Yale’s “America at 250: A History”
Rob James
December 23, 2025
Yale University offered this past semester a free course for students and community members surveying all of United States history in twenty-six lectures plus accompanying podcasts, and made the lectures and podcasts available online. Coinciding as the course does with our 250th anniversary on the horizon, I decided on my weekends to wade into the lectures (if not the reading required of the enrollees). I used to know some parts of this, and I am sure I never knew other parts. The lectures understandably gave short shrift to the wars, so I plan to link to my separate coverage of five of the larger conflicts. I hope my notes are useful to others who feel some rust in their historical joints.
INTRODUCTION (tutti)
1. The Road to 250
Course Syllabus: “This one-time-only course examines U.S. history from 1776 to the present, in advance of the nation’s semiquincentennial (or 250th birthday) in 2026. Taught jointly by Professors Joanne Freeman, David Blight, and Beverly Gage, the course emphasizes the history of the nation-state and the contested nature of American national identity. The class explores U.S. political history broadly conceived–not just as a realm of presidents and elections and wars (though there will be plenty of those) but as a conversation across time between citizens about what the United States is, was, and was meant to be. It proceeds from the premise that the American Revolution was the first but not the last radical act of national reimagining in U.S. history.”
Robert Penn Warren: “History is what you cannot resign from.” Herodotus: history is both a story and the reason why. James Baldwin: History is carried within us.
PART 1: THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT (Joanne Freeman)
2. Revolutionary (and Not-So-Revolutionary) Beginnings
Freeman’s three free history tips: (a) everything is contingent, could have turned out differently; (b) words change meaning over time and across people—take “democracy” (for Alexander Hamilton a pejorative equivalent to chaos; even Thomas Jefferson referred not to democracy but to a “democratical Republic”); (c) these are humans making choices and experiments, humans with all their foibles, weaknesses and strengths.
Colonists started simply by wanting rights as British subjects. Paul Revere did not shout “The British are coming”—in 1775 they were all British!—he shouted, “The regulars are coming.” The French and Indian War (1754-1763) pitted Britain and Prussia against France and Austria in a global conflict soon known as the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). (The shifting alliances in eighteenth century wars are dizzying—Nine Years’ War (King William’s War in America, or War of the Grand Alliance) 1688-1697 Britain and the others in a “grand alliance” against France, War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War in America) 1702-1713 France against the Holy Roman Empire, Britain and the Netherlands, War of the Austrian Succession (King George’s War in America or War of Jenkins’ Ear) 1744-1748 France and Prussia against Britain, the Netherlands and Austria itself, under Maria Theresa! No wonder I was confused.)
Britain expended a lot of money and personnel trying to secure its North American colonies and the rest of its newfound empire. While doing so, the British observed that the colonists were smuggling goods, avoiding duties on import. Therefore, they sought more tax revenues and sought to impose them further down the value chain. The 1765 Stamp Act was the first levied on easily seen household items. The colonists didn’t object specifically to “taxation without representation” (a cry dating to the English Civil War of the 1600s) so much as they objected to regulation of anything without representation. The actual colonial tax burdens were rather small in comparison with those imposed elsewhere, but the point was they had not been approved by the colonies (and unlike in the Caribbean the American colonial population did not feel close to the British elites). The several colonies and their militias worked together during the war and now had in Freeman’s felicitous phrase “the inkling of a we.”
The 1765 Stamp Act spurred formation of a Stamp Act Congress instigated by Samuel Adams. That tax was repealed after boycotts, but the repeal was accompanied by a Declaratory Act reserving to Parliament the right to make colonial impositions “in all cases whatsoever,” a phrase that stuck in the craw of Americans and eventually showed up in the Declaration of Independence.
It is unclear how democratic or even how independent colonists initially wanted to be. The populace divided among Rebels/Patriots, Loyalists/Tories, and those in between (including Native Americans and blacks) who would evaluate their opportunities.
The British troops in Boston seized colonial arms in Charlestown and in April 1775 rowed across the harbor (hence “by sea”) to take an arms depot in Concord. Midway at Lexington (where John Adams and John Hancock had holed up), British soldiers first killed British subjects. John Adams: the die is cast, the colonies are set on fire. In July 1775, the second Continental Congress extended the Olive Branch. George III said that he did not even read it and proclaimed Massachusetts to be in rebellion.
3. Declaring Independence
The Declaration of Independence was a document of elites, but “declaring independence” was a process, a set of actions engaged in by many. Independence was in the air as early as May 1775, when John Adams prepared a “to do” list for a new country and its government. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (January 1776) was in series a refutation of objections to rebellion, a demonstration of the necessity of rebellion, and finally and most audaciously an attack not only on Britain’s King and Parliament but on monarchies generally. The tract inspired others to speak of independence rather than restoration of rights as British subjects. (Paine was praised for his plain prose, what Jefferson inappositely called his “perspicuity of expression”!)
Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence based on other documents but sought to exhibit the current American mindset (to use an ananchronism). The preamble is now famous because its declaration that “all men are created equal” entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has been invoked by blacks, women, and other marginalized populations over the centuries, in America and beyond. But at the time the strength of the Declaration resided in the rhythmical recital of grievances. The King had “un-kinged himself.” His tyranny showed in his having imposed regulations without representation, controlling judges, maintaining standing armies in their midst, nullifying laws, and exalting military over civil authority. (No 2025 comment.) For both Paine and Jefferson, the enemy was now not Parliament but the King himself, or all monarchs.
The historian Pauline Meier identifies some ninety other lower-cased “declarations of independence” by cities and states. The Massachusetts leaders asked towns for such supportive declarations, while Maryland towns pressed their declarations upon their wavering representatives. In May 1776, the Continental Congress asked colonies (now states) to form their own governments. The principle was generally to establish not a “democracty” but “a republic”; this vague term suggested a polity based in some way on the public will, with some form of representation. (The electorate in any event was limited to white males with property, hardly our current idea of a democracy.)
There was some question of ripeness: should Congress declare independent only when it had the means to implement it? On the other hand, would any foreign powers join the conflict if the Americans were not at least calling themselves independent? A drafting committee was formed of Jefferson, Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingstone of New York. Adams encouraged Jefferson to write it (see the lyrics in the Broadway show and movie 1776). Jefferson’s draft chastised the King for supporting slavery, but the “deeply conflicted” Virginian also lambasted him for freeing or threatening to free slaves. The internally inconsistent clause was deleted during debate anyway, and like many other times in U.S. history, the slavery issue can was kicked down the road. The Declaration was approved July 2 and formally signed by John Hancock and the congress secretary July 4, 1776, later by the others.
Paine’s American Crisis No. 1 (“these are the times that try men’s souls,” December 1776). Declaring independence was a document, an event, and a process. It was also an act of treason.
Freeman necessarily gives short shrift to the Revolutionary War itself. I refer to my separate coverage of the events of that conflict.
4. What Kind of Union?
Jefferson said if the states were to have a bad government afterwards, they might as well have lived under the existing bad government and saved themselves the bloodshed. The Continental Congress drafted Articles of Confederation. They featured no executive or judiciary, only a unicameral legislature selected by state legislatures, with one state one vote. We criticize them today, but that structure was natural in 1776, consistent with the prevailing general fear of executive authority. New state governments exhibited much experimentation, but generally saw stronger lower legislative houses and weaker executives and upper houses.
