Questions for discussion

1. What other names of the U.S.A. do you know?

2. How can the U.S. area be compared with other countries’ ones?

3. What is the political division of the U.S.A.?

4. Why is Washington referred to as a federal city?

5. How does the geography of the U.S.A. vary across its immense area?

6. What rivers (deserts) play an important role in the economy of the U.S.A.?

7. In what way do the major cultural regions of the U.S.A. differ?

8. What advances the process of the U.S. regions’ Americanization?

9. What role was played by New England and the Middle Atlantic states in the 19th-century American expansion?

10. What gives the South its unmistakable identity?

11. What Western states don’t share the West's concern over the scarcity of water with the rest of states?

12. What has encouraged Midwesterners to direct their concerns to their own domestic affairs, avoiding matters of wider interest?

Unit 6

The u.S. History time line (1492-2012)

The U.S.A. development from colonial beginnings in the 16th century, when the first European explorers arrived till nowadays is discussed including:

• the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights

• the U.S. territorial acquisitions and westward expansion

• slavery, the Civil War and reconstruction

• industrialization and immigration in the 19^th century

• the "progressive" era

• the U.S. in the 1920’s, in the 1930’s, in the the post-war years and . in the 21st century

European Exploration: It is well known that America was discovered by Ch. Columbus in 1492. The first recorded voyage to North America was made by John Cabot or Giovanni Caboto, an Italian navigator in the service of England, who sailed from England to Newfoundland in 1497. These voyages inaugurated ongoing commerce between the Old and New Worlds.

Before Columbus, several flourishing civilizations had existed in the Americas for centuries. The earliest inhabitants of America may have arrived over 25,000 years before Columbus. There were discovered remains from the first large building projects, dating back to 500 B.C.-500 A.D., consisting of large ceremonial earthworks or mounds. Ancient American civilizations had reached a level of culture, which included personal wealth, fine buildings, expert craftsmanship, and religions.

But the European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives and cultures of the Native inhabitants of America. Up to 80% of indigenous Americans may have died from epidemics of imported diseases such as smallpox, and many tribes and cultures were completely eliminated in the course of European westward expansion.

Colonial America: Starting with the late 16th century, England, Scotland, France, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands began to colonize eastern North America. European settlers came from a variety of social and religious groups; they established small colonies and traded with the indigenous peoples. But, only the English established colonies of agricultural settlers, who were interested less in trade and more in the acquisition of land. That fact was decisive in the long struggle for control of North America.

The first Englishmen even hoped to find gold or a passage through the Americas to the Indies. Other early English explorers such as Francis Drake arrived in the Americas to plunder the wealth of the Spanish settlers.

English migrants came to America for two main reasons. The first reason was religious tied to the English Reformation. Groups of colonists came to America searching for a) either an asylum to practice a religion without persecution or b) a refuge to begin a new and holier settlement where complete theological agreement could be found.

The second reason for English colonization was economic, because between 1530 and 1680 the population in England doubled and the land became scarce.

The main waves of settlers in North America came in the 17th century. At first, most immigrants arrived as indentured (on a contract) servants. Then between the late 1610’s and the American Revolution, the British shipped about 50,000 convicts to its American colonies. So, as you see, the colonists who came to the New World were not a homogeneous mix; they belonged to different social and religious groups and came to the new continent for different reasons. And they created colonies with very different social, religious, political, and economic structures.

Early colonial attempts: The first English Colony of Roanoke (in 1586), resulted in failure. The "Lost" Colony of Roanoke was established off the coast of today's North Carolina. The second resupply ship, delayed for several years in England, found no trace of the colonists, discovering only the mysterious word "CROATOAN" carved on a tree. Over a hundred men, women, and children had disappeared in the middle of their daily tasks.

England made its first successful efforts only at the start of the 17th century. It was Jamestown, established in 1607 in a region called Virginia, on a small river near Chesapeake Bay. In addition to Jamestown, Va. (1607), the British settled Plymouth, Mass. (1620); Maryland (1634); and Pennsylvania (1681). The English took New York, New Jersey, and Delaware from the Dutch in 1664; a year later they began to colonize the Carolinas and then Georgia. By 1733, English settlers had founded 13 colonies along the Atlantic Coast, from New Hampshire in the North to Georgia in the South.

