These Truths: A History of the United States

The American Colonization Society was founded during a meeting at the Davis Hotel in Washington, DC. Its purpose was to create a colony in Africa to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population,” as the meeting’s leader, Kentucky congressman and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, defined the increasing number of free Black people who lived in the United States (176). Bushrod Washington, George Washington’s nephew and a Supreme Court justice, was president of the organization, while Andrew Jackson served as its vice president. Colonization was regarded as the only solution to dealing with emancipated Black people, as the organizers of this society believed it was impossible for the descendants of Africans to live among white people as equals. African American abolitionist David Walker called the venture a trick, insisting that Black people had as much right to remain in the United States as white people did. While some enslaved Black people were repatriated to the West African country of Liberia, ultimately only around 3,000 African Americans departed for the colony.

The Articles of Confederation were a precursor to the American Constitution. The Articles had been hastily drafted by the Continental Congress “for the purpose of waging war against Britain,” though they had proven inadequate in maintaining armed forces (114). They were nothing more than “a treaty of alliance among sovereign states” (119). The Articles were drafted in 1777 but were not ratified until 1781, due to the states’ “competing claims to western land” (114). Efforts to revise the Articles of Confederation had proven to be useless, resulting in a nation with 13 different currencies and navies.

A meeting was organized on September 11, 1786, in Annapolis, Maryland, to revise the Articles. The special convention included James Madison who, to prepare, read a great deal of political history. Delegates from five of the 13 states showed up for the convention at George Mann’s tavern. Twelve men from five states agreed to gather in Philadelphia the following year to devise necessary provisions “necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government” (117).

The Bill of Rights are ten amendments added to the Constitution to satisfy Anti-Federalists, particularly George Mason, who had initially refused to ratify the document if it did not include such an enumeration of rights. James Madison drafted the 12 amendments, 10 of which were approved by three-quarters of the states on December 15, 1791. The Bill of Rights includes amendments that remain some of the most contentious, including the First Amendment, which grants freedoms of speech and religion, and the 2nd Amendment, which has been interpreted to grant citizens the rights to own and carry firearms.

Initiated by Thurgood Marshall, Brown v. Board of Education struck down Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), declaring its doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional. Marshall began building the case in 1951, as part of his effort to eliminate Jim Crow laws by targeting schools. A third-grader named Linda Brown lived in Topeka, Kansas. Her father, Oliver, wanted her to attend a school several blocks away from their home, but it was a white school that she was forbidden to attend. Instead, the nearest Black school was a long walk and a bus ride away. Brown joined the civil suit against the Topeka Board of Education filed by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.

The first oral arguments took place in December 1952. At first, it seemed as though the court would rule in favor of segregation. Chief Justice Fred Vinson, a native of Kentucky, believed that Congress should be responsible for desegregating schools. Then, on September 8, 1953, Vinson died and Earl Warren took his place on the Court. Warren agreed with Marshall’s premise that the “separate but equal” doctrine rested on the notion that Black people were inherently inferior to white people. Warren used Marshall as an example of how that premise could not be true. Warren’s vote, added to the four justices who were already in favor of overturning Plessy, meant that Warren’s argument against segregation prevailed. Future chief justice William Rehnquist, then a clerk, believed that Plessy had been right.

