, nearly reached agreement on a "grand bargain" that would have included trillions in spending cuts, changes to Medicare and Social Security, and tax reform. The deal fell through near the end of the month, however, when the two could not agree on the level of additional tax revenue to be generated. Media reports indicated that Boehner had agreed to tax revenue increases of $800 billion, but, when Obama asked for another $400 billion, Boehner nixed the deal. In any case, many believed that the speaker would have been unable to win sufficient support for the agreement from House Republicans, who remained adamantly opposed to tax hikes and had passed a bill requiring a cap on spending and a balanced budget.

Nevertheless, as the threat of default grew more imminent, there was increasing consensus in both parties that the debt ceiling should be raised. With a broad agreement seemingly out of reach, compromise appeared to hang on whether the ceiling would be increased in one step (which would extend the limit past the 2012 election) or two (which would raise the issue again sooner). Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell proposed a solution that would allow the president to raise the ceiling provided that two-thirds of both houses of Congress did not vote against that action (that is, not enough votes to override a presidential veto). Senate majority leader Harry Reid advanced a bill that removed tax increases from the equation.

Raising the debt ceiling, capping spending, and the efforts of the �super committee�

On July 31, just two days before the deadline, an agreement was reached by the White House and congressional leaders that called for an increase of about $2.4 trillion to the debt ceiling through November 2012, to be imposed in stages. The agreement provided for an immediate increase of $400 billion, with an additional $500 billion to come after September 2011. This combined initial increase of $900 billion would be offset by budget cuts of some $917 billion that would result from an immediate cap on domestic and defense spending. The deal, which did not provide for tax increases, also stipulated that both houses of Congress had to vote on an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget. The final bill was approved by the House of Representatives by a vote of 269�161 (with centrists from both parties largely voting for it, while many of those farther on the right and left voted against it) and by the Senate by a bipartisan vote of 74�26. Yet despite these efforts, on August 5 Standard & Poor�s, one of the three principal companies that advise investors on debt securities, downgraded the credit rating of the United States from the top level, AAA, to the next level, AA+.

The bill also created a congressional �super committee� tasked with recommending by the end of November 2011 the measures by which an additional $1.2 to $1.5 trillion would be cut from the deficit over a 10-year period. If the committee had agreed on a set of proposals and had those proposals been approved by Congress, the debt ceiling would have been raised by a commensurate amount. In the event, however, the super committee failed to arrive at a consensus plan, which, according to the stipulations of the bill, triggered some $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts (evenly divided between defense and nondefense spending) to be implemented in 2013.

Occupy Wall Street, withdrawal from Iraq, and slow economic recovery

As these events unfolded in the autumn of 2011, another populist movement, this time on the left of the political spectrum, gained steam. Inspired by the mass protests of the Arab Spring and the demonstrations that had occurred in Spain and Greece in response to government austerity measures, a disparate group of protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street took up residence in a park near New York City�s financial district to call attention to a list of what they saw as injustices. Among the protesters� concerns were that the wealthy were not paying what the protesters considered a fair share of income taxes, that more efforts needed to be directed at reducing unemployment, and that major corporations�particularly banks and other financial institutions�needed to be held more accountable for risky practices. The protesters identified themselves as �the 99 percent,� the have-nots who would no longer put up with the corruption and greed that they perceived among �the 1 percent,� the wealthiest Americans. In the succeeding weeks the movement spread to other cities across the country.

Occupy Wall StreetDemonstrators swarming Zuccotti Park in New York City's financial district, October 10, 2011, as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests.Andrew Burton/AP

As winter approached, the last U.S. troops left Baghdad in December, bringing to a close the Iraq War.

Soldiers saluting during the ceremony to mark the end of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, Baghdad, December 15, 2011.Shannon Stapleton�Reuters/Landov

Spring 2012 found the American economic recovery continuing to progress slowly. Many corporations were solidly in the black again, and many of the banks and financial institutions that had been rocked by the collapse of the housing market and by recession had returned to solvency, a number of them having paid back the rescue loans provided by the government�s Troubled Asset Relief Program. Wages, however, remained largely stagnant, and the housing market, while showing some signs of recovery, was still tottering, with foreclosures widespread and in some places seemingly ubiquitous. Unemployment, which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had reached 10 percent in October 2009, fell significantly but still remained high at 8.2 percent in May 2012. Nevertheless, the U.S. economy was on more solid footing than Europe�s, which continued to suffer from the euro-zone debt crisis.

Deportation policy changes, the immigration law ruling, and sustaining Obamacare�s �individual mandate�

Immigration policy remained central to the national conversation. In June the Obama administration announced that deportation proceedings would no longer be initiated against illegal immigrants age 30 and younger who had been brought to the United States before age 16, had lived in the country for at least five years, did not have a criminal record or pose a security threat, and were students, veterans, or high-school graduates. Those who qualified received a two-year reprieve from deportation and the opportunity to pursue a work permit.

Also in June, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the provision of Arizona�s controversial 2010 immigration law that required police to check the legal status of anyone they stop for another law enforcement concern if they reasonably suspect that person to be in the United States illegally; however, the court struck down three of the law�s provisions, including one that permitted police to arrest individuals solely on the suspicion of being in the country illegally and another that criminalized undocumented immigrants� pursuit of employment.

In what some saw as its most important decision since Bush v. Gore in 2000, the Supreme Court at the end of June upheld (5�4) the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, most notably ruling not to strike down the act�s �individual mandate� provision by which Americans were required to obtain health insurance by 2014 or face financial penalties (see Affordable Care Act cases). The decision preserved what was for Obama the signature legislative achievement of the first three years of his presidency.

The 2012 presidential campaign, a fluctuating economy, and the approaching �fiscal cliff�

As the summer progressed, the 2012 presidential campaign heated up. Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, outdistanced a field of competitors that included former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum to gain the Republican nomination. Romney promised to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and pledged to limit government, preserve the Bush-era tax cuts while eliminating tax loopholes, and employ his acumen as a successful businessman to create 12 million new jobs within four years. He staked much of his campaign on his criticism of Obama�s handling of the economy.

Mitt Romney, 2010.� Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com

After expanding by 4.1 percent in the last quarter of 2011, GDP growth dropped to 2 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively, in the first and second quarters of 2012 before rebounding slightly to 2 percent in the third quarter. Unemployment hovered between 8.3 percent and 8.1 percent for most of the year before dropping to 7.8 percent in September, its lowest level since Obama had taken office in January 2009. Obama, who was unopposed for the Democratic nomination, defended his record on the economy, promised to attack the deficit by increasing the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans, and claimed that Romney�s plan for the economy did not add up.

All this unfolded as the country drew closer to the so-called fiscal cliff, the series of economic measures mandated by law to either expire or be enforced at the turn of the new year. They included the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, temporary payroll tax cuts initiated by the Obama administration, and some tax breaks for businesses, along with the automatic application of across-the-board spending cuts to the military and nonmilitary programs required by the Budget Control Act of 2011. There was fear that, absent some compromise, those measures would result in another recession.

The Benghazi attack and Superstorm Sandy

On September 11 the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked, and J. Christopher Stevens, who was serving as U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans were killed. Initially, it was thought that the attack was a spontaneous action by rioters angered by an anti-Islam film made in the United States (demonstrations had already occurred at the U.S. embassy in Cairo and elsewhere), but it soon appeared that the assault was actually a premeditated terrorist attack. The incident became an element of the presidential campaign, with Romney controversially criticizing the level of security at the Benghazi post and the administration�s response to the attack.

In the last week of October, during the final run-up to the election, a huge area of the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic states was pummeled by a powerful superstorm, Sandy, that resulted from the convergence of a category 1 hurricane that swept up from the Caribbean and made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey, and a cold front that descended from the north. New Jersey and New York were arguably the areas hardest hit by Sandy, as tidal surges flooded beach communities and portions of Lower Manhattan. More than 110 people died in the United States as a result of the storm, which left an enormous path of destruction and millions without power.

Superstorm SandyDowned power lines and damaged residences in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, U.S., in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, 2012.Julio Cortez/AP

Second Term

The 2012 election

In the November 6 election, Obama captured a second term, narrowly winning the national popular vote and triumphing in the electoral college by holding off Romney�s challenge in nearly all the �battleground� states. The Republicans and Democrats held on to their majorities in the House and Senate, respectively. Postelection negotiations between Obama and Boehner aimed at avoiding the fiscal cliff failed, but on January 1, 2013, a last-minute deal brokered by Biden and McConnell passed the Senate 89 to 8 and then was approved by the House 257 to 167, with about one-third of Republicans voting with Democrats during a rare New Year�s Day session. The compromise preserved the Bush-era income tax cuts for individuals earning $400,000 or less and couples making $450,000 or less annually, but it raised taxes on those earning more than that from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the first federal income tax increase in some two decades. The bill also raised taxes on dividends and inheritance for some high-end earners but allowed the payroll tax cut that had been initiated by Obama to lapse.

Obama, Barack; votingU.S. Pres. Barack Obama voting in the 2012 general election.Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

Gun violence was once again at the centre of the national dialogue after 20 children and 6 adults were killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on December 14, 2012. (The shooter also killed himself and his mother that day.) Obama echoed the widespread public concern by asking Congress to enact new gun-control legislation that would mandate universal background checks for gun purchases, eliminate the sales of assault weapons and magazines containing more than 10 rounds of ammunition, provide for enhanced protection in schools, and put renewed focus on the treatment of mental illness. As Obama sought to marshal support for such legislation, the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights advocates actively campaigned against it. In April 2013 the Senate debated and then took preliminary votes on a gun-control bill and a series of amendments that by consent of both parties needed a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 votes before the bill would be submitted for formal passage. Notwithstanding polls that indicated overwhelming public support for universal background checks, a measure that called for greatly expanded background checks failed to garner sufficient support (winning only a simple majority, 54�46). Although the vote generally followed party lines, a handful of Republicans supported the measure and a few Democrats opposed it. All the related amendments also failed, and the bill was withdrawn.

Sandy Hook Elementary School shootingA Connecticut State Police officer leading children out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, after a mass shooting at the school on December 14, 2012.Shannon Hicks�Newtown Bee/AP

�Sequester� cuts, the Benghazi furor, and Susan Rice on the hot seat

The budget compromise reached in January delayed for two months the automatic cuts on military and social spending that had been mandated by Congress in July 2012 if Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on an alternative approach to deficit reduction. When the new March 31, 2013, deadline passed without an agreement, the initial round of these so-called �sequester� cuts went into effect. The first high-profile consequence of the cuts, significant delays in air travel resulting from mandatory furloughs for air-traffic controllers, was quickly addressed by Congress authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration to shift funds from facility improvement to salaries. As the spring progressed, however, officials of more and more federally funded programs and agencies bemoaned the reductions to the services they provided that resulted from the sequester cuts.

Obama�s efforts to move forward with his second-term agenda were compromised by a number of controversies in which the administration was embroiled. Republican criticism of the government�s role in the Benghazi attacks had been ongoing, but it escalated in May, when assertions of mismanagement and unpreparedness were compounded by renewed accusations of a cover-up, which many Republicans saw reflected in a recently released e-mail exchange between officials of the State Department and the CIA that had preceded UN Ambassador Susan Rice�s appearance on television news programs a few days after the attacks. Characterizing the e-mail string as a dialogue grounded not in politics but in an effort to convey the changing understanding of events that had occurred just a few days previously, the administration dismissed the Republican allegations as politically motivated.

The IRS scandal, the Justice Department�s AP phone records seizure, and Edward Snowden�s leaks

Also in May 2013, Obama joined Republicans in roundly castigating the Internal Revenue Service after revelations that employees of the department had excessively scrutinized conservative groups� applications for tax-exempt status. Obama asked for and accepted the resignation of the department�s acting commissioner and promised to reform the department, but, unsatisfied, Republicans led further investigations into the matter.

That month Republicans as well as many Democrats also were outraged over revelations that the Department of Justice, as part of an investigation into a news leak related to a foiled terrorist plot, had subpoenaed and seized two months� worth of phone records of reporters and editors who worked in several Associated Press offices in May 2012 without notifying that organization. Despite Attorney General Eric Holder�s explanation that the news leak was serious, Republicans characterized the action as an egregious violation of the First Amendment and again pursued further congressional inquiries.

The government�s accessing of phone records was again the issue when in June 2013 Edward Snowden, an American intelligence contractor, revealed through The Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency had compelled telecommunications company Verizon to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of its subscribers. He also disclosed the existence of a broader data-mining program that gave the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Government Communications Headquarters�Britain�s NSA equivalent��direct access� to the servers of such Internet giants as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Snowden was charged with espionage by the U.S. and ultimately ended up in Russia, where he received temporary refugee status. In August, Bradley Manning, who had provided the Web site WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010, was convicted of espionage and theft, among other charges, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Removal of Mohammed Morsi, Obama�s �red line� in Syria, and chemical weapons

Developments in Egypt and Syria in 2013 continued to provide major challenges for U.S. foreign policy. When protests against the Egyptian military�s removal of Mohammed Morsi from the presidency in July led to the killing of hundreds of his supporters in July and August, some American politicians called for the suspension of U.S. financial aid to Egypt (more than $1 billion per year), citing U.S. law that required the federal government to terminate aid if power in the recipient country changed as a result of a coup. Attempting to maintain a neutral stance, the Obama administration hesitated to label Morsi�s removal a coup but called for a quick return to civilian leadership.

