Unit 6

Historical landmarks of USA

WORLD WAR I

The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties were thought to be one of the best periods in the United States history. The country was very rich in these years. Because of the First World War, other countries owed it a lot of money. It had plenty of raw materials and plenty of factories. Its national income—the total earnings of all its citizens—was much higher than that of Britain, France, Germany and Japan put together.

American factories produced more goods every year. The busiest were those making automobiles. Between 1922 and 1927, the number of cars on the roads rose from under eleven million to over twenty million. The electrical industry also prospered. It made hundreds of thousands of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, stoves and radios.

The United States became the first nation in history to build its way of life on selling vast quantities of goods that gave ordinary people easier and more enjoyable lives. These “consumer goods” poured off the assembly lines of big new factories. Between 1919 and 1929 such mass-production factories doubled their output. The growth of industry made-many Americans well off. Millions earned good wages. Thousands invested money in successful firms so that they could share in their profits. Many bought cars, radios and other new products with their money. Often they obtained these goods by paying a small deposit and agreeing to pay the rest of the cost through an “instalment plan”. Their motto was “Live now, pay tomorrow”.

Businessmen became popular heroes in the 1920s. Men like Henry Ford were widely admired as the creators of the nation's prosperity. Calvin Coolidge governments were controlled by the Republican Party. Republicans believed that if the government looked after the interests of the businessman, everybody would become richer. Businessmen whose firms were doing well, they claimed, would take on more workers and pay more wages. In this way their growing wealth would benefit everybody. To help businessmen Congress placed high import taxes on goods from abroad. The arm was to make imported goods more expensive so that American manufacturers would have less competition from foreign rivals. At the same time Congress reduced taxes on high incomes and company profits. This gave rich men more money to invest.

However, there were lots of poor Americans. Half the American people had hardly enough money to buy sufficient food and clothing. In the industrial cities of the North, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still laboured long hours for low wages in steel nulls. Factories and slaughter houses. In the South thousands of poor farmers, both black and white, worked from sunrise to sunset to earn barely enough to live with. The wealth that Republicans said would benefit everybody never reached people like these. The main reason for poverty among industrial workers was low wages. Farmers and farm workers had a hard time for different reasons. In the South farmers did not own the land they farmed. They were sharecroppers. For rent, a sharecropper gave the landowner part of what he grew—often so much that he was left with hardly enough to feed his family. In the West most farmers owned their land. But they, too, faced hard times. During the First World War they had been able to sell their wheat to Europe for high prices. By 1921 the countries of Europe no longer needed so much American food.

And farmers were finding it more difficult to sell their produce at home. Immigration had fallen. So the number of people needing food was growing more slowly. All the new cars didn't help either. American farmers found themselves growing products they could not sell. By 1921, around 600,000 of them were bankrupt. Bur to Americans who owned shares in industrial companies the future looked bright. Sales of consumer goods went on rising. This meant bigger profits for the firms that made them. This in turn sent up the value of shares in such firms. In 1928 the American people elected a new President. Herbert Hoover. Hoover was sure that American prosperity would go on growing and that the poverty in which some Americans still lived would be remembered as something in the past. Then, of course, the 1929 Crack happened.

Wall Street crash/ The Depression

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 began on October 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday") and was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its after effects. The crash, which followed the London Stock Exchange's crash of September, signalled the beginning of the 12-year Great Depression that affected all Western industrialized countries. A number of financial experts warned that the American economy was slowing down and in Semptember 1929 some investors started selling shares in large numbers. Many people started feeling nervous and investors went into panic and rushed to sell their shares. On 24 October, now referred to as Black Thursday, 12.8 million shareswere sold. Thousands of people saw their fortune, or any money they had in the bank, disappear. On 29 October 1929, 16 million shares were sold at very low prices. The Stock Market New York in had collapsed.

