With its sweeping, inclusive view of American history, "Created Equal "emphasizes social history-including the lives and labors of women, immigrants, working people, and minorities in all regions of the country-while delivering the familiar chronology of political and economic history. By integrating the stories of a variety of groups and individuals into the historical narrative, "Created Equal "helps connect the nation's past with the student's present. "Created Equal "explores an expanding notion of equality and American identity-one that encompasses the stories of diverse groups of people, territorial growth and expansion, the rise of the middle class, technological innovation and economic development, and engagement with other nations and peoples of the world.
Jacqueline Jones was born in Christiana, Delaware, a small town of 400 people in the northern part of the state. The local public school was desegregated in 1955, when she was a third grader. That event, combined with the peculiar social etiquette of relations between blacks and whites in the town, sparked her interest in American history. She attended the University of Delaware in nearby Newark and went on to graduate study at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. in history. Her scholarly interests have evolved over time, focusing on American labor and women’s, African American, and southern history. She teaches American history at Brandeis University, where she is Harry S. Truman Professor. In 1999, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Dr. Jones is the author of several books, including Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks (1980); Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family Since Slavery (1985), which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize; The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses Since the Civil War (1992); and American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998). In 2001, she published a memoir that recounts her childhood in Christiana: Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s. She recently completed a book titled Savannah’s Civil War, which spans the period 1854 to 1872 and chronicles the strenuous but largely thwarted efforts of black people in lowcountry Georgia to achieve economic opportunity and full citizenship rights during and after the Civil War.
Peter H. Wood was born in St. Louis (before the famous arch was built). He recalls seeing Jackie Robinson play against the Cardinals, visiting the courthouse where the Dred Scott case originated, and traveling up the Mississippi to Hannibal, birthplace of Mark Twain. Summer work on the northern Great Lakes aroused his interest in Native American cultures, past and present. He studied at Harvard (B.A., 1964; Ph.D., 1972) and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar (1964-1966). His pioneering book Black Majority (1974), concerning slavery in colonial South Carolina, won the Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association. Since 1975, he has taught early American history and Native American history at Duke University. The topics of his articles range from the French explorer LaSalle to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. He has written a short overview of early African Americans, entitled Strange New Land, and he has appeared in several related films on PBS. He has published two books about the famous American painter Winslow Homer and coedited Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (revised, 2007). His demographic essay in that volume provided the first clear picture of population change in the eighteenth-century South.
Dr. Wood has served on the boards of the Highlander Center, Harvard University, Houston’s Rothko Chapel, and the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. He is married to colonial historian Elizabeth Fenn. His varied interests include archaeology, documentary film, and growing gourds. He keeps a baseball bat used by Ted Williams beside his desk.
Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann, the son of a university psychologist, grew up in North Carolina as the youngest child in a family deeply interested in history. His formal education came at Durham Academy, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Stanford University (A.B., 1980), and Duke University (Ph.D., 1990). Informally, he was educated on the basketball courts of the South, the rocky shores of new England, the streets of Dublin, Ireland, the museums of Florence, Italy, and the high-country trails of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. He taught history at Cornell University from 1991 to 2003, when he moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to become the first E. N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History. Since 1988 he has been married to Lynn Borstelmann, a nurse and hospital administrator, and his highest priority for almost two decades has been serving as the primary parent for their two sons. He is an avid cyclist, runner, swimmer, and skier.
Dr. Borstelmann’s first book, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold Ward (1993), won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations. His second book, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, appeared in 2001. At Cornell he won a major teaching award, the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship. He is currently working on a book about the United States and the world in the 1970s.