The Articles referred to “the United States of … [the various states],” a “firm league of friendship,” more of a United Nations than a country. The central government had limited specific delegations. Congress could pass no tax without approval of all the states, could only request troops, and could only execute laws via committees. But Congress could exclusively conduct diplomacy exclusively. In 1777 the Saratoga victory and the opportunity for French diplomacy led to the Articles going into final form, but still they were not approved until 1778 and not ratified until 1781.
Sectional resentments were already brewing. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina dreaded “the cunning Northerners,” and his allies called for young Southerners to serve as clerks in order to succeed to the higher positions. A Pennsylvanian, on the other hand, questioned why 10,000 should have the same vote as 40,000. Smaller states wanted to sell the western lands, while larger states like New York and North Carolina wanted to keep them.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in the Federalist essays attacked the Articles as part of their campaign in support of the new Constitution. It is hindsight for us to dismiss the Articles in their entirety. But faults they had. George Washington and those in his camp (like Hamilton, Madison and Jay) were frustrated by Congress’s inability to summon men, materials and money. Money men were frustrated by its inability to tax. It could not regulate interstate or foreign affairs effectively. The British did not honor their 1783 commitment to depart their western forts, and banned the export of machine tools to America, frustrating the development of domestic manufacture. New York and New Hampshire fought with Vermont over contested territories; in fact, Vermont declared independence in 1777 with Ethan Allen even declaring he would separately entreat with Britain. The western portion of North Carolina sought to secede as the state of Franklin in 1784. In all of these crises, Congress was of no use.
In 1786 Daniel Shays of Massachusetts fomented a protest by farmers against seizures of land or crops for nonpayment of taxes and debts. When their protests were ignored, 1100 of them marched on Boston. Congress called for 800 militia, but the states declined. Wealthy citizens funded their own private army to disperse them; they went guerrilla for a while and dissipated by 1787 (Shays of course went to Vermont!). The Newburgh, New York protest by officers demanding payment of pensions was stopped only by Washington coming before them personally and unfolding his spectacles to the tears of many. A Pennsylvania protest briefly led Congress to relocate.
In Federalist 21, Hamilton asked: what if Shays had been a better general? Was there no “United States” thing except in wartime?
5. Framing a Nation: The Constitution
After September 11, 2001, Freeman wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that in 1776 Americans had a sense of vulnerability, fragility, and xenophobia. We felt all of those with 9/11. What has sustained us in America through times of crisis is process. Despite disagreement and controversy, we can depend on process to see us through.
It is easier to protest something than to visualize what you affirmatively want, and even harder to get other people to agree with your vision. The debate on reforming the Articles centered on the proper allocation, placement and restriction of power. Anti-Federalists did exist and made eloquent arguments warning against centralized power. But they fatefully stayed away from the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, leading to a sense of false consensus.
Twelve states (all but Rhode Island) met May to September 1787. There were 55 delegates, mostly lawyers, with experience in government but not professional “politicians,” which was still a pejorative and still can be to this day. Hamilton thought the proceedings would be secret, but they were often leaked (and Madison famously kept careful notes). The Virginia Plan (drafted by Madison but put in the mouth of the more generally popular Edmund Randolph) called for “amending” the Articles; a bicameral legislature with the lower house elected by populations and the upper house selected by the lower house; an “executive” (one man or more? with what tenure?); and a judiciary. The delegates soon agreed that the executive should be a single President, secure in their belief that “shame” would restrain anyone from doing anything wrong or abusing the office!
The New Jersey Plan from smaller states called for one house, one state one vote, with Congress appointing the president. Concerned about where this was headed, Hamilton launched into a six-hour speech calling for state governors to be appointed by the federal government for life, a Senate to be elected for life, and for the president to have a veto. It was “praised by everyone and accepted by no one.” How would public opinion be reflected and respected? The solution was two-, four- and six-year terms for Representatives, the President and Senators respectively. The great issue of slavery boiled down to representation and the famous 3/5 compromise, a pause on regulating the slave trade for twenty years, and a call for delivering up persons held to service in another state.
At this point the Great or Connecticut Compromise was proposed: a legislature consisting of the Senate selected by state legislatures and the House elected by populations, a judiciary, and a strong executive, with all kinds of checks and balances among those three branches. The Constitution document was approved September 1787 and the ratification process began. The Federalist essays were focused on New York but had impacts beyond. By June 1788 New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify and the Constitution came into effect. The Bill of Rights came in during the ratification process was finally given effect in 1791.
The Constitution was a pact that was “oath-able,” something one can swear allegiance to. And most importantly, it focused on process. Process served us well in the 1790s, the 1850s, the 1960s, and the 2020s we hope.
Hamilton wrote in Federalist 1: “[I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” The alternative to process is “might makes right,” which is no government at all.
6. Republican Precedents and Presidents: The Placement of Power
The 1790s witnessed struggles over the extent of federal power, executive authority, and the role of citizens. Everything was scrutinized. Should the Senate stand or sit for the President? When Washington was asked what level of china service should adorn his table, he cautiously replied “the medium.” He wore a plain coat with fancy buttons, sometimes taking a carriage and sometimes walking through the mud. In Pennsylvania he rotated his slaves to avoid its six-month residency emancipation law.
Those who became Federalists believed the citizenry should vote for their leaders and then stay away from politics until the end of the terms. Those who became Democrats favored engagement of the population throughout. A crisis emerged with the Jay Treaty, which proto-Democrats considered too favorable to the British. At a New York protest Hamilton told the angry crowd not to worry about a treaty, that was the government’s business. He was hit on the head by a rock, and characteristically challenged several people to duels. Jefferson spoke proudly of his victory in “the revolution of 1800,” but Adams retorted that he wasn’t all that different from Aaron Burr. Well, was 1800 a revolution or not? Hamilton is not as bad as many previously thought, and (despite the Broadway musical) not as good as many currently think.
7. What Kind of Nation? Democracy, Hamilton, Jefferson, and More
Freeman said there was a spectrum, but like everyone else she proceeded to describe the poles. Hamilton favored manufacturing, mercantile interests, Britain, and centralized government. Jefferson opposed the “money men” and favored agrarianism, France, and state-level government. Foreign and domestic affairs were enmeshed—the fledgling US was a pawn between Britain and France. The Whiskey Tax Rebellion was subdued in 1794 by President George Washington (1) (1789-1796) and “General Hamilton,” and they blamed the Democrats anyway.
1792 alliances were not yet parties—though one might be a Hamilton man or a Jefferson man. After the French interfered with US ships in the Caribbean, the US delegation (John Marshall, Eldridge Gerry and Thomas Pinckney) met Talleyrand’s agents X, Y and Z, and were told that a bribe was a precondition of any negotiation. The Federalists played up the scandal. President John Adams (2) (1797-1800) was even cheered! He proclaimed a “quasi war” with the French, supporting the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789, chiefly weaponized against the Democratic press (four out of their five largest newspapers). President Thomas Jefferson (3) (1801-1808) called this Federalist period “the reign of witches” but urged supporters to wait rather than secede.
The democratic strategy was to move to state level initiative. Madison and Jefferson formulated the principle of “interposition” in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, reserving to states whether Congressional acts should be given respect in their jurisdictions. Neither passed, but they were the wave of the future. Hamilton sees the tide is turning against federal extremism. Parties were emerging; they were at this time considered divisive—instead, all should meet together for the public good, rather than just with your own cohort.
