Culture and Identity
Columbus in the Americas
Christopher Columbus's first voyage from Spain to islands of the Caribbean, opening up Western colonisation of the Americas.
Declaration of Independence
American revolutionaries sign a Declaration of intent to 'dissolve the political bands' tying them to British colonial rule - and to fashion instead a 'Free and Independent' nation.
First Inaugural Address
George Washington, first President of the United States, delivers his Inaugural Address in New York (establishing one of the most important speeches in America's political calendar).
America's National Game
First recorded baseball game, between the New York Nine and the New York Knickerbockers in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Columbus Day
First national celebration of Columbus Day, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Bahamas.
The Institutionalisation of American Studies
American studies, dedicated in particular to research and teaching in US culture, is stabilised as an academic discipline: the American Studies Association (US home of the subject) is founded in 1951, the European Association for Academic Studies in 1954. and the British Association for American Studies in 1955.
The Contemporary Malaise
The Port Huron Statement, issued by the Students for a Democratic Society, demands a radical reset of the United States, exploding 'status quo politics' and embracing new values.
The Counterculture goes Mainstream
Box office success for the film Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper), a key contribution to American counterculture of the 1960s.
The Great Silent Majority
In an address to the American people, President Richard Nixon invokes 'the great silent majority': he is seeking popular support for government policy on the Vietnam War, but is trying more broadly to mobilise the idea of a consensus in America.
Celebrating the Border
Publication of Gloria Anzadúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which alternates between English and Spanish in its exploration of the cultural mix of the US/Mexico border country.
Baseball and American Nostalgia
Field of Dreams (dir. Phil Alden Robinson), one of American cinema's most nostalgic treatments of baseball, is released.
Interrogating Columbus's Legacy
Barry Lopez publishes The Rediscovery of North America: a powerful, revisionary account of colonial exploration of the Americas, viewed by Lopez as 'a ruthless, angry search for wealth'.
For and Against Columbus
The 500th anniversary of Columbus setting sail for the Americas: celebrated across the United States, but also fierecely protested against by Indigenous Americans and their supporters.
Presenting a 'More Complete Picture'
John Sayles's film Lone Star, exploring the complex mingling of cultures and ethnicities in the Texas/Mexico borderlands.
Demystifying Baseball
Bennett Miller's film Moneyball, based on the book by Michael Lewis, adopts a stats-based approach to baseball, contesting idyllic and patriotic baseball films such as Field of Dreams.
Trump's Second Inauguration
Donald Trump's second Inaugural Address as President, promising to make the United States 'the envy of every nation'.
Ethnicity and Immigration
What, Then, Is the American?
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's book, Letters from an American Farmer, reflecting, among other things, on American identity and on interethnic relationships in the newly independent United States.
Indian Removal
In the wake of the Indian Removal Act (1830), the forced relocation westwards of Native American peoples (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole), resulting in mass fatalities.
A Vision of Multiracial American Society
Herman Melville's novel, Moby-Dick: the Pequod, a whaling ship sailing from Nantucket in Massachusetts, has a crew of many ethnicities, described by Melville as 'federated along one keel'.
Anti-Chinese Prejudice
Passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, declaring that 'the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States […] is hereby suspended'.
Massacre of Native Americans
At Wounded Knee, South Dakota, some 300 Lakota Sioux men, women and children are killed by soldiers of the U.S. Cavalry.
American's First Immigration Processing Centre
Opening of the federal immigration station on Ellis Island, situated in New York Harbor (now part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument).
The Making of Americans
Frederick Jackson Turner's essay, 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History', argues that on the frontier immigrants to America shed their diverse heritages and become Americanised.
From her Beacon-Hand/Glows World-Wide Welcome
Emma Lazarus's sonnet 'The New Colossus', welcoming to America the 'huddled masses' and 'wretched refuse' of the world, is incised on a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
Evaluating Immigration to the US
Research into American immigration by the Dillingham Commission, resultting in a 41-volume report: a scholarly resource, but also a document promoting a white-centred conception of the US.
The Melting Pot
The Melting Pot, a play by the British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill that celebrates how people from 'East and West, and North and South' will be remade as Americans, opens in New York.
An Important Jewish American Autobiography
Mary Antin's memoir, The Promised Land, describing her experiences as a Jewish immigrant to the US from Belarus: 'I felt the pang, the fear, the wonder, and the joy of it.'
Two Difference Views on American Immigration
Randolph Bourne's article 'Trans-National America' and Madison Grant's book, The Passing of the Great Race: the first celebrates US multiculturalism, the second deplores US 'mongrelisation'.
Literacy Requirement for Immigrants
The 1917 Immigration Act (Barred Zone Act) requires immigrants aged 16 or above to demonstrate basic literacy in English or in 'some other langguage or dialect, including Hebrew or Yiddish'.
To Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the Unitied States
The Immigration Act (or Johnson-Reed Act) restricts immigration by nationality: the number of incomers is limited to 2 per cent of the people of each nationality who had been living in the US in 1890.
Japanese American Internment
Following US entry into the war against Japan, some 120,000 Japanese Americans are detained for varying periods at ten federally administered centres.
Reflecting on Internment
John Okada's novel, No-No Boy, reflecting on the post-war sense of dislocation experienced by a young Japanese American who had been interned during World War Two.
A Key Jewish American Voice
Philip Roth's debut fiction, Goodbye Columbus, and Five Short Stories, described by its publisher as exploring 'the intermingled comedy and tragedy, hilarity and heartbreak of modern Jewish-American life'.
Opening Up Immigration Again
The Immigration and Nationality Act (or Hart-Celler Act) abolishes the national quota system in place since 1924, opening the door to increased numbers of immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Red Power
In one of many radical Native American protests during this period, some 100 'Indians of All Tribes' occupy the abandoned penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, off San Francisco.
Latinx Advocacy
Founding of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) to challenge 'the social, economic, and political barriers that affect Latinos at the national and local levels'.
A Milestone in Native American Literature
Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, recounting the experiences of a member of the Laguna Pueblo Nation in New Mexico who returns home alienated and adrift after wartime service in the US Army.
New Native American Writing
Sherman Alexie's breakthrough short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, bringing a brash, hip style to exploration of traditional Native American themes.
Post-9/11 Retrenchment
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, passing of the USA PATRIOT Act, enhancing, among other things, surveillance and detention of immigrants suspected of terrorist activity.
