September 11th, 2001. "Nine/Eleven"

Although President George W. Bush described himself as a "compassionate conservative", the terrorist attacks that took place on September 11th, 2001, would change the direction of his presidency.

Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 and grew up in Saudi Arabia.  In 1998 he had formed a terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. ("the base".) Many American officials believe that Osama was a major contributor to four major terrorist attacks on the U.S. before Nine/Eleven even happened.  They also believe that Osama's associates operated in over 40 countries, including the U.S. and Europe, as well as the Middle East and Asia.

On September 11th, 2001, at 8:45 a.m. an American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 92 people, crashed into the World Trade Center's north tower.  Just eighteen 18 minutes later, another flight carrying 75 people struck the World Trade Center's south tower. At 9:40 a.m. yet another flight crashed into the Pentagon.  It had 64 people aboard.  At 9:50 a.m. the south tower collapsed, and 39 minutes later, the north tower did the same.

More Americans died in 2 hours that day than in the Civin War battle of Antietam on September 17th, 1862.

A Reflection On Vietnam

Vietnam was an unjust tragedy to the people that it effected.  People were scared emotionally and physically, and the people who experienced Vietnam could tell you that Napalm burns never heal.  Cities were distorted, homes were burned, families were seperared an lives were lost. 

The 1960's: Overview

The 1960's brought forth many events that went down in history as major game changers for the United States.  African American students, although were said to be set free from slavery, were still slaves to social decorum and boundaries.  Their efforts to push for equal rights led the federal government to pass the Civil Right Act in 1964, prohibiting social and educational discrimination.

The Civil Right Act inspired other groups to bring their "injustices" to the light, such as feminist groups fighting for equal educational and job opportunities, and Mexican Americans fighting for  more education programs and increased political power.  Native Americans pushed for control over their land, resources, and preservation of their native cultures.  Gays and Lesbians opted to end legal discrimination based on their (chosen) sexual attractions.

The Rosenburg Case

In 1951, a couple who's names were Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were found guilty by judge Irving Kaufman for having passing atomic secrets to Soviet agents.  This is was all in the midst of the Korean War.  The couple's punishment was death by the Electric Chair. Judge Irving Kaufman told the Rosenburgs: "I consider your crime worse than murder."

World War II and it's effects

WWII involved the most nations, (nearly 60) killed more human beings and cost the most money any other war in history.  It had 70 million people in it's service, and killed 17 million combatants. The Civilian deaths, however, racked an even higher number, with 19 million Soviet citizens, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews left dead.  35 million Human citizens died altogether because of this war.

The war started on September 1st, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.  The United states entered the war when attacked by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii.  (This is known as Pearl Harbor) That same year, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, giving him warning that the Nazi's might have the chance to build an atomic bomb.  This is when the secret $2 billion Manhattan Project started, and the race to build the first atomic bomb was on.

 On July 16th, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, the Manhattan Project was tested.  The first atomic bomb exploded.  This was what eventually ended the war, when America bombed Japan twice, ending the World Wide Suffering yet again.  This decision was the most controversial decision in all of military history.

Glamour and Greed: The Roaring 20's

"The Roaring 20's", or, "The Jazz Age" was a time when America saw a big change in social skills, fashion, music, entertainment, literature, religion, and mannerisms.  There were many many bitter feuds over issues such as evolution in schools, the Ku Klux Klan, immigration, race, prohibition, and women's roles.  The 1920's was a time of Glamour and Greed, good and bad things came from it.  Women finally earning their right to vote, popular poetry and art, classic novels and plays came from the glittering and short decade, but a high rate of murders and crimes did as well.  America really started to come into it's own during this period.  Famous authors, musicians and artists all made their mark on the world, such as author F. Scott Fitzgerald, poet E. E. Cummings, and artist Charles Demuth. New inventions came naturally with the new age and trends, for example, bathtub gin, flappers and raccoon coats.

The U.S. enter the War.

When the United States got involved in WWI, one third of the army was foreign born and immigrants as children, and over 10 million american citizens came from the Nations of the Central Power.  Millions of Irish Americans sided with The Central Power as well, due to their hatred for the English.