Elaine Tyler May grew up in the shadow of Hollywood, performing in neighborhood circuses with her friends. Her passion for American history developed in college when she spent her junior year in Japan. The year was 1968. The Vietnam War was raging, along with turmoil at home. As an American in Asia, often called on to explain her nation’s actions, she yearned for a deeper understanding of America’s past and its place in the world. She returned home to study history at UCLA, where she earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. She has taught at Princeton and Harvard Universities and since 1978 at the University of Minnesota, where she was recently named Regents professor. She has written four books examining the relationship between politics, public policy, and private life. Her widely acclaimed Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era was the first study to link the baby boom and suburbia to the politics of the Cold War. The Chronicle of Higher Education featured Barren in the Promis4ed Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness as a pioneering study of the history of reproduction. Lingua Franca named her coedited volume Here, there, and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture a “Breakthrough Book.”
Dr. May served as president of the American Studies Association in 1996 and as Distinguished Fulbright Professor of American History in Dublin, Ireland, in 1997. In 2007 she became president-elect of the Organization of American Historians. She is married to historian Lary May and has three children, who have inherited their parents’ passion for history.
Vicki L. Ruiz is a professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies and interim Dean for the School of Humanities at the university of California, Irvine. For her, history remains a grand adventure, one that she began at the kitchen table, listening to the stories of her mother and grandmother, and continued with the help of the local bookmobile. She read constantly as she sat on the dock, catching small fish (“grunts”) to be used as bait on her father’s fishing boat. As she grew older, she was promoted to working with her mother, selling tickets for the Blue Sea II. The first in her family to receive an advanced degree, she graduated from Gulf Coast Community College and Florida State University, then went on to earn a Ph.D. in history at Stanford in 1982. She is the author of Cannery Women, Cannery Lives and From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in 20th-Century America (named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1998 by the American Library Association). She and Virginia Sánchez Korrol have coedited Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia (named a 2007 Best in Reference work by the New York Public Library).
Active in student mentorship projects, summer institutes for teachers, and public humanities programs, Dr. Ruiz served as an appointee to the National Council of the Humanities. In 2006 she became and elected fellow of the Society of American Historians. She is the past president of the Organization of American Historians and the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women and currently serves and president of the American Studies Association. The mother of two grown sons, she is married to Victor Becerra, urban planner, community activist, and gourmet cook extraordinaire.
Detailed Contents
Maps
Figures and Tables
Features
Preface
Supplements
Meet the Authors
A Conversation with the Authors
Acknowledgments
15. Consolidating a Triumphant Union, 1865—1877
The Struggle over the South
Wartime Preludes to Postwar Policies
Presidential Reconstruction, 1865—1867
The Southern Postwar Labor Problem
Building Free Communities
Landscapes and Soundscapes of Freedom
Congressional Reconstruction: The Radicals’ Plan
The Remarkable Career of Blanche K. Bruce
Claiming Territory for the Union
Federal Military Campaigns Against Western Indians
The Postwar Western Labor Problem
Land Use in an Expanding Nation
Buying Territory for the Union
The Republican Vision and Its Limits
Postbellum Origins of the Woman Suffrage Movement
Workers’ Organizations
Political Corruption and the Decline of Republican Idealism
Conclusion
Envisioning History Two Artists Memorialize the Battle of Little Big Horn The Wider World When Did Women Get the Vote?
