American History Since 1877 - HIST 122 Resource Guide

The influenza or flu pandemic of 1918 to 1919, the deadliest in modern history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide--about one-third of the planet’s population at the time--and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims.

The ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution--which banned the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors--ushered in a period in American history known as Prohibition.

The 1920s were an age of dramatic social and political change. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar “consumer society.”

At the beginning of the 1930s, more than 15 million Americans--fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers--were unemployed. President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans needed to get them through this “passing incident in our national lives.”

The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.

“America at this moment,” said the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1945, “stands at the summit of the world.” During the 1950s, it was easy to see what Churchill meant. The United States was the world’s strongest military power.

At the beginning of the 1960s, many Americans believed they were standing at the dawn of a golden age. On January 20, 1961, the handsome and charismatic John F. Kennedy became president of the United States. His confidence that, as one historian put it, “the government possessed big answers to big problems” seemed to set the tone for the rest of the decade.

The Vietnam War was a long, costly armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States

American history streaming videos. Narrow search by links on the left.

First broadcast in 2004, this program offers a special one-hour analysis of the 9/11 Commission Report-connecting the dots of what happened that infamous day and studying the warning signs that could have averted the tragedy.

In this program, Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon argue the merits of democracy and communism in the impromptu Kitchen Debate, complete with on-screen translations. Also included are Nixon's famous "Checkers" speech; a 1960 campaign address to Wisconsin farmers by Senator Hubert Humphrey; and the verbal showdown between Senator Joseph McCarthy and attorney Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings that helped end McCarthy's political career.

The year 2000 marked the 25th anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. In this classic NewsHour program, Gwen Ifill and Terence Smith sit down with renowned historians and correspondents to ask them to address some of the lingering issues associated with that war.

his program begins with a fiery speech by Malcolm X that reminds us of the polarization of American political life in the 1960s. Nelson Rockefeller's condemnation of 1968 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as a political extremist; Goldwater's rebuttal of the charges; and Ronald Reagan's stump speech in support of Goldwater follow. Robert Kennedy's moving eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., concludes the program.

While the doughboys were fighting the war "over there," Americans at home were busy supporting it. This program looks at the domestic issues facing the United States during its involvement in World War I.