After the U.S. entered the war, in the name of patriotism, musicians stopped playing Bach and Beethoven, American renamed sauerkraut "Liberty Cabbage", schools stopped teaching the German language, and German newspapers were shut down. These things all occurred because of the high rise of searching for German Spies in our Nation.  Even if you didn't purchase war bonds, you were treated harshly, as it was considered unpatriotic. Even street names that had to do with anything German were renamed, such as Berlin Avenue in St. Louis was changed to Pershing.

Sgt. York

On December 13th, 1887, in a one room cabin Alvin Cullum York was born, the third of eleven children.  Alvin York and his family lived in Fentress County, which was located in the Cumberland Mountains of Northern Tennessee.

When Alvin was 27 years old, he led an obnoxious life, full of brawling and drunkenness.  He turned away from that lifestyle, however, on January 1st, 1915, when he attended a church service conducted by Reverend H.H, Russel.  York felt as if he had been hit by a bolt of lightning during that sermon, and he was moved to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  York then got off the immoral wide path he was on and began to walk the narrow road.  After some time, Alvin York was drafted into the military, which he registered for with an objecting conscience.  After coming home from basic training, however, Alvin struggled with his thought and conviction about going to war.  Finally, he decided that it was God's will that he go. On October 8th, 1918, Alvin York (single-handedly) captured 132 German soldiers, forced a German commander to order a battalion of 35 Machine Guns to surrender,  and only killing 25 German Soldiers in the process.  When York was asked how he did it, he simply replied:

"Sir, it is not man power. A higher power than man power guidedand watched over me and told me what to do." 

Hollywood made his actions into a film in 1941, titled Sargent York.  The real Alvin York lived a simple life after the war. He turned down may offers that would have easily made him $500,000 dollars.  He became a blacksmith, and used the royalties he had earned from the film to found a high school in Jamestown, Tennessee.

Quote from Alvin York: “There can be no doubt in the world of the fact of the divine power being in that. No other power under heaven could bring a man out of a place like that. Men were killed on both sides of me; and I was the biggest and the most exposed of all. Over thirty machine guns were maintaining rapid fire at me, point-blank from a range of about twenty-five yards. When you have God behind you, you can come out on top every time.” 

Sources:  http://www.sgtyorkdiscovery.com/The_York_Story.php
                http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3471
Image:    http://mentalfloss.com/article/22768/sergeant-alvin-york

A Prediction That Came True

Many opponents of suffrage argued that politics would debase, de-feminize, and destroy the family. At an 1894 state convention, Kansas Democrats said the vote for women would "destroy the home and family." In 1918, an Alabama representative predicted:

There will be no more domestic tranquility in this nation. No more "Home Sweet Home," no more lullabies to the baby. Suffrage will destroy the best thing in our lives and leave in our hearts an aching void that the world can never fill.

Digital History, 2014. 

"Failure is Impossible"

                                                       

In 1851, one Susan B. Anthony met an Elizabeth Cady Stanton at a temperance meeting in Seneca Fall, N.Y.  Elizabeth convinced Susan to pledge her life to women's rights.  Susan, a teacher, and daughter of a Quaker mill owner, was known to be a "tireless orator", a talented organizer, and would persevere in the presence of mockery and scorning.

By 1854, 10,000 signatures were signed to a petition for supporting woman's suffrage, and property rights for married women.  At this time, even if the woman had done the work that would pay her the wages that she deserved, they legally belonged to the husband.  (It was not until the 1860 that New York City would give the female population ownership over their own wages, the opportunity to bring court to action, or to have guardianship over their own children.)

During the Civil War, however, Stanton and Anthony put their endeavors to end woman's suffrage to the side, and decided to put all their energy into seeing the 13th amendment be granted passage, abolishing slavery.  Finally, when the war came to an end, Anthony and Stanton were enraged when the 15th amendment didn't give women the right to vote, and in not doing so, Stanton and Anthony refused to support the amendment.

In 1869, Susan B. Anthony, her sisters, friends and mother persuaded a male vote registrar (using the 14th amendment as their allay) to let them vote.  Anthony was fine $100 dollars for this action, to which she refused to, and never did, pay.