The court handed down its decision on May 17, 1954. Some African Americans, particularly educators, were skeptical of the ruling’s benefit, believing that Black teachers would lose their jobs and that school desegregation would distract from goals they believed were more pressing. White people, especially in the South, strongly resisted and called for Earl Warren’s impeachment. In 1955, the Court issued a second opinion, “urg[ing] schools to desegregate with ‘all deliberate speed’” (581). Most did not follow the Court’s ruling. By 1955, in eight Southern states, not one Black child attended school with a white child. The fight to end Jim Crow, which the case symbolized, put Black children on the front lines of that battle. The fight next took place in other spaces of public accommodation. After the Brown decision, reporters began to take greater notice of the clashes between civil rights activists and segregationists. President Eisenhower never publicly endorsed the Court’s decision, and he never asked Congress for a more robust civil rights bill.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first immigration law ever passed by Congress. The legislation “barred immigrants from China from entering the United States” and declared that the 14th Amendment “did not apply to people of Chinese ancestry” (335). Additionally, it declared that Chinese people already residing in the United States “were permanent aliens who could never become citizens” (335). The Chinese Exclusion Act further solidified the notion that race determined citizenship, in addition to establishing the prejudice of assuming that Asian Americans are non-natives. The Chinese Exclusion Act was extended in 1924 with the passage of the Asian Exclusion Act.

The Compromise of 1850 was an agreement brokered by Henry Clay, “the Great Compromiser” who had engineered the Missouri Compromise 30 years earlier, and Illinois senator Stephen Douglas. The agreement was brokered as a result of California’s entry into the union in September 1850. To avoid disturbing the delicate balance between free states and slave states, California was admitted as a free state; the slave trade was to be abolished in the nation’s capital; and Texas would give New Mexico a piece of land over which they had disputed in exchange for $10 million. To appease proslavery advocates, the territories of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah were to decide for themselves if they wanted slavery when they applied for statehood. Otherwise, the territories were organized with no mention of slavery.

The most key and notorious piece of legislation within the compromise was the Fugitive Slave Act, which “required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial” (261). The law initiated what former slave and autobiographer Harriet Jacobs called “a reign of terror to the colored population,” as slave catchers and bounty hunters worked to track down, capture, and return runaway slaves in exchange for lucrative rewards (261). Runaways who escaped to the North could still be tracked down, arrested, and taken back to the South. The law also encouraged the capture and trade of free Black people who were then sold to the South. One well-known example is that of Solomon Northrup.

The Connecticut Compromise, adopted by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 on July 17, “establish[ed] equal representation in the Senate, with two senators for each state” and, in the House of Representatives, apportioned “one representative for every 40,000 people” (124). The latter number was changed to 30,000. Each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person, according to the ratio, later known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, that Madison had created in 1783. A federal census would be taken every decade to count state populations. The result was that slave states had far greater representation in Congress than free states.

Initiated by Massachusetts senator Henry Laurens Dawes in 1887, the Dawes Act provided the federal government with “the authority to divide Indian lands into allotments and guaranteed US citizenship to Indians who agreed to live on those allotments and renounce tribal membership” (337). The legislation, as Senator Dawes explained, was designed to force Indigenous Americans to “choose between ‘extermination or civilization,’” while offering white Americans the opportunity to “wipe out the disgrace of our past treatment” and “lift Indians up ‘into citizenship and manhood’” (337). The Dawes Act not only patronized indigenous peoples, it was also the first step in termination—or, the federal government’s attempt to eliminate tribes and bands. Finally, it was yet another scheme to seize hold of tribal lands. The government reserved the right to seize what it called “residual” lands, or those parcels of land that were not reserved for allotment.

Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) was a seminal Supreme Court case for which Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the court’s 7-2 majority’s opinion. The plaintiff, Dred Scott, had been born into slavery. After his owner took him to a free state (Wisconsin), Scott sued for his freedom. Before filing the suit, Scott had been living with his owner, army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, on an army post in Illinois—another free state—for several years. After his owner died, Scott offered to purchase his and his wife’s freedom. After Emerson’s widow refused, Scott decided to sue for his liberty. Publicly, James Buchanan, who had recently been sworn in as president by Chief Justice Taney, claimed that he was content to leave both this decision and the broader question of extending slavery in the West to the court. Privately, Buchanan had tried to postpone the ruling and attempted to get at least one justice to join the court’s proslavery majority.

