Overview When Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as president on March 4, 1933, the nation’s economic crisis had become the most severe in its history. Not only was unemployment rising and poverty widespread, but the banking system appeared…
Category: Urban
1920s
No matter how you try to capture the spirit of the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, nothing looms larger in a discussion of that fast-paced decade than the Great Crash of 1929. The collapse of Wall Street stock prices on…
1900s
Overview Near the beginning of his memoir Growing Up (1982), journalist Russell Baker describes the United States of his mother’s childhood, in the first decade of the twentieth century, as a “young country,” one that seemed to his grandfather at least, as the “greatest country…
1890s
Overview The nineteenth century had always been an age of certainties, but by the 1890s, some of the post-Civil War consensus about American civilization and progress was beginning to fragment as it had never quite done before. Populists challenged the distribution…
ESSAY –Boston Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald
In Fall 2010, Dickinson College student Will Nelligan produced a lively short profile of John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, who was elected mayor of Boston in 1905. Ring the Bell Twice: Honey Fitz
IMAGE –Revere’s Boston Massacre Engraving
This famous engraving by Paul Revere depicting the riot in Boston on March 5, 1770, which resulted in the deaths of five colonists (including Crispus Attucks), what the patriot artisan calls here, “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston…
EXHIBIT –Remembering America Since 1945
In spring 2015, Dickinson students in History 118 (US Since 1877) conducted oral histories and produced essays with multi-media appendixes (such as podcasts or videos). Several of these extraordinary projects have been featured in this Storify essay summarizing their work.…
PODCAST –MLK Riots in Washington DC
In spring 2015, Dickinson student Caly McCarthy interviewed her father Joseph McCarthy about his recollections of the city of Washington DC in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination in 1968. The gripping interview also formed the basis…