Seemingly reluctant to be drawn into military involvement in another conflict in the Middle East, the administration had also been cautious in its response to the Syrian Civil War. While it had begun providing food and financial aid to those who were opposing the regime of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad in February 2013, the U.S. government did not provide military support to the opposition until June, largely in response to reports of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces. Commenting on a possible U.S. response to events in Syria, Obama had said in May 2012, �We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.� In late August 2013, in response to reports that an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian government had killed hundreds of people in suburban Damascus on August 21, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a statement released by Cameron�s office, �reiterated that significant use of chemical weapons would merit a serious response from the international community�; both men tasked officials of their governments and military �to examine all the options.�

The decision not to respond militarily in Syria

However, despite British intelligence assessments that chemical weapons had been used in the incident on August 21 and that it was �highly likely� that the Assad regime had been responsible, on August 29 Parliament voted against endorsing Cameron�s call for military intervention in principle. The next day, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States had �high certainty� that chemical weapons had been used and that government forces had carried out the attack. After indicating that U.S. military response would be forthcoming, even without British involvement, Obama shifted gears on August 31 and asked for congressional authorization for military action while awaiting the findings of UN weapons inspectors who had returned from Damascus after examining the site of the attack. Released on September 16, their report indicated that there was �clear and convincing evidence� that the nerve agent sarin had been delivered by surface-to-surface rockets; however, it did not attempt to assess responsibility for the attack. Two days earlier the United States and Russia, a key supporter of the Assad regime, had brokered an agreement on a framework under which Syria would accede to the international Chemical Weapons Convention and submit to the controls of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, provide a comprehensive listing of its chemical weapons arsenal within a week, destroy all of its chemical mixing and filling equipment by November, and eliminate all of its chemical weapons by mid-2014.

The 2013 government shutdown

After an October 1 deadline passed with the House and Senate failing to agree on a continuing resolution bill for the federal budget, the federal government partially shut down for the first time in 17 years, furloughing several hundred thousand federal employees and closing numerous government offices as well as national parks and other public lands. For weeks, most congressional Republicans, led by those associated with the Tea Party movement, had sought to include in the continuing resolution a one-year delay in funding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA; referred to by both parties as Obamacare), many of the provisions of which took effect on October 1. At the final hour the House Republican majority continued to refuse to rescind that requirement, while the Senate Democratic majority was steadfast in its rejection of it, forcing the government shutdown. On October 16�with political brinkmanship again having brought the government to the limit of the national debt ceiling and with the United States facing the possibility of a default that some feared might spark a global economic crisis�moderate Republicans voted with Democrats in both houses of Congress to pass a bill that fully reopened the government by funding it through January 15, 2014, extended national borrowing until February 7, and set up a committee tasked with arriving at longer-term budgetary solutions. The only change to Obamacare contained in the bill was a minor alteration to the procedures for verifying incomes for some people obtaining subsidized insurance.

The Obamacare rollout

The government shutdown temporarily diverted attention from an early October rollout of Obamacare that went badly awry. HealthCare.gov�the Web site that was established as a clearinghouse of information, a marketplace for insurance plans, and the place to apply for health coverage for those in 36 states�initially performed miserably. During its first weeks it operated slowly, erratically, or simply crashed, and far fewer users were able to access the site, much less apply for insurance, than had been hoped. In late October the Obama administration ordered a �tech surge� to address those problems, but progress in overcoming the glitches was slow, providing Republicans, who had borne the brunt of public dissatisfaction with the government shutdown, the opportunity to lambast the Web site in particular as well as Obamacare and the Obama administration in general. As HealthCare.gov�s performance improved, Obama went on the offensive, encouraging Americans to sign up for coverage and seeking to bolster his plummeting approval ratings. At the beginning of April 2014, after the end of the first open enrollment period, he would be able to announce that 7.1 million Americans had signed up for private insurance plans through the marketplace, meeting the administration�s target.

HealthCare.govA screenshot of the federally run HealthCare.gov site as it appeared on November 29, 2013.Jon Elswick/AP Images

The Iran nuclear deal, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, and the Ukraine crisis

The world�s focus shifted in November 2013 to Geneva, where the United States, the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, France, China, and Russia), and Germany (collectively referred to as the P5+1) entered into an interim agreement with Iran that placed restrictions on Iran�s nuclear activities for six months in exchange for a temporary reduction in the sanctions that had been imposed upon Iran by the international community. Meanwhile, negotiators worked toward a comprehensive final agreement.

Before the end of 2013, the House (by a vote of 332�94) and the Senate (64�36) passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, based on a compromise forged by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, the chairpersons of the House and Senate Budget Committees, respectively. The act replaced the bulk of the automatic spending cuts required by sequestration with targeted cuts, and it raised discretionary spending (split equally between military and nonmilitary funding). The resulting budget was intended to last through fiscal year 2014 and forestall another battle in January 2014, when the temporary budget agreement forged in October was due to expire (provided that the details of the budget could be worked out before then). A number of conservative congressional Republicans opposed the spending increases and called for the sequester-level cuts to remain in place, while many Democrats were disappointed because the act did not extend long-term unemployment benefits.

Among the foreign policy challenges faced by the United States in 2014 was how to respond to the upheaval in Ukraine that eventually resulted in the self-declared independence of the autonomous republic of Crimea, which was then annexed by Russia. The United States was one of many countries that condemned the involvement of Russia and Russian troops in the events in Crimea, and the United States also imposed sanctions on prominent individual Russians while joining the other members of the Group of Eight in suspending Russia from that organization.

The rise of ISIL (ISIS), the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap, and imposition of stricter carbon emission standards

In the summer of 2014, nearly three years after the last U.S. troops had left Iraq, events in that country prompted renewed U.S. intervention. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS])�an entity formed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Syrian Nusrah Front in April 2013�led a spreading uprising by Sunni militants that had begun taking control of Iraqi cities in January 2014. When the threat to the controversial regime of Prime Minister Nūrī al-Mālikī became dire in mid-June 2014, after ISIL fighters seized the northern city of Mosul (the second largest city in Iraq) and then Tikrīt (only about 100 miles [160 km] north of Baghdad), the United States took action. Obama�who was blamed for the uprising by some critics who claimed that he had removed U.S. forces too soon�sent some 300 U.S. Special Operations soldiers to Iraq as advisers, despite his desire not to return troops there.

The Obama administration also was criticized for a swap of prisoners with the Taliban at the end of May. Five Taliban leaders were freed from confinement at the Guant�namo Bay detention camp in exchange for U.S. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held captive in Afghanistan since 2009. Politicians from both parties were critical of the administration�s failure to consult Congress (as law required) before freeing Guant�namo detainees, and some Republicans claimed that too much had been given up for Bergdahl, the circumstances of whose capture had come under suspicion.

Many Republicans condemned the president�s use of executive authority to take action on issues not addressed by Congress, notably his imposition of more-stringent carbon emissions standards for power plants beginning in 2030, along with an increase in the minimum wage (to $10.10 per hour) for federal contract workers. In June Speaker of the House Boehner embodied the anger of many Republicans at the president�s initiatives by threatening to sue him for misusing his executive powers.

The child migrant border surge, air strikes on ISIL (ISIS), and the 2014 midterm elections

As spring turned to summer, the United States was confronted with a growing crisis on its border with Mexico. Since October 2013 more than 50,000 unaccompanied children�most of them from Central America and many of them fleeing drug-related gang violence�had been taken into custody while trying to enter the United States illegally. The crisis arose against the backdrop of Congress�s acknowledgment that immigration reform had again stalled.

migrant childrenU.S. Border Patrol agents processing a group of Central American migrants who entered the U.S. near McAllen, Texas, on June 18, 2014.Jennifer Whitney�The New York Times/Redux

In September Obama ratcheted up the campaign against ISIL, authorizing air strikes inside Syria for the first time and an increase of those in Iraq. He continued to pledge that he would not return U.S. combat troops to the region but asked Congress to approve some $500 million for the training and arming of �moderate� Syrians. As U.S.-led attacks increased, Obama worked to grow the coalition of countries that had committed to confronting ISIL. By the end of the month, some 20 countries were contributing air support or military equipment to the coalition effort, including France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, and Bahrain. Dozens of other countries provided humanitarian aid.

Framing the midterm congressional elections in November 2014 as a referendum on the presidency of Obama (whose approval ratings had plummeted to about 40 percent), the Republicans soundly defeated the Democrats to expand their majority in the House and retake control of the Senate. In gaining as many as 12 seats in the House, Republicans were in a position to match their largest majority in that body since 1947, and, by winning back seats in several states that had gone Republican in recent elections but tilted Democratic on the coattails of Obama�s 2008 presidential victory, Republicans gained nine seats in the Senate to reach a total of 54.

McConnell, Mitch: 2014 reelectionMitch McConnell celebrating with his wife, Elaine Chao, after he was reelected to a sixth term in the Senate, 2014.J. Scott Applewhite/AP Images

Normalizing relations with Cuba, the USA FREEDOM Act, and the Office of Personnel Management data breach

On December 17, 2014, after some 18 months of secret negotiations, Obama and Cuban leader Ra�l Castro simultaneously addressed national television audiences to announce the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba that had been suspended for more than 50 years. Because the embargo on trade with Cuba was codified in U.S. law, rescinding it would require congressional action; however, by May 2015 ferry service between the United States and Cuba had been authorized, and the U.S. government had removed Cuba from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.

Castro, Ra�l; Obama, BarackU.S. Pres. Barack Obama (right) and Cuban Pres. Ra�l Castro making televised addresses to announce the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and the easing of travel restrictions, December 17, 2014. AP Images

In June the Senate passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which curtailed the government�s authority to collect data and made the process by which it requested data through the national security court more transparent. The legislation replaced the USA PATRIOT Act, which had been enacted in the interest of national security in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Edward Snowden�s exposure in 2013 of the government�s bulk collection of phone and Internet records, however, had raised widespread concerns regarding the invasion of privacy. That led the House to pass legislation that would move the data out of the hands of the government to be stored instead by telecommunications companies and accessed by the government only after public requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. After stalling in the Senate long enough for financial authorization of elements of the National Security Agency to lapse temporarily as the PATRIOT Act expired�partly due to the delaying tactics of Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who thought the bill still gave the government too much access, and partly as the result of the opposition of McConnell, the new majority leader, who thought the new limitations under the legislation undermined the government�s security apparatus�the FREEDOM Act was finally passed in the Senate by a 67�32 vote on June 2 and signed into law by Obama.

Just a few days later the issue of data security was once again in the headlines, when U.S. officials announced on June 5 the discovery of a cyberattack on the records of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Initially it was believed that data relating to some four million current and former federal employees had been put at risk. Later it was learned that personal information regarding more than 21 million people had been compromised. The data breach�first detected in April 2015 and confirmed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in May�was believed to have been the work of hackers in China, though it was not clear whether the intent of the attack was espionage or financial gain.

data breachRed unlock symbol, indicating a data breach or hack.� weerapat1003/Fotolia

The Ferguson police shooting, the death of Freddie Gray, and the Charleston church shooting

In the summer of 2014, accounts of unarmed African Americans who had died in the process of arrest by police began to fill the media. In July 2014 a man in New York City died as a result of a choke hold applied an by arresting officer. In August protest demonstrations escalated into civil violence in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, after a policeman shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, during Brown�s arrest. Protests against those actions and against court decisions not to indict the involved officers continued into 2015, and in April of that year rioting erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, on the day of the funeral of Freddie Gray, a black man who died a week after incurring a severe spinal-cord injury while in police custody. Then, in June, the country was shocked when nine African Americans were shot and killed, allegedly by a young white man in a hate crime, in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The apparently white supremacist motivations of the accused killer sparked a discussion of the display of the Confederate flag on the grounds of the capitol of South Carolina and its perception by many as a symbol of oppression and racial subjugation. In July the South Carolina government legislated the flag�s removal.

Baltimore riotsA man throwing a brick at police in Baltimore on April 27, 2015, following the funeral of Freddie Gray. Patrick Semansky/AP Images

Same-sex marriage and Obamacare Supreme Court rulings and final agreement on the Iran nuclear deal

At the end of June the Supreme Court ruled on a pair of landmark cases. In Obergefell v. Hodges" class="md-crosslink">Obergefell v. Hodges, it found state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions to be unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. That ruling thereby legalized the practice of same-sex marriage throughout the country.

White HousePeople gathering in Lafayette Park to see the White House illuminated with rainbow colours in commemoration of the Supreme Court's ruling that effectively legalized same-sex marriage, June 2015.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Images

In King v. Burwell, the court upheld the portion of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that allowed the government to provide subsidies to poor and middle-class citizens in order to help them purchase health care, thus further solidifying the legality of Obamacare.

