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American History Custom Essays Samples
Free Online Research Papers, College Papers, English Papers, Admission Essays, Thesis, Analyzed Essays, Essay Papers, Term Papers, Coursework Essays, Custom Papers, Non-Plagiarized Essays
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|  Puritanism in America |
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| The American Puritans were part of a group that had its origins in sixteenth-century England. Some familiarity with the events that led up to the Great Migration to New England in the 1620s and 1630s or at least the shape of these events is necessary for an understanding of Puritanism in America. Quite as important is the intellectual inheritance that the Puritans, as Puritans, brought from England. Since the early Puritans, in both England and New England, were devoted to the "plain style," much of what they had to say is still clear and understandable, though they wrote more than 350 years ago. For this reason and because their language suggests their thought patterns, some of the leading spokesmen for Puritanism, clergymen and laymen, can usefully be allowed to speak for themselves. The use of contemporary documents often has the effect, when modernized slightly, of bringing that which is remote in time a good deal closer. |
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| Frontier |
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| In the United States and Canada, the frontier was the term applied until the end of the 19th century to the zone of unsettled land outside the region of existing settlements of European immigrants and their descendants. In a broad sense, the notion of the frontier was the edge of the settled country where unlimited cheap land was available to anyone willing to live the hard but independent life of the pioneer farmer.
Throughout the history of both countries, the expansion of settlement was largely from the east to the west, and thus the frontier is often identified with western areas of both countries. Many areas along the Pacific coast were, however, settled long before areas in the interior of North America, and thus in the later half of the 19th century, the frontier existed largely in the continental interior.
Frontier and front are both derived from the Latin "frons," (forehead, front, facade). 'Frontier' was borrowed into English from French in the 15th century with the meaning "borderland," the region of a country that fronts on another country. The use of frontier to mean "a region at the edge of a settled area" is a special North American development. |
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| Imperialism |
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| Imperialism is a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial conquest or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries. The term is often used to describe the policy of a country in maintaining colonies and dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the country calls itself an empire.
Insofar as 'imperialism' might be used to refer to an intellectual position, it would imply the belief that the acquisition and maintenance of empires is a positive good, probably combined with an assumption of cultural or other such superiority inherent to imperial power.
Imperialism draws heavy criticism on the grounds that it is a form of economic exploitation in which the imperialist power makes use of other countries as sources of raw materials and cheap labor, shaping their economies to suit its own interests and keeping their people in poverty. When imperialism is accompanied by overt military conquest, it is also seen as a violation of freedom and human rights.
In recent years, there has also been a trend to criticize imperialism not at an economic or political level, but at a simply cultural level, particularly the widespread global influence of American culture. Some dispute this extension, however, on the grounds that it is highly subjective (to differentiate between mutual interaction and undue influence) and also applied selectively (hamburgers being imperialist and black tea not). |
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| Industrialization in United States |
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| Industrialization (or industrialization) or an industrial revolution is a process of social and economic change whereby a human society is transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial state. This social and economic change is closely intertwined with technological innovation, particularly the development of large-scale energy production and metallurgy. Industrialization is also related to some form of philosophical change, or to a different attitude in the perception of nature, though whether these philosophical changes are caused by industrialization or vice-versa is subject to debate.
When capitalized, Industrial Revolution refers to the first known industrial revolution, which took place in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Second Industrial Revolution describes later, somewhat less dramatic changes which came about with the widespread availability of Electric power and the Internal-combustion engine.
Pre-industrial economies often rely on sustenance standards of living, whereby large portions of the population focus their collective resources on producing only what can be consumed by them, though there have also been quite a few pre-industrial economies with trade and commerce as a significant factor, enjoying wealth far beyond a sustenance standard of living. Famines were frequent in most pre-industrial societies, although some, such as the Netherlands and England of the 17th and 18th centuries and the ancient Classical civilization were able to escape the famine cycle through increasing trade and commercialization of the agricultural sector. |
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| The Iran-Contra Affairs |
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| The Iran-Contra Affair (also known as "Irangate") was a mid-1980s political scandal in the United States. President Ronald Reagan's administration sold arms to Iran, an avowed enemy. At the time, Americans were being held hostage in Lebanon by Hezbollah, a militant Shi'a organization loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini. The US government claimed that using the arms would influence Iran to release the hostages. At the same time, Iran, which was in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, could find few nations willing to supply it with weapons. However, the arms shipments began before the first hostage was taken, and ended a long time after the last hostage was released. The U.S. diverted proceeds from the sale to the Contras, anti-Communist guerrillas engaged in an insurgency against the socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Both the sale of weapons and the funding of the Contras violated stated administration policy as well as legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress, which had blocked further Contra funding. |
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| Korean War |
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| The Korean War, from June 25, 1950 to cease-fire on July 27, 1953 (the war has not ended officially), was a conflict between North Korea and South Korea. Some consider this Cold War-era conflict to have been a proxy war between the United States and its Western democratic allies, and the Communist powers of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. The principal combatants were North Korea, supported by People's Volunteer Army (PVA) of Communist China, and later Soviet combat advisors, aircraft pilots, and weapons; and South Korea, supported principally by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines, although many other nations sent troops under the aegis of the United Nations.