Historians typically recognize four regions in the lands that later became the eastern U.S. They are: New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake Bay and the Southern Colonies. New England included New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut; the Middle Colonies – Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware; the Chesapeake Bay – Virginia, Maryland; and the Southern Colonies – North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

The 13 colonies had a population of 2.6 ml in 1770, about one-third that of Britain; and nearly one in five Americans was a black slave. Though ‘subject to British taxation, the colonies had no representation in the British Parliament.

Two events were very important for the unification of the 13 colonies; the first, called the Great Awakening, a Protestant revival movement, took place between the 1730’s and 1740’s.

Another event was the French and Indian War or the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). It was a watershed event in the political development of the colonies. The influence of France was significantly reduced. The war resulted in greater political integration of the colonies and vast territorial acquisitions.

After the war by the Treaty of Paris (1763), France surrendered its vast North American empire to Britain. Britain gained all French territory east of the Mississippi River, including Quebec, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio valley. Britain also gained the Spanish colonies of East and West Florida.

But in removing a major foreign threat to the 13 colonies, the war also largely removed the colonists' need of the British colonial protection. Americans challenged the right of the British parliament to force taxes on them. They were angry that the British prevented them from trading with other nations and taking more land in the western part of America, e.g. the Royal Proclamation of 1763 prohibited settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains on land captured from France. American colonists started to protest. Another point which united the colonies in their negative attitude to Britain was the enormous import of British goods and very high taxes. They boycotted all imported British goods — particularly tea. The British responded by landing troops at Boston in 1768. In Boston, on December 16, 1773, some American patriots dressed as Native Americans went on board ships used to transport tea. They threw the tea into the water, an incident that became known as the Boston Tea Party.

The Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, coming after a dozen years of escalating political conflict between the colonies and the British Parliament, marked the beginning of the American Revolution. The last major battle of the American Revolution took place at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. A combined force of American and French troops surrounded the British army or as they were called the redcoats and forced them to surrender. Fighting continued in some areas for two more years, and the war officially ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, by which England recognized American independence and abandoned the territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

During the war years, the First and Second Continental Congresses acted as a central government, but it wasn’t a proper government after the war. Proclaiming that "all men are created equal" the Second Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, on July 4, 1776. That date is now celebrated annually as America's Independence Day.

In 1777, a plan for a union of the states was worked out. It was called the Articles of Confederation. The Confederation was not a strong government, it could not raise money by taxes; it could only ask the states to raise money for the national government. But it could declare war; make treaties, organize an army and navy; deal with the governments of other nations; run a postal service. In fact, the Articles of Confederation called the new nation a “league of friendship.”

The need for a more powerful and complete federal government led, in 1787, to the calling of the Constitutional Convention, which met in Philadelphia through the summer of 1787 and wrote a Constitution. In 1789, the Constitution of the United States was put into operation, and George Washington was elected the first President of the United States.

The Constitution called for a federal government, limited in scope, but independent of and superior to the states, it was able to tax, and was equipped with both Executive and Judicial branches and a two house Legislature.

The Constitution established the separation of powers between three different branches of government. The legislative branch consisted of Congress, a parliament made up of two parts: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Congress had a number of specific powers, including the power to collect taxes and control trade between states and with foreign countries, and could make laws to exercise these powers.

The power to run the country was given to the executive branch, led by a President and Vice-President.

The judicial branch consisted of the Supreme Court and a number of lower courts created by Congress. It was given power to decide legal disputes, including those involving the Constitution, national laws and differences between the states.

Together with this separation of powers, the Constitution introduced a system of checks and balances so that each branch had some power over the other two in order to stop them from becoming too powerful.

The national legislature, or Congress, embodied the key compromise of the Convention, between the equal representation of all states both large and small an the equal representation of all population of every state. The upper House, the Senate, represented the states equally, while the lower House, House of Representatives, was elected from districts of approximately equal population. So, the Constitution went into effect in 1789 and has not been changed ever since.

The original Constitution decided how to govern the country but said nothing about citizens’ rights and freedoms. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791. It consisted of 10 amendments out of 12 proposed by the Congress. One was not ratified, and one was finally ratified as the 27th Amendment.

The Bill of Rights guarantees Americans freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Americans have the right to assemble in public places, to protest government actions, and to demand change. There is a right to own firearms. Because of the Bill of Rights, neither police officers nor soldiers can stop and search a person without good reason. Nor can they search a person’s home without permission from a court to do so. The Bill of Rights guarantees a speedy trial to anyone accused of a crime. The trial must be by jury if requested, and the accused person must be allowed representation by a lawyer and to call witnesses to speak for him or her. Cruel and unusual punishment is forbidden.