The Dred Scott decision was the second instance in the Supreme Court’s history in which the judicial branch had overturned federal legislation. The first was Marbury v. Madison. Writing for the majority, Taney asserted that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. He also claimed that Congress had no power to circumscribe slavery in any state “because the men who wrote the Constitution considered people of African descent ‘beings of an inferior order [with] no rights which the white man was bound to respect’” (268). The court also used the case to consider the question of Black citizenship, ultimately deciding that those who were descended from slaves could never become “entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by [the Constitution]” (313). Five of the justices on the Supreme Court at the time were slaveholders, while two others were favorable to the proslavery faction and had likely been appointed for this reason.

Both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass gave speeches in which they condemned the decision, while slave owners gleefully declared that the Dred Scott decision “had settled the question of slavery for good” (270). Dred Scott died only months after the decision was handed down. He was 58. He and his wife, Harriet, had been formally freed on May 26, 1857, independent of the Court’s ruling against them. He had found employment as a porter at Barnum’s Hotel in St. Louis, despite having tuberculosis, while his wife worked as a laundress. Scott was buried in St. Louis. Harriet Robinson Scott, who died in St. Louis on June 17, 1876, lived long enough to witness both the Civil War and passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

Proposed by constitutional convention delegate James Wilson, the Electoral College was to be elected by the people to elect the president of the United States. To overcome the problem of the overrepresentation of enslaved people in Southern states, the delegates decided that the number of delegates sent to the Electoral College would be determined not by a state’s overall population, but by its number of representatives in the House. There was one member of Congress for every 40,000 people in a state, with those enslaved counting as three-fifths of one person. The federal government had left it to the states to choose their delegates. Originally, delegates were to use their own judgment when deciding on how to cast votes in the Electoral College.

Lepore describes the Electoral College as a concession to slaveholders. To determine the size of a state’s representation in the Electoral College, a census was required. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution calls for a census to be taken every 10 years. All free people were counted, but not unassimilated indigenous peoples, even if they lived within American territory. The first federal census was taken in 1790 and “counted 3.9 million people, including 700,000 slaves” (157).

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the Constitution that guarantees equal legal rights to all citizens, regardless of sex or gender. The amendment was first drafted in 1923 by suffragists. It was further amended over the years, approved by Congress, and sent to the states for ratification in 1972. The amendment was initially very popular among both Democrats and Republicans. Within one year, 30 out of 38 states moved to ratify the amendment. This momentum slowed down as white conservative women activists, led by Phyllis Schlafly, used an essentialist argument that had emerged during the Progressive Era to demonstrate that the amendment would reduce special protections for women and undermine the traditional family. By 1977, only 35 states had ratified the amendment, and five had rescinded their earlier support. By 1982, after the extended deadline for ratification had expired, the public accepted the defeat of the ERA. Since 2018, there has been a revival of interest in ratifying the amendment.

Born out of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist ideas, eugenics was a field of study defined by zoologist Charles Davenport, who had coined the term, as “the science of human improvement by better breeding” (392). Davenport also founded the American Breeders’ Association, a committee chaired by Stanford University president and biologist David Jordan. The association’s purpose was to “investigate and report on heredity in the human race” and to demonstrate “the value of superior blood and the menace to society of the inferior” (392). The result of such studies was sterilization laws. The first was passed in Indiana in 1907. Two-thirds of all states followed suit. Even after eugenics fell out of favor by the Second World War, numerous states continued to perform some version of sterilization, typically on women of color, either through coercion or targeted birth control campaigns.

Scientific racism received further legitimacy when Madison Grant, president of New York’s Museum of Natural History, published The Passing of the Great Race; Or, the Racial Basis of European History (1916), in which he dissected Europeans according to their geographical origins and phenotypes. He called Northern Europeans the “Nordic race” and characterized them as having blond hair and blue eyes. He warned that they were being overwhelmed by southern Europeans, whom he termed the “Alpine race,” which was characterized by their dark eyes and dark hair. Grant warned that democracy could not survive with “two races of unequal value liv[ing] side by side” (392). The American Eugenics Society, which was founded in 1922, would play a role in ensuring that recent Mexican immigrants would not attain citizenship.