Interpreting History A Southern Labor Contract
Part Six. The Emergence of Modern America, 1877—1900
16. Standardizing the Nation: Innovations in Technology, Business, and Culture, 1877—1890
The New Shape of Business
New Systems and Machines–and Their Price
Alterations in the Natural Environment
Innovations in Financing and Organizing Business
Immigrants: New Labor Supplies for a New Economy
Efficient Machines, Efficient People
The Birth of a National Urban Culture
Economic Sources of Urban Growth
Building the Cities
Local Government Gets Bigger
Thrills, Chills, and Bathtubs: The Emergence of Consumer Culture
Shows and Sports as Spectacles
Entertainment Collides with Tradition
“Palaces of Consumption”
Defending the New Industrial Order
The Contradictory Politics of Laissez-Faire
Social Darwinism and the “Natural” State of Society
Conclusion
Envisioning History What Every Woman Wants: An Ad for a Bathtub
The Wider World Some Major Inventions of the Late Nineteenth Century
Interpreting History Andrew Carnegie and the “Gospel of Wealth”
17. Challenges to Government and Corporate Power, 1877—1890
Resistance to Legal and Military Authority
Chinese Lawsuits in California
Blacks in the “New South”
“Jim Crow” in the West
The Ghost Dance on the High Plains
Revolt in the Workplace
Trouble on the Farm
Militancy in the Factories and Mines
The Haymarket Bombing
Crosscurrents of Reform
The Goal of Indian Assimilation
Transatlantic Networks of Reform
Women Reformers: “Beginning to Burst the Bonds”
Conclusion
Envisioning History Jacob Riis Photographs Immigrants on the Lower East Side of New York City
The Wider World The Jewish Diaspora
Interpreting History “Albert Parsons’s Plea for Anarchy”
18. Political and Cultural Conflict in a Decade of Depression and War: The 1890s
Frontiers at Home, Lost and Found
Claiming and Managing the Land
The Tyranny of Racial Categories
New Roles for Schools
Connections Between Mind and Behavior
The Search for Domestic Political Alliances
Class Conflict
Rise and Demise of the Populists
Barriers to a U.S. Workers’ Political Movement
Challenges to Traditional Gender Roles
American Imperialism
Cultural Encounters with the Exotic
Initial Imperialist Ventures
The Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War of 1898
Critics of Imperialism
Conclusion
Envisioning History Housing Interiors and the Display of Wealth
The Wider World The Age of Imperialism, 1870-1914
Interpreting History Proceedings of the Congressional Committee on the Philippines
Part Seven. Reform at Home, Revolution Abroad, 1900—1929
19. Visions of the Modern Nation: The Progressive Era, 1900—1912
Expanding National Power
Theodore Roosevelt: The “Rough Rider” as President
Reaching Across the Globe
Protecting and Preserving the Natural World
William Howard Taft: The One-Term Progressive
Immigration: Visions of a Better Life
Land of Newcomers
The Southwest: Mexican Borderlands
Asian Immigration and the Impact of Exclusion
Newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe
Reformers and Radicals
Muckraking, Moral Reform, and Vice Crusades
Women’s Suffrage
Radical Politics and the Labor Movement
Resistance to Racism
Work, Science, and Leisure
The Uses and Abuses of Science
Scientific Management and Mass Production
New Amusements
“Sex O’Clock in America”
Artists Respond to the New Era
Conclusion Envisioning History Resisting Eugenics: A Political Cartoon
The Wider World The Immigrants Who Went Back Home
Interpreting History Defining Whiteness
20. War and Revolution, 1912—1920
A World and a Nation in Upheaval
The Apex of European Conquest
Confronting Revolutions in Asia and Europe
Influencing the Political Order in Latin America
Conflicts over Race and Ethnicity at Home
Women’s Challenges
Workers and Owners Clash
American Neutrality and Domestic Reform
“The One Great Nation at Peace”
Reform Priorities at Home
The Great Migration
Limits to American Neutrality
The United States Goes to War
The Logic of Belligerency
Mobilizing the Home Front
Ensuring Unity at Home
Joining the War in Europe
The Russian Revolution and the War in the East
The Struggle to Win the Peace
Peacemaking and the Versailles Treaty
Waging Counterrevolution Abroad
The Red and Black Scares at Home
Conclusion
Envisioning History Political Cartoons and Wartime Dissent