U.S. territorial acquisitions and westward expansion: After the revolution the independent American republic expanded westwards without any opposition from either France or Britain. Lots of pioneers were drawn westward by economic opportunity and a chance to escape or purify an earlier way of life. Again the U.S. found itself in bloody conflict with rivals, such as Mexico and Native American tribes.

In 1803, Jefferson, the third U.S. president, purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France almost doubling the size of the country. The Louisiana Purchase added more than 1 mln square km of territory and extended the country's borders to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

The frontier moved westward by the forces other than the search for farmland. These forces were as follows: 1) the West was a vast storehouse of resources - gold, silver, coal, iron, copper, timber, rich soil, and immense grazing lands; 2) at the same time the rise of industry created an almost limitless market for many of the West’s riches.

The U.S. grew rapidly. The order in which states were admitted to the Union reflects the uneven frontier’s movement across the American West. By 1820, ten new states had been formed. By the 1840’s, the line of settlement had moved only a few hundred miles past the Mississippi River. By 1850, Arkansas, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin had been admitted as states. Then the frontier jumped across the middle of the country to Oregon and California on the Pacific Coast. California became the first American state on the Pacific in 1850. The frontier then moved both westward and eastward, as white settlers gradually pushed into the huge interior area of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the far South-west. Oregon, Minnesota, Kansas, Nevada, Nebraska, and Colorado were admitted to the Union between 1850 and 1876, but parts of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains were settled slowly. Alaska was bought from Russia in 1867. Then in 1889 and 1890, six states were added: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. Hawaii was annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines were annexed from Spain after the Spanish-American War in 1898 for $20 ml. Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona had joined the Union by 1912.

Between 1841 and the late 1860’s, more than a third of a million persons moved from the Missouri valley to the Pacific Coast. The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 further hastened western migration.

Railroads: As the size of the population on the Pacific Coast exploded, there grew a need to link the two parts of the continent. With the help of thousands of Irish immigrant laborers, the Union Pacific Railroad was built westward from Omaha, Nebraska. At the same time, the Central Pacific was built eastward from northern California by the efforts of Chinese workers imported for the job. By the 1890’s, a web of steel rails covered much of the West.

The role of the railroad was enormous. Railroads encouraged westward expansion more than any other single development.

Native Americans: New railroads made the relocation for settlers easier and increased conflicts with Native Americans. What happened to Native Americans in those years can be called as a massive murder or annihilation. Westward expansion depleted resources and damaged the environment, thus destroying the Native Americans’ ability to support themselves. In addition, the pioneers carried diseases that killed thousands of Native Americans.

The volume of white settlers taking over Native American land and the ways in which these settlers transformed the West destroyed the Native American culture of independence.

Slavery and Civil War: On the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. was a nation divided into 4 quite distinct regions: the Northeast, with a growing industrial and commercial economy and an increasing density of population; the Northwest, known as the Midwest, a rapidly expanding region of free farmers where slavery was forever prohibited; the Upper South, with a settled plantation system based on 4 mln black slaves’ labor; and the Southwest, a booming new frontier-like region with expanding cotton economy.

After Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, 11 southern states left the Union and proclaimed themselves an independent nation establishing a rebel government, the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. The states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. On April 12, 1861, Confederate soldiers fired at Union troops in Fort Sumter in South Carolina. That was the beginning of the Civil War.

The American Civil War was fought in the U.S. from 1861 to 1865. For both North and South, the Civil War was long and hard. More than 650,000 soldiers lost their lives. Many died in battle, many died of sickness in the army camps. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation which declared that all slaves in states fighting against the Union were free. As result, about 180,000 blacks joined the Union army.

Two years later, on April 9, 1865, after a long campaign the Confederate army surrendered to General Grant in Virginia. The war was over.

The Civil War was the most traumatic episode in American history. But it resolved two matters. 1) It put an end to slavery, and 2) it decided that the country was not a collection of semi-independent states but an indivisible whole.

The years after the American Civil War were called Reconstruction. It was the period when the southern states of the defeated Confederacy were reintegrated into the Union and the attempt was made to decide the fate of roughly 4 mln former African American slaves, to make them citizens, and give them voting rights. However, the end of Reconstruction in 1877 marked the end of the brief period of civil rights for African Americans. Later, racism was given more power; southern states passed laws to keep blacks from voting by imposing taxes and literacy requirements. By the early 20th century, every southern state adopted laws enforcing segregation - blacks and whites were separated in schools, parks, trains, hospitals, and other public places.