In the 1796 and 1800 elections, everyone voted for two candidates without specifying which one was to be president or vice president. This led to Adams being President and his foe Jefferson being Vice President in 1796. It was worse in 1800, where there was a tie between the two Democrats Jefferson and Aaron Burr and Burr refused to step aside. The contest was thrown into the House, where the vote was state by state, one state one vote. It came down to Federalists trying to defeat Jefferson—some would even nullify the election, retaining Adams pro tempore. Thirty-six ballots were tallied over six days; Virginia and Pennsylvania started to stockpile guns; Jefferson predicted “resistance.” Finally, the Federalist elector from tiny Delaware deemed dissolution of the Union the worse evil and led others in abstaining so that Jefferson was elected. This election was the fall of the Federalists at the national level, though they continued in force in states like Connecticut.
[Freeman skips over President James Madison (4) (1809-1816) and President James Monroe (5) (1817-1824). The War of 1812 (“Mr. Madison’s War”) was inspired by ongoing British intrigue on the continent; despite the burning of Washington, DC, Americans took some satisfaction (if not much return) from the survival of Fort McHenry (“The Star-Spangled Banner”) and the Battles of Lake Erie (Oliver Hazard Perry’s flag “DONT GIVE UP THE SHIP” no apostrophe) and New Orleans (Andrew Jackson). The Monroe Doctrine warned European powers to stay away from the Americas.]
Alexis de Tocqueville toured America for nine months in 1831 with his companion Gustave Beaumont (the most French-companiony name 1 can imagine), ostensibly to study prisons. In 1838 and 1839 he published Democracy in America. He criticized America for its “British rust,” and for its money-grubbing, self-interested, boring citizenry. But he praised Americans for their civic associations, their mobility, their drive, and their productivity. South of the Ohio River, he was horrified by the treatment of slaves, and everywhere he noted the maltreatment of Native Americans. He predicted not so much a civil war between North and South as a three-way racial war. Americans are trapped in habits of the heart, he said. Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and other visitors came to see democracy in America in action, and they were usually disappointed to see what Americans were like.
8. Jacksonian “Democracy”
The Age of Jackson is among other things the start of true party politics. President Andrew Jackson (7) (1829-1836) first achieved fame in the Battle of New Orleans. In 1824 he was a new kind of candidate after the founders Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. The election pitted old hands President John Quincy Adams (6) (1825-1828) and Henry Clay against the “new man” Jackson. He had never been abroad and did not speak a foreign language; Jefferson distrusted his irrational passions, though they may have been intentional and controlled after all. JQ Adams was considered effete, an author not an actor; he won the Electoral College though Jackson won the popular vote.
In the ensuing years Jackson got help from President Martin Van Buren (8) (1837-1840), who really did form the Democratic Party based in New York. Van Buren wrote even in 1867 that national parties worked good by transcending regional differences. Conversely, those opposed to Jackson became the Whigs. John Adams and John Quincy Adams are the first two one-termers in early American politics. Andrew Jackson had no campaign platform, just opposing the deep state and acting for the common man. After Jackson’s 1828 victory his 1829 inauguration saw 12,000 people swarm all over the presidential mansion, breaking or stealing china.
Jackson instituted rotation in civil offices to root out the ensconced Federalists, which was good for diversity, but which led to the corruptibility of the spoils system. He thought the President his own judge of the constitutionality of an act, not deferring to the Supreme Court. When that court said Georgia could not regulate Indian tribes (Worcester v. Georgia), Jackson rejected the decision (though he did not actually make the “Mr. Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” quip). When Congress approved rechartering the Bank of the United States, he vetoed it.
Jackson endorsed the 1830 Indian Removal Act forcibly relocating Native Americans from east of the Mississippi, holding that so-called “treaties” with tribes were absurd. In 1831, Cherokees established their own government, but when gold was discovered in Georgia and white settlers wanted in, Georgia and (despite the Supreme Court) Jackson opposed them. (The later 1838 Cherokee “Trail of Tears” left a quarter to half the exiles dead.)
What do we learn from the Age of Jackson? (a) violent men can do very well in a violent time; (b) the “democracy” concept is complex, since greater opportunity for white settlers could bring with it brutal oppression for Native Americans; and (c) territorial expansion disturbs a fragile status quo and creates political costs and risks, and was the immediate catalyst for the crisis leading to the Civil War. Jackson was truly a man of his time, and perhaps our own.
9. Whose America? Protest and Reform
The Industrial Revolution was in full flower in 1800s America. Population growth meant that even the House of Representatives needed a new physical house. It led to industrial growth, canals, railroads, telegraphs, refineries and factories; it also led to industrial overbuilding, panics, unemployment, and increases in and resistance to immigration. The revolution had a decidedly northern tilt, although the Southern “empire of cotton” and western expansion were also intertwined and affected. Both elite investors and western farmers applauded the state-financed Erie Canal (1817-1825). Free journeymen transformed into wage workers subject to division of labor, cogs in a machine. Railroads went from 400 localized lines without standard gauge in the 1840s to great integrated combines; with them came a concern with uniform time, thus spurring watches, clocks, and time zones.
With the steam-powered printing press daily newspapers were available. People could no longer say one thing in one place and a contrary thing in another place without its being covered, even comments or acts in the halls of Congress. With the telegraph, Whigs in Washington could follow events in real time at their Baltimore convention. Akin to William Gibson’s line that “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed,” it was a time when a con man could come into town and take advantage of others’ lack of communication.
In such times of great change, some people seek stability in the form of religion, utopias, and reforms. As for religion, there was a characteristically American reaction to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination; salvation should be a matter of personal will for anyone. The Second Great Awakening, exemplified by the revivals across the Burned-Over District in northern New York, made faith a matter of an individual’s heart not a hierarchical dictate. Methodist circuit riders and Presbyterian revival tents were successful.
As for utopias, there were the New Harmony commune of Robert Owen and enthusiasts for diet-driven celibacy like Graham and Kellogg. And as for reform, the temperance movement was led by women and persons of color, and political support for abolition was expanding through the North.
Freeman concludes her lectures by stressing to students young and old that their views matter, and therefore their understanding of history matters.
PART 2: AMERICAN DISUNION (David Blight)
10. The Mexican War and its Aftermath: Compromise or Armistice
Blight says an old Irish war cry was to kill the enemy but “spare the poets”—in times of crisis we need bards to tell of our time and deeds. Stephen Foster showcases the broad nineteenth-century American love of black (and blackface) minstrel music. Herman Melville wrote the massive meditation on obsession Moby-Dick, and the slave-ship novella Benito Cereno. Walt Whitman “is all he needs,” referring to Blight himself or Whitman himself. Ralph Waldo Emerson called Whitman a combination of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald. Emily Dickinson explored the universe and herself from her room in Amherst. “We need poetry so we don’t die of reality.”
The issue of slavery summoned an explosive combinations of forces--western expansion, free soil and free labor competing against the slave economy, federalism against states’ rights, a sense of the future versus a sense of the past, other sectional differences, and principled abolitionism and principled support of a way of life that could not be bargained one against another. Americans had been compromising for decades but in the 1850s finally ran out of ways to compromise.