In the United States, the conflict was termed a police action, as the Korean Conflict, under the aegis of the United Nations rather than a war, largely in order to remove the necessity of a Congressional declaration of war. |
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| Social Democracy |
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| Social democracy is a political ideology emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from supporters of Marxism who believed that the transition to a socialist society could be achieved through democratic evolutionary rather than revolutionary means. It emphasises a program of gradual legislative reform of the capitalist system in order to make it more equitable, usually with the theoretical end goal of building a socialist society.
The term social democracy can also refer to the particular kind of society that social democrats support. The Socialist International (SI) - the worldwide organization of social democratic and democratic socialist parties - defines social democracy as an ideal form of representative democracy, that may solve the problems found in a liberal democracy. The SI emphasizes the following principles for building a welfare state: First, freedom that includes not only individual liberties, but also freedom from discrimination and freedom from dependence on either the owners of the means of production or the holders of abusive political power, as well as the ability to determine one's own fate. Second, equality and social justice, not only before the law but also economic and socio-cultural equality as well, and equal opportunities for all including those with physical, mental, or social disabilities. Finally, solidarity - unity and a sense of compassion for the victims of injustice and inequality. |
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| The Great Depression |
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| The Great Depression was a massive global economic recession (or "depression") that ran from 1929 to approximately 1939. It led to numerous bank failures, high unemployment, as well as dramatic drops in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), industrial production, stock market share prices and virtually every other measure of economic growth. It is generally considered to have bottomed out in 1933, but it was not until well after the end of World War II before such indicators as industrial production, share prices and global GDP surpassed their 1929 levels.
What gave this downturn the name the "Great Depression" was that it was by far the largest sustained decline in industrial production and productivity in the century and a half for which economic records have been regularly kept, and the fact that its impact was felt throughout the entire industrialized world and their trading partners in less developed nations.
The term Great Depression can refer to the economic event, but it can also refer to the cultural period, often called simply "The Depression", and to the political response to the economic events. |
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| The New Deal |
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| The New Deal is the name given to the series of programs used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the goal of stabilizing, reforming and stimulating the United States economy in the Great Depression.
The New Deal had three components: direct relief, economic recovery, and financial reform.
Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded Hoover's FERA work relief program, and added the CCC, PWA, and (starting in 1935) the WPA. In 1935 the Social Security and unemployment insurance programs were added. Separate programs were set up for relief in rural America, such as the RA and FSA.
Recovery was the goal of restoring the economy to pre-depression levels. (That did not necessarily mean 1929, which many economists considered an artifically inflated bubble.) It involved "pump priming" (deficit spending), dropping the gold standard, efforts to re-inflate farm prices that were too low, and efforts to increase foreign trade. Much of the New Deal's efforts to help corporate America was channelled through a Hoover program, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).
Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy, and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. It included the NRA (1933), regulation of Wall Street (SEC, 1933), the AAA farm programs (1933 and later), insurance of bank deposits (FDIC 1933) and the Wagner Act encouraging labor unions (1935). Despite urgings by some New Dealers, there was no major anti-trust program. Roosevelt said that he opposed socialism (in the sense of state ownership of the means of production), and only one major program, the TVA (1933), involved government ownership of the means of production.
Whether the New Deal was successful in achieving the three Rs, and whether the program had a beneficial or deleterious effect, remains a topic of heated debate. The New Deal is also used to describe the New Deal Coalition that Roosevelt created to support his programs, including the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, European and African-American minorities or ethnics, and farm groups. By 1934, the Supreme Court began declaring significant parts of the New Deal unconstitutional. This led Roosevelt to propose the Court-packing Bill in 1937. Although the bill failed, the Lochner era soon ended when Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts switched his vote in several critical New Deal cases, and Roosevelt soon had the opportunity to appoint new Justices as the old Lochner court retired. By 1942, the Supreme Court had almost completely abandoned its "Judicial Activism" of striking down congressional laws, as accused by New Deal supporters. Congress's economic policy. The Supreme Court ruled in Wickard v. Filburn that the Commerce Clause covered almost all such regulation allowing the necessary expansion of federal power to make the New Deal "constitutional". |
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| Urbanization in the United States |
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| Urbanization is the expansion of a city or metropolitan area, namely the proportion of total population or area in urban localities or areas (cities and towns), or the increase of this proportion over time. It can thus represent a level of urban population relative to total population of the area, or the rate at which the urban proportion is increasing. Both can be expressed in percentage terms, the rate of change expressed as a percentage per year, decade or period between censuses.
For instance, the United States or United Kingdom have a far higher urbanization level than China, India or Nigeria, but a far slower annual urbanization rate, since much less of the population is living in a rural area while in the process of moving to the city.