On July 14, after some two years of continuing negotiations, the P5+1 and Iran reached a final agreement on limits on Iran�s nuclear program in exchange for the reduction of sanctions against the country. The terms of the final agreement largely followed a framework agreement that had been accepted by both sides in April. Over a 10-year period, Iran would greatly reduce its nuclear stockpile and give inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear facilities in exchange for the gradual removal of sanctions. By September the deal had won enough support in the Senate to ensure that a potential congressional resolution disapproving the deal would not have enough votes to overcome a presidential veto.

European Union; P5+1; Iranian officialsEuropean Union, P5+1, and Iranian officials in Geneva, July 2015.U.S Department of State

New climate regulations, the Keystone XL pipeline, and intervention in the Syrian Civil War

In July 2015 the U.S. and Cuba officially reopened embassies in each other�s capital. In August Obama used executive authority to announce new climate regulations requiring U.S. power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030; however, even before the regulation had been reviewed by a federal appeals court, a lawsuit brought against the action was granted a stay request by the Supreme Court that was to remain in place as the lawsuit made its way through the courts. Environmentalists gained a more permanent victory in November when Obama rejected the proposal to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Opponents of the project had argued that extracting the petroleum from tar sands in Alberta would contribute significantly to global warming.

Having admitted in June 2015 that his administration lacked a �complete strategy� to confront ISIL, Obama authorized the deployment of several dozen special-operations troops in Syria in October 2015. That action�which occurred at the same time as growing direct involvement by Russia in the Syrian Civil War�was presented as one component of an evolving strategy that eventually led to talks aimed at effecting a political transition in Syria. In March 2016 Secretary of State Kerry accused ISIL of carrying out a genocide against religious and ethnic minorities in the areas of Syria and Iraq that it controlled and called for an international investigation into atrocities committed by ISIL and punishment for those found to be responsible.

The Merrick Garland nomination and Supreme Court rulings on public unions, affirmative action, and abortion

Also in March 2016, Obama nominated judicial moderate Merrick Garland to take the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by the death of staunch conservative Antonin Scalia. However, Senate Republicans had already vowed not to hold confirmation hearings for any new justice until after the 2016 presidential election. As a result, a trio of important rulings were decided without a full bench. On March 29, in its ruling on the most important labour-law case brought before it in decades, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the court reached a 4�4 tie that preserved the right of public unions to charge agency fees (charges to nonmembers to cover the cost of collective bargaining and other nonpolitical union activities from which nonmembers benefit). Ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin on June 23, the court voted 4�3 (with one justice recused) to affirm an appellate court decision that had endorsed the race-conscious admissions policy of the university as consistent with the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The decision represented an important victory for advocates of affirmative action. Finally, on June 27, 2016, by a 5�3 vote in Whole Woman�s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court invalidated two provisions of a 2013 Texas law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion clinics in the state, purportedly in the interest of protecting women�s health. The court ruled that the two provisions placed an �impermissible obstacle� to women seeking an abortion in Texas, in violation of the court�s decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), which had prohibited �substantial obstacle[s] in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability,� including �[u]nnecessary health regulations,� as an �undue burden� on the right to abortion.

Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt decisionAbortion rights activists rejoicing in front of the Supreme Court, June 27, 2016, after the court decided in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt to invalidate two provisions of a 2013 Texas law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion clinics in the state.J. Scott Applewhite/AP Images

The Orlando nightclub shooting, the shooting of Dallas police officers, and the shootings in Baton Rouge

Meanwhile, the epidemic of gun violence in the United States persisted. Mass shootings at a community college in Oregon in October 2015 and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in November were followed by another in early December at a social services centre in San Bernardino, California, in which a husband and wife with militant Islamist sympathies killed 14 people and injured 22. On June 12, 2016, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that was a centre for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social life. Forty-nine people were killed and 50 others wounded in the attack by a lone gunman.

In July more police shootings and the shooting of police officers took the Orlando event�s place in the headlines. On the evening of July 7, a sniper shot and killed four police officers and a rapid transit officer and wounded several others in downtown Dallas at the close of a peaceful protest against the shootings earlier in the week of African American men by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota. Before being killed by a robot-detonated explosive, the shooter told negotiators that he was upset by recent police shootings. Later in July three law-enforcement officers were shot and killed and three more wounded in Baton Rouge in another retaliatory incident.

The Donald Trump administration

The campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination

Against this backdrop the campaign for the 2016 election unfolded with the primary battles of both parties largely shaped by unlikely insurgent populist candidates�businessman and reality TV star turned Republican Donald Trump and democratic socialist U.S. senator turned Democrat Bernie Sanders. Trump rose to the top of an extremely crowded Republican field, winning primary after primary by employing unfiltered�often outlandish�personal attacks on his rivals in debate, in media interviews, and especially on Twitter. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were particular targets of Trump�s vitriol before he turned it on the last two candidates blocking his path to the nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Because Trump�s critique was also aimed at the Republican establishment, not only was there an effort by elements of that establishment to stifle his candidacy, but he also had trouble gaining the support of a number of key Republican leaders once he had secured the party�s nomination.

Trump, DonaldDonald Trump.� Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock.com

Nonetheless, Trump won fervid popular support, especially among blue-collar white men, with his promise to return America to greatness by combating illegal immigration, negotiating beneficial trade deals, taking a tough economic stance against China, beefing up the military, obliterating ISIL, and eschewing political correctness. In the process, Trump also stirred hostile reaction by proposing highly controversial policies and regularly making inflammatory remarks. Among those policies most derided by his critics were his promises to build a wall between Mexico and the United States and to ban Muslims from entering the country. In addition, he was taken to task by opponents for his disparaging comments about Mexicans, remarks to and regarding women that were widely perceived as offensive, and his impugning of the character of the Muslim American parents of a U.S. soldier killed in combat after the soldier�s father was critical of Trump in a speech during the Democratic National Convention.

The campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination

On the road to that convention, front-runner Hillary Clinton was pushed to the limit by the challenge of Vermont Senator Sanders, whose �political revolution� was funded by some seven million mostly small-dollar donations (the average donation was long said to have been $27). Sanders supporters, including a legion of young people, were inspired by his firebrand determination to redress economic inequality, rein in Wall Street, provide single-payer universal health care, introduce tuition-free college education, and reform the political system.

Sanders, BernieBernie Sanders.Gage Skidmore

Having served as first lady, as a U.S. senator for New York, and as secretary of state, Clinton brought a wealth of experience to her candidacy, but for many voters she represented the status quo, even if she offered the potential of breaking the Oval Office�s glass ceiling as the first woman president. She was also dogged by the perception among many in the electorate that she was not trustworthy, partly because of her use of a private server for some of her e-mail during her tenure as secretary of state, an action that earned disapprobation from the FBI after investigation but that was not determined to be illegal.

Clinton entered the convention with over 2,800 delegates�more than the 2,383 needed to nominate�but her big advantage over Sanders, who had nearly 1,900 delegates, came from some 600 superdelegates in her column. Sanders could count on only about 50 superdelegates, who were not chosen through the primary and caucus process but instead were made up of prominent party members, members of the Democratic National Committee, and major elected officeholders. As the party�s nominee, Clinton sought to reach out to supporters of Sanders, who had left an indelible mark on the party�s platform and pushed Clinton to present herself prominently as a progressive and to shift many of her policies leftward.

Clinton, HillaryHillary Clinton at a campaign rally, 2016.� Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com

Hillary Clinton�s private e-mail server, Donald Trump�s Access Hollywood tape, and the 2016 general election campaign

The presidential general election campaign was among the most rancorous in recent history, with Clinton accusing Trump of being devoid of the temperament and judgment required to serve as president, while Trump argued that Clinton lacked the �stamina� necessary for the office and that she should be jailed for what he claimed was criminal use of her private e-mail server while secretary of state. Together they were among the most unpopular final major-party presidential candidates in U.S. history.

Trump�s comments and attitudes toward women and Clinton�s use of that private e-mail server came back to haunt them as the election campaign wound to a close in October. Early in the month a hot-mic video from an infotainment television program (Access Hollywood) in 2005 surfaced in which Trump boasted to a reporter about sexual exploits that were grounded in predatory behaviour. Trump sought to defuse the onslaught of outrage that followed by characterizing his remarks as �locker-room talk� and denied subsequent allegations by a series of women who claimed that he had sexually assaulted them, but his already low support among women voters continued to wane, and some Republicans began to withdraw their endorsements. Only weeks before the election, FBI Director James Comey announced that the bureau was reviewing additional e-mails related to the Clinton investigation that had been recently discovered, intensifying concerns about her trustworthiness that already plagued her candidacy. Only on the Sunday before the election did Comey announce that no criminal activity by Clinton had been found by this additional investigation.

Trump�s victory and Russian interference in the presidential election

In the weeks before the election, Clinton held a small but steady lead in opinion polling both on the national level and in the battleground states. In the event, however, Trump confounded both pollsters and political pundits by not only winning several crucial battleground states (Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina among them) but also by bettering Clinton in states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that had been longtime Democratic strongholds in presidential elections. In the process, Trump found a path to the more than 270 electoral college votes necessary to be elected as the 45th president, although Clinton won the popular vote by more 2.8 million votes. In the meantime, Republicans held on to their majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Pence, Mike; Trump, DonaldPresident-elect Donald Trump (right) shaking hands with running mate Mike Pence prior to Trump's victory speech, November 9, 2016.John Locher/AP Images

Some Democrats blamed what they saw as the undemocratic nature of the electoral college for Clinton�s defeat. Others pointed to Comey�s actions, �fake news� that had been generated by questionable Internet sites and subsequently shared as true news on social media sites like Facebook, and intervention in the election by Russia, including computer hacking of the e-mail of members of the Democratic National Committee and its release through WikiLeaks. During the transition period between the Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies collectively indicated their belief that the Russian government had engaged in a systematic effort to influence the election in Trump�s favour. The president-elect forcefully questioned this conclusion, and Republicans largely dismissed the Democrats� broader accusations as efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Trump�s impending presidency.

United States presidential election of 2016Results of the U.S. presidential election, 2016.Encyclop�dia Britannica, Inc.

�America First,� the Women�s Marches, Trump on Twitter, and �fake news�

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump echoed the populist criticism of the Washington establishment that had been a hallmark of his campaign and struck a strongly nationalist �America First� tone, promising that �America will start winning again, winning like never before.� The day after Trump�s inauguration, �Women�s Marches� and supporting events were held in cities across the United States and abroad in support of (among other issues) gender and racial equality and in defiance of the legislative and cultural challenges to them that the marchers expected from President Trump and a Republican congressional majority. Estimates varied, but many observers suggested that between 3.3 million and 4.6 million people had turned out to march in U.S. cities, making the collective action one of the largest mass protests in U.S. history.

Women's March, Washington, D.C.A crowd filling Independence Avenue during the Women's March in Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017.Alex Brandon/AP Images

Trump�s first months in office were steeped in controversy. From the outset, his approach to the presidency departed from many of the expectations associated with the conduct of the chief executive. Most notably, he continued to use Twitter regularly, arguably employing it as his principal platform for expressing presidential prerogative. Having appropriated the term �fake news� to denigrate mainstream media coverage of events that were unfavourable to his administration, he sought to circumvent the press and shape the country�s political narrative directly. Critics characterized the sometimes personal assaults contained in his tweets as beneath the dignity of the presidency; supporters saw the unfiltered (seemingly impulsive) immediacy of these terse statements as the embodiment of his anti-Washington establishment stance.

Scuttling U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline, and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

Among Trump�s first steps as president were executive actions aimed at fulfilling a number of his most prominent campaign promises. In addition to directives paving the way for the unraveling of Obamacare and guaranteeing nonparticipation by the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a trade deal championed by Obama, Trump was quick to reverse Obama�s policies directed at protecting the environment. The new president signed memoranda that set the stage for reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline�a 1,179-mile (1,897-km) oil pipeline project that had been rejected by his predecessor in 2015�as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline, the completion of which entailed construction of a section cutting across part of the Missouri River that would potentially endanger the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and which had been halted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pending the completion of an environmental impact statement. Trump�s actions were aimed at delivering on his campaign promise to expand U.S. energy exploration and production. The new president�s most controversial policy decision in the first six months of his presidency regarding the environment came in June 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, a broad range of measures (agreed to by 195 countries) aimed at limiting increases in worldwide temperatures and mitigating the economic consequences of global warming. Trump, who doubted that climate change was real, argued that the agreement was unfair to the United States and that its mandate for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would damage the U.S. economy.