Filibusters were originally Southern vigilantes, as Lepore describes them, or Americans who incited insurrections in Latin America in the 1850s “to extend a market for slaves” (281). From the Spanish word filibustero (“freebooting”), the term had originally been used to describe 16th-century piratical persons or ships. Americans who went south looking to expand slavery into Latin America “outfitted ships with arms and ammunition and attempted to conquer Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and Brazil” (281). Future secessionist William Lowndes Yancey argued that, if it was legal to buy slaves in Virginia and transport them elsewhere, why was it not equally permissible to buy them in other countries and import them to the South?

The filibuster now refers to a rhetorical device used in the Senate to delay and, ultimately, block the passage of legislation. During the antebellum years, it was a tool of Southern senators to impede any antislavery legislation. During the civil rights era, it was a tool of Southern senators used to uphold legal segregation. Some contemporary filibusters are also used to block legislation on issues concerning race, such as voting rights and police reform.

Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which helped to bring peace after the First World War, was drafted from a report written by Walter Lippmann called “The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests.” Wilson submitted his Fourteen Points to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918. The policy’s main proposals were “free trade, freedom of the seas, arms reduction, the self-determination of colonized peoples, and a League of Nations” (396).

The French and Indian War is the name that North American colonists gave to their arena of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which “stretched from Bengal to Barbados” and involved “Austria, Portugal, Prussia, Spain, and Russia, and engaged armies and navies in the Atlantic and the Pacific,” as well as those in the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. The war was also instrumental in encouraging union among the British North American colonies.

During the earlier battles, the colonists had done their own fighting and raised their own provincial armies and militias. Then, in 1755, Britain sent its own regiments to North America, led by General Edward Braddock. Benjamin Franklin believed that the Crown’s decision was an “attempt to keep the colonies weak” (77). Braddock and his troops pillaged, instilling fear among the colonists. Braddock’s troops were later defeated, and Braddock himself was shot. Washington carried the dying general off the battlefield.

The French and Indian War was the most expensive in history and revealed the schism between British and American troops. The colonists regarded the British as “lewd, profane, and tyrannical,” while the British regarded “the colonists [as] inexpert, undisciplined, and unruly” (78). To the British, rank was everything, and their officers were wealthy, upper-class gentlemen, while enlisted men were drawn from the poor. In the colonial forces, on the other hand, there were hardly such distinctions. In Massachusetts, for example, one in three men served in the war, “whether they were penniless clerks or rich merchants” (78).

In 1759, the British and American forces defeated the French in Quebec. This led the Iroquois to abandon their previous position of neutrality to side with the British, which shifted the course of the war. In 1763, when peace was reached with the Treaty of Paris, the map of North America was redrawn. France gave all of Canada and New France east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain, while all of its land west of the Mississippi—a territory called Louisiana—went to Spain. Spain, meanwhile, gave Cuba and half of Florida to Britain. The war also left Britain nearly bankrupt. It also “led to a contraction of debt, followed by a crippling depression” (81).

The Great Migration was a movement of African Americans from the South to the North and West. Prior to the migration, 90% of all Black people in the US lived in the South. Five hundred thousand African Americans left the region between 1915 and 1918 for Detroit, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other cities. Between 1920 and 1930, another 1.3 million left the South. By the beginning of World War II, nearly half of all Black people in the US lived outside of the South.

In Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 landmark case on reproductive rights, the Supreme Court “struck down state bans on contraception” (649). Estelle Griswold, who led a Planned Parenthood clinic in Connecticut, was arrested for providing contraceptives—ironically, just as Margaret Sanger had been 50 years earlier. As it later did in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court based its ruling on a constitutional argument about privacy, not equality. In 1972, the court extended the precedent of privacy established in Griswold from married couples to the unmarried.

