The end of the Civil War saw the Confederacy, who had intended to secede from the Union in order to protect their right to own slaves, among other reasons, defeated and in a poor position economically. In order to successfully bring them back into the Union and thoroughly unite the two sides of the country, a rough period of Reconstruction followed. The first thing that needed to happen was to rebuild the South, whose economy was in ruins – eleven major cities were severely damaged by warfare, and healthy farmland and livestock were hard to find. 1
Part of the Union’s goal was to rebuild railroads and repair farmland as much as possible. The South was restored to the Union, though there was a substantial amount of resistance. Blacks were freed from slavery, and had difficulty adapting to life as still-disenfranchised freedsmen. After Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Andrew Johnson had to continue Reconstruction using his idea, while Radical Reconstruction in Grant’s tenure saw more extreme measures taken to give freed blacks rights and expedite the reintegration of the South, which was met with mixed reactions on both sides. Many historians see the Reconstruction as a failed attempt to force reunion between both sides, and it also failed to bring blacks substantial political and social freedom.
In the years that passed after the Civil War, technology began to leap forward with the expansion of the steam engine and the invention of electricity. The Second Industrial Revolution saw a large progression in technology and efficiency of manufacturing, helping to secure America’s place as an economic powerhouse. Thomas Edison developed electricity for commercial and industrial use in the 1880s, and the invention of the automobile also made for more convenient travel and a huge change in the way people traveled and interacted with each other.
The influx of immigrants that started coming in around the early 1900s provided both a new set of ideas and a new workforce for factories that were being set up for faster manufacturing and industry. This also led to the urbanization of America – the clustering of large groups of people around cities. Social issues such as labor and immigration came to a head around this time, with the development of worker’s unions and concerns over growing usurping of the workforce by recent immigrants.
When World War I broke out between the Allied and Axis nations in 1914, America chose to remain neutral. In 1917, however, the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by German forces helped push the United States towards joining Britain and France in the fight against Germany. The influx of American forces to the Allied front during the war was about 10,000 soldiers per day, far too many for the Germans to keep up, given the losses they were experiencing. The American contribution to the war came to a head during the Hundred Days Offensive, the final offensive of the Allies before the war was won in 1918. This series of battles started at the Battle of Amiens and led to the Germans signing an armistice after being soundly defeated on the Western front.
A decade after the American and Allied victory in World War I, America suffered a devastating financial breakdown called the Great Depression. Black Tuesday, which occurred on October 29, 1929, was an enormous collapse of the American stock market. This led to extreme poverty and substantially decreased unemployment. People of all social classes felt the crunch, and so homelessness and starvation was rampant.
In order to fix the Great Depression, a number of initiatives were implemented. Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the New Deal, a series of initiatives meant to stimulate economic recovery. A great number of agencies were created to provide financial security and create opportunities to recover from the Depression, and reform the existing financial system. There were two waves of New Deals, each dealing with their own distinct problems – the First New Deal handled transportation, banking and other programs, while the Second New Deal focused on social security and labor unions, among other things.
Despite all these initiatives, one of the most helpful things for the Americans to help them recover was their entry into World War II. On September 7, 1941, the Axis Japanese forces carried out a sneak attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, without provocation. President Roosevelt declared war on Japan and the Axis forces on December 11, formally declaring their entry into the war and affiliation with the Allied forces. After four more years of war, including a powerful attack on northern France on D-Day (June 6, 1944), American forces, along with the rest of the Allies, managed to defeat the Axis forces. Japan surrendered after the American deployment of two nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while numerous invasions along Western Germany and Berlin by the Soviets and Allies led to the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Following World War II, America was an economic and military superpower. The development of a significant military force and all manner of military technology (including the atomic bomb) led to America’s cementing of its superiority over the majority of the nations of the world. However, the conflicting ideologies presented by the two remaining superpowers – America and the Soviet Union – led to a cold war that would last for decades. There was no formal declaration of war, but espionage and political relations between the two nations would remain confrontational and hostile for the next half century. American paranoia at Soviet and Communist spies led to the McCarthy era of suspicion and blacklisting, where anyone suspected of being a Communist was put on trial, regardless of the validity of the charges.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War, where the Soviets moved missiles into Cuba and assembled launch facilities in preparation for a potential attack on America. On October 28, 1962, then-president John F. Kennedy reached an agreement with Nikita Khruschchev to get the weapons dismantled, promising to refrain from invading Cuba.