Industrialization and Immigration: Between 1865 and 1900, the U.S. became the world’s leading industrial nation. The availability of land, the diversity of climate and economy, the presence of navigable canals, rivers, and coastal waterways for the transportation needs of the emerging industries, the abundance of natural resources, fast transport, and the availability of capital powered the Second Industrial Revolution. It resulted in the U.S. pioneering in organization, management and coordination of work; and industries were stimulated by technology and transportation. Division of labor was a basic achievement of industrialization.

The period of the late 19th century when there was a dramatic expansion of American wealth and prosperity was termed by Mark Twain as the "Gilded Age". High tariffs sheltered U.S. factories and workers from foreign competition. By the century's end, American industrial production and per capita income exceeded those of all other world nations and ranked only behind Great Britain.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of immigrants encouraged the availability of cheap labor. Between 1880 and 1914, peak years of immigration, more than 22 million people migrated to the U.S. All in all, between 1840 and 1920, about 37 million of immigrants came to the U.S.

The laissez-faire capitalism of the end of the 19th century fostered huge concentrations of wealth and power, on the one hand, and severe exploitation of workers, on the other. John D. Rockefeller used to say: “the growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest”. This "Social Darwinism" had many supporters. But the growth of industry and cities created problems. Workers faced long hours, dangerous conditions, poor pay, and an uncertain future. Periodic economic crises swept the nation, further producing high levels of unemployment. The situation was worse for women and children, who made up a high percentage of the work force in some industries and often received but a fraction of the wages a man could earn.

Industrialization and abusive industrial practices led to the often violent rise of the labor movement in the U.S.

The "progressive" era: As the U.S. entered the vulnerable 20th century; the demand arose to remedy the problems created by industrialization and to minimize violent labor conflicts and clashes. In the 1890’s, progressivism emerged as a political movement. Between the 1890’s and the 1910’s, progressive efforts affected local, state, and national politics. Progressivists included both Democrats and Republicans. They also left a mark on journalism, academic life, cultural life, and social justice movements.

From their viewpoint, economic privilege and corrupt politics threatened democracy. Progressivism embraced many types of reforms. Progressives strove to curb corporate power, to end business monopolies, and to wipe out political corruption. T. Roosevelt, U.S. President in 1901-1905, was one of the most popular Presidents in American history. People called him Teddy or TR. A popular toy, the Teddy Bear, was named after him.

Here is a list of some of the new laws passed by Roosevelt’s government: laws about ways of financing water supply to dry farmland, about government loans to help farmers, about making illegal selling dangerous foods and medicines, about making working conditions at factories and in mines safer, about setting up national forests and parks and conservation of natural resources, about starting an income tax, etc. Regulation, T. Roosevelt believed, was the only way to solve the problems caused by big business. He became known as a trustbuster. He tried to break up large trusts that reduced competition and controlled prices.

Progressivism reached its peak during W. Wilson’s presidency. Wilson carried out significant reforms to introduce laws governing tariffs, trusts, labor, agriculture, and banking. In 1913, he reduced taxes on imported goods; introduced an income tax. Wilson supported the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created a centralized banking system, etc.

World War I: When World War I began in 1914, the U.S. entered it only on April 6, 1917. The U.S. casualties in WWI were 112,000 people and mainly to diseases including influenza. The war ended in October 1918 when Germany asked for peace.

The war changed American mentality; the U.S. withdrew from European affairs. The American people chose isolationism: they turned their attention away from international relations and solely toward domestic affairs. The aftershock of the October Revolution resulted in real fears of communism in the U.S.A. Americans became hostile to foreigners. In 1919, a series of terrorist bombings produced a three-year "Red Scare." Under the government authority political meetings were raided and several hundred foreign-born political radicals were deported. Congress enacted immigration limits in 1921 and tightened them further in 1924 and 1929. The Ku Klux Klan, a racist organization, attracted new followers and terrorized blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.

The Roaring Twenties: The 1920’s or the Roaring Twenties were an extraordinary and confusing time. It was the age of Prohibition: as in 1920 the 18th Constitutional Amendment outlawed the sale of alcoholic drinks. Gangsters carried machine guns; they organized bootlegging - illegal supply of alcohol from Canada and elsewhere.