Who Are We?
Conservative US political scientist Samuel Huntington's Who Are We?: subtitled 'The Challenges to America's National Identity', the book worries about developments in the US such as 'Hispanicisation'.
Armenian Americans
Sean Baker's feature film Tangerine, shot on smartphones, which, as well as focusing on trans African American sex workers in Los Angeles, considers the city's Armenian community.
A 'Big, Beautiful Wall'
In his first campaign for President, Donald Trump commits to a massive extension and fortification of the barrier between the United States and Mexico.
Haitian Immigrants Demonised
On spurious evidence, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump and running mate J. D. Vance accuse Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio of killing and eating local people's pets.
African American Culture
Foundations of Slavery
'20 and odd Negroes', from present-day Angola in South-west Africa, are forcibly transported to Jamestown, Virginia, initiating the transatlantic slave trade.
Slavery's Consolidation
Massachusetts legalises slavery, predating similar decisions in other British colonies in North America, including Maryland, New Jersey and New York.
Resisting Slavery
Some twenty-three enslaved persons in New York City engage in an armed insurrection, met with brutal punishment and the devising of still more stringent slave codes.
A Foundational Moment in African American Literature
Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved person in Boston, publishes Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in London.
Beginnings of the Abolition of Slavery
Starting in Vermont and culminating in New Jersey, slavery is declared illegal in regions of America north of Maryland.
Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Prohibition on importing enslaved people to the United States, meaning that slaveholders in the Southern states now have to reproduce the institution through the existing enslaved population.
A Major Rebellion of Enslaved People
Charismatic carpenter and preacher Nat Turner leads a rebellion of enslaved persons in Virginia (for fictional treatments, see William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner [1967] and Nate Parker's film Birth of a Nation [2016]).
Slave Narrative
One of the most important personal testimonies to American slavery's physical, psychological and cultural oppressiveness: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.
A Concession to Slaveholders
Passing of the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring people even in free states to return to their 'owners' enslaved people who had escaped.
Nationwide Abolition of Slavery
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified at the conclusion of the Civil War, prohibits 'slavery' and 'involuntary servitude' in the United States.
Ratification of Segregation in the American South
The Supreme Court rules in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities, deemed 'separate but equal', are not unconstitutional.
A Major Work of African American Cultural Analysis
African American sociologist, historian and activist W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of fourteen essays on religion, music, education, etc. in the Black community.
African American Cultural Upsurge
The Harlem Renaissance: a major movement of African American literature, music and visual culture, centred on - but not limited to - Harlem in New York City.
A Milestone in African American Jazz
Duke Ellington, the major jazz composer, pianist and band leader, performs for the first time with the Cotton Club Orchestra in Harlem.
Changing American Culture 'Forever'
Richard Wright's incendiary novel, Native Son, about a young, impoverished African American in Chicago who goes on the run after being caught up in the death of a white woman.
Breaking a Colour Bar
Jackie Robinson signs for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American in the twentieth century to play major league baseball.
A Book of the Very First Order
Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man. Its African American narrator announces on the first page: 'I am an invisible man. […] invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me'.
Desegregating Education
In a corrective to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court rules in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in the US school system is unconstitutional.
Desegregating Transportation
The year-long Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (among others), concludes with the Supreme Court outlawing the racial segregation of public transport.
Christianity and Anti-Racism
While briefly imprisoned, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes 'Letter from Birmingham Jail', outlining his socially activist model of Christianity.
Seeking 'The Sunlit Path of Racial Justice'
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, attended by supporters of other ethnicities as well as African Americans, and featuring Martin Luther King's iconic speech, I Have a Dream'.
Landmark Civil Rights Legislation
Passing of the Civil Rights Act, barring discrimination by employers, employment agencies, trade unions and schools on grounds including race (also national origin, sex and religion).
Malcolm X
Publication of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, just ten months after the great African American political theorist, organiser and activist had been shot dead in New York .
What We Want Now!
The Black Panther Party, bringing together a Black Nationalist outlook and a Marxist classs analysis, and inspired by liberationist movements in the Global South, is founded in Oakland, California.
The Death of Dr. King
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee by a fugitive white criminal: outpouring of grief and rage in the African American community, with unrest in more than 100 US cities.
Black Power
At a medal ceremony in the Mexico City Olympics, two African American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, make iconic Black Power salutes.
Remembering Slavery
Alex Haley's non-fictional chronicle Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) and its adaptation as an ABC miniseries (1977) play a major part in centring slavery again in the national consciousness.
Early Days in Hip-Hop
The Sugarhill Gang's hit song 'Rapper's Delight' helps to 'mainstream' hip-hop, a new African American music that until then was circulating mainly in neighbourhood or underground venues.
This is not a Story to Pass On
Toni Morrison's great novel Beloved, drawing upon Gothic and horror traditions to present African American slavery and its aftermath.
Riots in Los Angeles
Six days of major unrest in Los Angeles, following the court acquittal of four LAPD officers who, in 1991, had been filmed by a bystander beating up an African American detainee, Rodney King.
The First African American President
Illinois Senator Barack Obama, of Kenyan heritage on his father's side, becomes the first African American to be elected President of the United States.
Black Lives Matter
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi initiate the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, following acquittal of a white man who had fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012.
Re-Staging Slavery
Steve McQueen's Oscar-winning film, 12 Years a Slave, adapting the 1853 autobiography by former enslaved person, Solomon Northup.
Black Superheroes
Ryan Coogler's film Black Panther, adapting a Marvel Comics strand, proves hugely successful: open to some political interrogation, but Afrocentric in its design choices, its soundtrack, etc.
This is America
Childish Gambino's song and video, reflecting in nuanced, complex fashion on the history and present of Black Americans.
I Can't Breathe
George Floyd, an African American living in Minneapolis, is fatally asphyxiated after arrest by a white police officer: huge national and global protests follow, re-igniting Black Lives Matter.
Contesting the Canon
Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction, Percival Everett's novel James reimagines Huckleberry Finn from an African American perspective: the narrator is Twain's escaped enslaved person Jim, here preferring to call himself James.
Religion
The Pilgrim Fathers
The Pilgrim Fathers sail from England and begin to develop the colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, accelerating Puritan settlement of New England.
The Eyes of All People Are Upon Us
The sermon 'A Model of Christian Charity', most often attributed to Puritan leader John Winthrop, reminds people of their godly mission in America: 'we shall be as a city upon a hill.'
