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John J. Pershing
U.S. Army general John J. Pershing (1860-1948) commanded the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in Europe during World War I. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson selected Pershing to command the American troops being sent to Europe. After the war, Pershing served as army chief of staff from 1921 to 1924. -
Warren G. Harding’s “Return to Normalcy”
Popular support for Republicans grew, since Republicans promised a “return to normalcy.” Republicans ceased to promise progressive reforms and instead aimed to settle into traditional patterns of government. In 1920, after eight years under a progressive Democrat, Americans elected a conservative Republican as president, the first of the decade’s three Republican presidents. Warren G. Harding won the election of 1920 by a landslide on the promise of a “return to normalcy”. -
Glenn Curtiss
In 1902 friends and bankers backed the new company, G.H. Curtiss Manufacturing Company, which began producing the Hercules motorcycle. His lightweight air cooled engines were masterpieces, and then, the best available in the United States. In 1903 Curtiss was the first American Motorcycle Champion, establishing a world record mile at 56.4 seconds. In 1904 he set a ten mile speed record and that same year he invented the handlebar throttle. Curtiss was nicknamed the “fastest man in the world” -
Franklin D. Roosevelt
In 1910, at age 28, Roosevelt was invited to run for the New York state senate. Breaking from family tradition, he ran as a Democrat in a district that had voted Republican for the past 32 years. Roosevelt was reelected in 1912 and served as chair of the agricultural committee, passing farm and labor bills and social welfare programs. In 1914, Franklin Roosevelt, decided to run for the U.S. Senate seat for New York. The proposition was doomed from the start, as he lacked White House support. -
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary photography. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines. Lange and Taylor documented the rural hardship they encountered for the Farm Security Administration, established by the U.S. Agriculture Department. -
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey went to Jamaica in 1912 and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with the goal of uniting all of African diaspora to "establish a country and absolute government of their own." After corresponding with Booker T. Washington, the American educator who founded Tuskegee Institute, Garvey traveled to the United States in 1916 to raise funds for a similar venture in Jamaica. -
Alvin York
Known as the greatest [American] hero of World War I, York avoided profiting from his war record before 1939. York's role as hero went beyond his exploit in the Argonne and continues to both inspire and confound. On October 8, 1918, Corporal Alvin C. York and sixteen other soldiers under the command of Sergeant Bernard Early were dispatched before sunrise to take command of the Decauville railroad behind Hill 223 in the Chatel-Chehery sector of the Meuse-Argonne sector. -
Langston Hughes
He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred. His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. -
Charles Lindbergh
Lindbergh, Charles Augustus (1902-1974), an American aviator, made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21, 1927. Other pilots had crossed the Atlantic before him. But Lindbergh was the first person to do it alone nonstop. Before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Lindbergh campaigned against voluntary American involvement in World War II. -
The Great Migration
The Great Migration, or the relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from 1916 to 1970, had a huge impact on urban life in the United States. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many blacks headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that first arose during the First World War. -
Sussex Pledge
On March 24th 1916 a German submarine in the English Channel attacked what it thought was a minelaying ship. It was actually a French passenger steamer called 'The Sussex' and, although it didn't sink and limped into port, fifty people were killed. Several Americans were injured and, on April 19th, the US President (Woodrow Wilson) addressed Congress on the issue. He gave an ultimatum: Germany should end attacks on passenger vessels, or face America 'breaking off' diplomatic relations. -
Red Scare
One of the pioneering efforts to investigate communist activities took place in the U.S. House of Representatives, where the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed in 1938. HUAC’s investigations frequently focused on exposing Communists working inside the federal government or subversive elements working in the Hollywood film industry, and the committee gained new momentum following World War II, as the Cold War began. -
Jazz Music
In the late 19th century, while the rest of America was stomping their feet to military marches, and New Orleans was dancing to VooDoo rhythms.New Orleans was the only place in the New World where slaves were allowed to own drums. VooDoo rituals were openly tolerated, and well attended by the rich as well as the poor, by blacks and whites, by the influential and the anonymous. It was in New Orleans that the bright flash of European horns ran into the dark rumble of African drums; it was like l -
Battle Of The Argonne Forest
The Battle of the Argonne Forest was part of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive planned by General Ferdinand Foch.
The offensive called for a three-pronged attack on the Germans at the Western Front. While the BEF and the French Army would attack the German lines at Flanders, the British forces would take on the German troops at Cambrai and the AEF, supported by the French Army, were to fight the German troops at the Argonne Forest. -
Treaty Of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles, presented for German leaders to sign on May 7, 1919, forced Germany to concede territories to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The Germans returned Alsace and Lorraine, annexed in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, to France. All German overseas colonies became League of Nation Mandates, and the city of Danzig, with its large ethnically German population, became a Free City. -
The Great Depression
On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression, the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern industrial world. It spread from the United States to the rest of the world, lasting from the end of 1929 until the early 1940s. With banks failing and businesses closing, more than 15 million Americans became unemployed. African Americans suffered more than whites, since their jobs were often taken away from them and given to whites. -
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance influenced future generations of black writers, but it was largely ignored by the literary establishment after it waned in the 1930s. With the advent of the civil rights movement, it again acquired wider recognition. he publishing industry, fueled by whites’ fascination with the exotic world of Harlem, sought out and published black writers. -
The Dust Bowl
Ranchers and farmers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by the American agricultural ethos of expansion and a sense of autonomy from nature, aggressively exploited the land and set up the region for ecological disaster. Most early settlers used the land for livestock grazing until agricultural mechanization combined with high grain prices during World War I enticed farmers to plow up millions of acres of natural grass cover to plant wheat. -
The New Deal
On March 4, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address before 100,000 people on Washington’s Capitol Plaza. “First of all,” he said, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He promised that he would act swiftly to face the “dark realities of the moment” and assured Americans that he would “wage a war against the emergency” just as though “we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