 "It is downright mockery, to talk to women of the blessings of liberty when they are denied the only means of securing them--the ballot." 

Not until the year 1883, 14 years after Anthony's death, that her life's goal would be ratified in the Tennessee legislature, by a single vote.

Segregation

Although the African American race was said to be equal to the White Americans and just as free, they were not treated as such.  In the state of Florida, it was required that black children and white children's school books were not to be found together, and had to be stored separately. African American children were not permitted to sit on the same side of the classroom as White children, and for a short time, segregation ruled to the point of black children's education ending at the fifth grade.

The famous Whitehouse bath tub

"William Howard Taft is better known for his weight than for his presidency. The most corpulent president, he was 6-feet, 2-inches tall and weighed 330 pounds. A special bathtub was installed in the White House large enough to accommodate four average sized adults." Digital History, 2014

Conservation

"The United States was the first nation in the world to create wilderness parks. Theodore Roosevelt launched conservation as a national political movement. As president, he argued on behalf of conserving natural resources and preserving wild lands; he set aside the first national monuments and wildlife refuges. In 1906, he signed the Antiquities Act, which enabled a president to protect wild lands as national monuments. The Grand Canyon was among the places he protected under the act." -Digital History, 2014.

Theodore Roosevelt becomes president

Born in 1858, New York City, Theodore Roosevelt as a child suffered many fevers, asthma attacks and stomach pains. So much so that blowing out a bedside candle would only add to his frailties. However, he was determined to better his strength and stamina, so he hiked, boxed, weight lifted and swam.  Doing so, allowed Roosevelt to become the great and influential president that history books, mountain sides, and people remember him to be.  He was elected to the New York State legislature at the young age of 23. Then, just three years later, his wife and mother died in the same day. Roosevelt fled.  To get away from the tragedies that came upon him so suddenly, he traveled to a 25,000 acre ranch in North Dakota badlands, and resigned himself to the cowboy lifestyle, spurs and all.  He returned, however, to serve as a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, and went on to be New York's crusading police commissioner, the assistant secretary of the Navy, and governor of New York, all beofre his election as Vice President in 1900.  With William McKinley's sudden assassination, Roosevelt became the youngest president in american history, at the age of 42.

    

President William McKinley and Leon Colgolsz.

On September 6th, 1901, President William McKinley walked along the lines of the well-wishers as the Pan American Exposition as Buffalo, N.Y.  Fifty secret service agents and soldiers roamed the area. A man in the crowd had his hand wrapped in a large white handkerchief, but underneath it was a 32 caliber revolver.  A secret service agent lay his hand on the man's shoulder, who's name was Leon Colgolsz, and suggested that he go to the first aid station.  "After I meet the President.  I've been waiting a long time." was Leon's reply, He approached the President and said: "Please excuse the left hand, Mr. President."  McKinley shook his hand and moved on, greeting others in the crowd, and Leon lunged for the President, and as a secret service agent tried to grab him, Leon shot twice in rapid succession.  "I done my duty!" Leon cried out, and the President died eight days later. 

Leon Colgolsz was a twenty-eight year old anarchist. (His last name is pronounced Chol-gots.) He didn't believe in marriage, voting, governments, or religion. He had written in confession that McKinley had been around the country proclaiming prosperity when there was no prosperity to be had for a working man.  McKinley's assassination is said to have marked the end of one era in National Politics, and the beginning of a new one.

The first Newsboys.

In the movies, 'newsboys' are portrayed as young boys, hollering at the top of their little lungs, trying to sell a newspaper for some spare change.  However, the picture Hollywood painted of little loveable boys running around the streets of New York city without a care in the world is very different from the reality of what really happened. 

Real newsboys first appeared in the mid 19th century, when a mass circulation of newspapers were on every street corner of New York. They were orphan children that usually didn't have shoes, coats or hats.  Charles Loring Brace, a reformer in 1866, described the homeless street children's condition in this way:

"I remember one cold night seeing some 10 or a dozen of the little homeless creatures piled together to keep each other warm beneath the stairway of The [New York] Sun office. There used to be a mass of them also at The Atlas office, sleeping in the lobbies, until the printers drove them away by pouring water on them. One winter, an old burnt-out safe lay all the season in Wall Street, which was used as a bedroom by two boys who managed to crawl into the hole that had been burned."