Molestations from the Invisible World
Fervid paranoia about withcraft grips Salem, Massachusetts, resulting in the execution of fourteen women and five men for their alleged consorting with the Devil.
American Religious Revival
'The Great Awakening', aiming to recapture the godly fervour of the first Puritan settlers, sweeps through the American colonies.
Right of Religious Observance
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution declares that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof'.
A Milestone in African American Christianity
The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) is founded by Philadelphia-based minister Richard Allen, with a view to providing Black Americans with non-racist places of worship.
Growth of Catholocism
The Catholic Church in the United States grows prodigiously, powered by the number of incomers from traditionally Catholic nations such as Ireland, Italy and Poland.
America's Godly Purpose
In Volume 1 of Democracy in America, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville observes that US expansion across North America is popularly understood to be 'driven on by the hand of God'.
Christianity and Slavery
The Southern Baptist Convention is established, in the wake of increasing disagreements with Northern Baptists over the legitimacy of slavery.
Mormon Pioneers
Mormons under the leadership of Brigham Young arrive in the Utah Territory and identify a site for the Salt Lake Temple (the building of which will begin in 1853).
The Rise of Judaism
Significant upsurge in the number of practising Jews in the United States, propelled by mass immigration by members of Jewish communities in Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, etc.
Establishing Islam
America's first mosque is built by Albanian Muslims in Biddeford, Maine.
A Pioneering Media Evangelist
The charismatic Pentecostalist Sister Aimee Semple McPherson conducts lavish, multi-media services at the Angelus Temple, or Church of the Foursquare Gospel, in Los Angeles.
The Scopes Monkey Trial
State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes: a court case in Dayton, in which Scopes is convicted of teaching evolutionary biology in high school, thus deviating from the Biblical account of Creation.
Religion and the Radio
Radio career of the Michigan-based Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin: hugely successful at its peak, his show, The Golden Hour is eventually cancelled because of its virulent right-wing content.
The Nation of Islam
The Nation of Islam, a major Islamic organisation (though one considered heterodox by some Muslims in America), is founded in Detroit by Wallace Fard Muhammad.
A Major American Evangelist
Publication of Calling Youth to Christ, the first of countless books and public interventions by the charismatic Southern Baptist minister Billy Graham.
The Pledge of Allegiance
Despite the separation of church and state in the United States, Congress votes to add the phrase 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance that commits its speaker to uphold the nation.
Origins of the 'Megachurch'
Founding in Houston, Texas of Lakewood Church, an evangelical Baptist and Word of Faith site which will grow to become one of the largest megachurches in the United States.
Prayer in School
Deciding the case of Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court adjudges it unconstutitional to promote the public recitation of a prayer in US schools.
The Beginnings of Christian Rock
'Larry Norman, previously a singer and songwriter with the Californian band People!, releases the album Upon This Rock - a record often taken to inaugurate the genre of Christian Rock.
The Moral Majority
Founding by Virginia pastor Jerry Falwell Sr. and Paul Weyrich of the Moral Majority - a movement intended to contest secular humanism and to fortify the Republican Party.
Evangelicalism and Politics
Frustrated by the failure of mainstream Republican politicians to advance the evangelical agenda, Pat Robertson, a Virginia-based televangelist, runs a vigorous (if ultimately unsuccessful) Presidential campaign.
A Sect and the State
Some eighty people die in a disastrous federal raid on the Waco, Texas headquarters of the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Davidian Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Religious Diversity in US Congress
Keith Ellison (Muslim, Minnesota) and Mazie Hirono (Buddhist, Hawaii) become the first members of their respective faith communities to be elected to the United States Congress.
Obama's Pastor
With Barack Obama running for President, controversy erupts over sermons delivered by his Chicago pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright: in one, rather than seeing the US as divinely blessed, Wright says 'God damn America' for the nation's iniquities.
Evangelical Cinema
Five films of the God's Not Dead franchise, based on the writing of Rice Broocks and aiming to use narrative cinema to confront contemporary secularism and spread the Word.
America's Religious Landscape Now
Latest survey by the Pew Research Center records 62 per cent of Americans identifying as Christians (of various denominations), 7 per cent as 'other religions', 29 per cent as 'religiously unaffiliated'.
Regions
Our Manifest Destiny
In his essay 'Annexation', journalist and editor John L. O'Sullivan declares that it is 'our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions'.
Settling the West
The Homestead Act grants adult heads of families 160 acres of publicly surveyed land, with the proviso that they should tend and improve these for five years before acquiring the title deeds.
Mapping the West
Expedition led by naturalist and soldier John Wesley Powell surveys parts of the South-west, including the Grand Canyon and elsewhere on the Colorado River.
Manifest Destiny on Canvas
John Gast's painting American Progress, depicting the westward progress of the United States: Indigenous Americans and buffalo alike flee in the face of the nation's modernity .
This Mother of Ours
At the Powder River Council, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull evokes the IndigenAous understanding of Western land: as continuous, to be held in common and reverenced, and not as something that can be parcelled up into exchangeable items of property.
Redistributing Native American Land
Passing of the Dawes Act (or General Allotment Act), dividing Native lands previously held in common into individually owned parcels (many subsequently acquired by white incomers).
The Frontier has Gone
The US Census Bureau declares the frontier closed, recognising the scale of settlement already in the West.
Enter the Man
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, a novel by Easterner Owen Wister, romanticises about the figure of the cowboy even as he was being superseded in a modernising, urbanising West.
You Belong to the Land
Willa Cather's novel O Pioneers!, set in Nebraska and featuring a female protagonist Alexandra who approaches the land in a spirit of mutuality and tenderness, not with an acquisitive mentality.
Evaluating Western Masculinity
Shane, written by Jack Shaefer first as a magazine serial and then as a novel, before filming by George Stevens, explores both the allure and the danger of the autonomous male in the American West.
Pathological Whiteness
John Ford's film The Searchers, which has at its centre a white protagonist deranged by the thought that his niece might be involved sexually with a Native American chief.
The Spaghetti Western
Sergio Leone's five films - the Dollars Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West and Duck, You Sucker! - that combine playful stylisation and acerbic demystification in their presentation of the Old West.
Westworld
In Michael Crichton's film Westworld, a theme park's presentation of the Old West becomes lethal, replaying rather than repressing the region's legacy of male violence.
