header by Emerson Taymor, 2005
1. The Colonial Era: 1607-1763
2. The Revolutionary Era: 1763-1789
3. The Early National Period: 1789-1824
4. Jacksonian America: 1824-1848
5. Antebellum America: 1848-1860
6. The Civil War Era: 1861-1877
9. The Twenties
10. Depression and New Deal: 1929-1939
14. The Sixties
The Sixties
combined timeline of civil-rights advances and retreats
the 1968 book that tried to predict the world of 2018Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 2005); Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind," Atlantic (Mar. 2014)
KENNEDY AND JOHNSON PRESIDENCIES
did the 1960 election really get stolen? (David Greenberg, Slate, 2000)
Kathryn Olmsted, "The Dealey Plaza Irregulars: The JFK Assassination and the Collapse of Trust in the 1960s," from Real Enemies (2008)LBJ introduces the Voting Rights Act (1965); the "Johnson treatment" in action; Jules Feiffer worries that LBJ is abandoning the Great Society (1965); LBJ's advisors measure the achievements of the Great Society (1966); Karen Tumulty, "The 'Great Society' Agenda Led to Great--and Lasting--Philosophical Change," Washington Post (2014)
Adam Liptak, "On Voting Rights, Test of History v. Progress" does the Voting Rights Act still matter today? or does Obama's victory render it obsolete? (Mew York Times, 2009)
Annie Lowrey, "50 Years Later, War on Poverty is a Mixed Bag" (New York Times, 2014)
THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
SNCC founding statement (1960); how protestors prepared and dressed; history of the SCLC; Ella Baker, "Bigger Than a Hamburger" (1960); Declaration of Indian Purpose (1961); "Ghosts of Mississippi" (how the President of Mississippi State had his players play in the NCAA tournament against integrated competition in 1963)
Stephanie Stokes Oliver, "Fashioning Freedom," Harper's Bazaar (Jan. 2022)--on fashion and civil rights
poster advertising the March on Washington; logistics of the march; Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963); Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream" (1963); see the speech live; people who were there remember; John Lewis, speech at the March on Washington (1963); the Mobile Register complains that the "irresponsible" march is "an act of intimidation" (1963); cartoon on the Selma march, 1965 poll data on the civil rights movement, 1961-1969; who voted for and against the Civil Rights Act; conservative protest calling the bill a "$100 billion blackjack"
Steven Mintz, "Winning the Vote: A History of Voting Rights in America," Gilder Lehrman Center (2018)
from Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (2018): on how the story omits the role of HS student activism; on the activist career of Coretta Scott King letters from Freedom Summer; a letter recalling conditions in 1964 in one high school; Louisiana literacy test, 1964; Kevin Blackistone, "Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the Athlete-Activists Who Took a Stand," Washington Post (Feb. 13, 2018)--about police shootings of protestors at South Carolina State, 1968 Senate Committee report on the FBI campaign against MLK (1976); cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson on MLK, rap, and women's issues, from I May Not Get There with You; Emily Lordi, "Hearing Otis Redding's 'Try a Little Tenderness' As a Song of Resistance," The Atlantic (2017)STUDENTS AND THE NEW LEFT
SDS, Port Huron statement (1962); Jews and the Civil Rights Movement, from the Jewish Women's Archive; if you've ever wondered where the phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" came from, here's where
the SF Chronicle covers the 1968 SF State strike; Weatherman manifesto (1969); letters to Long Island's Newsday about HS students and activism, 1969; University of Washington Daily parody quiz, 1970: "Are You Right On?"