At the end of Van Buren’s single term, the two Whig Presidents William Henry Harrison (9) (1841) and John Tyler (10) (1841-1844) served; Tyler annexed Texas. Democratic President James K. Polk (11) (1845-1849) defeated Henry Clay by winning New York, thanks for a 3% spoiler vote for the Liberty Party, for which Abraham Lincoln never forgave those single-subject abolitionists. “Young Hickory” Polk had General (later Democratic President) Zachary Taylor (12) (1849-1850) stationed at Matamoros below the Nueces River that Mexico considered the Texas border. In response, Mexico sent military past the Rio Grande, the Americans’ claimed border. Polk announced to Congress that the country was already at war. Needing to “support the troops,” Congress was impelled to “recognize” the war. Emerson said we might conquer Mexico, but Mexico will poison us. The war was bloody, with 13,000 US and 50,000 Mexicans dying. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) gave the US what are now Texas, California, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and beyond. Abraham Lincoln in his one term in Congress called it “Mr. Polk’s war,” a fever dream.
The California gold rush began in earnest in 1849, leading to demands for its admission as a state. That was the start of the high-stakes 1850s, with President Millard Fillmore (13) (1850-1853), the last Whig, and Democratic President Franklin Pierce (14) (1853-1856) more or less looking on.
11. The Road to Disunion: Politics, Dred Scott, and the Crisis of the 1850s
The Southern politicians knew that unless slavery expanded in the West it would be eventually contained and made extinct by the increase of Senate votes elsewhere. The old line was represented by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, admitting Missouri to the Union as a slave state but otherwise preventing slavery north of the “36 30” line atop the Texas-Oklahoma border. David Wilmot, who was a Pennsylvania Democrat but who opposed the Mexican War, started introducing into bills a proviso that no land gained from Mexico could ever have slavery. His proviso would pass the House frequently, but not the Senate. A suggested compromise approach was that the question whether to admit slavery could be resolved by “popular sovereignty” votes. But when would the vote be taken—before or after new pro-slavery and anti-slavery populations arrive?
Senators Henry Clay of Kentucky, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina were the great debaters on western expansion and slavery. The Great Compromise of 1850 was adopted: California was admitted as a free state; the slave trade (but not slavery) was abolished in the District of Columbia; the Texas border was moved back and space was left for a New Mexico territory and a Utah territory to have possible slavery through popular sovereignty; and a federal fugitive slave act was enacted, enforced by federal magistrates who were monetarily incentivized to return slaves. A young Senator Stephen Douglas, expert in parliamentary procedure, craftily avoided individual votes and drove an up-or-down vote on the entire package. “It was an armistice, not a compromise.”
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was an express repeal of the Missouri Compromise, because it allowed popular sovereignty north of the line in question. The Republican Party emerged, stitching together a motley crew of the old Whigs, some of the Northern Democrats, fervent abolitionists, and xenophobic Know-Nothings. One could oppose slavery while being very racist—the concern of many was that the slave economy would out-compete and deprive opportunities for white settlers. “Free soil free labor” coexisted with either concern, or lack of concern, for the slaves or blacks themselves.
Early in the administration of Democratic President James Buchanan (15) (1857-1860), Chief Justice Roger Taney issued the Dred Scott decision. Scott had accompanied his army physician master to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory (what is now Minnesota) and returned to Missouri. There he was supported by “free soil free labor” advocates. The case saw many years, successes and reversals. The 7-2 Supreme Court decision was devastating: (a) blacks can never be United States citizens and (b) slavery can never be banned anywhere, so the Missouri compromise unconstitutionally prevented slavery in territories north of the line. The South supported the decision while the North denounced it. (Stephen Douglas tried to finesse it, saying that it was merely hypothetical since there were no slaves in the West.) The Dred Scott decision energized the Republican Party. There was no middle ground.
12. Two Constitutions, Secession and War, 1860-1862
1857, the year of Dred Scott, also saw a global economic crash occasioned by a glut of Russian wheat exports; for its ill effects the North blamed the South and the South blamed the North. Republican President Abraham Lincoln (16) (1861-1865) launched his campaign for Illinois Senate with his “house divided” speech in Springfield. There he called for the “ultimate extinction” of the slave power conspiracy, naming as conspirators “Stephen [Douglas], Franklin [Pierce], Roger [Taney], and James [Buchanan].” The seven debates with Douglas were well attended and reported on. At Freeport, Douglas fatefully said he would accept popular sovereignty votes against slavery, contrary to the Dred Scott decision. He belittled Frederick Douglass in one crowd by calling him “Fred” (to a similar slight Douglass coldly replied “Madam, it is Frederick”). They covered all the issues of the day—popular sovereignty, western expansion, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas won in the Illinois legislature 54 to 46, but Lincoln’s national reputation had been made.
John Brown was the man the South had always feared would appear; “he knew how to die” (Steven Vincent Benét). In bloody Kansas 1854 he and followers killed four men with swords. At Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859 his eighteen men tried to take over a federal armory, seeking to foment a slave rebellion. He was tried and hanged; “martyrs are made not born.”
The 1860 election dissolved into a four-way contest among the Northern Democrats of Douglas and the Southern Democrats of John Breckenridge (who split with Douglas over his Freeport endorsement of popular sovereignty after Dred Scott), the Republicans of Lincoln (considered more moderate at that point than the staunch abolitionist William Seward) and the Constitutional Union of Bell, a party that simply wanted to defer the whole subject. After Lincoln was elected but before he was inaugurated, seven states seceded, with SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, LA and TX forming the Confederate States of America headed by Jefferson Davis as president and Alexander B. Stephens as vice president. Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address loftily appealed to the “mystic chords of memory,” extended the “olive branch,” and invoked “the better angels of our nature.” When he sought to resupply Fort Sumter in the Charleston, SC harbor, it was fired upon. Four more states (VA, NC, TN, AK) joined the Confederacy (though crucially not the other “border” or slave states DE, MD, KY and MO, with WV also calving off in 1863). The better angels were not in control.
13. Union Victory, Confederate Defeat, and Emancipation
“Spare the poets.” Whitman’s enthusiasm in “Beat, Beat, Drum” at the outset of the war, markedly changed in his midwar “The Wound-Dresser.” Melville: War is death of the young, that is what war is. Emerson: War is the realist.
The Republicans and the North described their aspiration in very abstract terms: they were fighting for “the Republic,” “the flag,” “the Union.” Southerners were more concrete: they saw the Union not as an asset but as an existential threat to their system of slavery and their broader way of life; they clothed their grievances in the language of the rebels of 1776. (Others, like Stephen Douglas of IL and Andrew Johnson of TN, were against secession though not for abolition of slavery.)
The South had the military advantages of interior lines and many superior officers; the North had everything else. The Anaconda blockade of Southern ports was a sieve in 1861, but was starting to take effect by 1863 and worked in 1864 and 1865. The North had huge advantages in population, finance and manufacturing. The war itself further turned the North into an international industrial giant. Interestingly, its complex party system was an asset not a liability, as it required more political debate and attention to consensus than did the one-party Confederate monolith.
Blight barely describes the war itself, showing one simple map of the front line moving seemingly inexorably and inevitably in 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865. The progress of the war was neither inexorable nor inevitable. I refer to my separate coverage of the Civil War Period.