War was Always Here
Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, a ferocious and hallucinatory retelling of violent mid-nineteenth-century history in the US/Mexico borderlands.
Demystifying the West
Mike Davis's study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz - one of many scorching texts in which Davis uncovers class injustice, racial inequality and environmental degradation in the West.
Deromanticising the West
Annie Proulx publishes three collections of 'Wyoming stories': the landscape they evoke is sublime, but the human lives playing out there are described as hard and attritional.
The Multicultural West
Tommy Lee Jones's 'post-western' The Three Burials of Melquades Estrada explores the mix of languages, culures and economies in the contemporary border country between the US and Mexico.
Retrieving Native American Stories
There There and Wandering Stars: Tommy Orange's two novels, uncovering Native American stories from beneath the surface of the contemporary, urbanised West.
The Book That Made This Great War
Harriet Beecher Stowe's hugely successful novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin: a powerful abolitionist text, even as it reproduces aspects of white supremacist thinking.
America's Civil War
America's most destructive conflict, causing approxiimately 700,000 deaths and ending in the defeat of the secessionist Southern states.
Federal Occupation of the South
The (short-lived) era of Reconstruction, in which federal agencies operating in the South attempted to redress some of the economic and cultural deficits faced by the region's African Americans.
Lighting Out for the Territory
Mark Twain's classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, celebrating idyllic experiences of loafing by the Mississippi, but also excoriating Southern racism, violence and sentimentality.
White Supremacism on Screen
D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation is released, mixing innovations in cinematic form with a toxic conception of American history, especially with regard to white/Black relations in the South.
Honouring Southern Country Music
Originally known as the WSM Barn Dance, The Grand Ole Opry opens in Nashville, Tennessee, offering frequent radio broadcasts of Southern country music in all its varieties.
A High Point in the Southern Literature
Astonishing quartet of fictions by Mississippi-born William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! - bringing modernist techniques to bear on inquiries into the South's tangled racial history.
Southern Agrarianism
I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, a set of essays written by writers and scholars styling themselves as 'Twelve Southerners', makes the case for a traditional, anti-modern South.
Photographing the Depression South (and West)
Photographers working for the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), document the effects of the Depression on regional lives.
A Weapon of Terror Against Black America
Gone With the Wind, adapted from Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel: epic in scale and sumptuous in technique as it re-creates the antebellum South, but a film fiercely criticised by African Americans.
How to Portray Souther Poverty
The multimodal book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with a poetic text by James Agee and monochrome photographs by Walker Evans, seeks to capture the lives of the rural poor in Alabama.
White Rock
Elvis Presley begins his phenomenally successful rock 'n' roll career, recording at Sun Studios in Memphis.
The Southern Strategy
Sustained campaign by the Republican Party to gain, and then maintain, electoral supremacy in the South by adopting conservative policies and traditional cultural positions.
Famous Tales of Southern Small-Town Life
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty: rich assembly of work by this key writer of the American South (who wrote novels as well as short fiction, and embraced myth and fantasy as well as realism), born in Mississippi in 1909.
The Nuevo South
Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Latinx population in Southern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky and Louisiana has grown rapidly, modifying regional culture to a significant extent.
African Americanising the South
Magic City, a collection by the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa, reflects on the experiences of growing up as a Black person in rural Louisiana in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Interconnected South
The Lacuna, one of many novels by Kentucky-raised Barbara Kingsolver, contests the idea of Southern separateness or autonomy, alternating between North Carolina and Mexico.
Blowing Up the Plantation
Quentin Tarantino's film Django Unchained draws on the conventions of the spaghetti western in its narrative of a former enslaved person's revenge in the antebellum South.
A Musical Mash-Up
Beyoncé's Grammy Award-winning album, Cowboy Carter, draws on the singer's Western origins in Texas, but even more on Southern musical traditions including bluegrass, rock 'n' roll and zydeco.
Cities
The Rational City
A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania in America, envisaging the future Philadelphia as an orderly, gridded city, is produced by the surveyor Thomas Holme.
America's Capital
Construction of the Capitol, the White House and other federal buildings in Washington, D.C., following the city's recognition by the Residence Act as the seat of American government.
Mast-Hemm'D Manhattan
'Walt Whitman's poem 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry', celebrating the human teeming of New York City: 'Thrive, cities - bring your freight, bring your shows.'
The Sum and Epitome of Human Knowledge
Construction of the technologically innovative Brooklyn Bridge in New York (later celebrated in much American culture: e.g. Hart Crane's poetry collection The Bridge [1930] and Joseph Stella's painting The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme [1939])
Documenting the Urban Poor
Jacob Riis's book of photojournalism, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York: disfigured by racism, but powerful in its testimonies to urban inequality.
Go Out into the Streets
The Ashcan School of painters, including George Bellows, Robert Henri and John Sloan, develops an American version of realism, often focusing on scenes of everyday urban life.
Showcasing the American City
World's Columbian Exposition (or Chicago World's Fair), held to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to the Americas, displays America's cultural swagger and technological modernity .
Gender Dynamics in the US City
One of the high achievements of American Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser's novel, Sister Carrie, which follows the fortunes of its rural protagonist Carrie Meeber in Chicago's burgeoning leisure economy.
Casino City
Las Vegas's economy of gambling and holidaying is inaugurated, as land is purchased for the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino.
Architects Bringing 'Order' Out of 'Chaos'
In Plan of Chicago, Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett address the 'complicated problems' raised by this 'great city', aiming to improve everything from bridges and boulevards to parks and harbours.
The Modern Babylon-on-the-Hudson
Manhatta, a short, experimental documentary by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand: inspired by Walt Whitman's 1860 poem 'Mannahatta', the film celebrates the energy, diversity and modernity of New York City.
Collage City
John Dos Passos's modernist novel Manhattan Transfer, interweaving the narratives of multiple characters in New York (from a lawyer to a seamstress, an architect to a destitute urban wanderer).
A Typical City
Sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd publish two books on 'Middletown' (based on Muncie, Indiana), aiming to document and evaluate 'all the things people do in this American city'.
Skyscraper City
Construction of the 1250-feet high Empire State Building in New York City, for four decades the tallest building in the world.
The Private Eye in the City
From The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye: Raymond Chandler publishes six novels featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe that range across the geography of Los Angeles.
The Loneliness of a Large City
Nighthawks, Edward Hopper's best-known painting, picturing three customers and a cook in a sparsely furnished diner set in a deserted urban nightscape.
