The speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration at the start of his second term as president.

Smuggler Nation is not the oft told, routinely taught story of America’s emergence as a major nation and a global power, rather we come to see U.S. history as “the story of how smuggling – and the att...

Usually, when we say "American slavery" or the "American slave trade," we mean the American colonies or, later, the United States. But North America was a bit player. From the trade's beginning in the...

The Bonus Army was the popular name of an assemblage of some 43,000 marchers—17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups—who gathered in Washington, D.C., in the spring and summ...

American abolitionist who advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to end slavery. (1800-1859).

In this week's episode of "Scheer Intelligence," Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer interviews Joel Whitney, author and co-founder of Guernica magazine.Whitney's new book, "Finks: How the C.I.A. T...

Free State of Jones may well be the most politically important film about the civil war and its aftermath to appear in a quarter century. Free State of Jones is a proper antidote to identitarian think...

A series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the ...

Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on the United States of America.

American lawyer civil libertarian. (1857-1938).

The Great Dismal Swamp was once a thriving refuge for runaways. Archaeologists are learning more about their free communities.

Hundreds of Denver-area high school students walked out their classrooms in a mass protest against what they call an attempt to censor their history curriculum by refocusing it on topics that promote ...

Our rights and liberties are under ever-increasing attack.

With all our talk about police violence aimed at poor and minority communities, we have yet to talk about the group most likely to be killed by law enforcement: Native Americans. Native American men ...

A collection of photographs by Dorothy Lange, commissioned by the US government to record the process of relocating Japanese-americans into internment camps in 1942, along with accompanying quotations...

Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financiall...

Francis Daniel Pastorius (September 26, 1651-1720) was a German born educator, lawyer, poet, and public official, who is particularly known for his anti-slavery advocacy.

Documenting the history of the 1960s Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.

Freedom Riders were Civil Rights activists who rode on interstate buses into the segregated southern United States.

In the 1750s, the United States of America was not yet a country, but its trouble with immigrants already had begun. People of non-WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) descent were crossing the ocean t...

A soil collection project is commemorating the forgotten victims of lynching and helping to tell their stories.

In the wake of recent American mass killings, the author reminds us of mass murders of indigenous people in American history.

A nuclear weapons command exercise by NATO in November 1983 prompted fear in the leadership of the Soviet Union that the maneuvers were a cover for a nuclear surprise attack by the United States, trig...

A JOYLESS IRONY of our time is that just as capitalism seemed all-triumphant and the sirens of neoliberalism had declared history to be at an end, the crisis rolling out of Asia has brought the self-r...

The first slaves imported into the American colonies were 100 White children. They arrived during Easter, 1619, four months before the arrival of a the first shipment of Black slaves. Mainstream histo...

Were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965.

President of the United States during the American Civil War. (1809-1865).

Great Emancipator or unreconstructed racist? Defender of civil liberties or subverter of the Constitution? Each generation evokes a different Lincoln. But who was he?

The site of forced school desegregation during the American Civil Rights Movement.

In 1764, Americans thought of themselves as British subjects of King George III. By 1788, they would, by their own decisions and actions, have made themselves the free citizens of a new republic forge...

One hundred and fifty years ago North America saw the start of a revolutionary war fought between rival systems and opposing political ideologies. Neil Faulkner looks at The American Civil War.

Although the 'American Dream' became a reality for millions in the 1920s, it was built on shaky grounds - the huge speculative bubble that was building up on Wall Street was waiting to collapse

Interview with historian Gar Alperovitz. Alperovitz has revealed for the first time the key role he and a handful of other activists played in helping whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leak to journalists...

The My Lai Massacre was the mass murder conducted by a unit of the U.S. Army on March 16, 1968 of 347–504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were wo...

The "nadir of American race relations" refers to the period in United States history from the end of Reconstruction through the early 20th century, when racism is deemed to have been worse than in any...

Nativism favors the interests of certain established inhabitants of an area or nation as compared to claims of newcomers or immigrants. It may also include the re-establishment or perpetuation of such...

The New Deal was a series of economic programs passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, from 1933 to 1938. The programs were resp...

John Bordne, a resident of Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, had to keep a personal history to himself for more than five decades. Only recently has the US Air Force given him permission to tell the tale, whic...

The Security State has its own language: Securityspeak. Like Newspeak, the ideologically refashioned successor to English in Orwell’s “1984,” Securityspeak is designed to obscure meaning and conceal t...

A selection of materials from the early years of radical popular culture in the United States, showing how different peoples, over several generations, sought to create out of their own resources a be...

This issue of Other Voices looks at why so many people deny or ignore the very real and very near threat of climate change. We also look into the ways on how NGOs tame and undermine grassroots movemen...

Topic of the week is the Arms Trade. Featured resources include The No-Nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade, an article on Israel's War Business, and the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade. A new feature ...

Ukraine is spotlighted in this issue of Other Voices, with several articles on the events of the past year, from the overthrow of the government, to the rise of the far right, the armed conflict in th...

In this issue, we look at the relentless persistence of people challenging injustice and entrenched power in places around the world, including Palestine, Korea, China, Canada, and the United States. ...

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War.

Author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary. (1737-1809).

Howard Zinn attempts to present the history of the United States through the perspectives of common people rather than political and economic elites.

In the history of the United States, Reconstruction Era has two uses; the first covers the entire nation in the period 1865-1877 following the Civil War; the second one, used in this article, covers t...

The Red Shirts or Redshirts of the Southern United States were paramilitary groups in the 19th century, active primarily after the formal Reconstruction era of the United States. They first arose in M...

Red Summer describes the bloody race riots that occurred in the United States during the summer and early autumn of 1919. In most instances, whites attacked African Americans in more than two dozen Am...

Riding the rail (also called running out of town on a rail) was a punishment in Colonial America in which a man (rarely a woman) was made to straddle a fence rail (usually the triangular split-rail ra...

The 'Reconstruction Amendments” — the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution — are targeted in many of the Tea Party and far-right Republican campaigns against the rights of ...

The Sedition Act of 1918 was an Act of the United States Congress signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on May 16, 1918. It forbade the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language...

Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.

During the late 19th century, blacks and whites in the South lived closer together than they do today.

Attitudes to a variety of issues changed, sometimes radically, throughout the decade. The urge to 'find oneself' the activsm of the 1960's and the quest for autonomy were characterised by the changes ...

A discussion with reknowned historian Bernard Bailyn whose recent book "The Barbarous Years" examines a particularly violent period of America's early history which has since been almost erased.

Slavery in the United States was a form of unfree labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776, and continued mo...

A review of Edward E. Baptist’s examination of slavery, presented in an entirely new way, extensively through the voices of the slaves themselves.

Celebrating SNCC's legacy.

The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door took place at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, in a symbolic attempt to keep his inaugural pr...

One of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

Tarring and feathering is a physical punishment, used to enforce unofficial justice.

A Union League is one of a number of organizations established starting in 1862, during the American Civil War to promote loyalty to the Union side and the policies of Abraham Lincoln.

Donald Trump is at home in the underworld. Tom Robbins writes that the de facto GOP nominee "has encountered a steady stream of mob-tainted offers that he apparently couldn't refuse" in his decades in...

A leading Civil War historian challenges the new orthodoxy about how slavery ended in America.

The Washington Post on October 25, 2015 published an important story based on a recently-published U.S. intelligence review from 1990 that confirmed Soviet leaders in 1983 believed the Reagan administ...

An American radical left organization.

The White League was a white paramilitary group started in 1874 that operated to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and political organizing. Its first chapter in Grant...

American historian, political scientist, social critic, activist and playwright. (1922-2010).