The Homestead Act of 1862 made available “up to 160 acres of ‘unappropriated public lands’” to individuals and heads of household who would agree to farm them for five years in exchange for a small fee (317). In October 1864, the National Convention of Colored Men called for legislative reforms that would allow all Black men—not women—to settle on lands granted to citizens by the Homestead Act.

Formed in May 1938 by 37-year-old conservative Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr., the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was organized to investigate and root out “suspected communists and communist organizations” (442). Dies’s work continued the campaign waged by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been surveilling Black writers and artists for many years. During Congressional hearings, Dies tried to convince the public that the writers and artists employed by the WPA had embedded Communist messages in the poems, plays, documentary photographs, and folklore collections on which they had worked. HUAC was later led by Republican Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy whose “witch hunts,” or rabid investigations into suspected communists, particularly in Hollywood, led to “blacklisting,” or the destruction of careers.

The 1924 Immigration Act had two parts—the Asian Exclusion Act, an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the National Origins Act. The Immigration Act instituted a quota system that was to end immigration from Asia and limit it from Eastern and Southern Europe. It also hardened immigration along racial lines, codifying the idea of a “white race.” Those who were deemed “white” came from European countries regarded as nations. Its citizens were believed to be more assimilable than those who came from Asian countries, who were classified as “races.” The Immigration Act did not restrict immigration from Mexico, however.

The John Birch Society, whose members were nicknamed “Birchers,” was formed in 1958 and defines itself as a right-wing political advocacy group. Its “goals included impeaching [Supreme Court Chief Justice] Earl Warren and withdrawing the United States from the United Nations” (614). Its leader, Robert Welch, had suggested that President Eisenhower might have been a communist agent. All of them especially loathed President Kennedy. Birchers also believed that the launch of Sputnik was a hoax.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act started as a bill designed to organize Permanent Indian Territory into what became the states of Kansas and Nebraska. The law, which was passed in 1854, allowed for the citizens of the new states to decide by popular sovereignty if they wanted slavery. The act also effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which would have prohibited slavery in Kansas. Nebraska was far north, making it inevitable that it would enter the Union as a free state. Kansas, however, became a battleground between proslavery activists and Free-Soilers. Both factions struggled for control over the territory, resulting in a small civil war nicknamed “Bleeding Kansas” by newspaper publisher Horace Greeley. In 1854, the Republican Party was founded by citizens who had been determined to defeat the bill in Congress. Though Kansas had applied for admission to the Union in 1859, its progress was stalled by proslavery forces in the state who did not want Kansas to enter the Union as a free state. Kansas finally entered the Union in 1861 as a free state, after the Confederate states, which comprised much of the South, seceded.

Lochner v. New York (1905) was a Supreme Court decision that both intensified the debate around judicial review and worked to undo some Progressive labor reforms. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to uphold the notion of “liberty of contract,” or a business owner’s freedom to forge agreements with employees. This notion led the court to void a New York state law stating that bakers “could work no longer than ten hours a day, six days a week” (377). In a dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes accused the court of applying social Darwinism to the Constitution, as the majority believed that the more advantaged side in a dispute had the right to win.

The Louisiana Purchase (1803) was Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana Territory, an expanse of land “nearly a million square miles west of the Mississippi,” from Napoleon Bonaparte. The land had been claimed by the Spanish since 1763 and “inhabited by Spaniards, Creoles, Africans, and Indians generally loyal to Great Britain” (169). Napoleon had secretly purchased the territory in 1800, one year after he took control of France. The Louisiana Territory was to be part of Napoleon’s New World empire, with Haiti, which had declared its independence in 1803. However, with Haiti, which was going to be the crown jewel of his empire, out of his hands, Napoleon saw little reason to hold on to the swath of land bordering the United States. Also, at war with Great Britain, he needed revenue.