It was the God-Damned Street
Ann Petry's realist novel, The Street, which focuses on an African American single mother and offers a more sombre, less exuberant portrait of Harlem than emerges in Harlem Renaissance literature, painting and music of the 1920s and 1930s.
The Rise of the Suburb
Construction by real-estate developer William J. Levitt of Levittown, a suburban housing development for New York City; four more developments on the US mainland by Levitt & Sons, plus one on Puerto Rico, follow by 1951.
White Flight
Acceleration in the numbers of white people leaving city centres for suburbia or smaller towns nearby: e.g. the white population of Detroit falls from more than two million in 1950 to less than 500,000 in 1980.
The Most Exuberantly Pro-Los_Angeles Book Ever Written
Reyner Banham's text Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, which celebrates LA's plural building styles, its suburban sprawl, its appeal to the car not the pedestrian (see also a documentary film of 1972: Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.
Citizenly Interactions
Sociologist William H. Whyte releases a book and a film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which detail a rich variety of human encounters in eighteen locations in Manhattan.
Tensions in the American City
Spike Lee's powerful film, Do the Right Thing, tracing the build-up of racial and cultural tensions on one hot summer's day in a neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City.
Urban Ruin, Urban Revival
From Silent Cities to Detroit Is No Dry Bones, Chilean-born photojournalist Camilo José Vergara publishes a series of striking urban studies, finding signs of renewal as well as decay.
The Multiperspectival City
David Simon's HBO series, The Wire, explores life in contemporary Baltimore through five prisms: the illegal drug trade, the port system, the city government, the school system, the print media.
From Natural to Social Disaster
Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans (and the larger Gulf Coast), its destructive natural effects magnified by the dilatory official efforts of rescue and renewal.
America's Tallest Building
Construction of One World Trade Center (or One WTC or the Freedom Tower), on the site of the Twin Towers in Manhattan destroyed in the attacks on 9/11.
Los Angeles Burns
'Catastrophic wildfires burn in January across vast areas of Los Angeles, causing fatalities, property loss and environmental destruction (see Mike Davis's prescient 1999 article, 'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn').
Class
Transatlantic Feudalism
The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, principally authored by the political philospher John Locke, proposes exporting an English-style feudalist schema to the Carolina colony.
The Promise of Equality in America
'The American Declaration of Independence asserts that 'all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.' How this creed of equality will actually be lived out in America is, of course, another matter.
The Feudal South
Three romantic novels by William Alexander Caruthers - The Cavaliers of Virginia, The Kentuckian in New-York, The Knights of the Horseshoe - that can be taken as representative of the antebellum South's frequent modelling of itself as a feudal society.
American Trade Unionism
Successive founding of four major trade unions, marked by differences in their degree of radicalism: Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, Women's Trade Union League, International Workers of the World (or 'Wobblies').
Skewering the Upwardly Mobile
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a novel co-written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, satirises pursuers of wealth in the modernising, capitalising US.
Muckraking
'Name given to a large body of journalism, photography and fiction, dedicated to exposing injustice and exploitation: notable texts include Lincoln Steffens's The Shame of the Cities, Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.
Strike!
Iconic event in American labour history as workers for the Pullman Palace Car Company of Chicago, supported by workers in other industries, sustain a strike that immobilises much of the US rail network.
Conspicuous, Consumption, Conspicuous Leisure
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, lays bare the behaviours of the wealthy American elite.
American Anarchism
The Russian-born anarchist theorist and activist Emma Goldman founds Mother Earth, described as 'A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature'.
Stories in Pictures
Lewis Hine, an academic sociologist as well as a photographer, goes undercover to capture striking images of exploited child labour for campaigns run by the National Child Labor Committee. Content
Pie in the Sky
The trade union activist Joe Hill, who will be executed in Utah on murder charges four years later, sings the protest song, 'The Preacher and the Slave': 'You will eat, by and by / In that glorious land above the sky.'
A Butler's Thumb
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby: Nick Carraway, the narrator, is half in love with Gatsby's extreme wealth, but he also cannot help noticing the estate's exploited labour.
American Marxism
For over two decades, New Masses serves as the house journal of the Communist Party USA, attracting as contributors in its heyday not only radical political theorists, narrowly defined, but leftist novelists, poets and visual artists.
The Working Class Shall Smash All the Powers Against It
Publication of the prison letters of Italian American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been executed in 1927 for their still-disputed involvement in a case of murder and armed robbery.
The American Dream
James Truslow Adams's book The Epic of America popularises the term, 'the American dream' - but not exclusively or narrowly as a vision of economic aspiration (Adams imagines 'a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank').
Photographing the Poor
Dorothea Lange's photographs of Florence Owens Thompson, an itinerant pea picker in California - the best-known of these, Migrant Mother, is adopted as an iconic image of the Depression.
Representing the 'Okies'
In his best-selling novel The Grapes of Wrath, filmed the following year, John Steinbeck documents, movingly and angrily, Oklahoma farmers uprooted by the Depression who travel to California in search of survivable conditions.
Protesting in Song
Folk singer Woody Guthrie releases the album, Dust Bowl Ballads, featuring excoriations of the class divide such as 'Do Re Mi': on living in California, he sings, 'But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot / If you ain’t got the do re mi.'
An Inescapable Network of Mutuality
Delivering a Fourth of July speech, 'The American Dream', Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. extends his social critique to class injustice as well as structural racism. As long as there is 'poverty in this world', he says, 'no one can be totally rich, even if he has a billion dollars'.
Blue-Collar
Bruce Springsteen's sixth studio album, Nebraska, regarded by many critics as his most powerful reflections on the condition of hard-pressed, working-class Americans.
Upwardly Mobile African Americans
NBC's popular comedy The Cosby Show, starring Bill Cosby as a wealthy African American obstetrician and implying, in the process, the feasibility of economic success for the Black population at large.
The Product Doesn't Belong to You
Rage Against the Machine, the first, eponymous album of one of America's most noted leftist and anti-authoritarian bands, formed in Los Angeles.
Unwashed Working-Class America
Joe Bageant's book of reportage, Deer Hunting with Jesus, exploring the culture as well as the economic condition of working-class voters in Winchester, Virginia who have abandoned the Democrats and now vote for the Republicans.