The Roaring Twenties came to a sudden end. Investors lost their money in the Crash and could not pay their debts. Many banks closed, ordinary people lost their savings and people lost all hope for the future. People could no longer buy consumer goods like cars and clothes. As a result,workers were made redundant, other workers wages was cut and unemplyment rose to very high levels. This was the start of The Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash

of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped,

causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when The Great Depression reached its lowest point,

some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country's banks had failed.

WORLD WAR II

The military history of the United States in World War II covers the war against Germany, Italy, Japan and starting with the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. During the first two years of World War II, the United States had maintained formal neutrality, while supplying Britain, the Soviet Union, and China with war material through the Lend-Lease Act which was signed into law on 11 March 1941, as well as deploying the U.S. military to replace the British invasion forces in Iceland.

The U.S. economic sanctions on Japan, as part of the effort to deter Japanese military aggression in Asia and the Pacific, was a major cause of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Overall priorities were set by Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired by William Leahy. Highest priority went to the defeat of Germany in Europe, but first the war against Japan in the Pacific was more urgent after the sinking of the main battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor. Admiral King put Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, based in Hawaii, in charge of the Pacific War against Japan. The result was a series of some of the most famous naval battles in history. The Imperial Japanese Navy had the advantage  but in June 1942, its main carriers were sunk during the Battle of Midway, and the Americans seized the initiative. With its merchant fleet sunk by American submarines, Japan ran short of aviation gasoline and fuel oil, as the U.S. Navy in June 1944 captured islands within bombing range of the Japanese home islands. Strategic bombing directed by General Curtis Lemay destroyed all the major Japanese cities, as the U.S. captured Okinawa after heavy losses in spring 1945. With the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and an invasion and Soviet intervention imminent, Japan surrendered.

The war against Germany involved aid to Britain, her allies, and the Soviet Union, with the U.S. supplying munitions until it could ready an invasion force. U.S. forces were first tested to a limited degree in the North African Campaign and then employed more significantly with British Forces in Italy in 1943–45, where U.S. forces, representing about a third of the Allied forces deployed, bogged down after Italy surrendered and the Germans took over. Finally the main invasion of France took place in June 1944, under General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Air Forces and the British Royal Air Force engaged in the area bombardment of German cities and systematically targeted German transportation links and synthetic oil plants, as it knocked out what was left of the Luftwaffe post Battle of Britain in 1944. With the Soviets unstoppable in the east, and the Allies unstoppable in the west, Germany was squeezed to death. Berlin fell to the Soviets in May 1945, and with Adolf Hitler dead, the Germans surrendered.

During the war, over 16 million Americans served in the United States Armed Forces, with 405,399 killed in action and 671,278 wounded. There were also 130,201 American prisoners of war, of whom 116,129 returned home after the war.The military effort was strongly supported by civilians on the home front, who provided the military personnel, the munitions, the money, and the morale to fight the war to victory. World War II cost the United States an estimated $341 billion in 1945 dollars.

WORLD WAR II

The Americans and the Russians had fought Hitler's Germany together as allies. But friendship between them barely lasted the war out. The Russian dictator, Stalin, knew that many Americans hated the Soviet Union's communist way of life. He feared that the United States might drop atomic bombs on his country at any moment. The new American President, Truman, was just as suspicious of the Soviet Union. He suspected that Stalin's actions in eastern Europe were the first steps in a plan to covert the world to communism. The United States and the Soviet Union became deeply suspicious of one another. People began to speak of a "Cold War" between them. Although the two countries were not actually fighting, they were always quarreling.

Truman Doctrine

Truman decided to stop Soviet influence from spreading. For this reason, he started sending money and supplies to contain communism. This kind of policy is known as Truman Doctrine.

NATO

This was an alliance of nations who agreed to support one another against threats from the Russians and set up combined armed forces to do this.

McCarthy

Joseph McCarthy was an ambitious an unscrupulous politician that used fears to win fame and power for himself. He started what came to be called a "Witch hunt" - a search for people he could blame for the supposed threats to the United States.