It was the age of jazz and spectacular silent movies, the age of girls dancing the Charleston, Charlie Chaplin playing comical tricks. For big business, the 1920’s were golden years. The U.S. was now a consumer society, with booming markets for radios, home appliances, synthetic textiles, and plastics. Between 1919 and 1929, mass-production factories doubled their output.

In the 1920’s, America became a nation on wheels. It seemed as if every family were buying a car. One of the most admired men of the decade was Henry Ford, who had introduced the assembly line into automobile factories. Ford could pay high wages and still earn enormous profits by mass-producing the Model T, a car that millions of buyers could afford.

Buying durable goods on the install­ment plan was a new idea in American business. The installment plan made it possible for people to “own” cars before they really owned them.

It had a good effect on business because more people were able to buy expensive things. Suburbs, towns and neighborhoods lying around bid cities, began to grow fast. In the 1920’s, the nation became increasingly urban, and everyday life was transformed as the "consumer revolution" brought the ever growing use of automobiles, telephones, radios, and other appliances. The pace of living quickened, fortunes were rapidly accumulated on the skyrocketing stock market, in real estate speculation, and elsewhere. For a moment, it seemed that Americans had the Midas touch. To some it seemed a golden age.

But this prosperity masked deep problems: agriculture was not prosperous, and industry and finance became dangerously over-extended. With profits soaring and interest rates low, plenty of money was available for investment. Much of it, however, went into reckless speculations in the stock market. Stock shares’ prices were far above their real value. Investors bought stocks “on margin” (с уплатой только части стоимости ценных бумаг), borrowing up to 90% of the purchase price. The inflated stock market led to the crash of Thursday, October 29, 1929. The bubble burst. And the stock market crashed.

U.S. in the 1930’s. The Great Depression was the period of American history that followed "Black Thursday", October 29, 1929.

The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, collapsing farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement. Unemployed Americans received no government unemployment pay. Millions spent hours and days in “breadlines”. The net effect of the Great Depression was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future.

The usual explanations of the Great Depression include numerous factors: especially high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted overoptimistic loans by banks and investors, the lack of high-growth in new industries, and growing wealth inequality - all interacting to create a downward economic spiral of reduced spending, falling confidence, and lowered production.

In the U.S. between 1929 and 1933, unemployment soared from 3% of the workforce to 25%. By 1932, thousands of American banks and over 100,000 businesses had failed. Industrial production was cut in half, wages decreased 60%.

With millions unemployed, political ferment and discontent increased greatly among the working classes. And an unsympathetic, improper or repressive response from the U.S. government might well have sparked a socialist uprising. In November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President on the platform of “a New Deal for the American people,” this phrase served as a label for his administration and its many domestic achievements. His main idea was that the federal government should take the lead in the fight against the Depression.

By March 1933, there had been 13 mln unemployed, and almost every bank had been closed. Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. His New Deal was often contradicting, pragmatic, and experimental. But Roosevelt’s self-confidence galvanized the nation. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, he said at his inauguration. He followed up these words with decisive actions. Within 3 months - the historic “Hundred Days” - Roosevelt rushed through Congress a great number of laws to help the economy recover.

The New Deal consisted of 3 types of programs (3 R’s programs) designed to produce "Relief, Recovery and Reform". He proposed and the U.S. Congress enacted his New Deal program to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through policies of greater government action. Roosevelt implemented a number of programs to aid the poor and unemployed. He contributed to the future stability of the economy by instituting new regulations in business, particularly banking.

FDR’s critics accused him of turning America into a socialist state. It was not true, for Roosevelt opposed socialism (in the sense of state ownership of the means of production), his only one major program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), involved government ownership of the means of production.

The strongest legacy of the New Deal was to make the federal government a protector of interest groups and a supervisor of competition among them.

The New Deal did not transform American capitalism in any genuinely radical way. Corporate power remained nearly as free from government regulation or control in 1945 as it was in 1933. But the New Deal created the rudiments of the American welfare state, through its many relief programs and above all through the Social Security system.

To the administration’s credit, Roosevelt appointed an unprecedented number of African Americans to second-level positions in his administration. The New Deal established a political alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party that survives to this day.