We Are the 99%
Occupy Wall Street (OWS), lasting for fifty-nine days across the autumn, brings protesters to New York's financial quarter to campaign against corporate greed and class injustice.
Photography and the Precariat
Chris Arnade's book of photojournalism, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, follows in the tradition of How the Other Half Lives and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in its documentation of the economically and socially precarious.
Wealth Inequality in America
According to the Urban Institute, 'Wealth inequality is higher in America than in almost any other developed country': e.g. the wealthiest families have 71 times the wealth even of 'families in the middle'.
Gender and Sexuality
Gender Fluidity in Puritan America
A case heard in Jamestown, Virginia against Thomas(ine) Hall, an indentured servant, uncovers evidence of someone living a gender-fluid life, regularly alternating between names, clothes, etc. variously coded as 'male' or 'female'.
The Public Universal Friend
For forty years, the former Jemima Wilkinson preaches a message of sexual equality in the sight of God to audiences in states including Rhode Island and Connecticut, having in 1876 adopted the name of 'the Public Universal Friend' and henceforth avoided - or mixed - gender denotations such as pronouns and clothes.
Like Dolls and Spoiled Children
Early feminist Angelina Grimké, writing in Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, critiques American gender relations for reducing women to the condition of 'mere drudges' or ornaments, simply fulfilling the wishes of their superior menfolk.
Sexism in the Workplace
Female millworkers in Lowell, Massachusetts form the Female Labor Reform Association, campaigning against sexist workplace practices.
Extending American Equality
America's first 'woman's rights convention', held at Seneca Falls in New York State, issues the Declaration of Sentiments, largely authored by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which modifies the US Declaration of Independence by asserting that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.'
The Limits of White Feminism
Sojourner Truth, formerly an enslaved person, delivers a powerful speech, 'Ain't I a Woman?' at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio - reminding her audience of the differentiation of American women's experience by factors such as race.
A Degrading, Beastly Senuality
First edition of Walt Whitman's poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, attracts a fierce response from conservative critics appalled by its celebration of the erotic life (including, in poems such as 'Calamus', homosexuality.
War and Gender
An unidentified drummer wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg and subsequently exposed as biologically female, not male, is one of several Civil War combatants who vow not to return to the gender assigned them at birth.
Temperance and Feminism
Founding in Ohio of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which, for almost two decades (1879-98), is under the charismatic leadership of Frances E. Willard: the movement offers women an opportunity to enter public life dynamically.
To Construct the World Anew
Social reformer, pacifist and intellectual Jane Addams opens Hull House in Chicago, a settlement offering local, socially disadvantaged women facilities ranging from nursery care for their children to college-level education.
Critiquing Patriarchy
Two important texts by Charlotte Gilman exposing the institutionalisation of patriarchy and its corroding effects upon women: the first fictional ('The Yellow Wallpaper', 1892), the second discursive (Women and Economics, 1898).
A Trans Sanctuary
Founding in New York City of the Cercle Hermaphroditos, offering a safe space where trans women living difficult lives characterised by concealment could gather together to support each other and express themselves openly.
The Inward Life that Questions
Kate Chopin publishes The Awakening, a novel that scandalises some conservative readers for its portrait of a wealthy New Orleans woman, Edna Pontellier, who increasingly rejects marriage and motherhood, 'that outward life which conforms.
Sport, Race, Gender
The African American heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson precipitates a crisis of white masculinity by defeating 'the Great White Hope' Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevadal; white crowds react to Jeffries' loss by rioting in cities including Cincinnati, Houston and New York.
Women's Right to Vote
Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution which enfranchises American women, asserting that 'The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Rosie the Riveter
To help recruit more women to the domain of paid physical labour (so many men American being engaged elsewhere in the war effort), the first illustrations depicting Rosie the Riveter: a fictional character, who exhibits muscularity and determination.
Ten Years Before Stonewall
Riot by patrons of Cooper Do-Nuts, a café in Los Angeles popular with all sections of the LGBTQ+ community: the unrest is sparked by police attempts to arrest two drag queens, two male sex workers and one gay man. Less far-reaching in its impact than Stonewall in 1969, but a milestone, nevertheless, in LGBTQ+ resistance.
A High Watermark in Second-Wave Feminism
Betty Friedan publishes a bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique, which fiercely criticises the notion that women will find fulfilling lives simply by undertaking the roles of wife, mother and homemaker.
Like 'A Numb Trolley-Bus'
Sylvia Plath's highly influential novel, The Bell Jar, having as its narrator Esther Greenwood a young woman who tries to find authenticity and autonomy in a world governed by patriarchal institutions (from education to therapy).
Our Mother Stonewall was Giving Birth to a New Era
The Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, New York City, mobilising members of the LGBTQ+ community against police officers attempting to shut down a popular bar; the riots galvanise a new militancy in American LGBTQ+ activism, e.g. the founding in New York very soon afterwards of the Gay Liberation Front.
Abortion and the State
In deciding the case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court affirms the constitutionality of American women's right to abortion.
Women's Poetic Voices
Adrienne Rich wins the National Book Award for Poetry for her collrection, Diving into the Wreck (sharing the honour with Allen Ginsberg); she divides the prize money with shortlisted fellow feminist poets, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker.
Everything Want to be Loved
Alice Walker's epistolary novel, The Color Purple: a massive success, both critically and commercially, and a book that inscribes the value of neglected Black women's lives, including lesbian lives.
The Subversiveness of Gay Life
Edmund White's trilogy of novels about gay experience in America from the 1950s to the moment of HIV/AIDS (A Boy's Own Life, The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Farewell Symphony); being gay is linked to cultural dissent and resistance more broadly.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt
Initiation by American LGBTQ+ activists including Cleve Jones based in San Francisco, of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt: each of the woven panels, joined to the others as an expression of solidarity, while being individualised by choice of colour, lettering, imagery, etc., commemorates a life lost to AIDS.
Intersectionality
University of Chicago legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw publishes an essay, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’ that has a major effect, both theoretically and practically, in foregrounding the idea of intersectionality - the importance of understanding that minoritised women experience multiple, interrelated oppressions.
Re-Wilding American Masculinity
Robert Bly, previously best-known as a poet, publishes Iron John: A Book About Men: the book becomes a key text of the emerging men's movement, warning of the dangers of 'flying away from the father'.
Gender and Performance
Publication of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, two paradigm-shifting books by US philosopher Judith Butler that understand gender identity not as innate but as constructed, a feat of performance.