Marshall Plan

The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, channeled over $13 billion to finance the economic recovery of Europe between 1948 and 1951. The Marshall Plan successfully sparked economic recovery, meeting its objective of ‘restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole.’ The plan is named for Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who announced it in a commencement speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Elected in 1960 as the 35th president of the United States, 43-year-old John F. Kennedy became the youngest man and the first Roman Catholic to hold that office. He was born into one of America’s wealthiest families and parlayed an elite education and a reputation as a military hero into a successful run for Congress in 1946 and for the Senate in 1952.

As president, Kennedy confronted mounting Cold War tensions in Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere. He also led a renewed drive for public service and eventually provided federal support for the growing civil rights movement.

His assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas while riding in a presidental motorcade in Dealey Plaza sent shockwaves around the world and turned the all-too-human Kennedy into a larger-than-life heroic figure.

He also was an important part of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closet to nuclear conflict. President John Kennedy notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security.

To this day, historians continue to rank him among the best-loved presidents in American history.

REGIONALISM

There long has been in the United States a cyclical process of forgetfulness and rediscovery of the idea of region. In the twentieth century, for example,"regionalism" was vibrant in the 1930s but passe in the 1950s and 1960s. There has been a spate of new studies of region since the 1970s, in many disciplines, regarding many different places. The resurgence of interest in and loyalty to region is reflected in the impassioned localism of environmentalism and historic preservation; the new regionalism appears, too, in the form of regional magazines and festivals, in the packaging of local particularities by tourist boards and chambers of commerce. In academic circles, the new regionalism has been manifested in a fascination with local history and with the proliferation of state humanities councils and regional studies centers. Regionalism grows, too, by default, as many seem to have lost faith in national innocence and the national state, have grown dubious of a transcendent national character and American exceptionalism. In an age of disillusionment with big structures and transhistorical dreams, many Americans have apparently decided that places closer to home deserve more of their loyalty.

Despite the renaissance of regionalism, despite the ever-growing sophistication with which we can study and measure regional characteristics, many discussions of region, popular and academic, seem to revolve around an extraordinarily persistent set of assumptions. One assumption is that regional identity is, at heart, an inheritance from the past, a moral and intellectual "heritage" that, if it is to endure, must be preserved from the ravages of modern life. To many people, it appears that there was a time in the past when each region was most fully itself: the Old South, the Old West, pristine New England. Since then, we are told, there has been a relentless adulteration and watering down of these places by the forces of modern life.
Despite the renaissance of regionalism, despite the ever-growing sophistication with which we can study and measure regional characteristics, many discussions of region, popular and academic, seem to revolve around an extraordinarily persistent set of assumptions. One assumption is that regional identity is, at heart, an inheritance from the past, a moral and intellectual "heritage" that, if it is to endure, must be preserved from the ravages of modern life. To many people, it appears that there was a time in the past when each region was most fully itself: the Old South, the Old West, pristine New England. Since then, we are told, there has been a relentless adulteration and watering down of these places by the forces of modern life.

INMIGRATION AND ETHNICITY

Native Americans

Native Americans, also known as American Indians, Indians, Indigenous Americans and other terms, are the indigenous peoples of the United States. There are over 500 federally recognized tribes within the U.S., about half of which are associated with Indian reservations. The term excludes Native Hawaiians and some Alaska Natives.

The ancestors of modern Native Americans arrived in what is now the United States at least 15,000 years ago, possibly much earlier, from Asia via Beringia. A vast variety of peoples, societies and cultures subsequently developed. Native Americans were greatly affected by the European colonization of the Americas, which began in 1492, and their population declined precipitously due to introduced diseases, warfare, and slavery. After the founding of the United States, many Native American peoples were subjected to warfare, removals, and one-sided treaties, and they continue to suffer from discriminatory government policies today. Since the 1960s, Native American self-determination movements have resulted in many changes to the lives of Native Americans, though there are still many contemporary issues faced by Native Americans. Today, there are over five million Native Americans in the United States.