The purpose of the war changed from restoration of the Union to spurring a new birth of freedom. Lincoln began only wanting to contain slavery to the South (though he did speak of the system’s “ultimate extinction” in 1858 Springfield). As the war intensified (and perhaps for foreign policy concerns) he transformed it into a moral quest for emancipation. Lincoln was a “beautiful paradox” (Carl Sandburg), “an inconsistent large man” (W.E.B. Du Bois).
Four-fifths of the blacks in the Union army were from the South, not the North as typified by the Massachusetts 54th soldiers seen in the movie Glory. The Emancipation Proclamation (preliminary June 1862, final January 1863) only freed slaves in rebel hands; the President felt that was the limit of his executive and federal power. The 1864 election was up for grabs early on, with even some Republicans seeking to unseat Lincoln and negotiate a peace. The victories at Mobile Bay (Farragut’s “damn the torpedoes” [mines]) in August and at Atlanta in September sealed his reelection. Douglass thereafter traveled to the newly free state of Maryland, where he had previously been enslaved, and at a Baltimore pulpit proclaimed “I am Noah’s dove.”
14. Reconstruction: Andrew Johnson vs. the Radical Republicans
Lincoln delivered a still amazing Second Inaugural Address. The middle is a terrifying meditation on the inscrutability of retributive justice. One side would accept war; the other would foment war; and so the war came. An eighth of the population was black slaves in one part of the country, a “peculiar interest” that was “somehow” the cause of the war. The parties made incompatible prayers to the same God, who has His own purposes. We might wish that the war would quickly end, but it may be that every drop of blood drawn with the lash must be paid for by one drop drawn with the sword. The conclusion speaks of binding up the nation’s wounds, but there is no offer of a pragmatic “olive branch” compromise any more.
Lincoln was assassinated April 14, 1865, just two days after the surrender at Appomattox Court House. Melville: “they killed him in his kindness.” Whitman’s “When lilacs last” and “O Captain! My Captain.” The prose of postwar America commingled realism and sentimentalism.
Secretary of State Seward was also stabbed and assaults were made on the vice president and others, so John Wilkes Booth really was part of a conspiracy to decapitate the federal government. Lincoln had replaced the New Hampshireman Hannibal Hamlin as VP with the only senator from a seceded state (TN) who had stayed in the Senate—a man who was pro-slavery but anti-secession. Democratic President Andrew Johnson (17) (1865-1868) battled the Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. The question was how would the South be handled postwar. Lincoln’s idea was a 10% loyalty-oath plan, only disenfranchising a few senior Confederate leaders, with rapid and lenient treatment leading to re-recognition of the Southern states by action of the President (in Lincoln’s legal mind since secession was unconstitutional, no state had ever actually technically seceded). He was seeking to avoid resentments leading to Civil War 2.0. In contrast, the Radical Republicans called for the Wade-Davis Act, which would disenfranchise many, even stripping them of citizenship, and launching a long and arduous process toward re-admission by Congress, not by the President.
America was in ruins! Now we have ruins just like Greece and Rome, we are a real civilization. The architect of many of those ruins, William Tecumseh Sherman, regarded the South as a conquered province. He did not stay to listen to the full comments of twenty black ministers who visited him in Savannah.
Johnson’s motto was “the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is”—with no rights for blacks other than conceding the end of slavery. The Freedmen’s Bureau (1865-1869) was a social welfare program for emancipated blacks, refugees both black and white, and “abandoned lands” of the Confederates. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, and according to Blight its exception for criminal sentences should not be blamed for large and disparate incarceration rates caused by 1970s drug laws. John Bingham was chair of the Congressional committee that produced the 14th Amendment with its amazing clauses, “federalizing the Bill of Rights” so they apply to states. “Bingham should have a postage stamp.”
Frederick Douglass visited Johnson, but the President spoke all the time (and called him the N-word behind his back). Essentially Johnson said, “Be happy that you’re free, what more do you want?” Infuriated, Douglass wrote that the Constitution is good enough when a good man is in office. But what we need is a Constitution that serves us well when a bad man is in office. (Blight clarified to the 2025 audience that was Douglass speaking.)
Blight reported in the podcast the views of some scholars that the Johnson impeachment was staged. He had for some time been in open warfare with the Radical Republicans, spitting into Charles Sumner’s hat (Sumner was not a likeable man in the first place, speaking Latin without translation in the Senate). Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on the basis of states’ rights, but the veto was overridden; by 1866 the Republicans had supermajorities in both houses. They passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 establishing the five military territories with Republican and black leaders. Finally, they passed the Tenure of Office Act, purporting to prohibit a President from changing his own cabinet members; it was unconstitutional, but when Johnson predictably removed the Secretary of War, impeachment proceedings began. Three times the impeachment was reviewed in committee, finally getting to the House where the majority vote occurred. It went to the Senate for trial, but at that point the Republicans reportedly got cold feet, scared of throwing someone out just as their preferred candidate Ulysses Grant was coming in, possibly casting a cloud on his legitimacy. Johnson promised or signaled he would not run for re-election in 1868, and the impeachment conviction vote failed by a single vote in the Senate. In Blight’s opinion, Johnson should have been impeached and convicted, for impoundment of funds and obstruction of other statutes, but not on this Tenure of Office Act ground.
15. The Defeat of Reconstruction, 1870-1877 and Beyond
Huckleberry Finn is part nostalgia (for Missouri of the 1830s and 1840s when it was the frontier, beyond which was the “territory”), part moral development of Huck (resisting all he has been taught about blacks and slavery, the crux of the novel is his conclusion that he “can’t pray a lie”), part a meditation on the joys and terrors of the open wide Mississippi River, and part a commentary on the 1880s when it was written, the era that Mark Twain himself dubbed the Gilded Age.
Frederick Douglass in 1875 was concerned what would happen if the Northern and Southern whites made peace with one another and went back into their “accustomed channels.” He was in league with the Radical Republicans and their concept of a federalized Bill of Rights, a very interventionist national government, supporting black suffrage and black “equality.” But take care, “equality” is a contested concept: it can be equality before God or Nature, equality under the law, or (especially in the 20th century) equality of opportunity amid persistent and increasing economic inequality.
Republican President Ulysses S. Grant (18) (1869-1876) was a failure in life until the Civil War, when he displayed his cold cruel logistical genius. He claimed no policy other than deferring to the will of the people. He was far from a Radical Republican. Against him the Democrats ran Seymour and Blair on an explicitly white supremacist platform. The first Ku Klux Klan was essentially a military auxiliary of the Democratic Party peaking 1868 to 1871; 200 political murders were committed in 1868 alone. In Blight’s felicitous phrase, “It was a tenuous, memory-laden peace.”
The 15th amendment could have been much broader and specifically abolished literacy tests and poll taxes, but was limited to prohibiting the deprivation of anyone from vote purely on account of race. The suffrage movement leaders were offended that women’s rights were not included, but there was no chance of such a clause being approved.
The principal debate concerned “Southern redemption.” States would be readmitted to the Union on one date, but left in the hands of federally appointed and therefore Republican-led (and black-staffed) governments. When would they be “redeemed,” so that governance would be returned to the populace where Democrats dominated? Grant was hampered both by scandals and by the economic panic of 1873 (with high unemployment that really affected the nation until the 20th century). Industrial conflict and economic woes, and the threats some saw from immigration, started to produce fatigue among Northerners, and the end of what we usually call Reconstruction.