A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Circulation of Tony Kushner's play, Angels in America, first on stage (in two parts, 1991 and 1992) and then on TV (2003); the play memorialises lives lost to AIDS, while also positioning the epidemic more broadly in post-war American history.
Resistance to Same-Sex Marriage
A Republican-dominated Congress passes the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), aimed at preventing federal recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage; states are given the right to deny the validity of marriages conducted outside their own jurisdictions.
Boundless Freedom
The title track of Lady Gaga's hit album, Born This Way includes a powerful appeal to gender and sexual inclusiveness: 'No matter gay, straight, or bi / Lesbian, transgender life / I’m on the right track, baby.'
Legitimisation of Same-Sex Marriage
Two landmark legal decisions by the Supreme Court enshrine the legitimacy of same-sex marriage: in 2013 the striking-down of 1996's Defense of Marriage Act; in 2015 the decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which gives same-sex couples the right to marry on the same terms and conditions as heterosexual partners.
Emergence of the INCEL
22-year-old Elliot Rodger kills six people and injures fourteen others in an attack fuelled by misogyny in Isla Vista, California; Rodger's actions, together with the 140-page manifesto he left behind, subsequently make him a hero of the incel movement.
Abortion Rights Curtailed
In the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade (1973), cancelling women's federally guaranteed right to abortion and returning decision-making on abortion to state legislatures.
An Unsmashed Glass Ceiling
Vice-President Kamala Harris is defeated in the Presidential election by the Republican candidate Donald Trump, meaning that the United States is still to have a female President.
Two Genders Only
In his second Inaugural Address as President, Donald Trump declares it henceforth government policy 'that there are only two genders: male and female' - a proposition soon underpinned by Executive Order 14168, 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism'.
Youth
A Girl's Book
Publication, in two volumes, of Louisa M. Alcott's enduringly sucessful novel, Little Women, exploring the diverse experiences in their New England community of the four March sisters (and their mother [Marmee] - their father is away at the Cvil War).
The Respectable Boys
Mark Twain's novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, narrating the lively (but ultimately contained) escapades of boys - and the occasional girl - in a small town on the Mississipi.
The Young Demographic
Harper's Young People, oriented towards all young readers between the ages of six and sixteen, launches in 1879; in 1895 it is redirected towards male teenagers, under the title of Harper's Round Table.
Youth and Bestsellerdom
Publication in the US of Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel, Anne of Green Gables, about an 11-year-old orphan growing up; the book is set in Prince Edward Island (and Montgomery was Canadian), but it appeals hugely to a young demographic in the United States.
The Invention of the Teenager
First issue of the magazine, Seventeen, aimed at a slightly wider readership than the title would imply (typically aged between 13 and 19); the magazine has varied in focus across its history (e.g. its homepage now has an LGBT tab), but it is still in publication.
None of 'That David Copperfield Kind of Crap'
J. D. Salinger's phenomenally successful novel, The Catcher in the Rye, narrated by sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield who is determined to root out and resist everything that is 'phoney' in America.
Jive Talking
The biker film The Wild One, directed by László Benedek: for all its scenes of violence, one of the most striking sequences sees the bikers confusing an ageing bartrender by their 'jive-talking' or 'bebop' language.
Juvenile Delinquency
The work of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which conducts hearings on the effects upon young people of comic books alleged to have graphic content.
The Most Startling Motion Picture in Years
Release of Richard Brooks's film Blackboard Jungle, a 'problem youth movie' focusing on the efforts of an earnest teacher of English to engage male students in a challenging inner-city high school.
A Challenging Drama of Today's Teen Violence
One of the key 'teen films' from Hollywood: Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring the charismatic James Dean as an alienated teenager (Dean's performance was posthumous, sadly, as he died in a car crash a month before the film's release).
Beatlemania
The first two US tours of the Beatles, provoking massive excitement among young American fans.
Greasers v. SOCS
The Outsiders, a novel about sensitive young males trying to navigate their way between two rival gangs and carve out their own authentic space, is published while the writer, S. E. Hinton, is herself only eighteen years old.
Grease is the Word
Release of the hugely successful musical dramedy Grease, plotting the cross-class, cross-cultural romance of teen characters played by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
The Laureate of American Teen Cinema
Series of successful, teen-centred films written and directed by John Hughes, including Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Some Kind of Wonderful.
I Don't Really Like My Friends
Michael Lehmann's film Heathers, significantly darkening the genre of the teen movie as it explores not only verbal but physical violence in the interactions of Ohio high school students.
Something Wrong?
John Singleton's film, Boyz n the Hood, set in South Central Los Angeles, is released. Starring Ice Cube of N.W.A, the movie has hip-hop fashionability, yet it is a harrowing examnation of the attrition of young Black males in tough urban neighbourhoods.
Generation X
Canadian writer Douglas Coupland's epochal novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, gathering together fragmentary narratives by an eclectic cast of precariously situated young people in California.
A Voice of Generation X
Suicide of Kurt Cobain, guitarist and singer-songwriter of Seattle grunge band Nirvana: resonance of his death for young fans in the US, and beyond, for whom Nirvana were an authentic voice.
Into the Buffyverse
Spinning off from his 1992 feature film, Joss Whedon's successful TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, offering a witty mash-up of the high school movie and the horror movie.
Writing in Code
Lauren Myracle's quintet of Internet Girls novels - including ttyl (2005), ttfn (2007) and l8r, g8r (2008) - that utilise the language of texting as their medium, thus offering a potential defence against adult oversight.
Darkness and Light
The phenomenally successful Twilight series, comprising Stephenie Meyer's novels (2005-20) and their film adaptations (2008-12); despite the vampiric theme, Meyer also infuses the narratives of her young characters with positivity.
The Birth of the Swiftie
Taylor Swift's eponymous debut album, inaugurating a colossally successful musical career, blending genres such as pop and country and accumulating along the way a massive, predominantly young fan base (the Swifties).
Critiquing Millenials
First and second editions of psychologist Jean Twenge's bestselling book, Generation Me, which finds the Millennial generation to be narcissistic and lacking the social glue of mid-twentieth-century Americans.
The Smartphone Revolution
The first generation iPhone goes on sale, launched to great excitement at the Macworld IT trade show in San Francisco by Steve Jobs, presiding ceative force of Apple.