ICE enforcement and removal operations

Within his first week in office, Trump had fulfilled another of his signature campaign promises by issuing an executive order mandating the construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico aimed at controlling illegal immigration. An additional executive order authorized the withholding of federal funds from �sanctuary� cities that had chosen to provide refuge for illegal immigrants. That order was answered with defiant statements by a number of big-city mayors. Nevertheless, at the administration�s behest, in February the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency began an aggressive effort to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants. The operation targeted individuals with serious criminal records, but opponents of the policy argued that it was being used less specifically to simply round up undocumented immigrants. Many observers were surprised in June, however, when the Trump administration announced that it would allow the Obama administration�s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to stand, thus continuing to bar the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children. At the same time, though, the administration eliminated a parallel program that would have similarly prohibited the deportation of undocumented parents of children who are U.S. citizens or legal residents.

The travel ban

Immigration was also the focus of another controversial executive order early in Trump�s term. Issued in late January, the order suspended immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and, in the eyes of many, effectively fulfilled Trump�s campaign promise to institute a �Muslim ban.� This so-called travel ban was immediately greeted with widespread protests at U.S. airports. By early February, enforcement of the ban had been enjoined nationwide by order of a district court in Washington state. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay the order, in March the Trump administration superseded the first executive order with a second that was crafted to get around the constitutional challenges to the first that were grounded in the assertion that it violated both the due process clause and the establishment-of-religion clause. Enforcement of the new ban�which removed Iraq from the list of countries involved and narrowed the categories of affected persons�was blocked by injunctions issued by district courts in Hawaii and Maryland that were largely upheld in May and June by the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals, respectively. In June the U.S. Supreme Court put these cases on the docket for its October 2017 term and in the interim removed the injunctions for �foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.�

Pursuing �repeal and replacement� of Obamacare

The �repeal and replacement� of Obamacare�another of Trump�s central campaign pledges and a fundamental objective for the Republican Party during the Obama era�moved forward slowly, in fits and starts. In the absence of a detailed plan from the Trump administration, House Republicans, led by Speaker Paul Ryan, took the lead in advancing the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which was intended to reduce the federal government�s involvement in health care without eliminating the care provided for millions of Americans by the PPACA, long characterized by Republicans as a costly catastrophe. Introduced in March, the AHCA met with lockstep opposition from Democrats and proved contentious with Republicans. The bill did away with the PPACA�s requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, rolled back federal funding of Medicaid, and, as part of nearly $1 trillion in proposed tax cuts over 10 years, promised $274 billion in tax cuts for Americans earning at least $200,000 per year. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the AHCA would trim the federal deficit by some $337 billion over 10 years, but it would also leave an additional 24 million Americans without health insurance. The most conservative House Republicans argued that the bill did not go far enough in undoing Obamacare, while moderate Republicans feared that it would leave too many people unable to pay for health care. In response to this lack of consensus, Ryan pulled the legislation in March, before it was put to a vote, but at the beginning of May a revised version of the act was adopted by a 217�213 vote in which 20 Republicans joined the Democrats in opposition.

John McCain�s opposition and the failure of �skinny repeal�

As the bill moved to the Senate for consideration, a number of opinion polls indicated that it was deeply unpopular with the public. Agitated protest over the proposed changes to Obamacare greeted members of Congress when they met with constituents during legislative breaks. Under the direction of majority leader McConnell, the Republican leadership crafted a Senate version of the bill behind closed doors. When the Senate version emerged, retitled the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) of 2017, it took an approach similar to that of the House bill, though it called for earlier and more substantial cuts to Medicaid funding. Meeting with opposition from both hard-line conservative and moderate Republican senators, the BCRA lacked the support necessary to obtain the quick passage McConnell had sought before the congressional recess for the July 4 holiday, and a vote on it was delayed.

When a more modest version of the Senate bill, branded �skinny repeal,� resurfaced at the end of the month, it maintained most of the tax increases that had funded the PPACA, but it allowed states to opt out of pivotal consumer protections such as forbidding insurers from charging higher rates for preexisting conditions. With Democrats in lockstep opposition, the bill failed 51�49 when John McCain returned to the Senate from his battle with brain cancer to join fellow Republican senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) in turning thumbs down in a dramatic post-midnight vote. In September McCain�who had come to believe that health care reform required a circumspect bipartisan approach�joined Murkowski, Collins, and Rand Paul in opposing last-ditch repeal legislation offered by Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) and Bill Cassidy (Louisiana). This time McCain�s opposition was less because of objections to the bill�s substance than to the effort to ramrod it through Congress. By February 2018 the Republican congressional leadership had resigned itself to its inability to pass legislation to comprehensively repeal Obamacare, though removal of the �mandate� (the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance) would be part of the sweeping tax reform passed later in the year. Moreover, the Trump administration shifted its attack on the PPACA to support for the lawsuit filed by some 20 states that sought to overturn all provisions of the act on legal grounds.

Neil Gorsuch�s confirmation to the Supreme Court, the air strike on Syria, and threatening Kim Jong-Un with �fire and fury�

Another objective high on the list of Republican priorities during the 2016 election, the selection of a judicial conservative to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court, was accomplished in April with the Senate�s confirmation of Trump�s nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Democrats attempted to employ a filibuster to block Gorsuch�s appointment, but the Republican majority changed the Senate rules to remove the 60-vote minimum required to terminate debate and proceeded to a confirmation vote. In the event, Gorsuch was confirmed by a 54�45 vote that went largely along party lines.

In the meantime, several high-profile foreign policy issues heated up. On April 6, 2017, responding to a chemical weapons attack by the government of Bashar al-Assad that killed some 80 Syrian civilians, Trump ordered an air strike on the Syrian air base at which the chemical attack had originated. Nearly five dozen Tomahawk missiles were launched against the air base from warships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The attack increased the already high tensions between the United States and Russia, which supported the Assad government.

Elsewhere, the regime of Kim Jong-Un in North Korea stepped up its aggressive development of missile-launched nuclear weapons. Departing from the Obama administration�s policy of �strategic patience,� which sought to use sanctions and political isolation to make an impact on North Korean behaviour, Trump attempted to persuade China, which was broadly engaged with North Korea, to use its influence to restrain Kim Jong-Un. At the same time, Trump issued sabre-rattling warnings to Kim Jong-Un while U.S. and South Korean forces undertook joint military exercises as a show of strength. A defiant North Korea responded in early July with its first successful launch test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, which was interpreted by experts as having a range capable of reaching Alaska. On August 8 Trump warned North Korea not to make any more threats to the United States, promising that threats would be met with �fire and fury like the world has never seen.�

Violence in Charlottesville, the dismissal of Steve Bannon, the resignation of Michael Flynn, and the investigation of possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign

Later in August a firestorm of criticism met Trump�s response to a demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, by members of the so-called alt-right (a loose association of white nationalists, white supremacists, extreme libertarians, and neo-Nazis) that erupted in violence, resulting in the death of a counterdemonstrator. After initially laying blame for the violence on �many sides,� Trump was compelled to more strongly condemn white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and neo-Nazis. In impromptu public remarks, Trump then reversed his stance, not only agreeing with the protestors� opposition to the removal of a statue of Confederate icon Robert E. Lee but also stating his belief that there had been �some very fine people� among the white nationalist protestors, remarks that further escalated the condemnation of his response to the incident as racially divisive.

The events in Charlottesville dovetailed with Trump�s dismissal in August of his chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, an anti-globalist populist who had helped engineer Trump�s election, first at the helm of Breitbart News, which provided a platform for the alt-right, and then as the executive director of Trump�s campaign. Bannon had clashed with other members of Trump�s inner circle and belittled them in remarks made that month in a phone conversation with the coeditor of the liberal publication The American Prospect.

All the events of the first portion of the Trump presidency unfolded in a widespread environment of concern over Russian tampering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and against the backdrop of investigations into the possible connections between Russian officials and operatives and members of the Trump campaign and the Trump administration. Michael Flynn, Trump�s national security adviser, was forced to resign in February, having lied to Vice President Pence regarding the nature of Flynn�s telephone conversation in December 2016 with Russia�s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Some two weeks before his resignation, the White House had been warned of the Department of Justice�s belief that Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail by Russia. That concern had arisen as a result of the FBI�s examination of the communications between Flynn and Kislyak that had come to the agency�s attention through routine monitoring of the ambassador�s communications.

Jeff Session�s recusal, James Comey�s firing, and Robert Mueller�s appointment as special counsel

From July 2016 a secret investigation had been conducted into possible collusion between Russian officials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. On March 2, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from oversight of that no-longer secret investigation after controversy grew regarding his own meetings with Kislyak before the election and over statements Sessions had made during his confirmation hearing regarding the possibility of preelection contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Almost from the outset of the first reports of Russian involvement in the election, Trump had been dubious of the veracity of the accusations and downplayed their significance, casting them as an outgrowth of Democrats� sour-grapes frustration at losing the presidential election.

In May Trump dismissed Comey as director of the FBI shortly after Comey testified before Congress, in part about the bureau�s investigation of possible Russian intervention in the election. Purportedly, Trump fired Comey at the recommendation of recently appointed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who, in a memo solicited by the president, criticized Comey�s handling of the public announcements related to Clinton�s e-mails. Soon after Comey�s dismissal, however, the president made it known that he had planned to fire Comey regardless of the Justice Department�s recommendation, at least partly because of Comey�s handling of �this Russia thing,� which Trump repeatedly characterized as a politically motivated witch hunt. Following his ouster, a memo written by Comey came to light summarizing a meeting with Trump in January 2017 at which Comey claimed that the president had both sought a pledge of loyalty and indirectly asked him to halt the investigation of Flynn�s activities.

Comey�s description of the encounter (which would be repeated in new testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June) sparked concern, even among some members of Trump�s own party, that the president�s actions may have constituted obstruction of justice. Four congressional committees�the Senate and House intelligence committees, the House oversight committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism�were actively investigating Russian interference in the election. In the wake of the Comey memo, however, protracted calls by many Democrats and even some Republicans for the appointment of an independent prosecutor or special committee were answered on May 17 by the Justice Department�s appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI�s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

Hurricanes Harvey and Maria and the mass shootings in Las Vegas, Parkland, and Santa Fe

In August Hurricane Harvey, the most forceful storm to make landfall in the United States in more than a decade, inundated the Houston area. The city received more than 16 inches (400 mm) of rain in a 24-hour period. Catastrophic flooding claimed several lives, more than 100,000 homes were damaged, and thousands of people remained displaced months afterward. Already challenged by the events in Houston, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) responded to another natural disaster when Puerto Rico was hammered by Hurricane Maria, a nearly category 5 cyclone, in September. That storm caused more than $90 billion in property damage and left some 400,000 of the island�s electricity customers without power for nearly five months. Puerto Rico�s Department of Public Safety�s initial official death toll from the storm was 64 lives, but some later estimates put the figure in the thousands, and in August 2018 the Puerto Rican government upped the official estimate to nearly 3,000 deaths.

Mass shootings continued to afflict the country. In October 2017 in Las Vegas, 58 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded when a man used as many as 23 guns to rain fire on the audience of a country music festival from the window of a 32nd-floor hotel room. In February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, 14 students and three staff members were killed when a former student who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons went on a rampage. Some of the students who survived the shooting became outspoken advocates for tighter gun-control laws and played prominent roles in the March for Our Lives protest that drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018, as well as to some 800 other gun-control rallies across the country and around the globe. Nonetheless, fewer than two months later, on May 18 in Santa Fe, Texas, another 10 people were killed in a shooting at a high school.

The #MeToov movement, the Alabama U.S. Senate special election, and the Trump tax cut

A different kind of social movement began shaking American society in October 2017, after it was revealed that film mogul Harvey Weinstein had for years with impunity sexually harassed and assaulted women in the industry. After one of his victims, actress Alyssa Milano, made her story known, a multitude of others who had been victims of sexual harassment or assault began sharing their experiences on social media. The resulting movement, which took its name from the social media hashtag used to post the stories, #MeToo, grew over the coming months to bring condemnation to dozens of powerful men in politics, business, entertainment, and the news media, including political commentator Bill O�Reilly, television newsmen Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, actors Kevin Spacey and Sylvester Stallone, and U.S. Sen. Al Franken.

Allegations of sexual misconduct also played a pivotal role in the special election in December 2017 to fill the seat in the U.S. Senate for Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became attorney general. During the general election campaign, allegations surfaced that the Republican candidate, controversial former Alabama supreme court justice Roy Moore, had, when in his 30s, not only romantically pursued a number of teenage girls but also engaged in improper behaviour with some of them, including alleged assault. Seemingly in response to the allegations and as a reflection of growing discontent with the Trump presidency, Alabama voters elected a Democrat (Doug Jones) to the Senate for the first time in more than two decades.

The Alabama election was a setback for Trump, who had prominently supported Moore. Nevertheless, the president saw the implementation of a number of policy initiatives that pleased both his solid base of supporters and Republicans in general. Most notably, some two weeks after Jones�s election, Trump signed into law sweeping tax-cutting legislation that had been at the top of Republican wish lists for years. The new law reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, kept the existing seven tax brackets for individuals but reduced rates almost across the board from 39.6 percent to 37 percent for the highest earners and from 15 percent to 12 percent for those in the second lowest bracket, and eliminated the tax penalty for individuals who had not purchased health insurance.

Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement, Trump-Trudeau conflict at the G7 summit, and imposing tariffs

Trump fulfilled another campaign promise and dissolved one of the landmark foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration on May 8, 2018, when he announced that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. plus Germany) nuclear deal with Iran. �It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement,� Trump said, while promising to reimpose �the highest level of economic sanctions� on Iran. The other signatories of the agreement remained committed to it.

Trump�s decision in the matter was reflective of his growing willingness to impose policies that isolated the United States from its traditional allies. He had come into office promising to pull the U.S. out of NAFTA if Canada and Mexico did not renegotiate the agreement; in August 2017, representatives from the three countries began formal discussions on revamping the historic deal. In May 2018 Trump announced his intention to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico, and the EU, claiming that the tariffs were necessary to protect U.S. industries as a matter of national security. At a summit in Quebec in June, Trump was at odds with the other Group of Seven (G7) leaders over a variety of issues but especially trade. Although the U.S. president initially supported the communiqu� that the leaders issued at the end of the meetings, Trump took umbrage at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau�s statement at a post-summit news conference that, if necessary, Canada would institute counter-tariffs and would not be �pushed around� by the United States. Relations had become strained between the two countries with the �world�s longest undefended border.�

Tariffs on steel and aluminum were also to be imposed on China, but that action proved to be only the opening salvo in a trade war that the Trump administration unleashed on the Asian economic giant. Trump had long argued that China was taking advantage of the United States in trade. Determined to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China and arguing that Chinese infringement of the intellectual property of American businesses and undercutting of American producers was a threat to U.S. national security, Trump, by July, had instituted tariffs on some $34 billion worth of Chinese goods, prompting China to respond in kind.

The Trump-Kim 2018 summit, �zero tolerance,� and separation of immigrant families

Less than a year after exchanging threats of nuclear war with Kim Jong-Un, the mercurial Trump responded in May 2018 to warming relations between North and South Korea by preparing plans for a summit meeting with the North Korean leader. The meeting, which was to be held in June, was cancelled by Trump after a North Korean official characterized threatening statements by Vice President Pence as �ignorant and stupid.� When Kim�s government adopted a conciliatory tone, Trump reversed his decision, and the two men held a historic meeting�the first face-to-face encounter between the sitting leaders of the United States and North Korea�in Singapore on June 12. With the world watching, Trump surprised both South Korea and the Pentagon by promising to end joint U.S.�South Korea military exercises, while Kim pledged to work �toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,� a promise that soon appeared to be contradicted by North Korean actions.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration had become the object of widespread outrage over its implementation in early April of a policy that called for the children of migrants entering the U.S. illegally to be separated at the U.S. border from their parents, all of whom were detained under the administration�s �zero tolerance� policy. As awareness grew of the resulting situation�which saw even very young children removed from their parents and relocated�criticism of the policy spread across the political spectrum. Initially, the administration defended the policy and claimed that the law prevented it from taking another approach until Congress acted. Republicans attempted to address the problem, pushing through broader immigration legislation, but it failed to be enacted. By mid-June the hue and cry had grown so loud and the potential political damage loomed so large that Trump was compelled to issue an executive order terminating the separations. In the wake of the order, the Department of Homeland Security announced that 2,342 children had been separated at the border from 2,206 adults between May 5 and June 9.

The Supreme Court decision upholding the travel ban, its ruling on Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, No. 16-1466, and the retirement of Anthony Kennedy

Trump�s determination to secure the country�s borders received a shot in the arm later in June from the Supreme Court, which ruled 5�4 to uphold a third version of the travel ban that restricted entry into the United States for citizens of Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Venezuela. The Court ruled that the ban was within the constitutional scope of presidential authority and that Trump�s inflammatory remarks during the election campaign regarding the threat posed by Muslims to the American people did not undermine that authority.

The Court also dealt a blow to organized labour with its 5�4 decision in June on Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, No. 16-1466, which overturned the precedent established in a 1977 decision and found that public-sector employees who chose not to join unions could not be required to pay fees to support collective bargaining.

The Supreme Court was on the mind of many Americans at the end of June when Justice Anthony Kennedy, who had so often acted as the swing vote between the Court�s conservative and liberal factions, announced his intention to retire. Naming his replacement offered Trump the opportunity to tip the Court�s ideological balance toward conservatism for a generation. The president had come into office promising to name to the bench judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and so it seemed certain that Senate Democrats would to try to determine the nominee�s stance on that politically pivotal case. When conservative District of Columbia Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh was named the nominee, however, some of the attention shifted to writing by Kavanaugh in which he had expressed doubts regarding whether a sitting president should be criminally investigated or prosecuted.

The indictment of Paul Manafort, the guilty pleas of Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, and indictments of Russian intelligence officers

That issue took on heightened importance because the congressional and Mueller investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election remained in the headlines and continued to provide a subtext for virtually everything that unfolded in Washington. By October 2017 the Mueller investigation had led to its first criminal charges, as Paul Manafort, Trump�s campaign chairman from June to August 2016, was indicted for conspiracy, money laundering, tax fraud, failure to file reports of foreign financial assets, serving as an unregistered foreign agent, and making false and misleading statements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Manafort had been forced to resign his post with the Trump campaign after an investigation by the Ukrainian government revealed that he had received some $13 million under the table for his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Phone calls between Manafort and Russian intelligence agents had been intercepted.

In December 2017 Flynn was indicted and pled guilty to the charge of lying to FBI, reportedly regarding his contact with Kislyak. Also pleading guilty to having lied to the FBI was George Papadopoulos, a onetime adviser to Trump who had tried several times to arrange meetings between representatives of the Trump campaign and Russians. Papadopoulos had been informed that Russian government officials had compromising information about Hillary Clinton. As the investigation moved forward, it appeared to focus on several key areas of inquiry, the role and nature of cyberattacks and information-influencing operations (including fake news), money laundering, the possibility of collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia, and whether obstruction of justice had occurred.

On July 13, 2018, indictments were issued for 12 Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential campaign in Trump�s favour. The indictments painted a detailed portrait of a complex undertaking by Russian agents that included attempts to infiltrate state election boards, money laundering, �phishing� efforts to access the e-mail of Democratic Party and Clinton campaign officials, dissemination of the stolen documents through WikiLeaks and false online personas, and financing through the use of cyber currency (such as Bitcoin). In the wake of the indictments, Trump continued to vociferously question the authenticity of the intelligence community�s accusations of Russian involvement.

Cabinet turnover

Almost from the outset, turnover was rampant in the Trump administration. Among the first to go was the chief of staff, Reince Priebus. He was replaced by Homeland Security head John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general who reportedly imposed order on a White House often characterized in the press as chaotic. Also early on, Sean Spicer�s duties as press secretary were assumed by Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Especially notable were the departures of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom were widely perceived as moderating influences on Trump�s inclination toward impetuous actions in the realm of foreign policy. Trump loyalist Mike Pompeo, whom Trump had appointed as director of the CIA, took over at the Department of State, while John R. Bolton, a controversial former UN ambassador, became national security adviser. Both men were much closer to Trump�s worldview than their predecessors had been. Accusations of corruption and ethics violations led to the resignations of a number of Trump appointees, including Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services and Scott Pruitt, who had worked to eliminate regulations as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. They were the most prominent of the cabinet members who were alleged to be living in high style at taxpayer�s expense.

Trump�s European trip and the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin

In July 2018 Trump stirred controversy on a trip to Europe. At a meeting of the heads of government of NATO countries, he accused the other member states of not paying their fair share for the organization�s operations. While visiting Britain, he gave a newspaper interview in which he was critical of British Prime Minister Theresa May�s handling of her country�s withdrawal from the EU (�Brexit�), while he praised Boris Johnson, her political rival within the Conservative Party. Trump then characterized the EU as a trading �foe� of the United States. All this riling of traditional U.S. allies occurred in the lead-up to Trump�s summit meeting in Helsinki with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, which followed on the heels of the indictments of the 12 Russian intelligence agents.

In the press conference that followed Putin and Trump�s roughly two-hour one-on-one meeting (only translators had been present), Putin once again denied Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In response to a reporter�s question, Trump indicated that he trusted Putin�s denial more than the conclusions of his own intelligence service. Moreover, Trump refused to take the opportunity to condemn other transgressive Russian actions. Politicians on both sides of the aisle were deeply critical of the president�s statements and comportment. When he returned to Washington, Trump attempted to �walk back� some of the comments he had made in Helsinki. He expressed his support for U.S. intelligence agencies and claimed that he had misspoken during the press conference, saying �would� when he meant to say �wouldn�t� in the statement �I don�t see any reason why it would be [Russia that had interfered with the U.S. election].� Trump also said that he had forcefully warned Putin during their meeting against any further Russian intervention in U.S. elections, but he then made the surprising announcement that he would be inviting Putin to a summit in Washington in the autumn.

The USMCA trade agreement, the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford, and the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh

At the end of August 2018 Mexico and the United States announced their agreement on the terms of a new trade agreement that preserved much of NAFTA while also introducing a number of significant changes. On September 30 Canada also agreed to join the new accord, which was branded the United States�Mexico�Canada Agreement (USMCA). Most of the agreement, which still required approval from the countries� legislatures, was not set to go into effect until 2020.

In October the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh as the replacement for Kennedy but not before the confirmation process was interrupted by accusations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted childhood acquaintance Christine Blasey Ford when they were teenagers in Maryland. Two other women also came forward with accusations: a former classmate of Kavanaugh�s at Yale University accused him of a separate act of sexual assault, and a third woman declared in a sworn statement that Kavanaugh had attended parties at which gang rapes took place. Following impassioned testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by both Kavanaugh (who denied all three allegations) and Blasey Ford, a supplemental investigation of Blasey Ford�s allegations and those of Kavanaugh�s Yale classmate was conducted by the FBI. Limited in duration and scope (dozens of witnesses recommended by the accusers were not contacted), the investigation produced a confidential report that the Judiciary Committee�s Republican chairman declared had found �no corroboration� of the allegations. The Senate then narrowly confirmed Kavanaugh�s appointment.

Central American migrant caravans, the pipe-bomb mailings, and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting

This episode of instant American history was starkly reminiscent of the accusations of sexual impropriety made by Anita Hill during the Senate confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991. Riveted and riven by the Kavanaugh confirmation, the country headed into the 2018 midterm elections suffused in partisan rancor. Trump emphatically embraced the election as a referendum on his presidency as he stumped for Republican candidates. Rather than emphasize positive developments on the economic front (including an unemployment rate that had fallen to 3.7 percent by September 2018 and GDP growth of 4.2 percent in the second quarter and 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2018), the president instead chose to refocus attention on immigration, which remained a �red meat issue� for his core supporters. In particular, he repeatedly raised the alarm against the supposed threat of violence posed by the imminent �invasion� of several thousand asylum-seeking Central Americans in a caravan that was slowly making its way northward toward the United States.

In the weeks before the election, with divisive rhetoric escalating, a series of shocking events quickly unfolded. Beginning on October 22, pipe-bomb-bearing packages were intercepted that had been bound for more than a dozen political opponents and prominent critics of Trump, including Hillary Clinton, activist billionaire George Soros, and former president Obama. A Florida man who was a staunch Trump supporter was arrested in connection with the pipe bombs and charged with five federal crimes, including the illegal mailing of explosives. Another man who had made anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic statements on social media stormed a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 27, killing 11 people who were attending services there. Earlier in the week, still another individual had shot and killed two seemingly random African American victims in a grocery store in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, after failing to gain entrance to a black church. These events produced a national outpouring of concern over the virulence of the political tribalism that had not only taken root but seemed to be growing quickly in American life.

The 2018 midterm elections

Against this backdrop, Americans went to the polls on November 6 to fill 35 U.S. Senate seats (26 of which were held by Democrats) and to elect a new House of Representatives and 36 governors. When the votes were counted, the Democrats had regained control of the House of Representatives, the Republicans had increased their majority in the Senate, and both parties were able to claim significant victories in the gubernatorial elections�most notably with Republicans holding on to the governorships of Florida and Ohio, while Democrats retook the state executives in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. The congressional election was originally characterized as a disappointment for Democrats, largely because of losses by some high-profile hopefuls, but, as the results of too-close-to-call contests were reported in the coming days, it became clear that there actually had been a �blue wave�: Democrats picked up 40 House seats, the largest gain by the party in that body since it added 49 seats in the 1974 post-Watergate election. A record number of women had run for office, and nearly one-fourth of the members of the new House of Representatives were women. Despite opposition from some Democrats who felt their party needed younger, fresher leadership, Nancy Pelosi once again was chosen to be speaker of the House.