16. Gilded Age and the Aftermath of Reconstruction, South, North, and West
The three-hour silent film Birth of a Nation (1915) is based on Thomas Dixon’s best-selling The Clansman. A cinematic landmark, it pounded home the risk of miscegenation and launched the second wave of Ku Klux Klan violence. Mark Twain authored The Gilded Age 1872. The era saw industrial excesses, three million immigrants 1865-1873 alone. Vanderbilt with his canals and railroads basically founded Wall Street. Trusts emerged in meat packing, oil, steel, and other commodities.
It was a time of Native American “containment” on reservations, or flat-out genocide in California, Chinese Exclusion Acts (first of women, then of all), and discrimination against Hispanics. Scandals in the Grant Administration included a whiskey tax that facilitated massive kickbacks. Republicans were no longer the radicals, they were the party of business. Democrats ran on an anti-corruption platform and in the 1874 midterms increased their presence in both houses, an amazing comeback from near death of the party in 1865.
1876 witnessed Custer’s Last Stand, making him a martyr whose image appeared in paintings in saloons across the country. The Democrats ran Samuel Tilden, the New York Boss Tweed antagonist. The Republicans ran Rutherford Hayes, a slight politician (lampooned as “Ruther-fraud”). It was a close election with Tilden ahead in the electoral college 184 to 166, but 185 votes were needed. Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina had not yet been redeemed, and it was the vote in those three states that was in dispute. To resolve the matter a 15-member Commission of Congressmen, Senators and Justices was appointed, broken down on party lines 8 to 7 in favor of Republicans. Justice Bradley was in the middle, kind of like Joe Manchin during the Biden Administration.
Bradley eventually broke for Hayes. In a smoke-filled room the Compromise of 1877 was made. First, Louisiana and South Carolina would be redeemed. Second, the remaining thousand federal troops would leave the South. Third, there would be a transcontinental railroad with a Southern terminus. Fourth, one or two cabinet positions would be reserved for Democrats, including the lucrative post of postmaster general. Fifth, states would promise to enforce the civil rights acts. Sixth, Republican James Garfield would become Speaker of the House. And so President Rutherford B. Hayes (19) (1877-1880) was inaugurated, in the (demolished in 2025) east wing of the White House.
An industrial overbuilding led to unemployment, reduced wages, and labor unrest. The great railroad strike of 1877 started in Pennsylvania and spread across the country. General strike attempts were made in Chicago. In San Francisco there were anti-Chinese riots. Eventually, the $5 a day proposal made progress towards resolution. In the South, there was no cash credit for either blacks or poor whites. A financial system developed of tenant farming or “sharecropping,” with the landlord taking 50% of the crops and the tenant selling his 50% to a “furnishing merchant” whose leverage led to further economic oppression of the underclass of both races.
17. A Violent Reunion: The Lost Cause, New South and Origins of Jim Crow
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow: This system began not immediately after the Civil War, but in the 1880s and 1890s. The catalyst was the fear of a populism that would unite blacks with poor whites, necessitating social and political institutions of white supremacy to split them apart. Focus was on miscegenation—as with Birth of A Nation (1915), any black who fraternized with white women was a target. 4000 lynchings 1880-1920, 5000 by 1968. Supremacy went from degrees of personal animus to reservations of whites-only facilities.
Blight’s final lecture was a whirlwind survey of currents in the bloody and unhappy 1880s and 1890s.
Yalie William Graham Sumner’s sociology, social Darwinism, and laissez-faire government
Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), larger than the suffrage and abolitionist movements—save the family by keeping dad from liquor
Growth of corporate power—railroads, mining, steel, oil—trending to monopoly, partially countered by the beginnings and the limits of economic regulation
Tariffs favoring domestic manufacturers against the interests of consumers
Veterans had power—Grand Army of the Republic a major Republican force (the US spent $2bn on the Civil War but $8bn on pensions, 40% of federal budget in 1890)
Western expansions and segregation of Native Americans into reservations and Indian schools; 1890 Wounded Knee massacre; Supreme Court held them “wards,” not extended citizenship until 1924
Corruption in federal employment (Republican President James B. Garfield (20) (1881) shot by a frustrated job seeker) led to Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 under Republican President Chester A. Arthur (21) (1881-1884)
Teeming cities, 2.6 million immigrants 1880-1920, and backlash under Democratic President Grover Cleveland (22) (1885-1888) (marked by opposition to tariffs and passage of the Interstate Commerce Act), Republican President Benjamin Harrison (23) (1889-1892) (though Cleveland won the popular vote; his administration was marked by high (“McKinley”) tariffs and the Sherman Antitrust Act) and Grover Cleveland again (24) (1893-1896) (afflicted by the Panic of 1893)
Panic of 1893 hit everyone but especially farmers
Split between those favoring more money in the economy (silver, debtors) and those favoring less (gold, creditors). Most Democrats silver, most Republicans gold. Populist party emerged as a real threat to the two-party system. William Jennings Bryan was nominated by Democrats 1896 (“Cross of Gold” speech; Populists did not endorse) and campaigned with religious fervor; Republican President William McKinley (25) (1897-1901) stayed home, promised moderation and prosperity, and won.
PART 3: THE AMERICAN CENTURY (Beverly Gage)
18. Immigration and its Discontents
Gage opens her lectures with one of my childhood favorites, Schoolhouse Rock. “The Great American Melting Pot” is an enduring story we tell about ourselves. 1860-1900 immigration mostly from Germany, Britain and Scandinavia, while 1900-1920 saw relatively more Jews and Italians. Federal immigration restrictions include the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Acts, the 1890 federal immigration law, Ellis Island 1892 and Angel Island 1910. The Statue of Liberty was planned for 1876 centennial, finished 1886 thanks to fundraising through Emma Lazarus’s welcoming poem “The New Colossus.” By end of era a very different attitude toward immigration was prevalent.
Reports of Spanish atrocities in Cuba led to calls for US intervention, initially resisted by Cleveland and McKinley. When the battleship Maine was mysteriously bombed in Havana, the four-month Spanish-American War was launched. Naval victories at the Battle of Manila Bay (Admiral Dewey) and land victories at San Juan Hill (including Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders) sealed the annexation of Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, and the Philippines and protectorate status over Cuba. Separately, the US also annexed Hawaii in the same 1898 year.
McKinley was known for tariffs designed to protect American manufacturing and agrarian interests. He was assassinated by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, in 1901, and was succeeded by President Theodore Roosevelt (26) (1901-1908). Further anarchist violence of the time since the 1886 Haymarket tragedy (cause still unclear).
It was an era when liberal elites embraced eugenics as good for the human race. The Second Ku Klux Klan was opposed to various “others”—not just blacks but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants generally.
The US initially avoided the entangled alliances of the European powers in 1914, but longstanding British ties and German naval actions (sinking of the Lusitania with many Americans aboard) led to entry in 1917. Further immigration restrictions in 1917. A system of quotas was created in 1924 that lasted into the 1960s.
Not all immigration activity was restricted. In 1924 American citizenship was granted to Native Americans on reservations. Citizenship was extended to Puerto Ricans.