New Deal programs stimulated demand and provided work and relief for the impoverished through the increased government spending. In 1929, federal expenditures were only 3% of the GDP. Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditure tripled (9%). However, spending on the New Deal was far smaller than on the war effort. During the war, federal expenditures went from 3% of the GDP in 1929 to about 30% in 1946 and amounted to $62 billion. In short, spending financially cured the depression. Between 1939 and 1944 (the peak of wartime production), the nation’s output almost doubled.

Consequently, unemployment fell by two-thirds in Roosevelt's first term (from 25% to 9%, from 1933 to 1937), then from 14% in 1940 to less than 2% in 1943 as the labor force grew by 10 mln. As you see, unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years; consumption, investment, and net exports - the pillars of economic growth - remained low.

It was World War II, not the New Deal that finally ended the crisis. In 1941, FDR said “Old Dr. New Deal has to be replaced by Dr. Win-the-War.” His New Deal was over.

30 years later one old American man expressed in his simple words how many Americans felt about FDR in those years. “Roosevelt?” he said in his television interview. “He was God in this country”. Even so, it was not FDR’s New Deal that ended unemployment in the U.S. It was the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, who did that.

Roosevelt and U.S. foreign policy: In the 1920’s and 1930’s, isolationist sentiment in America was very strong. But in September 1939, Roosevelt called Congress to revise the neutrality acts and legitimize a cash-and-carry program that allowed Britain and France to buy American arms. In June 1940, the U.S. started supplying Britain with military aid in order to help the British defend themselves against Germany.

Roosevelt wanted the U.S. to become “the great arsenal of democracy.” In 1941, he and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced the Atlantic Charter, which set forth Allied goals for WWII and the postwar period.

War economy: WWII brought the U.S. economy to life. Industry quickly shifted to war production, automakers began turning out tanks and planes, and the U.S. became the world’s largest weapons manufacturer. New industries emerged. The war economy brought full employment, longer work weeks, and (despite wage controls) higher earnings.

Farmers prospered, too. Farm income tripled. Labor scarcity drew women into the war economy. More than 6 mln women entered the work force in wartime; women’s share of the labor force leaped from 25% in 1940 to 35% in 1945. Members of minorities, who were out of jobs in the 1930’s, also found work in the war economy.

The war made the U.S. a military and economic world power. But the cost of the war worldwide was immense. About 57mln people died as a result of the war, including acts of genocide such as the Holocaust. Allied military and civilian losses were 44 mln; those of the Axis - 11 mln. The USSR alone lost more than 20 mln people. The U.S. lost almost 300,000 people in battle deaths, which was far less than the toll in Europe and Asia; furthermore, there had been no fighting or bombing in North America. So, the U.S. was in much better shape than the war-torn countries.

Cold War: The United Nations (U.N.) was formed at the end of WWII. But the post-war era was marked by the beginning of the Cold War, in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union attempted to expand their influence at the expense of the others. The contest in new types of weapons and new forms of using them known as the arms race alongside with persistent hostility between the Western and Communist nations defined the life of the post-war world from 1946 till 1991.

The cold war landmarks were the policy of the iron curtain, or the Truman Doctrine (U.S. President in 1945-1953) of helping ‘all free people’ to resist Communist influence and contain communism; the Marshall Plan, devised by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947, in which the U.S. gave or loaned billions of dollars to various European countries, particularly Germany, to assist in post­war reconstruction of their industries.

The widespread fear of Com­munism was one of the reasons behind the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949. The same fear, during the 1950’s, brought to life the political phenomenon of McCarthyism; discrediting people without proof.

The F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Investigation) was the axis of political and war strategies machine of the U.S.; it implemented the policy of “massive retaliation” (revenge) or “brinksmanship” or confrontation.

Numerous political and armed incidents and war actions throughout the post-war world for spheres of influence increased international tension and the possibility of another global con­flict: such as the wars in North Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1960-1973), the support of France in their Indochina War (1946-1954), the Soviet-American conflict in Cuba (1962).

In fact, the Cold War reached its height during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the U.S. over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis began on October 16, 1962 and lasted for 14 days. It is regarded by many as the moment when the cold war was closest to becoming a nuclear war.

East-West tensions eased rapidly thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the U.S.-Soviet Cold War.

Economic achievements: Between 1945 and 1970, the U.S. enjoyed a long period of economic growth, called by many historians as “a chicken in every pot” time. A majority of Americans enjoyed a comfortable standard of living. At the center of middle-class culture in the 1950’s was a growing obsession with consumer goods. In 1960, 55% of all households owned washing machines, 77% owned cars, 90% had television sets, and nearly all had refrigerators. The suburbs grew. U.S. auto-manufacturers in Detroit responded to the boom with new car models.