The 2018�19 government shutdown

Even before the new Congress began its term, Pelosi and the Democrats locked horns with Trump over his demand that the new budget to fund the continuing operation of the federal government include $5.7 billion to pay for construction of the border wall that had been the central promise of his campaign for the presidency. With funding for the federal government due to expire on December 21, Trump held a televised meeting with Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer on December 11 at which the president said that he would be �proud to shut down the government for border security.� Trump refused to sign a short-term budget bill passed by the Senate that did not include his desired funding, and the Senate was then unable to pass a bill sent to it by the still Republican-controlled House of Representatives that included $5.7 billion for the wall. As a result, on December 22 a partial shutdown of the federal government began that would become the longest such shutdown in the country�s history.

As Trump continued to argue that the country faced a border crisis involving an influx of illegal drugs and an invasion of �bad people,� Democrats countered that the construction of a wall would be an overly expensive ineffective solution to the immigration problem. Instead, they proposed that the budget include $1.6 billion for border fencing, cameras, and technology to aid immigration control. As some 800,000 federal employees went without paychecks, negotiations dragged on fruitlessly. Trump eventually downgraded his demand for the wall to a concrete and steel �barrier� and offered a three-year extension for individuals living in the country under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy in exchange for wall funding, but Democrats refused to discuss the wall until the government was reopened. In the meantime, Pelosi took steps to prevent Trump from delivering the State of the Union address in the Capitol, scheduled for January 29, 2019. With opinion polling indicating that more Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown than blamed the Democrats, the president relented on January 25, ending the shutdown after 35 days. On February 14 both houses of Congress adopted a budget package negotiated by a special bipartisan committee that included $1.375 billion for 55 miles (88 km) of new border fences and another $1.7 billion for additional border security. The next day Trump controversially declared a national emergency to address the �security crisis� on the country�s southern border and sought to divert $6.7 billion from military construction, counternarcotics operations, and Department of the Treasury asset forfeiture funds for wall building.

Sessions�s resignation, choosing a new attorney general, and the ongoing Mueller investigation

In the immediate aftermath of the midterm elections, Sessions resigned as attorney general at the request of Trump, who remained frustrated by Sessions�s recusal from the Russia investigation. Trump�s appointment of Matthew G. Whitaker, who had been critical of the special counsel�s investigation, as interim attorney general was widely criticized by Democrats. In February 2019 the Senate confirmed William Barr as attorney general, a position he had also held in the administration of Pres. George H.W. Bush. Barr, too, had earlier been critical of the special counsel�s investigation.

By early March 2019, 34 individuals and three companies had been criminally charged as a result of the Mueller investigation, including Manafort, who was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison after being convicted on charges that included mortgage fraud, foreign lobbying, and witness tampering. In addition to Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, others who were indicted included Rick Gates, who worked with Manafort and was a senior aide on Trump�s inauguration committee, and Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump�s former personal lawyer, pled guilty to lying to Congress and to charges related to his involvement in paying hush money to two women who alleged that Trump had sex with them. Having cooperated with investigators but still facing a prison term of three years, Cohen gave high-profile televised testimony to Congress in February about his involvement with Trump, painting a broadly disparaging portrait of his former boss as a liar but offering no direct evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates in the Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election.

The Mueller report

After Mueller delivered the long-anticipated report on his investigation to the Department of Justice in March, Attorney General Barr issued a four-page summary in which he reported that Mueller had found no evidence that Trump or his associates had colluded with the Russian government. Barr also indicated that Mueller had chosen not to offer a determination on whether Trump had obstructed justice, leaving that task to Barr. According to Barr, there was insufficient evidence to establish that Trump had committed a crime. Trump pronounced that the report had completely exonerated him, but Democrats were quick to demand the release of the entire report, nearly 400 pages, in order to draw their own conclusions. Those demands intensified after The New York Times reported that some members of Mueller�s team had indicated that Barr�s summary �failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry� and that those findings �were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated.� The Department of Justice responded by defending Barr�s approach. In the meantime, several House committees, now chaired by Democrats, continued to investigate related matters, and a number of criminal cases that were outgrowths of the Mueller investigation continued to be pursued independently by public prosecutors in the New York and Virginia jurisdictions. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Presidents of the United States

The table provides a list of the presidents of the United States.

Presidents of the United States no.presidentbirthplacepolitical partyterm *Died in office. **Resigned from office.

1 George Washington Va. Federalist 1789�97

2 John Adams Mass. Federalist 1797�1801

3 Thomas Jefferson Va. Democratic-Republican 1801�09

4 James Madison Va. Democratic-Republican 1809�17

5 James Monroe Va. Democratic-Republican 1817�25

6 John Quincy Adams Mass. National Republican 1825�29

7 Andrew Jackson S.C. Democratic 1829�37

8 Martin Van Buren N.Y. Democratic 1837�41

9 William Henry Harrison Va. Whig 1841*

10 John Tyler Va. Whig 1841�45

11 James K. Polk N.C. Democratic 1845�49

12 Zachary Taylor Va. Whig 1849�50*

13 Millard Fillmore N.Y. Whig 1850�53

14 Franklin Pierce N.H. Democratic 1853�57

15 James Buchanan Pa. Democratic 1857�61

16 Abraham Lincoln Ky. Republican 1861�65*

17 Andrew Johnson N.C. Democratic (Union) 1865�69

18 Ulysses S. Grant Ohio Republican 1869�77

19 Rutherford B. Hayes Ohio Republican 1877�81

20 James A. Garfield Ohio Republican 1881*

21 Chester A. Arthur Vt. Republican 1881�85

22 Grover Cleveland N.J. Democratic 1885�89

23 Benjamin Harrison Ohio Republican 1889�93

24 Grover Cleveland N.J. Democratic 1893�97

25 William McKinley Ohio Republican 1897�1901*

26 Theodore Roosevelt N.Y. Republican 1901�09

27 William Howard Taft Ohio Republican 1909�13

28 Woodrow Wilson Va. Democratic 1913�21

29 Warren G. Harding Ohio Republican 1921�23*

30 Calvin Coolidge Vt. Republican 1923�29

31 Herbert Hoover Iowa Republican 1929�33

32 Franklin D. Roosevelt N.Y. Democratic 1933�45*

33 Harry S. Truman Mo. Democratic 1945�53

34 Dwight D. Eisenhower Texas Republican 1953�61

35 John F. Kennedy Mass. Democratic 1961�63*

36 Lyndon B. Johnson Texas Democratic 1963�69

37 Richard M. Nixon Calif. Republican 1969�74**

38 Gerald R. Ford Neb. Republican 1974�77

39 Jimmy Carter Ga. Democratic 1977�81

40 Ronald Reagan Ill. Republican 1981�89

41 George Bush Mass. Republican 1989�93

42 Bill Clinton Ark. Democratic 1993�2001

43 George W. Bush Conn. Republican 2001�09

44 Barack Obama Hawaii Democratic 2009�17

45 Donald Trump N.Y. Republican 2017�

Vice presidents of the United States

The table provides a list of the vice presidents of the United States.

Vice presidents of the United States no.vice presidentbirthplacetermpresidential administration served under *Died in office. **Resigned from office.

1 John Adams Mass. 1789�97 George Washington

2 Thomas Jefferson Va. 1797�1801 John Adams

3 Aaron Burr N.J. 1801�05 Thomas Jefferson

4 George Clinton N.Y. 1805�09 Thomas Jefferson

George Clinton N.Y. 1809�12* James Madison

5 Elbridge Gerry Mass. 1813�14* James Madison

6 Daniel D. Tompkins N.Y. 1817�25 James Monroe

7 John C. Calhoun S.C. 1825�29 John Quincy Adams

John C. Calhoun S.C. 1829�32** Andrew Jackson

8 Martin Van Buren N.Y. 1833�37 Andrew Jackson

9 Richard M. Johnson Ky. 1837�41 Martin Van Buren

10 John Tyler Va. 1841 William Henry Harrison

11 George Mifflin Dallas Pa. 1845�49 James K. Polk

12 Millard Fillmore N.Y. 1849�50 Zachary Taylor

13 William Rufus de Vane King N.C. 1853* Franklin Pierce

14 John C. Breckinridge Ky. 1857�61 James Buchanan

15 Hannibal Hamlin Maine 1861�65 Abraham Lincoln

16 Andrew Johnson N.C. 1865 Abraham Lincoln

17 Schuyler Colfax N.Y. 1869�73 Ulysses S. Grant

18 Henry Wilson N.H. 1873�75* Ulysses S. Grant

19 William A. Wheeler N.Y. 1877�81 Rutherford B. Hayes

20 Chester A. Arthur Vt. 1881 James A. Garfield

21 Thomas A. Hendricks Ohio 1885* Grover Cleveland

22 Levi Morton Vt. 1889�93 Benjamin Harrison

23 Adlai E. Stevenson Ky. 1893�97 Grover Cleveland

24 Garret A. Hobart N.J. 1897�99* William McKinley

25 Theodore Roosevelt N.Y. 1901 William McKinley

26 Charles Warren Fairbanks Ohio 1905�09 Theodore Roosevelt

27 James Sherman N.Y. 1909�12* William Howard Taft

28 Thomas R. Marshall Ind. 1913�21 Woodrow Wilson

29 Calvin Coolidge Vt. 1921�23 Warren G. Harding

30 Charles G. Dawes Ohio 1925�29 Calvin Coolidge

31 Charles Curtis Kan. 1929�33 Herbert Hoover

32 John Nance Garner Texas 1933�41 Franklin D. Roosevelt

33 Henry A. Wallace Iowa 1941�45 Franklin D. Roosevelt

34 Harry S. Truman Mo. 1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt

35 Alben W. Barkley Ky. 1949�53 Harry S. Truman

36 Richard M. Nixon Calif. 1953�61 Dwight D. Eisenhower

37 Lyndon B. Johnson Texas 1961�63 John F. Kennedy

38 Hubert H. Humphrey S.D. 1965�69 Lyndon B. Johnson

39 Spiro T. Agnew Md. 1969�73** Richard M. Nixon

40 Gerald R. Ford Neb. 1973�74 Richard M. Nixon

41 Nelson A. Rockefeller Maine 1974�77 Gerald R. Ford

42 Walter F. Mondale Minn. 1977�81 Jimmy Carter

43 George Bush Mass. 1981�89 Ronald Reagan

44 Dan Quayle Ind. 1989�93 George Bush

45 Albert Gore Wash., D.C. 1993�2001 Bill Clinton

46 Dick Cheney Neb. 2001�09 George W. Bush

47 Joe Biden Pa. 2009�17 Barack Obama

48 Mike Pence Ind. 2017� Donald Trump

First ladies of the United States

The table provides a list of the first ladies of the United States.

First ladies of the United States first ladypresident

Abigail AdamsJohn Adams

Louisa AdamsJohn Quincy Adams

Ellen ArthurChester A. Arthur

Barbara BushGeorge Bush

Laura Welch BushGeorge W. Bush

Rosalynn CarterJimmy Carter

Frances ClevelandGrover Cleveland

Hillary Rodham ClintonBill Clinton

Grace CoolidgeCalvin Coolidge

Mamie EisenhowerDwight D. Eisenhower

Abigail FillmoreMillard Fillmore

Betty FordGerald R. Ford

Lucretia GarfieldJames A. Garfield

Julia GrantUlysses S. Grant

Florence HardingWarren G. Harding

Anna HarrisonWilliam Henry Harrison

Caroline HarrisonBenjamin Harrison

Lucy HayesRutherford B. Hayes

Lou HooverHerbert Hoover

Rachel JacksonAndrew Jackson

Martha JeffersonThomas Jefferson

Eliza JohnsonAndrew Johnson

Lady Bird JohnsonLyndon B. Johnson

Jacqueline KennedyJohn F. Kennedy

Harriet LaneJames Buchanan

Mary Todd LincolnAbraham Lincoln

Dolley MadisonJames Madison

Ida McKinleyWilliam McKinley

Elizabeth MonroeJames Monroe

Pat NixonRichard M. Nixon

Michelle ObamaBarack Obama

Jane PierceFranklin Pierce

Sarah PolkJames K. Polk

Nancy ReaganRonald Reagan

Edith RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt

Eleanor RooseveltFranklin D. Roosevelt

Helen TaftWilliam Howard TaftMargaret TaylorZachary Taylor

Bess TrumanHarry S. Truman

Melania TrumpDonald Trump

Julia TylerJohn Tyler

Letitia TylerJohn Tyler

Hannah Van BurenMartin Van Buren

Martha WashingtonGeorge Washington

Edith WilsonWoodrow Wilson

Ellen WilsonWoodrow Wilson

State maps, flags, and seals

The table provides a list of state maps, flags, and seals.

State maps, flags, and sealsstatemapflagsealUnited StatesAlabama

Alaska

Arizona

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

District of ColumbiaFlorida

Georgia

Hawaii

Idaho

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

Kentucky

Louisiana

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

State nicknames and symbols

The table provides a list of state nicknames and symbols.