President Jefferson and James Madison arranged for fellow Virginian James Monroe to go to Paris and offer Napoleon $2 million for New Orleans and Florida, though he was authorized to offer as much as $10 million. Napoleon unexpectedly offered to sell all of the Louisiana Territory for $15 million. Monroe seized the chance and agreed. As a result of the purchase, the size of the United States doubled.

Manifest Destiny was the notion that the United States was destined to cover the North American continent from east to west. Historian and politician George Bancroft, who played a key role in the nation’s origin story, was a believer in Manifest Destiny. The nation’s devotion to westward expansion contributed to its policies of removing Indigenous Americans, as well as its development of the Trans-Pacific Railroad.

Marbury v. Madison (1803) was a lawsuit filed by Federalist Party leader William Marbury against Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison. The seminal case created the precedent for judicial review. Chief Justice John Marshall granted the Supreme Court the power to decide if laws passed by Congress (the legislative branch) are constitutional. The Constitution had not previously granted the Court this power.

The Missouri Compromise (1820) was an agreement in Congress, brokered by Kentucky congressman and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, to admit Missouri to the Union as a slave state, while Maine, which had petitioned for admission, would be admitted as a free state. As a result of organizing the deal, Clay earned the nickname “the Great Compromiser.” Additionally, a line was formed above the border of Missouri. All territories “above that line would enter the Union as free states, and any states below that line would enter as slave states” (179).

The Monroe Doctrine (1823), named after the fifth US president, James Monroe, “establish[ed] the principle that the United States would keep out of wars in Europe,” but would deem any attempt by European powers to colonize parts of the Americas “as acts of aggression” (180). Drafted by John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s secretary of state and successor as president, the Monroe Doctrine was an assertion of both American power and sovereignty.

Muckraking was a kind of investigative journalism that first developed at McClure’s magazine in 1902 when its publisher, the Irish immigrant Samuel Sidney McClure hired three of his best writers “to expose corruption and lawlessness” in unions, corporations, and big-city politics (371). Theodore Roosevelt coined the term. Quoting from Pilgrim’s Progress, Roosevelt cursed “the Man with the Muck-rake” who focused “only on that which is vile and debasing” (371).

A laundryman named Curt Muller challenged an Oregon 10-hour work day law in the Supreme Court. The Court upheld the Oregon law. The precedent established by the case solidified the constitutionality of labor laws for women, legitimized sex discrimination in employment, and allowed social science research to be used in court decisions. The latter would be integral in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Muller v. Oregon also reaffirmed the notion that women, as a presumably weaker sex, needed special protections, making them dependent on the state.

The National Origins Act, which was part of the Immigration Act of 1924, “restricted the annual number of European immigrants to 150,000” and placed a limit on the number of new arrivals that was “proportional to their representation in the existing population” (407). The purpose of the law, and similar quota systems, was to discontinue immigration from Asia and to limit the admission of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

The National Security Act of 1947 was a post–World War II law that established the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It changed the War Department into the Department of Defense, which was housed in the newly constructed Pentagon. Finally, the act created the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt first announced his “new deal” as a political slogan when he accepted his party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1932. Roosevelt likened the New Deal to Christian ethics and delivered stump speeches all over the nation to promote it. His speeches were “the first presidential campaign speeches recorded on film and screened in movie theaters as newsreels” (430). Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation reform, which came in two parts, helped to pull the United States out of the Great Depression, while also creating social and economic safety net programs, particularly Social Security and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which still exist today. Banking reforms included the Emergency Banking Act, in which banks had to prove that they were solvent to become established, and the Glass-Steagall Act, which led to the creation of the FDIC and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Public Works Administration created tens of thousands of infrastructure projects, including cultural and arts institutions, such as the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theater Project. The Federal Writers’ Project “produced some eight hundred books” (441).

The Agricultural Adjustment project addressed crises among agrarian workers. As governor of New York, Roosevelt had seen over 3,000 farms become abandoned. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Farm Security Administration, and other agrarian initiatives “extended a better and fairer distribution of resources like land, power, and water to a national scale” (437).