The Wider World Casualties of the Great War, 1914-1918
Interpreting History Sex and Citizenship
21. All That Jazz: The 1920s
The Decline of Progressive Reform and the Business of Politics
Women’s Rights After the Struggle for Suffrage
Prohibition: The Experiment That Failed
Reactionary Impulses
Marcus Garvey and the Persistence of Civil Rights Activism
Warren G. Harding: The Politics of Scandal
Calvin Coolidge: The Hands-Off President
Herbert Hoover: The Self-Made President
Hollywood and Harlem: National Cultures in Black and White
Hollywood Comes of Age
The Harlem Renaissance
Radios and Autos: Transforming Leisure at Home
Science on Trial
The Great Flood of 1927
The Triumph of Eugenics: Buck v. Bell
Science, Religion, and the Scopes Trial
Consumer Dreams and Nightmares
Marketing the Good Life
Writers, Critics, and the “Lost Generation”
Poverty Amid Plenty
The Stock Market Crash
Conclusion
Envisioning History Selling Treats in the Los Angeles Suburbs
The Wider World Global Hollywood
Interpreting History F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Part Eight. From Depression and War to World Power, 1929—1953
22. Hardship and Hope: The Great Depression of the 1930s
The Great Depression
Causes of the Crisis
Surviving Hard Times
Enduring Discrimination
The Dust Bowl
Presidential Responses to the Depression
Herbert Hoover: Failed Efforts
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The Pragmatist
Eleanor Roosevelt: Activist and First Lady
“Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself”
The New Deal
The First Hundred Days
Monumental Projects Transforming the Landscape
Protest and Pressure from the Left and the Right
The Second New Deal
FDR’s Second Term
A New Political Culture
The Labor Movement
The New Deal Coalition
A New Americanism
Conclusion
Envisioning History In the Shadow of the American Dream
The Wider World The Great Depression in North America and Western Europe
Interpreting History Songs of the Great Depression
23. Global Conflict: World War II, 1937—1945
The United States Enters the War
Fascist Aggression in Europe and Asia
The “Great Debate” over Intervention
The Attack on Pearl Harbor
Japanese American Relocation
Foreign Nationals in the United States
Wartime Migrations
Total War
The Holocaust
The War in Europe
The War in the Pacific
The Home Front
Propaganda and Morale
Home Front Workers, Rosie the Riveter, and Victory Girls
Racial Tensions at Home and the “Double V” Campaign
The End of the War
The Manhattan Project
Planning for the Postwar Era
Victory in Europe and the Pacific
Conclusion
Envisioning History The Limits of Racial Tolerance
The Wider World Casualties of World War II
Interpreting History Zelda Webb Anderson, “You Just Met One Who Does Not Know How to Cook”
24. Cold War and Hot War, 1945—1953
The Uncertainties of Victory
Global Destruction
Vacuums of Power
Postwar Transition to Peacetime Life
Challenging Racial Discrimination
Class Conflict Between Owners and Workers
The Quest for Security
Redefining National Security
Conflict with the Soviet Union
The Policy of Containment
Colonialism and the Cold War
The Impact of Nuclear Weapons
American Security and Asia
The Chinese Civil War
The Creation of the National Security State
At War in Korea
A Cold War Society
Family Lives
The Growth of the South and the West
Harry Truman and the Limits of Liberal Reform
Cold War Politics at Home
Who Is a Loyal American?
Conclusion
Envisioning History The Unity of Communists?
The Wider World The Most Populous Urban Areas
Interpreting History NSC-68
Part Nine. The Cold War at Full Tide, 1953—1979
25. Domestic Dreams and Atomic Nightmares, 1953—1963
Cold War, Warm Hearth
Consumer Spending and the Suburban Ideal
Race, Class, and Domesticity
Women: Back to the Future
Mobilizing for Peace and the Environment
The Civil Rights Movement
Brown v. Board of Education
White Resistance, Black Persistence
Boycotts and Sit-Ins
The Eisenhower Years
The Middle of the Road
Eisenhower’s Foreign Policy
Cultural Diplomacy
Outsiders and Opposition
The Kennedy Era
Kennedy’s Domestic Policy
Kennedy’s Foreign Policy
1963: A Year of Turning Points
Conclusion
Envisioning History The Family Fallout Shelter
The Wider World The Distribution of Wealth
Interpreting History Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