State nicknames and symbols¹Species not designated.²Game bird; some states have also designated a representative game bird.³Waterfowl; some states have also designated a representative waterfowl.⁴Raptor; Idaho has designated a state raptor.⁵Wildflower; some states have designated representative wildflowers, particularly when the official state flower is a cultivated or nonnative variety. statestate treestate birdstate flowerstate nickname(s)mottoUnited States -- bald eagle rose¹ -- In God We Trust Alabama southern longleaf pine yellowhammer; wild turkey² common camellia; oak-leaf hydrangea⁵ Cotton State; Yellowhammer State; Heart of Dixie We Dare Defend Our Rights Alaska Sitka spruce willow ptarmigan alpine forget-me-not The Last Frontier North to the Future Arizona palo verde Coues's cactus wren saguaro cactus blossom Grand Canyon State Ditat Deus (God Enriches) Arkansas pine¹ northern mockingbird apple blossom The Natural State; Land of Opportunity Regnat Populus (The People Rule) California coast redwood; giant sequoia (both known as California redwood) California valley quail California poppy Golden State Eureka (I Have Found It) Colorado Colorado blue spruce lark bunting white-and-lavender columbine Centennial State Nil Sine Numine (Nothing Without Providence) Connecticut white oak American robin mountain laurel Nutmeg State; Constitution State Qui Transtulit Sustinet (He Who Transplanted Still Sustains) Delaware American holly blue hen chicken peach blossom First State; Diamond State Liberty and Independence District of Columbia scarlet oak woodthrush American Beauty hybrid rose -- Justitia Omnibus (Justice for All) Florida sabal palm (cabbage palmetto) northern mockingbird orange blossom; coreopsis^{1, 5} Sunshine State In God We Trust Georgia live oak brown thrasher Cherokee rose; azalea^{1, 5} Empire State of the South; Peach State Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation Hawaii kukui (candlenut) nene (Hawaiian goose) yellow hibiscus Aloha State Ua Mau Ke Ea O Ka Aina I Ka Pono (The Life of the Land Is Perpetuated in Righteousness) Idaho western white pine mountain bluebird; peregrine falcon⁴ Lewis's mock orange ('Syringa') Gem State Esto Perpetua (Let It Be Perpetual) Illinois white oak northern cardinal violet¹ Prairie State; Land of Lincoln State Sovereignty, National Union Indiana tulip tree (yellow poplar) northern cardinal peony¹ Hoosier State Crossroads of America Iowa oak¹ eastern goldfinch wild prairie rose Hawkeye State; Corn State Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain Kansas eastern cottonwood western meadowlark common sunflower Sunflower State; Jayhawker State Ad Astra Per Aspera (To the Stars Through Difficulties) Kentucky tulip tree (yellow poplar) northern cardinal goldenrod¹ Bluegrass State United We Stand, Divided We Fall Louisiana bald cypress eastern brown pelican southern magnolia; Louisiana iris⁵ Pelican State; Creole State; Sugar State Union, Justice, Confidence Maine eastern white pine black-capped chickadee white pine cone and tassel Pine Tree State Dirigo (I Direct) Maryland white oak Baltimore oriole black-eyed Susan Free State; Old Line State Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine (Manly Deeds, Womanly Words) Massachusetts American elm black-capped chickadee; wild turkey² mayflower (trailing arbutus) Bay State; Old Colony State Ense Petit Placidam Sub Libertate Quietem (By the Sword We Seek Peace, But Peace Only Under Liberty) Michigan white pine American robin apple blossom; dwarf lake iris⁵ Wolverine State; Great Lake State Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice (If You Seek a Pleasant Peninsula, Look About You) Minnesota red, or Norway, pine common loon pink-and-white lady's slipper North Star State; Gopher State; Land of 10,000 Lakes; Land of Sky-Blue Waters L'�toile du Nord (The North Star) Mississippi southern magnolia northern mockingbird; wood duck³ southern magnolia Magnolia State Virtute et Armis (By Valor and Arms) Missouri flowering dogwood eastern bluebird hawthorn blossom¹ Show Me State Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto (The Welfare of the People Shall Be the Supreme Law) Montana ponderosa pine western meadowlark bitterroot Treasure State; Big Sky Country Oro y Plata (Gold and Silver) Nebraska eastern cottonwood western meadowlark giant goldenrod Cornhusker State; Beef State Equality Before the Law Nevada single-leaf pi�on; bristlecone pine mountain bluebird sagebrush Sagebrush State; Silver State; Battle Born State All for Our Country New Hampshire white birch purple finch purple lilac; pink lady's slipper⁵ Granite State Live Free or Die New Jersey red oak eastern goldfinch blue violet Garden State Liberty and Prosperity New Mexico two-needle pi�on roadrunner yucca flower¹ Land of Enchantment Crescit Eundo (It Grows As It Goes) New York sugar maple eastern bluebird rose¹ Empire State Excelsior (Ever Upward) North Carolina pine¹ northern cardinal flowering dogwood Tar Heel State; Old North State Esse Quam Videri (To Be Rather Than To Seem) North Dakota American elm western meadowlark wild prairie rose Flickertail State; Sioux State; Peace Garden State; Rough Rider State Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable Ohio Ohio buckeye northern cardinal scarlet carnation; white trillium⁵ Buckeye State With God, All Things Are Possible Oklahoma eastern redbud scissor-tailed flycatcher; wild turkey² Oklahoma hybrid rose; American mistletoe; Indian blanket⁵ Sooner State Labor Omnia Vincit (Labor Conquers All Things) Oregon Douglas fir western meadowlark Oregon grape Beaver State She Flies With Her Own Wings Pennsylvania eastern hemlock ruffed grouse mountain laurel Keystone State Virtue, Liberty, and Independence Rhode Island red maple Rhode Island Red chicken blue violet Little Rhody; Ocean State Hope South Carolina sabal palm (cabbage palmetto) Carolina wren; wild turkey²; wood duck³ yellow jessamine; Canada goldenrod⁵ Palmetto State Animis Opibusque Parati (Prepared in Mind and Resources) South Dakota Black Hills spruce ring-necked pheasant American pasqueflower Mount Rushmore State; Coyote State; Sunshine State Under God the People Rule Tennessee tulip tree (yellow poplar) northern mockingbird; bobwhite quail² iris¹; purple passionflower⁵ Volunteer State Agriculture and Commerce Texas pecan northern mockingbird bluebonnet¹ Lone Star State Friendship Utah blue spruce California seagull sego lily Beehive State Industry Vermont sugar maple hermit thrush red clover Green Mountain State Freedom and Unity Virginia flowering dogwood northern cardinal flowering dogwood Mother of Presidents; The Old Dominion Sic Semper Tyrannis (Thus Always to Tyrants) Washington western hemlock willow goldfinch coast rhododendron Evergreen State; Chinook State Alki (By and By) West Virginia sugar maple northern cardinal great laurel Mountain State Montani Semper Liberi (Mountaineers Are Always Free) Wisconsin sugar maple American robin wood violet Badger State; America's Dairyland Forward Wyoming eastern cottonwood (plains subspecies) western meadowlark Indian paintbrush Equality State Equal Rights

Geography

The land

(Landforms and geology): The standard work on the landform regions of the United States is William D. Thornbury, Regional Geomorphology of the United States (1965). Walter Sullivan, Landprints: On the Magnificent American Landscape (1984), is a lively, authoritative, and well-illustrated treatment. An elementary, illustrated textbook is E.C. Pirkle and W.H. Yoho, Natural Landscapes of the United States, 4th ed. (1985). Nevin M. Fenneman, Physiography of Western United States (1931), and Physiography of Eastern United States (1938), are exhaustive and still standard references. William L. Graf (ed.), Geomorphic Systems of North America (1987), is a highly technical discussion. Recommended atlases include Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (1932, reprinted 1975); and Geological Survey (U.S.), The National Atlas of the United States of America (1970).

(Climate): Stephen S. Visher, Climatic Atlas of the United States (1954, reprinted 1966), contains more than 1,000 maps. United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Climates of the United States, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1980), makes available physical and climatic data in narrative, tabular, and map form. Scholarly discussions are found in Reid A. Bryson and F. Kenneth Hare (eds.), Climates of North America (1974).

(Plant and animal life): An authoritative regional treatment of plant and animal ecology is Victor E. Shelford, The Ecology of North America (1963, reprinted 1978). Michael G. Barbour and William Dwight Billings (eds.), North American Terrestrial Vegetation (1988), covers all major types. The relationship between climate and natural vegetation is obvious but far from simple; the most ambitious cartographic attempt to correlate them in a North American setting is explained in Robert G. Bailey (comp.), Description of the Ecoregions of the United States (1978).

(Human geography): A general text covering the human geography of the continent is J. Wreford Watson, North America, Its Countries and Regions, rev. ed. (1967). D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492�1800 (1986), is indispensable for an understanding of the origins of America�s human geography. Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (1981), is a lively, highly readable description of the emerging socioeconomic regions.

(Landscape and land use): Stephen S. Birdsall and John W. Florin, Regional Landscapes of the United States and Canada, 3rd ed. (1985), is a general introduction. John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (1982), offers a valuable account of the early evolution of settlement. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984), delves into the meaning of everyday man-made environments. The growth and development of America�s cities and towns are detailed in Alexander B. Callow, Jr. (ed.), American Urban History, 3rd ed. (1982); and Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620�the Present (1980). Peirce F. Lewis Wilbur Zelinsky

The people

The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published annually by the United States Bureau of the Census, is the standard summary of statistics on the country�s social, political, and economic composition. Interpretations of demographic data include Edward G. Stockwell, Population and People (1968); and Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, The Real Majority (1970). For an analysis of national values, a classic account is Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vol. (1944, reprinted 1975). Inquiries into the nature of American society include Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996); and Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). Immigration is discussed in John Isbister, The Immigration Debate: Remaking America (1996); and Joel Millman, The Other Americans: How Immigrants Renew Our Country, Our Economy, and Our Values (1997). Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 2nd ed. enlarged (1973), covers the era of mass immigration, 1860�1920. Examinations of contemporary American minority groups include Stephan Thernstorm (ed.), Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980); and Frank D. Bean and W. Parker Frisbie (eds.), The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups (1978). Ethnic patterns are treated in James Paul Allen and Eugene James Turner, We the People: An Atlas of America�s Ethnic Diversity (1988). Oscar Handlin

The economy

Anthony S. Campagna, U.S. National Economic Policy, 1917�1985 (1987), chronicles changes in U.S. economic policies through much of the 20th century. Aspects of the economy are treated in Howard F. Gregor, Industrialization of U.S. Agriculture (1982), an atlas emphasizing aspects of industrialized farming, mainly from U.S. census information; and Robert J. Newman, Growth in the American South (1984), on the shift of U.S. manufacturing to the Southern states in the 1960s and �70s. Two good sources of data on the U.S. economy are the Economic Report of the President (published every year), and the Statistical Abstract of the United States. W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor (1999), gives a century-long perspective on the U.S. economy.

Administration and social conditions

The United States Government Manual (annual) offers a broad overview of the federal structure; while the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report and National Journal (weekly) provide closer views of the public record of the federal legislature. Congressional Quarterly�s Guide to Congress, 3rd ed. (1982), details the development and organization of Congress. See also The Book of the States, published biennially by the Council of State Governments. Donald R. Whitnah (ed.), Government Agencies (1983), contains essays on the agencies� purposes and histories, with bibliographies. Discussions of election politics include Fred I. Greenstein and Frank B. Feigert, The American Party System and the American People, 3rd ed. (1985); the series by Theodore H. White, begun with The Making of the President, 1960 (1961), which continued by covering subsequent presidential elections; and Jack P. Greene (ed.), Encyclopedia of American Political History, 3 vol. (1984). Alexander DeConde (ed.), Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 3 vol. (1978), also contains useful bibliographies. Neal R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom, The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today, rev. and updated ed. (1984), is an insightful look at persistent social differences among various regions of the country. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Cultural life

Kirk Varnedoes and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture (1990), was an early attempt to address the �high and low� question unemotionally. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (1997, reissued 1999), tried to use the broader social context now demanded to chronicle the ambitions and limitations of American art. Important �post-structuralist� views of American art have also been offered by Arthur C. Danto, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (2001). The broader questions of the future of American culture in a time of multicultural transformation have been engaged in many places, memorably in Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991). The debate over �political correctness� has been examined in Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, rev. ed. (1998); Dinesh D�souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991); and Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993). Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (2001), attempts to track the crucial influence on American culture of America�s most distinct philosophical movement, Pragmatism. The classic statement of the American vision in literary criticism is Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950, reissued 1976). See also Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? (1982), a radical egalitarian polemic against the division of American literature into �high� and �low� forms. Emory Elliott (ed.), Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), covers the many aspects of American literature. Daniel Hoffman (ed.), Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (1979), is a general introduction. Useful works on art include Dore Ashton, American Art Since 1945 (1982); Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970, reissued 1982); and Milton W. Brown et al., American Art (1979). The renaissance of American dance has produced two great dance critics, Arlene Croce and Edwin Denby. Their works include Arlene Croce, Going to the Dance (1982), and Sight Lines (1987); and Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (1986). For a history of America�s unique contribution to the theatre arts, see Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theater, expanded ed. (1986). James Agee, Agee on Film, vol. 1, Reviews and Comments (1958, reprinted 1983), is still the most eloquent writing about American movies. Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrollable Documentary (1974), is a good introduction to alternative theories about alternative film. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 4 vol. (1986), is an excellent starting point for research. Gilbert Chase, America�s Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present, rev. 3rd ed. (1987), is invaluable and readable. Geoffrey C. Ward, Jazz: A History of America�s Music (2000)�based on a film by Ken Burns�is a stimulating and serious history of America�s most original art form. Whitney Balliett, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz (2000), is a personal history of the achievement of Ellington and Armstrong. Adam Gopnik

History

Among the many overviews of U.S. history, the following are representative: Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic, 7th ed. (1980); and John A. Garraty and Robert A. McCaughey, The American Nation, 6th ed. (1987). Reference sources include Dictionary of American History, rev. ed., 8 vol. (1976�78); and Richard B. Morris (ed.), Encyclopaedia of American History, 6th ed. (1982).