19. Money, Power, and Progressivism
“Onward Christian Soldiers” captures the vibe of the Progressive Era at its 1900-1920 peak. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the coming Armageddon. Concerns were (a) democracy had been corrupted by wealth and big business, leading to the tyranny of capital and corporations, (b) fear of the possible civil war or revolution, and (c) steering a way for the working class to gravitate to the middle class. A big tent, with (a) both pro and anti vax in the 1919-1920 flu pandemic, (b) NAACP opposed to Woodrow Wilson’s racism, and (c) suffrage and temperance opposed to their foes.
By 1920, what were called “progressives” split—the ongoing progressives drifted left toward socialism (Walter Lippmann, The New Republic), while the rest are generally associated with New Deal “liberalism.” Today, “liberals” are moderates and “progressives” are left. The old progressives had a positive view of the future, contemporary progressives less so. Lippman said politics now required the consideration and manipulation of public opinion—how to communicate, how to take advantage of how people relate to information (and misinformation), how to create consent. A good way to create consent is to build up fear of something—it overrides the rational mind.
Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago provide services to new arrivals. Roosevelt spoke of “the strenuous life” exalting masculinity over effete urbanity, and attacked “malefactors of great wealth” from his “bully pulpit” the White House. The era saw direct election of Senators 1916, initiative, referendum and recall (led by Hiram Johnson in California, this trio began as progressive reforms but were and are subject to recapture by affected interests), women’s suffrage 1920, and the lofty but failed experiment of Prohibition (1918-1933). The era saw creation of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission and an expanded census, and the rise of faith in administrative agency expertise more generally.
1860 to 1932 was a time of Republican dominance, with the solid South occasionally poking through as in the 1912 split among Republican President William Howard Taft (27) (1909-1912), Roosevelt on the Progressive or Bull Moose ticket, and the winner, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (28) (1913-1920).
Gage understandably gives short shrift to World War I itself. Refer to my notes for greater detail.
Wilson called it a war to make the world safe for democracy, a war to end wars, but the Republican Senate refused to ratify his own League of Nations. Progressives were cleft over pacifism and the Red Scare. Eugene Debs received many votes, and was imprisoned for his speech during World War I. The war was a disaster for freedom of political expression”—capped off by the Attorney General Mitchell Palmer raids.
Three Republican Presidents followed Wilson. Warren Harding (29) (1921-1923) promised a “return to normalcy” but was hampered by scandal including Teapot Dome; Calvin Coolidge (30) (1923-1928) thought the business of America to be business and presided over a boom; and Herbert Hoover (31) (1929-1932) was a skilled engineer but faced a Depression that his skills and temperament could not solve. That was a head-spinning summary of a far more complicated decade, but I empathize with Gage trying to cover this sprawling subject in a handful of lectures.
20. A New Deal for America
Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless America.” The 1930s saw the rise of protest politics. Walter Lippmann thought the practice of democracy had been ceded to interests, not the people. The 1920s saw mass media and expansion of consumer products. Wall Street saw a euphoria that people thought would never stop, sending stock prices ever higher. The stock market crash in October 1929 was one bellwether of the reversal, but there were others: World War I debts were not paid; a housing crisis and banking crisis with no social safety net or insurance; environmental damage including the Dust Bowl (see the book and movie The Grapes of Wrath); a real estate overbuilding; homeliness; sharecropping system failed. 25% unemployment, and in the industrial cities as high as 60-70%.
The Republicans have been in charge and of course they were clobbered in 1932, leading to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (32) (1933-1945). The New Deal was the work of FDR, Congress, and many consultants. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said FDR had a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament; despite his patrician background, he could communicate with people and mastered the new medium of radio (there are those who hate me, “and I welcome their hatred”). Scholars endlessly debate the New Deal—progressive or liberal? Reform or revolution? Beginning or ending? Guaranteed rights or government dispensations? Did it work?
FDR was a fifth cousin of TR and married Eleanor Roosevelt, TR’s niece. After serving in Wilson’s cabinet (Navy) he lost in the 1920 election and became disabled through polio but became NY governor. After inauguration there were the famous Hundred Days of legislative action (note, legislative action). There was a first New Deal 1933-1934 very experimental akin to the American Revolution, with permanent changes like the SEC and FDIC and failed ones like price and wage stabilization, end of Prohibition. The second New Deal 1935-1936 saw CCC and public works, Social Security, and the NLRA (Wagner Act) facilitating labor unions that were not company captives.
Southern Democratic Senators voted as a bloc with high seniority. Economically liberal but socially in the world of Jim Crow. Agriculture and domestic service were excluded from Social Security. Enforcement of federal laws left to states. The New Deal was a curious coalition. FDR even tried to primary the Southerners, which ticked them off.
Labor rose as a factor. Communists aligned with worker representatives. From 1919 when strikes were crushed to the 1935 NLRA facilitating organization. Industry-wide unions, UAW, USW, UMW, OCAW. Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), eventually the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The New Deal framers did not plan very much for World War II. It transformed America and the world.
21. A New Deal for the World
The end of World War I had been a disappointment for progressives. The US did not ratify Wilson’s own League of Nations. US withdrew from world struggles, 1920s and 1930s isolationism. Charles Lindbergh and America First Committee had large rallies to stay out of conflicts and intrigues. The immigration gate closed.
Then in 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland and Germany and the USSR entered into a non-aggression pact (splitting the American Communists, who had seen the Soviet Union as the bulwark against fascism). FDR is an internationalist but needs to bring the country along, as with the lend-lease program with the UK before entering hostilities. Even Republican Henry Luce (of Time and Life) supports intervention in this “American Century.”
Pearl Harbor and the occupation of the Philippines changed all that. Paradoxically, the industrial and military demands of the war really did end the Great Depression. It led to a persistent administrative state and an industrial juggernaut. A standing army, and a military-industrial complex, were in the offing. 16 million served in the armed forces (the Army alone went from 200,000 in 1940 to 7 million in 1944). Segregated by race and gender to be sure; the 1942 Japanese internments (2/3 of them American citizens) clarified that.
The most significant event of the war for the US was a lack—a relative lack of damage to the US itself (400,000 dead compared to 26 million USSR, 20 China, 7 Germany, 3 Japan, 6-7 Jews). At war’s end the US had 60% of world industrial output. (Gage understandably does not cover the war—see my own separate notes on WWII.)
Democratic President Harry S. Truman (33) (1945-1952) lost no sleep over using the atomic bomb not once but twice in Japan—it was a military tool after all, and it was widely believed the Japanese elite would likely not surrender completely until a much more deadly invasion of Honshu occurred. 1947 National Security Act facilitated modern defense institutions.
22. Anticommunism and the American Way
Paul Robeson cited as example of someone who started apolitical (fame in music) then political (Communism) then social (racial justice). Many progressives flirted with Communism until the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, some even thereafter.
The postwar question burned: what is Americanism and what is un-Americanism? Joe McCarthy led the way with suspicion of everyone; he flamed out but anti-communists such as the John Birch society outlasted him (thanks to Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welch for ending the McCarthy Second Red Scare period though). The Cold War saw polarization, not just a power struggle but a struggle over ideology, religion, technology vs democracy.
1949 rocked by the Chinese revolution and the Russian atomic bomb, and 1950-1953 Korean War. Republicans take House 1946 and White House with WWII hero President Dwight D. Eisenhower (34) (1953-1960).
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom attacks concentrated, coordination of all kinds—government as well as industry—since all contributed to loss of personal freedom. Meanwhile J. Edgar Hoover over his long career (1920s to 1970s) sees expression of dissent itself as un-American.