During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency (1963-1969) “War on Poverty,” many assistance programs for individuals and families were launched: including Medicare, which pays for many medical costs of the elderly, the Medicaid program, which finances medical care for low-income families, Food Stamps to help poor families obtain food. These programs are still used.

Unemployment and inflation: The 1970’s were ridiculed as the period of stagflation. The world oil shock of 1973 resulted in the energy crisis, unemployment, inflation, and the U.S. developed a trade deficit.

Reaganomics: In the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan began with a series of cuts in taxes and spending. Reagan downsized government regulation. The unemployment rate decreased from 10.8% in Dec. 1982 to 7.5% in Nov. 1984, and the economic growth rate increased from 4.5 to 7.2%. Reagan’s policies of spending on weapons helped more people find jobs. Businessmen made bigger profits. Most Americans became better off. This made Reagan popular. He was popular for another reason, too. After the shame of Vietnam and Watergate his simple ‘stand on your feet and act tough” policies made many Americans feel proud of their country again. But during the Reagan Administration the federal debt tripled (from $930 billion on Dec. 31, 1981 to $2.6 trillion on Sep. 30, 1988), reaching record levels. In addition to the fiscal deficits, the U.S. started to have large trade deficits. The U.S. went from being the world’s largest creditor nation to becoming the world’s largest debtor nation.

“Globalization and the new economy of the Tech Bubble:” The federal budget was balanced for the first time since the 1960’s under the Clinton Administration, mainly due to massive investment in the stock market in the 1990’s further accelerated by the dot-com boom. The 1990’s saw a significant boost in the software and “dot-com” industries. The Internet project was opened up for commercial traffic in 1994.

Two phenomena troubled many Americans and many name them as the root reasons of the 2008-2009 recession. Corporations were resorting more and more to processes known as downsizing: trimming the work force to cut costs despite the hardships it inflicted on workers and outsourcing. And in many industries the gap between the annual compensations of corporate executives and common laborers became enormous.

George W. Bush Administration was marked by dreadful attacks of Islamic terrorists on 9/11^th 2001, the invasion in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. Many allies of the U.S., including France, Germany, and Canada, as well as millions of people within the U.S. and around the world, did not support this invasion. The U.N. Security Council did not approve of the invasion. These invasions ignited Moslem “anti-Americanism” and inspired insurgency movements and a real civil war between the 3 main population groups belonging to different branches of Islam: Sunni, Shiites and Curds who are fighting against each other and Western instructors still left in Iraq and Afghanistan. A vast majority in Muslim nations believe that the U.S. is hostile and hateful to Islam. In fact, the U.S. got trapped in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, this Taliban-bound triangle.

The incumbent U.S. President Barack H. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were sworn in on January 20, 2009. People all over the world believed in Obama that he would be able to improve the image of the U.S., release the country from the failures of the Bush administration and retain the respect of the country, on the one hand, and pacify the whole world, on the other hand.

Obama came to office in such difficult circumstances as Franklin Roosevelt. He started, as did FDR, with an enormous stock of political capital. U.S. people understood that the challenges President Obama faced were not of his own making.

But the beginning of his presidency was marked by a severe economic recession of 2008 resulting from a housing market bubble, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, military spending and a declining dollar value. This economic crisis was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Like FDR, President Obama started with his 3 R’s program called Change, also including Relief, Recovery and Reform, aimed at helping the economy recover from the worldwide recession. The program included increased federal spending for health care, infrastructure, automobile industry, education, various tax breaks and incentives, and direct assistance to individuals, distributed over the course of several years. The Obama administration also enacted economic programs designed to stimulate the economy.

In Dec. 2009, a year after the election, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It could be viewed as a rejection of the unpopular legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Normally the Nobel Prize is presented for accomplishment, but this prize was based only on good intentions. In his lecture in Stockholm before the Norwegian Nobel Committee President Obama said, that he would “accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century.”

And the whole world was full of expectations for a better and safer future. But our expectations ended on March 20, 2011 with the U.S. and West-European bombs falling on Libya. The year of 2011 brought conflicts in Yemen, Egypt, now in Syria. These are “Obama’s extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” aren’t they? With these extraordinary efforts at hand President Obama and his predecessors and followers are laughing at us and at the whole world.