In 1938, the U.S. House of Representatives established the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). With communist and fascist regimes posing threats to the security of European countries, Congress decided to…
Virginia’s House of Burgesses was the first representative assembly in North America. It was created by Governor George Yeardley (c. 1587–1627) under instructions from the Virginia Company of London, which…
In October 1929, the United States stock market crashed. It signaled the beginning of a major economic crisis that would last for years and extend beyond the nation to affect…
J. Edgar Hoover served in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for over fifty years, mostly at the head of the organization as its director. Hoover built the FBI from…
Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as the thirty-first president of the United States in March 1929. Despite the economic prosperity that existed then, the country would be mired in the worst…
Near the end of the nineteenth century, Homestead, Pennsylvania, was a steel mill town with a population of more than ten thousand people. Of those inhabitants, just over thirty-four hundred…
The Homestead Act was passed in Congress on May 20, 1862. It encouraged people to move west to settle new territories by promising free land. With little money but great…
The creation of the Office of Homeland Security, a department in the executive branch of the federal government, occurred less than four weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.…
During World War II (1939–45), the leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), created a program of ethnic cleansing that came to be called the Holocaust. His intention was to purify…
Americans spent the 1930s trying to survive the Great Depression. Many people lost faith in their country’s economic system, and some turned to communism, an economic theory in which the…