The rate of urbanization over time is distinct from the rate of urban growth, which is the rate at which the urban population or area increases in a given period relative to its own size at the start of that period. The urbanization rate represents the increase in the proportion of the urban population over the period.
In terms of a geographical place, urbanization means increased spatial scale and/or density of settlement and/or business and other activities in the area over time. The process could occur either as natural expansion of the existing population (usually not a major factor since urban reproduction tends to be lower than rural), the transformation of peripheral population from rural to urban, incoming migration, or a combination of these.
In either case, urbanization has profound effects on the ecology of a region and on its economy. Urban sociology also observes that people's psychology and lifestyles change in an urban environment.
The increase in spatial scale is often called "urban sprawl". It is frequently used as a derogatory term by opponents of large-scale urban peripheral expansion especially for low-density urban development on or beyond the city fringe. Sprawl is considered unsightly and undesirable by those critics, who point also to diseconomies in travel time and service provision and the danger of social polarization through suburbanites' remoteness from inner-city problems. |
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| The Vietnam War |
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| The Vietnam War or Second Indochina War was a conflict between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam), allied with the National Liberation Front (NLF, or "Viet Cong") against the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), and its allies - notably the United States military in support of the South, with American combat troops committed from 1965 to 1973.
After France's attempted recolonization of Indochina was defeated in 1954 by the Viet Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the country was partitioned in two by a Demilitarized Zone or DMZ, and each portion became controlled by separate governments with distinctly different ideologies and political bases. The Vietnam War began as a civil war—fought to determine the status of Vietnam as either a unified nation or as one partitioned indefinitely into two independent states (as after the Korean War). Fighting began in 1957, and with U.S. and Soviet-Chinese involvement and support, it would steadily escalate and spill over into the neighboring Indochinese countries of Cambodia and Laos.
South Vietnam - and allies such as the U.S. - portrayed the conflict as one based in a principled and strategic opposition to communism, to deter its expansion throughout Southeast Asia and elsewhere. North Vietnam and its Viet Cong allies claimed the war as a struggle to reunite the country and to repel a foreign aggressor—virtually a continuation of the earlier war for independence against the French.
After fifteen years of protracted fighting and massive civilian and military casualties, major, direct U.S. involvement ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. Fighting between Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces against the dominant combined People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and Viet Cong forces would soon bring an end to the RVN and the war. With the Northern victory, the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) with a communist-controlled government based in Hanoi. |
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| United States in World War I |
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| World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, the War of the Nations and the War to End All Wars, was a world conflict occurring from 1914 to 1918. The war was fought by the Allies on one side, and the Central Powers on the other. No previous conflict had mobilized so many soldiers or involved so many in the field of battle. By its end, the war had become the second bloodiest conflict in recorded history (behind the Taiping Rebellion), though it was surpassed within a generation by World War II.
No other war had changed the map of Europe so dramatically—four empires were shattered: The German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, and the Russian. Their four dynasties, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and the Romanovs, who had roots of power back to the days of the Crusades, all fell during or after the war.
World War I became infamous for trench warfare, where troops were confined to trenches because of tight defenses. This was especially true of the Western Front. Over 9 million died on the battlefield, and nearly that many more on the home front due to food shortages, genocide, and ground combat. Among other notable events, chemical weapons were used for the first time, the first large-scale bombing from the air was undertaken, and some of the century's first large-scale civilian massacres took place.
A long stretch of American isolationism left the United States reluctant to involve itself with what was popularly conceived as a European dispute.
Early in 1917 Germany resumed its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. This, combined with public indignation over the Zimmermann telegram, led to a final break of relations with the Central Powers. President Woodrow Wilson requested that the U.S. Congress declare war on Germany, which it did on April 6, 1917. The Senate approved the war resolution 82-6, the House with 373-50. Wilson hoped a separate peace could be achieved with Austria-Hungary, however when it kept its loyalty to Germany, the US declared war on Austria-Hungary in December 1917.
Although the American contribution to the war was important, particularly in terms of the threat posed by increased US presence in Europe, the United States was never formally a member of the Entente, but an "Associated Power". Significant numbers of American troops only arrived in Europe in the summer of 1918.
The United States Army and the National Guard had mobilized in 1916 to pursue the Mexican "bandit" Pancho Villa, which helped speed up the mobilization. The United States Navy was able to send a battleship group to Scapa Flow to join with the British Grand Fleet, a number of destroyers to Queenstown, Ireland and several divisions of submarines to the Azores and Bantry Bay, Ireland to help guard convoys. However, it would be some time before the United States forces would be able to contribute significant manpower to the Western and Italian fronts.
The British and French insisted that the United States emphasize sending infantry to reinforce the line. Throughout the war, the American forces were short of their own artillery, aviation, and engineering units. However, General John J. Pershing, American Expeditionary Force commander, resisted breaking up American units and using them as reinforcements for British Empire and French units, as suggested by the Allies. Pershing also maintained the use of frontal assaults, which had been discarded by that time by British Empire and French commanders. As a result the American Expeditionary Force suffered a very high rate of casualties in its operations in the summer and fall of 1918. |
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