Congress also passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 to “[grant] workers the right to organize, and established the Works Project Administration, to hire millions of people” who built key infrastructure, such as “roads and schools and hospitals,” in addition to employing “artists and writers” (438). Later that year, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which “established pensions, federal government assistance for fatherless families, and unemployment relief” (438).

Despite being a relief program, the New Deal did not evenly distribute resources to all groups. African Americans were excluded from certain programs, despite suffering poverty at higher rates than white people. To ensure the compliance of Southern Democrats with his legislation, President Roosevelt permitted discriminatory practices within New Deal programs. By 1938, New Deal reforms resulted in “the top [one] percent of American families earn[ing] only 16 percent of all income,” a rate that alarmed conservatives (442).

NATO is a military alliance that the US signed with Western Europe after the Second World War in the interest of forming “a united front against the USSR and any further Soviet aggression” (539).

The Northwest Ordinance was a deal brokered at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in which the delegates decided that “any new states entering the Union formed north of the Ohio River” would not have slavery, while those south of the river would be slaveholding states (124). The measure was passed on July 13.

Nullification was a state’s presumed right to nullify, or to invalidate and override, a federal law. The crisis over nullification set the stage for the South’s secession from the Union. The most vocal proponent of the legislative tactic was the South Carolina congressman, former secretary of war, and former vice president John C. Calhoun, who sought to “nullify” a tariff that Congress had established. The tariff worried Southerners “who argued that it put the interest of northern manufacturers above southern agriculturalists” (217). Its opponents supported, instead, what they called “free trade.” In protest of the tariff, Calhoun wrote a treatise on behalf of his state’s legislature in which he developed a theory of constitutional interpretation, arguing that states could declare federal laws null and void. If a state declared a federal law unconstitutional, the Constitution would need to be amended. If the proposed amendment were not to be ratified, the objecting state retained the right to secede from the Union. The states, Calhoun insisted, were sovereign before the Constitution was written, and they were to remain sovereign.

Nullification was an anti-majoritarian policy—that is, if states could secede from the Union for objecting to a law, then the majority could not rule. The nullification crisis that ensued was not really about the tariff, but about states’ rights, which also pressed the question of slavery. South Carolina, which by then had the largest number of enslaved people in the nation, was trying to reject the federal government’s power to pass laws that were contrary to its interests, particularly its interests in slaveholding. The nullification crisis also hardened the line between sectionalists and nationalists.

Originalism is a conservative constitutional argument rooted in the idea that the Constitution should be strictly interpreted according to the Founders’ original intentions for government. The legal argument developed in the late 1970s as part of a campaign to expand access to firearms, using the 2nd Amendment as justification. Ironically, those who touted originalism in this context negated the “well-regulated militia” clause that is key to the 2nd Amendment.

In response to the new war on terror, President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act on October 26, 2001, which “grant[ed] the federal government new powers to conduct surveillance and collect intelligence to prevent and investigate terrorist acts” (744). Critics of the law, which quickly passed both houses of Congress shortly after the September 11 attacks, “cit[ed] violations of civil liberties, especially as established under the Fourth Amendment, and civil rights, especially the due process provision of the Fourteenth Amendment” (744).

The landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) legitimized Jim Crow laws through the court’s determination of “separate but equal.” Homer Plessy, “a shoemaker from New Orleans who looked white but who, under Louisiana’s race laws was technically black,” had been arrested for violating an 1890 Jim Crow law that enforced separate railcars for Black and white residents (358). Plessy had intentionally gotten arrested so that he could challenge the state’s law. A lower court, presided over by Judge John Ferguson, had ruled against Plessy, leading the plaintiff to appeal to the Supreme Court.