26. The Vietnam War and Social Conflict, 1964—1971
Lyndon Johnson and the Apex of Liberalism
The New President
The Great Society: Fighting Poverty and Discrimination
The Great Society: Improving the Quality of Life
The Liberal Warren Court
Into War in Vietnam
The Vietnamese Revolution and the United States
Johnson’s War
Americans in Southeast Asia
1968: The Turning Point
“The Movement”
From Civil Rights to Black Power
The New Left and the Struggle Against the War
Cultural Rebellion and the Counterculture
Women’s Liberation
The Many Fronts of Liberation
The Conservative Response
Backlashes
The Turmoil of 1968 at Home
The Nixon Administration
Escalating and Deescalating in Vietnam
Conclusion
Envisioning History Pop Art
The Wider World Military Expenditures, 1966
Interpreting History Martin Luther King Jr. and the Vietnam War
27. Reconsidering National Priorities, 1972—1979
Twin Shocks: Détente and Watergate
Triangular Diplomacy
Scandal in the White House
The Nation After Watergate
Discovering the Limits of the U.S. Economy
The End of the Long Boom
The Oil Embargo
The Environmental Movement
Reshuffling Politics
Congressional Power Reasserted
Jimmy Carter: “I Will Never Lie to You”
Rise of a Peacemaker
The War on Waste
Pressing for Equality
The Meanings of Women’s Liberation
New Opportunities in Education, the Workplace, and Family Life
Equality Under the Law
Backlash
Integration and Group Identity
Conclusion
Envisioning History U.S. Dependence on Petroleum Imports
The Wider World Conservative Religious Resurgence in the 1970s
Interpreting History The Church Committee and CIA Covert Operations
Part Ten. Global Connections, at Home and Abroad, 1979—2007
28. The Cold War Returns–and Ends, 1979—1991
Anticommunism Revived
Iran and Afghanistan
The Conservative Victory of 1980
Renewing the Cold War
Republican Rule at Home
“Reaganomics”
The Environment Contested
The Affluence Gap
Cultural Conflict
The Rise of the Religious Right
Dissenters Push Back
The New Immigrants
The End of the Cold War
From Cold War to Détente
The Iran-Contra Scandal
A Global Police?
Conclusion
Envisioning History The Mall of America
The Wider World Global Immigration in the 1980s
Interpreting History Religion and Politics in the 1980s
29. Post—Cold War America, 1991—2000
The Economy: Global and Domestic
The Post—Cold War Economy
The Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor
Service Workers and Labor Unions
Industry versus the Environment
Tolerance and Its Limits
The Los Angeles Riots: “We Can All Get Along”
Values in Conflict
Courtroom Dramas: Clarence Thomas and O. J. Simpson
The Changing Face of Diversity
The Clinton Years
The 1992 Election
Clinton’s Domestic Agenda and the “Republican Revolution”
The Impeachment Crisis
Trade, Peacemaking, and Military Intervention
Terrorism and Danger at Home and Abroad
The Contested Election of 2000
The Campaign, the Vote, and the Courts
The Aftermath
Legacies of Election 2000
Conclusion
Envisioning History The Great American Voting Machine
The Wider World How Much Do the World’s CEOs Make Compared to Workers?
Interpreting History Vermont Civil Union Law
30. A Global Nation in the New Millennium
George W. Bush and War in the Middle East
The President and the “War on Terror”
Security and Politics at Home
Into War in Iraq
The Election of 2004 and the Second Bush Administration
The American Place in a Global Economy
The Logic and Technology of Globalization
Free Trade and the Global Assembly Line
Who Benefits from Globalization?
The Stewardship of Natural Resources
Ecological Transformations
Pollution
Environmentalism and Its Limitations
The Expansion of American Popular Culture Abroad
A Culture of Diversity and Entertainment
U.S. Influence Abroad Since the Cold War
Resistance to American Popular Culture
Identity in Contemporary America
Negotiating Multiple Identities
Social Change and Abiding Discrimination
Still an Immigrant Society
Conclusion
Envisioning History Where Is the West?
The Wider World Capital Punishment, Abolition and Use
Interpreting History The “War on Terror”
Appendix
The Declaration of Independence
The Article of Confederation
The Constitution of the United States of America
Amendments to the Constitution
Presidential Elections
Present Day United States
Present Day World
Glossary
Credits
Index
Maps