African-Americans

African Americans (also referred to as Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. The term typically refers to descendants of enslaved black peoplewho are from the United States. As a compound adjective, the term is usually hyphenated as African-American. 

Black and African Americans constitute the third largest racial and ethnic group in the United States (after White Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans). Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved peoples within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West/Central African and European descent, and some also have Native American ancestry. According to US Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not self-identify as African American. The overwhelming majority of African immigrants identify instead with their own respective ethnicities (~95%).

Asia-Americans

In the 1860s, Chinese workers had been broutght to California to build the railroads. Many Americans felt threatened by these people wit a different language and a different racial appearance who worked for less pay. Chinese communities int the West were attacked and their buildings were burned down.

In 1882 the strength of anti-Chinese felling caused Congress to ban most Chinese immigration. Japanese and other Asian immigrants were refused entry as well and by 1924 no Asian immigrants were pemitted into the United States. The ban lasted until after the Second World War.

Hispanic / Latinos

In 1950 the population of the United State included fewer htan four million resident "Hispanics". By the mid 1980s this number had increased to 17.6 million and was still rising fast. In some parts of the United States, especially in the South and West, it became more common to hear Spanish being spoken on the streets than English.

About 60 percent of the United States' resident Hispanics came from other Latin American countries, such as Cuba and Colombia. The same as those of earlier immigrants from Europe- to escape from poverty or political persecution in their homelands.

The increase in the number of Hispanics was partly the result of an important change int he American immigration system. But in 1965 a new law said that what would count in the future was who applied first.

The result was a big increase in immigration from non-European countries.

EDUCATION

PRIMARY EDUCATION

Historically, in the United States, local public control (and private alternatives) have allowed for some variation in the organization of schools. Elementary schoolincludes kindergarten through sixth grade (or sometimes, to fourth grade, fifth grade or eighth grade). Basic subjects are taught in elementary school, and students often remain in one classroom throughout the school day, except for specialized programs, such as physical education, library, music, and art classes. There are about 3.6 million children in each grade in the United States. 

SECONDARY EDUCATION  

Secondary education is often divided into two phases, middle/junior high school and high school. Students are usually given more independence, moving to different classrooms for different subjects, and being allowed to choose some of their class subjects (electives)

"Middle school" (or "junior high school") has a variable range between districts. It usually includes seventh and eighth grades and occasionally also includes one or more of the sixth, ninth, and very occasionally fifth grades as well. High school (occasionally senior high school) includes grades 9 through 12. Students in these grades are commonly referred to as freshmen (grade 9), sophomores (grade 10), juniors (grade 11) and seniors (grade 12). At the high school level, students generally take a broad variety of classes without specializing in any particular subject, with the exception of vocational schools. Students are generally required to take a broad range of mandatory subjects, but may choose additional subjects ("electives") to fill out their required hours of learning.  Some international schools offer international school leaving qualifications, to be studied for and awarded instead of or alongside of the high school diploma, Honors, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate.

HIGHER EDUCATION

Higher education in the United States is an optional final stage of formal learning following secondary education. Higher education, also referred to as post-secondary education, third stage, third level, or tertiary education occurs most commonly at one of the 4,627 Title IV degree-granting institutions, either colleges or universities in the country. These may be public universities, private universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, or for-profit colleges.

High visibility issues include greater use of the Internet and massive open online courses, competency-based education, sexual assault, cutbacks in state and local spending, rapidly rising tuition and increasing student loan debt, the adjunctification of academic labor, and student poverty and hunger.

According to the National Student Clearinghouse, US college enrollment has declined for six consecutive years and is projected to continue declining for the next two decades.

Strong research and funding have helped make America's elite colleges and universities among the world's most prestigious, making them particularly attractive to international students, professors and researchers in the pursuit of academic excellence.

Unlike the tertiary education system of the UK and Australia, American education is unique in the world to place strong emphasis on Liberal Arts education in its higher education curriculum.