Discovery and exploration

Useful introductions include Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America, 2 vol. (1971�74); and David B. Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (1977). The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Colonial development to 1763

Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vol. (1934�38, reprinted 1964), is the starting point for an understanding of the structure of the British Empire in America. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, 15 vol. (1936�70), represents the culmination of the �British Imperial� school of interpretation. Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 2nd ed. (1982); and Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole (eds.), Colonial British America (1984), are excellent surveys.

(Settlement): Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939, reissued 1983), and a sequel, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953, reissued 1967), together constitute perhaps the finest work of intellectual history ever written by an American historian. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America (1975); and James Axtell, The European and the Indian (1982), are important accounts of white�Indian relations.

(Imperial organization): Useful surveys include Michael Kammen, Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (1970); and Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676, the End of American Independence (1984).

(The growth of provincial power): James A. Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700�1815 (1973), is an excellent survey of the American economic and political order. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness (1988), seeks to demonstrate the variety of colonial social developments. Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (1952, reprinted 1981), argues persuasively that the colonial South consisted of not one but three sections. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740�1790 (1982), imaginatively surveys the social order of 18th-century Virginia. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979), surveys the growth of American cities in the 18th century. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607�1789 (1985), is a good survey.

(Cultural and religious development): Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958, reissued 1988), gives a brilliant, if overstated, account of American uniqueness. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976), provocatively examines American intellectual development. See also Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735�1789 (1956, reprinted 1974). Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (1966), makes an important though polemical contribution to the understanding of the Great Awakening.

(America, England, and the wider world): Overviews are found in Francis Parkman, A Half-Century of Conflict, 2 vol. (1892, reprinted 1965); Howard H. Peckham, The Colonial Wars, 1689�1762 (1964); and Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755�1763 (1974). Richard R. Beeman

The American Revolution

Richard L. Blanco (ed.), The American Revolution, 1775�1783: An Encyclopedia, 2 vol. (1993), is a valuable reference source. Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (1985), considers American social history in the explanation of how American resistance developed. P.G.D. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis (1975), is a scholarly account of British objectives and methods, and The Townshend Duties Crisis (1987) is the most comprehensive account of this episode. Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress (1987), studies how Congress acquired formal �legitimacy� in the course of rebellion. Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (1978), analyzes the concepts that took shape in the Declaration of Independence. Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics (1979), interprets the complex politics of the Continental Congress. Willard M. Wallace J.R. Pole

The early federal republic

Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic (1983), stresses the jurisdictional problems of relations among states and between states and the Confederation. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776�1787 (1969), provides a comprehensive �ideological� interpretation emphasizing the transformation of political thought into action. David F. Epstein, The Political Theory of The Federalist (1984); and the lengthy introduction to Cecelia M. Kenyon, The Antifederalists (1966, reprinted 1985), are excellent studies. Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781�1788 (1961, reprinted 1974), analyzes the social origins and aspirations of the Anti-Federalists. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (1984), argues that capitalism was seen as a liberating force by Jeffersonians as well as by Hamiltonians. Other studies of the period include Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (1970); James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789�1815 (1970); John Zvesper, Political Philosophy and Rhetoric (1977); Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (1969); and Noble E. Cunningham, The Jeffersonian Republicans (1957), The Process of Government Under Jefferson (1978), and The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power (1963). J.R. Pole

From 1816 to 1850

(The Era of Mixed Feelings): A comprehensive overview of the politics of this period is George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings (1952, reprinted 1973). Shaw Livermore, Jr., The Twilight of Federalism: The Disintegration of the Federalist Party, 1815�1830 (1962, reissued 1972), is an excellent analysis. Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819�1821 (1953, reissued 1967), skillfully untangles that complex problem.

(Economic development): Still valuable and informative are Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (1957, reissued 1967); Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (1967, reprinted 1970); and Walter Buckingham Smith, Economic Aspects of the Second Bank of the United States (1953, reissued 1969).

(Blacks, slave and free): Particularly noteworthy studies are Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750�1925 (1976); Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790�1860 (1961, reprinted 1970); and Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974, reissued 1981).

(Social and intellectual developments): Lightly documented but brilliantly insightful is Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vol. (1835; originally published in French, 1835), available in many later editions. Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (1973), challenges Tocqueville�s version of equality in Jacksonian America. Other useful treatments are William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828�1843 (1985); and Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1976); Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820�1860 (1975); Martin Duberman (ed.), The Antislavery Vanguard (1965); and David Brion Davis (comp.), Ante-Bellum Reform (1967).

(Jacksonian politics): Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945, reissued 1953), is an influential study that stimulated a great array of refutations of its pro-Jackson interpretation, including Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America, new ed. (1978, reprinted 1985). A stimulating if not always convincing comparison of Jacksonian and earlier America is Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (1984). Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System (1966, reissued 1973), is an influential study. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975), is brilliant, original, and controversial. John M. Belohlavek, Let the Eagle Soar!: The Foreign Policy of Andrew Jackson (1985), fills a void in the Jacksonian literature.

(Expansionism): Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (1942, reissued 1989); and K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846�1848 (1974), are scholarly treatments. Edward Pessen

The Civil War

Syntheses of modern scholarship are James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire (1982); and J.G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. rev. (1969). Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, 8 vol. (1947�71), provides a comprehensive history. Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South, 3rd ed. (1975, reissued 1988), is a general history of the region. Full, critical assessments of slavery are provided by Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (1956, reprinted 1978); and the study on slavery by Genovese, cited in the section covering 1816 to 1850. A perceptive account of the political conflicts of the late 1850s is Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (1948, reissued 1967); while Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (1978), offers an analysis of the constitutional issues. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party (1983), discusses the strong partisan attachments of ordinary citizens. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), is an engrossing narrative history of the Civil War. Comprehensive coverage of the Confederate military effort in the East is Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee�s Lieutenants, a Study in Command, 3 vol. (1942�44, reissued 1970�72); while Warren W. Hassler, Jr., Commanders of the Army of the Potomac (1962, reprinted 1979), does the same for the Federals. Studies of the war in the Mississippi valley include Thomas L. Connelly, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861�1862 (1967), and Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862�1865 (1971). An examination of the Gettysburg battle is Edwin B. Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (1968, reissued 1984). Virgil Carrington Jones, The Civil War at Sea, 3 vol. (1960�62), describes the naval war. David Herbert Donald Warren W. Hassler

Reconstruction

Excellent syntheses of scholarship on the Reconstruction period are Rembert W. Patrick, The Reconstruction of the Nation (1967); John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction (1961); and Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865�1877 (1965, reprinted 1975). The fullest account of blacks� experience in the postwar years are Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979); and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America�s Unfinished Revolution, 1863�1877 (1988). C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction (1951, reissued 1966), covers behind-the-scenes political and economic negotiations in the disputed 1876�77 election. A definitive account of the South in the post-Reconstruction era is C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877�1913 (1951, reissued 1971). Important studies of postwar race relations include C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (1974, reissued 1982); and Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (1984). David Herbert Donald

The transformation of American society, 1865�1900

(National expansion): A comprehensive study of the American �frontiers� of the period is Harold E. Briggs, Frontiers of the Northwest: A History of the Upper Missouri Valley (1940, reissued 1950). Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (1931, reprinted 1981), is a scholarly classic; see also Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge, Westward Expansion, 5th ed. (1982); and Rodman W. Paul, The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, 1859�1900 (1988). Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860�1890 (1963, reprinted 1981), traces the development of this policy after the Civil War. Studies of the occupation of the Plains by the farmers are Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer�s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860�1897 (1945, reprinted 1977); and Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers� Frontier, 1865�1900 (1966, reissued 1987).

(Industrial development): Edward C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age (1961), recounts development from the Civil War to 1897. Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885�1914 (1957), offers a perceptive appraisal of the impact of industry on American life. Discussion of the trade unions during the second half of the 19th century is Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860�1895 (1929, reprinted 1964).

(Politics): Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 2nd ed. (1988), provides an overview of the era. Leonard D. White, The Republican Era, 1869�1901 (1958, reissued 1965), presents a careful and useful analysis. H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877�1896 (1969); and Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, Reform, and Expansion, 1890�1900 (1959, reissued 1963), are also valuable. Studies of populism include John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (1931, reprinted 1981); and Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976). Harold Whitman Bradley The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Imperialism, progressivism, and America�s rise to power in the world, 1896�1920

(American imperialism): Varying interpretations of imperialism are presented by Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy (1961, reissued 1973); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860�1898 (1963); and Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899�1902 (1979). David F. Trask, The War with Spain (1981), is an account of the Spanish-American War. Julius W. Pratt, America�s Colonial Experiment (1950, reissued 1964), discusses the administration of the American overseas empire. A. Whitney Griswold, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States (1938, reissued 1966), remains the standard work; but, for the Open Door policy and relations with China, see also Tyler Dennett, John Hay: From Poetry to Politics (1933, reissued 1963). The U.S. penetration and domination of the Caribbean is most authoritatively recounted in Dana G. Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900�1921 (1964, reprinted 1980).

(The Progressive era): An introduction to the United States during the Progressive era is John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change (1980); and Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (1983).

(The rise to world power): An overview of the period is John M. Dobson, America�s Ascent: The United States Becomes a Great Power, 1880�1914 (1978). Surveys of American national politics from Roosevelt through Wilson are George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900�1912 (1958, reprinted 1962); Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910�1917 (1954, reprinted 1963); and Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917�1921 (1985). On the neutrality issue, see Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914�1917 (1959); and Arthur S. Link, Wilson, 5 vol. (1947�65), especially the last three volumes. American mobilization is well covered by Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1917�1919 (1966); and Neil A. Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society (1986). Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917�1918 (1959, reissued 1970), and a sequel, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918�1919 (1967), include a brilliant account of the development of Wilson�s peace program in its worldwide context. A study on Wilson and American diplomacy at the Paris peace conference is Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers (1986). For an account of the fight over the treaty in the United States, see William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (1980). Wesley M. Bagby, The Road to Normalcy: The Presidential Campaign and Election of 1920 (1962), is an excellent study. Arthur S. Link

From 1920 to 1945

Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties (1982), gives extensive overviews of political, social, and cultural aspects of this period. Ascholarly history is William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914�32 (1958). Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil (1976), provides a challenging revisionist history of Prohibition. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (1931, reprinted 1986), is a contemporaneous account, covering all aspects of the years 1919�31; its companion volume is Since Yesterday (1940, reprinted 1986), on the 1930s. The standard account of politics in the 1930s is William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932�1940 (1963). J.C. Furnas, Stormy Weather: Crosslights on the Nineteen Thirties (1977), is a complete survey. Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933�1941 (1969), is authoritative. Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph (1973, reprinted 1985), comprehensively covers the war years 1939�45. John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (1976), offers a critique of the war period. Military history is provided by Kenneth S. Davis, Experience of War: The United States in World War II (1965; also published as The American Experience of War, 1939�1945, 1967). A comprehensive study is I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot (eds.), The Oxford Companion to World War II (also published as The Oxford Companion to the Second World War, 1995). Civil and military history is discussed in William L. O�Neill, A Democracy at War: America�s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (1993, reissued 1995).

From 1945 to the present

A general discussion of U.S. history since 1945 is Michael Schaller, Virginia Scharff, and Robert D. Schulzinger, Present Tense: The United States Since 1945, 2nd ed. (1996). A critical perspective is Melvyn Dubofsky and Athan Theoharis, Imperial Democracy: The United States Since 1945, 2nd ed. (1988). An overview of the early postwar years is John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941�1960 (1988). James Gilbert, Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945�1985, 2nd ed. edited by R. Jackson Wilson (1986), is a useful survey. Coverage of the Cold War is provided by Ralph B. Levering, The Cold War, 1945�1987, 2nd ed. (1988); and John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (1982), a brilliant analysis of U.S. Cold War policies. Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War (1986), is a reliable overview. One of the most useful histories of the Civil Rights Movement is Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954�1963 (1988). George C. Herring, America�s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950�1975, 2nd ed. (1986), is solid. William L. O�Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960�s (1971), is a study of the quality of American life under the impact of changing social values. Frederick F. Siegel, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (1984), analyzes the relationship between American social and cultural life and government policy. Lyndon Johnson is the subject of Robert Dallek, Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 2 vol. (1991�98). An examination of American Cold War foreign policy is John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1988, reprinted 1989). William L. O'Neill