23. Race, Rights, and Resistance
I don’t have good notes on this lecture, partly because its topics are within my direct experience. (Gage notes it is a difficult period to teach: older attendees think they know this stuff already because they lived through it, while younger attendees have no connection to it since history courses in high school almost always finish in the spring before getting to this time period!)
We think of the Sixties as a time of flower power, liberalism, civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., and experimentation amid affluence. But Gage reminds us that it was “the divided Sixties,” there was a strong and burgeoning conservative current at the very same time.
Eisenhower was succeeded after a close election by Democratic President John F. Kennedy (35) (1961-1963). JFK had a curious blend of aggressive posturing to USSR (Bay of Pigs and Berlin airlift balanced by Cuban Missile Crisis), ambivalence to logic of containment in Vietnam, and political openness to social reforms. After his assassination Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson (36) (1963-1968) fatefully forced the party, and the South in particular, to go along with civil rights legislation—and at the same time to escalate in Vietnam. Civil rights and the war in Southeast Asia came crashing into one another. My own notes on the Vietnam War are incorporated for reference.
24. Reagan’s America
The fringe progressives and the fringe conservatives in an era of affluence both complain that our two parties are too much alike. From the right, we see a fusion of William F. Buckley, Jr. (“I stand athwart History yelling Stop”), Russell Kirk (traditional conservatism, go slow), Whittaker Chambers (anti-Communist though a former Communist himself), Hayek himself libertarian; then Barry Goldwater; then Ronald Reagan; then Richard Nixon (belatedly; earlier with Eisenhower he was more of a moderate domestically though a Red-baiter internationally); Kevin Phillips; and various neoconservatives. The Southern states break with the Democratic party at the Presidential electoral level in 1964 with Goldwater and 1968 with George Wallace and in 1976 onward more broadly. Even some “urban ethnics” long claimed in the Democratic column become “Reagan Republicans.”
Democrats tore themselves apart over Vietnam (see my separate notes on the Vietnam War) with Hubert Humphrey nominated in a bloody convention in Chicago 1968; the winner by a nose was Republican President Richard M. Nixon (37) (1969-1974). Once in office he did some unexpected things, like enact environmental laws and Title IX, and seek relations with China and the USSR, but the Watergate scandal and a lack of support inside his own party brought him down. He resigned rather than face impeachment, succeeded by Republican President Gerald R. Ford (38) (1974-1976). A dark horse candidate early in his primary campaign, Democratic President Jimmy Carter (39) (1977-1980) had a one-term administration faced with one crisis after another.
Republican President Ronald Reagan (40) (1981-1988) entered national politics from the right and stayed there. He narrowly lost his party’s nomination in 1976 but roared back in 1980, defeating Carter with the help of evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.
Gage’s main point in her lecture was that the fabled Sixties featured the seeds not only of modern progressive ideology associated with the contemporary left but also of the mix of ideologies now associated with the contemporary right.
25. Making Sense of the Millennium
Gage races through the last few decades, as we have seen in any other history course. Reagan quoted libertarians like Milton Friedman and praised the UK’s Margaret Thatcher, who had similarly decried “the cult of the [centralized] state.” But his ideology mixed with pragmatism and contradictions. Attacked organized labor (PATCO strikebreakers), slow to respond to AIDS crisis. Reagonomics featured tax cuts designed to “starve the [federal] beast” and raise private activity leading to compensating tax revenues (the “Laffer Curve”) but it didn’t pan out; large deficits began to run.
The 1980s saw a superficial foreign consensus—call it the Washington or neoliberal consensus. “Tear Down this Wall” speech 1984. Halting efforts at arms control, juxtaposed with Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) and interventions in Central America. Left office in 1989 proclaiming the requirement of eternal vigilance for patriotism.
His VP and successor, Republican George H.W. Bush (41) (1989-1992), walked into “the end of the Cold War”—November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and December 1991 end of the Soviet Union. To his credit he didn’t gloat. Others did, like Francis Fukuyama and The End of History? magazine article, changed in book form to delete the question mark. Reached a high leading worldwide efforts to repel Iraqi invasion of Kuwait 1990-1991, but aftermath left Middle East muddled and Saddam Hussein still in power. Rise of big media, CNN 24/7 news coverage. A late 1992 recession made Americans forget all the positives, and Bush looked old and tired.
Young Democratic Bill Clinton (42) (1993-2000) proclaimed he was a different kind of Democrat, paving a “middle way.” The era of the big state is over (1996), he said, and championed workfare and telecommunications deregulation. He and his VP Al Gore were the last of the solid Southern Democrats. Bogged down early trying to develop a national health care plan. Championed free trade with Mexico under NAFTA, which paradoxically spurred a third-party campaign by Ross Perot that cut into Republican votes. A brief bipartisan consensus around 1965 Immigration Act facilitating immigration from Latin America and Asia. But Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America led to government shutdown. 1994 Republicans take House for first time since 1954.
Republican George W. Bush (43) (2001-2008) campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” besting the more moderate John McCain in primaries, but he and his advisers including VP Dick Cheney governed from the right. Deeply divided election, resolved by fiat of the U.S. Supreme Court. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 redefined his approach into attempts at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. The end of his presidency saw a global financial crisis 2007-2009. (And the iPhone and prevalence of the internet—don’t underestimate the relevance to politics and history of a new technology.)
The seeds of 2020 politics were sown years ago. Gage showed excerpts from Patrick Buchanan in 1992 decrying immigration, elite universities, and other landmarks of the culture wars to come in which we are living today; those wars have been in open sight for decades even if we averted our glances until consequential elections. The primary system for each party and the wild swings from redistricting have led to intense polarization of our system of government—there are few moderates to speak to one another let alone control outcomes.
Democratic Barack Obama (44) (2009-2016) conveyed a sense of optimism and hope. Started off strong with response to the financial crisis but was hampered by divided government. Gage had nothing specific to say about Obama, and nothing at all about Republican Donald J. Trump (45) (2017-2020), Democratic Joseph R. Biden (46) (2021-2024),or Republican Donald J. Trump (47) (2025- ). Her excuse is that “history” stops around the time the historian or the history student goes to school.
CONCLUSION (tutti)
26. Meanings on the Eve of 2026
Gage referred to the 1976 convention speech of Barbara Jordan decrying the state of the Union at the bicentennial. But much the same kind of comparison, of real to ideal, happened in 1926 and in 1876. The image of the 1876 commemoration was the forearm and torch of the still incomplete and unfunded Statue of Liberty. What will we have to say in 2026?
“You do history because something in the present bugs you,” Blight said. After quoting the Gettysburg Address, he modestly concluded, “A President can make a speech that isn’t all about him.”
Freeman emphasized that the founding documents are results of real debates among real people. Process is our protector. Those human founders knew they were experimenting but were acutely aware of posterity. They lit first and foremost upon the coming together of a “we.” And that “we” is what history involves, all scholars and students, all Americans.
She concluded: Patriotism should not be glossy, shallow and performative. It should be genuine and embrace complexity and shortcomings. We are continuously at a moment of reckoning for us to come together and work towards something better. (You can tell I like her sweeping rhetoric. Freeman has a History Matters podcast that sounds intriguing.)
The 26-lecture course ended bizarrely with the three professors dancing together to Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.”