In 1872, a man named James B. McCabe Jr. wrote:

"There are 10,000 children living on the streets of New York.... The newsboys constitute an important division of this army of homeless children. You see them everywhere.... They rend the air and deafen you with their shrill cries. They surround you on the sidewalk and almost force you to buy their papers. They are ragged and dirty. Some have no coats, no shoes and no hat." 

1899 was the year when several thousand newsboys (who made about 30 cents a day) called a strike.  They refused to handle newspapers of William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer.  The New York Tribune quoted what Kid Blink (named for being blind in one eye)  had said to 2,000 strikers:

"Friens and feller workers. Dis is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we'se got to stick together like glue.... We know wot we wants and we'll git it even if we is blind."

"The lot of newsboys began to improve as urban child-welfare practices took root, and publishers began competing for newsies by giving them prizes and trips." -Digital History, 2015.

Theodore Roosevelt Quote

"We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it today means that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would."

The Mother Of Birth Control

"A woman cannot call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother."

In the year of 1916, Margret Sanger, a former nurse, contributed to the changes America started to undergo during the beginning of the Progressive era. She coined the phrase "birth control" and eventually convinced the courts that the Comstock Act did not stop doctors from distributing birth control devices and information. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood, and helped in the making of the birth control pill, which was came into availability in 1960.

Jane Addams Quote

“Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.” 

The life expectancy in 1900

During the year 1900 the life expectancy for White American was just 48 years, and the African Americans only 33.  Today, American's average life span is 74 for a man and 79 for a woman.  If a woman had four children, there was a fifty-fifty chance that one of those children would die before age .

The Philippine American War

At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was involved in a bloody war in the Philippines, fought from February 1899 to June 1902.  The Philippine American war is almost forgotten, it claimed 250,000 lives.  Few People remember the war, it is said that is was a sequel to the Spanish American War in 1889, when Cubans were fighting for their independence.  On February 4th in the year 1899, a fight broke out between the Americans and the Philippines., leaving 59 Americans and 3,000 Filipinos dead.  During an incident of the war, in which General Jacob W. Smith ordered his men to kill anyone over the age of ten on Samar Island, more than 4,000 American Soldiers and the estimated number of 20,000 Filipino fighters died.  About 200,000 Filipino civilians died through the Philippine American war, mostly of disease and hunger.

The Philippines were finally granted their independence in 1946.

The Panama Canal

On December 31st, 1999, The Untied States of America willingly gave up the Panama Canal after 85 years of controlling it.  The Panama Canal was 51 feet long, with $3.1 billion in infrastructure and bases.  The Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  The need of the canal, however, faded with time.  In World War II, the U.S,. stationed 65,000 troops in the Canal to guard it. But, by the end of the 20th century, the Panama Canal was no longer necessary for America's economical and strategic interests.  Many vessels and aircrafts couldn't fit through the Canals' locks.

The Canal's construction started in 1879.

In the next 20 years, it is estimated that from somewhere between 16,000 and 22,000 workers died from yellow fever, malaria, typhoid, snake bites and accidents.  Rain averaging 200 inches per year washed away much of the work.  The Canal was finished in the face of medical, political and technological obstacles.  The Isthmus of Panama was located in Columbia, and when the U.S. proposed to build a canal, they rejected the proposal.

"You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail current jelly to the wall."
-Theodore Rosevelt.

By 1913, the number of workers was 44,000.  25,000 and more worked as canal diggers.  200 trainloads of dirt had to be dug and hauled away every day.  In Decemeber of 1908, 22 tons of dynamite had exploded unexpectedly, killing 23 workers. During the construction, William Gorgas, an army physician, oversaw the building of the Canal, and the draining of the swamps.  His intention was to reduce the number of deaths by getting rid of the mosquitoes, which were the cause of yellow fever and malaria. It took $387 million dollars over the course of 10 years to build the Canal.

"The Panama Canal was a declaration of America's coming of age in the world." -Digital History.