The early 1960s saw a more local brand of conflict occur in America, in the form of the Civil Rights Movement. No longer content with what limited freedoms were given to African-Americans throughout the centuries, and fed up with the remaining discrimination, blacks demanded equal treatment and an end to segregation of blacks from whites in schools, businesses and the like. Leaders of this movement included Martin Luther King, Jr., radical Muslin Malcolm X, and other civil rights activists. Eventually, discrimination legislature was introduced, including the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which would prevent institutional discrimination from taking place and cementing the ability of African-Americans to reach political and economic power.
Another important event in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the Vietnam War, an offensive taken by the United States in Vietnam in order to oust the North Vietnamese government, and defeat the Communist-controlled Viet Cong. This war introduced the universal presence of media in conflict, showing people at home the horrors of a war that the American military was not suited to fight. It introduced the effectiveness of guerilla warfare and sneak attacks to the American military, as that was the primary means of offensive for the Viet Cong. On the home front, the institution of the draft and the rise of a hippie, free love counterculture led to significant resistance and disapproval of the war, with many not wanting to go, and seeing the American military’s significant losses as a sign that they should pull out of Vietnam. The Case-Church Amendment of 1973 ended the military involvement in Vietnam, finalizing what many see as the first and most prominent American military defeat in a conflict to date.
In the 1970s and 1980s, up to the 1990s, industrial and manufacturing technology began to improve, to the level where the economy and social politics were becoming increasingly globalized. American maintained a significant economic foothold, becoming the center of computer technology due to the presence of Silicon Valley, an area of California known for high tech companies such as Microsoft and Apple. The 1990s saw the advent of the Internet, which allowed people from all around the world to connect to each other in powerful and significant ways through their computer. Increased networking has since permitted America and other countries to easily communicate and have an immediate impact on economics and politics from the other end of the world.
On September 11, 2001, the most devastating foreign attack on American soil was carried out by members of a Muslim extremist group known as al-Qaida, who hijacked four airplanes and crashed them into various American monuments. Two infamously hit the World Trade Center in New York, causing both towers to collapse and killing almost three thousand people. One hit the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and the fourth was retaken by passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania before it could hit Washington, DC.
This landmark event in American history led to a decidedly different atmosphere and a shifting in priorities towards a War on Terror. The average American began to see themselves as much less secure than they felt they were, since this devastating attack still occurred despite their relative military strength.
Seeking to remove the Al-Qaida threat, Americans staged military interventions in Middle Eastern countries – 2001 saw the invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban government, who was said to be hiding Al-Qaida members, including leader Osama bin-Laden. In 2003, the American government, claiming to have found weapons of mass destruction, then engaged in a military occupation of Iraq, deposing Saddam Hussein’s government and remaining there as an occupying force to rebuild the government and search for WMDs. American forces remain there to this day.
Up to this point, American history has been storied and dramatic, recovering from a devastating Civil War and its subsequently difficult Reconstruction to benefit from an industrial revolution, and the economic benefits of two world wars. It became the economic and political powerhouse that we know it as today as a result of its development of scientific and military technology, and continues to present itself as a world leader, facing the challenges of an economic depression and controversial military decisions.
APPENDIX
When compared to my previous essay, I feel as though this one is much more informed and detailed. I am increasingly familiar with American history, as well as names, dates, places and people involved in these events.
There is not a great deal of narrative change between the two essays; the basic steps are more or less the same. However, I went into more detail in this essay regarding exactly what role the Americans played in both world wars, as I had that information available to me. I had connected the counterculture movement with the Civil Rights Movement in my first essay, when in reality they were two distinct movements, though they occurred at the same time. I linked the counterculture movement instead with Vietnam, which I covered in greater detail in this essay; the Vietnam War, in my mind, was much more concretely linked to the hippie movement, due to its preoccupation with escaping or protesting the war.
The public’s reaction to 9/11 was able to be given a bit more credence, due to the study I found relating American reactions to the 9/11 attacks with a more intense sense of paranoia and depression related to their ability to handle such a terrible attack. My personal opinion is left out of the body of the essay, unlike when I opined on the worsening nature of American policy at the end of the first essay. This lends it slightly more objectivity, though I made some observations in the conclusion of this essay.
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