the FBI spies on UC students, at Ronald Reagan's request (SF Chronicle, 2002); letters to the editor after Kent State, 1970, from James Michener's Kent State; the killings at Jackson State (1970); FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on campus unrest (1970); the FBI's files on John Lennon, from Jon Wiener, Gimme Some Truth; the evolution of riot gear, 1960s-today THE BLACK POWER ERAMalcolm X, "God's Judgment of White America" (1963); SNCC, "The Basis of Black Power" (1965); Stokely Carmichael calls for Black Power (1966); Black Panther party, ten point program (1966)l Kambiz GhaneaBassiri on the origins and history of the Nation of Islam, from A History of Islam in America (2010); Edward Curtis IV, "Islamism and Its African American Muslim Critics: Black Muslims in the Era of the Arab Cold War," American Quarterly (2007)
a summary of the American Indian Movement; National Indian Youth Council, statement of policy (1969); proclamation from Indians of All Tribes (1969); AIM's 20-point program (1972); Vine Deloria, introduction to Custer Died for Your Sins (1969); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "Wounded Knee 1890 and 1973," from An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; Mary Crow Dog remembers Wounded Knee
Delano farmworkers' strike, 1969; Young Lords party, 13-point program (1969); an interview with the founder of the Brown Berets (2003); Lori Flores, "How the United Farm Workers Can Regain Their Importance," Washington Post (Sep. 2018)
the original "model minority" article about Japanese-Americans (New York Times, 1966); Amy Uyematsu proclaims the emergence of "yellow power" (1969)
Time covers "Four Lives in the Gay World" (1969); Gay Liberation Front, Come Out! (1969); the Village Voice reports from inside the Stonewall Inn, 1969
THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT
SNCC position paper: women in the movement (1964); an article about Jo Freeman from the Jackson Daily News (1966); Betty Friedan explains why feminism is good for men, c. 1968; Radical Women, "No More Miss America" (1968); feminists protest Miss America, 1969; more on the Miss America protest, with pro- and anti- signs and letters and columns; Phyllis Graber, "Discrimination in High School Sports" (1971); Gloria Steinem, Women's Liberation (1970)
the pill at 50 (from Time, 2010); historian Elaine Tyler May, "Promises the Pill Could Never Keep": the legacy of the pill (New York Times, 2010)
1968
RFK speaks just after the assassination of MLK (1968); listen to the speech
on the 1968 Democratic convention, from Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America; Nixon's "Silent Majority" speech; see Nixon give it; film footage taken by the Nixon campaign, 1968; Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley on TV, August 1968 (there's an entire Netflix documentary on this); Buckley being Buckley
"The Fire Wasn't This Time": reports on race, 1968 and 1998 (actual comparisons here)
"How to Seize a Country," Time (1969); Edward Luttwak, "A Scenario for a Military Coup d'Etat in the United States," Esquire (1970)GOP Apologizes for Southern Strategy (2006)
VIETNAM
a huge array of Vietnam sources, from Mt. Holyoke
poll data on Americans' trust in their government, 1958-1996; poll data on Americans' support for the war; support for the war by age
Tonkin Gulf: what really happened? from McGeorge Bundy's Lessons in Disaster (2008); Christian Appy on gender and Presidents' behavior in the war; on bombing and its effects, both from American Reckoning (2015); the first teach-ins on the war, at the University of Michigan, 1965; LBJ considers escalation (on video); King's Riverside Church speech (1967); David Garrow, "When Martin Luther King Came Out Against the War" (New York Times, 2017); historian Mark Atwood Lawrence: the CIA tells Lyndon Johnson, 1967, that losing the war wouldn't really be a problem for the US (2011); Jon Elliston, "Mr. Ba's Family and the Phoenix Operation," on counterinsurgency programsjournalist Mary McCarthy goes to Vietnam, 1967; Ernest Vigil opposes induction into the army (1968); competing perspectives on Vietnam from General William Westmoreland and a soldier Bill Clinton, letter to the draft board (1969) John Kerry, statement to Congress for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1971); pop music about the war, from Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, We Gotta Get Out of this Place; The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (2017); Lea Ybarra and Nina Genera on Chicano mobilization against the war (1972) from Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: a Southerner's perspective on the North; on what and who gets left out of American documentaries; the fall of Saigon and after