Allen C. Guelzo
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Middle-class Americans emphasized differences between the two sexes. Doctors said political rights for women would make them mannish, threatening differences embedded in nature itself. Early advocates of suffrage, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, argued that women, with their nurturing virtues, would purify and ennoble the political world.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
This episode stresses that either side could have won the Civil War and offers a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses each brought to the early stages of the fight. The war mushroomed from a limited military contest at the time of First Bull Run in July 1861 into a massive struggle by the time of Shiloh and the Seven Days battles in the spring and early summer of 1862.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Prohibition created ideal conditions for organized crime; the alcohol ban became unenforceable. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan targeted Catholics and Jews as much as African Americans. A brighter side: high levels of employment; rising real wages; improving city conditions; the rapid spread of cars, refrigerators, and radios among ordinary families; and the maturing of the movie industry.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin determined how to engage their forces over Europe and North Africa. A year of hard campaigning led to the defeat of Germany, a junction with Soviet forces in central Europe, and discovery of the Holocaust's full horror. America itself was transformed into a high-wage, high-employment economy, with women taking on jobs previously reserved for men.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, the year the Environmental Protection Agency was created. Endangered species, wild rivers, and scarce water resources all became issues of government concern, as did the cleanup of toxic chemical sites. Environmentalists in the 1980s and 1990s alerted the nation to further resource shortages and potential threats to Earth's welfare.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The Homestead Act encouraged farmers to acquire land at almost no cost, and those who could overcome the loneliness, prairie fires, insect infestations, extremes of climate, and incessant winds were able to build prosperous lives. By 1890, they were growing massive annual surpluses, driving down the cost of food throughout the Western world and eliminating the danger of famine in America.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The broad stretch of coastal territory between the Chesapeake and Long Island had been settled by the Swedes along the Delaware Bay and the Dutch along the Hudson River. Dutch settlements (renamed New York) developed into a major commercial center. Quaker William Penn's Pennsylvania emerged, by the 1750s, with a commercial aristocracy similar to that of New England.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
In the Second Continental Congress of July 1776, a resolution declaring independence was adopted by the Congress and framed by a Declaration of Independence composed by Thomas Jefferson. In the Articles of Confederation of 1781, a joint government for the United States was created.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The outcome of the war remained uncertain as late as the summer of 1864. Successes turned the tide decisively in favor of the Union. This episode examines the final year of military action, highlighting the roles of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Grant and Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. It also describes Lincoln's assassination and gives a reckoning of the war's cost.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Adams's presidency was one of the worst political disasters in the history of the American presidency. Jackson gathered his forces for 1828, and won by a staggering landslide in the first popular election of a president. It showed a shift in American political consciousness and the movement of the United States from its original shape as a republic toward the newer shape of popular democracy.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Victorian religion in America was less doctrinal and more sentimental than its Puritan antecedents. Traveling revivalists and preachers tried to help the poor and reform grim urban conditions and worked to outlaw alcohol. America's principle of religious freedom and church-state separation allowed other religions to flourish and showed doubters the nation could accommodate religious pluralism.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
For Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, the republic depended on developing the republic's systems of finance, manufacturing, and commerce. Opposing him were Thomas Jefferson and the southern agricultural interests in Congress, both of whom believed that the future of America lay in independent domestic agriculture.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The English joined the great game of extraction and settlement last of all the major European nations. By 1680, settlements around the Chesapeake Bay achieved success with tobacco and the forced recruitment of a workforce of African slaves. Virginia worked its way through what became a typical English pattern: from company colony, to unstable free-for-all, to stable aristocracy.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The surprise development in the new republic's political life was the formation of political parties. James Madison became the organizer of the Democratic-Republicans, and Hamilton recruited his Congressional supporters into the Federalist Party. The Federalists only barely managed to elect their candidate, John Adams, as Washington's successor in 1796.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The great railroad strike of 1877 showed that strikes could succeed if they enjoyed community support but would fail if business owners used their political influence and court injunctions against the unions. Bitter union-management confrontations punctuated the 1890s. Railroad leader Eugene Debs and others created the American Socialist Party in 1900.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The Revolution was not even over before the ramshackle nature of the Articles of Confederation began to show at the seams. A convention assembled in Philadelphia in 1787 to construct a constitution, which proposed a single executive president, a bicameral Congress, and a judiciary.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Aircraft carriers became the crucial weapon of the Pacific war. By mid-1945, Allied victory in the Pacific was assured. Japanese refusal to surrender and the prospect of a costly and difficult invasion of Japan prompted the new president, Harry Truman, to approve the use of the war's greatest secret weapon, the atomic bomb.
38) The History of the United States, 2nd Edition: Episode 53,African Americans after Reconstruction
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
When Reconstruction ended in 1876, southern "Redeemers" took political control of the South, passing legislation enforcing racial segregation. The federal government's decision to withdraw from the area meant that the white elite ruled unchallenged for much of the next 80 years. Most African Americans lived by sharecropping, condemning many of them to a cycle of debt and dependency.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Bill Clinton's eight-year administration underlined the difference between America and other Western nations that had created cradle-to-grave social welfare states. Continued turbulence in the Middle East made America a devil-nation to the Arab world. This judgment confronted America in the starkest possible way in September 2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The year between the summer of 1862 and the summer of 1863 convinced Americans on both sides that the war would be long and bitter. This episode traces some of the major military campaigns of this year, underscoring the enormous swings of morale behind the lines in the North and South as each side won victories and suffered defeats.