In a 7-1 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the Louisiana court’s ruling. The court decided that Jim Crow laws did not violate the Constitution because “separate accommodations were not necessarily unequal accommodations” (359). Justice John Marshall Harlan, the sole dissenter in the case, disagreed with “the establishment of separate classes of citizens” and insisted that the Constitution was “color-blind” (359). He pointed out both the absurdities of Jim Crow laws and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. While Chinese people could not become American citizens, they were free to ride in passenger coaches with white citizens. Conversely, African Americans, who were citizens, could be arrested and declared criminals if they were to ride in coaches alongside white people. Harlan found it ridiculous that a set of laws could grant more rights to noncitizens than to citizens. Harlan also rightfully predicted that the ruling would prove to be as harmful as the Dred Scott decision. Until 1954, Black people had no recourse to fight segregation. Forms of de facto segregation spread to the North and the West.

Populism is the notion that “the best government is that most closely directed by a popular majority” (181). American populism developed alongside Andrew Jackson’s rise to political power. Lepore notes that, while populism is intended to be about the people, it is truly an argument about the significance of numbers. As the electorate grew, some Americans expressed concern about both the kinds of men who could vote and who could be elected to office.

The Second Great Awakening was a period of evangelical fervor that occurred in the early 19th century. The movement reached its height in the 1820s and 1830s, particularly in factory towns. Its proponents believed that they could eliminate sin from the world, in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ, whom some believed would arrive as early as within three months. They did not expect the Savior’s return to Bethlehem or Jerusalem, but to industrial American cities, such as Detroit or Cincinnati. The movement emphasized spiritual equality, which strengthened antislavery protests and paved the way for the early women’s suffrage movement. Evangelicals also “recast the nation’s origins as avowedly Christian” (200).

The name of the movement dates back to 1886, when a Congregationalist minister named Henry George referred in his book Progress and Poverty to “a social gospel” (365). Academic theologians led the Social Gospel movement. They accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, seeing it as consistent with the purposeful universe that is depicted in the Bible. Conversely, they rejected the social Darwinism promoted by Herbert Spencer, the English natural scientist who introduced the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Proponents of the Social Gospel busied themselves with the problems wrought by industrialism, particularly poverty and child labor.

The Constitution’s three-fifths clause was an addition to the Constitution devised by James Madison in 1783. Based on a federal census conducted every decade starting in 1790, the arrangement provided slave states with more representation in Congress than free states. Virginia, for example, had three extra seats in the House and, thus, six more electors in the Electoral College. In 1804, after the nation acquired the Louisiana Territory, Connecticut and Massachusetts “called for the abolition of the three-fifths clause” (172). At the Hartford Convention in 1814, delegates from five New England states threatened secession over what they deemed an uneven distribution of power due to the South’s unofficial slave representation. The call to eradicate the clause was abandoned after General Andre Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. With the passage of the 13th Amendment, the three-fifths compromise became obsolete.

Signed on September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, resulting in Great Britain’s recognition of the United States’ independence and sovereignty. In exchange, indebted Americans agreed to pay their British creditors. When the states defaulted on their debts, the British threatened to default on their commitment to surrender their northwestern fronts in Oswego, Niagara, and Detroit to the United States. The treaty also changed the composition of the British Empire and reduced the number of enslaved Africans in the empire by half. The American negotiators of the peace were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay.

Named after the 32-year-old Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot, the Wilmot Proviso (1846) was an agreement to add a stipulation to any future treaty that would end the war with Mexico. The stipulation asserted that slavery and involuntary servitude would ever exist in any of the lands acquired from the Mexican-American War.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was “a federation of women’s clubs formed in Cleveland in 1874” (339). They had developed out of the Woman’s Crusade—an anti-saloon campaign formed by women who were concerned about the neglect and domestic violence that often resulted from alcohol abuse. To have some agency against these abuses, members of the WCTU insisted that women needed the right to vote. The WCTU’s activism reshaped party politics, leading suffragists, such as WCTU leader Frances Willard, to leave the Republican Party and found the Home Protection Party, which merged with the Prohibition Party in 1882.