Youth and Dystopia
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, a series of dystopian novels in which lethal violence of children against each other is packaged as media spectacle, is published (and subsequently adapted for a series of films, starring Jennifer Lawrence).
Queering the American Youth Narrative
Barry Jenkins's Oscar-winning film Moonlight, tracing in structurally innovative and formally beautiful fashion the trials of a young African American in Florida (e.g. regarding his sexuality).
The Contemporary Teen Condition
According to the American Psychological Association, 41.5 per cent of US teenagers believe they are not receiving 'the social and emotional support they need' (strikingly, US parents paint a different picture, with 93.1 per cent believing their teens are adequately supported).
Global America
First Imperial Ventures
Increasingly active beyond its borders, the US intervenes successively in Hawaii (overthrowing the independent monarch, as a prelude to annexing the territory), Cuba (fighting the Spanish-American War) and the Philippines (fighting the Philippine-American War).
The Conquering American
In The Americanization of the World, British newspaper editor W. T. Stead looks ahead positively to an era of US hegemony, in culture as well as commerce; he is not uncritical, however, noting the attritional effects on people of the US's 'determination to make speed'.
The American Automobile Abroad
Two decades of rapid international expansion by the Michigan-based Ford car company: e.g. factories in Canada (1904) and Britain (1911), and showrooms in nations including Chile, Ireland, Italy and Spain.
The US and World War I
Studiedly neutral for the first three years of warfare in Europe, the US is driven by concern over the safety of Atlantic shipping and the rumour of a German-sponsored invasion from Mexico to enter the war on behalf of Britain and its allies.
The League of Nations
President Woodrow Wilson plays a key part in negotiations to establish the League of Nations, a global assermbly that preceded the UN; retreating into an isolationist stance, however, the US never joins the institution (and it disbands in 1946).
Countering Hollywood
The Cinematograph Films Act is passed in Britain, aiming especially to counter the effect of incoming Hollywood movies by mandating a minimum quota of British-made films on the nation's cinema screens.
Global Recognition of American Literature
Ninety years after the British clergyman and critic Sydney Smith had asked, sneeringly, 'Who reads an American book?', novelist Sinclair Lewis becomes the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Exporting American Jazz
First European tours, very enthusiastically received, by the great African American jazz trumpeter, vocalist and bandleader Louis Armstrong: first to the United Kingdom (1932), then more widely on the continent (1933).
The American Century
Henry Luce, proprietor of many US magazines, writes an influential essay, 'The American Century' that anticipates US dominance in the world, but insists this must be a cultural and political hegemony, not simply economic pre-eminence.
The US and World War II
Following Japan's bombing of the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the US enters the war in support of Britain, France and their allies.
The 'Sleeping Giant' Awoken
Japanese Admiral Yamamoto's (alleged) remark that the Pearl Harbor attacks would provoke the US into severe retaliatory action are realised: the US firebombs Tokyo, and later drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hastening the war's end but at a colossal cost in human life and environmental degradation.
Economic Aid and It's Benefits
The Marshall Plan (or Economic Recovery Program), named after Secretary of State George C. Marshall, sees the US committing vast sums to Europe to aid post-war economic recovery; altruistic in one sense, the Plan boosts US commercial power and cultural influence.
A 'Forgotten War'
The US participates in the Korean War, fighting with the South Koreans against the Chinese- and Soviet-backed North.
Rock 'N' Roll Crosses the Atlantic
Elvis Presley's song 'All Shook Up' gives the singer the first of twenty-one number one hits in the United Kingdom (the final one to be achieved in his lifetime will be 'Way Down', released two months before his death in 1977).
Shiny Barbarism
British cultural commentator Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literacy - one of many post-war diatribes in Europe against the supposed effects on the continent's well-being of US culture and commerce.
American Art and American Power
The New American Painting, an exhibition of work in the school of Abstract Expressionism (including paintings by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko), travels through eight European countries and suggests the global pre-eminence of US culture.
Vietnam War / American War
Spiralling US involvement in civil war in Vietnam: peaks with the deployment of 543,000 troops in 1969, and culminates in US military disengagement in 1973. 58,000 US soldiers are killed; there is a colossal death toll on the Vietnamese (civilians as well as combatants), together with widespread ecological degradation.
McDonald's on the Move
Beginnings of McDonald's' global extension, as its first restaurant outside the United States opens in Richmond, British Columbia.
The First Gulf War
Taking a central role in a multi-nation military coalition, the United States invades Iraq and secures the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
The Everything Store
Jeff Bezos founds Amazon in Bellevue, near Seattle: initially an online book retailer, the company will diversify into numerous other strands of e-commerce, as well as fields such as digital streaming: its operations have a huge impact on patterns of consumption and production worldwide.
Declaration of War Against America
Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born radical Islamist and founder of Al-Qaeda, issues a 'declaration of jihad [or war] against Americans', principally for their military presence in 'the Arabian peninsula'.
The United States Under Attack
Al-Qaeda suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. result in 3000 deaths, prompting President George W. Bush, soon afterwards, to launch an invasion of Afghanistan.
The Second Gulf War
Sometimes referred to as 'the Iraq War' and describing an American-led invasion of Iraq, unsanctioned by the United Nations, which results in large-scale Iraqi civilian (as well as military) casualties, the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein, and the incubating of the jihadist Islamic State.
The NFL Abroad
The Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants contest a regular season match in the National Football League (NFL), inaugurating the 'International Games' whereby the NFL has sought to extend its reach by staging games each year in 'world cities'.
Streaming Across the World
Netflix, formerly a mail-order film retail business, rebrands in 2007 as a subscription strreaming service, ultimately developing a production arm also; in January 2025, the number of its subscribers worldwide tops 300 million for the first time.
Globalising Hip-Hop
Jay-Z becomes the first rapper to headline at the iconic Glastonbury festival in the UK - to general enthusiasm, though not to the liking of Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher, who complains: 'I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It’s wrong.'
When America Sneezes...
Evidencing the global interconnectedness of the contemporary economic system, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank, precipitates a worldwide downturn.
America First
A year before his successful first bid for the Presidency, Donald Trump adopts this slogan, one previously associated with nativist, even racist interests early in twentieth-century America.
Hollywood's Revenue Model
Exemplifying the importance of global box office takings to Hollywood's economic success now, Black Panther achieves almost half of its colossal return in non-US markets: $649m. as against US cinema income of $700m.
McDonald's Worldwide
The number of McDonald's restaurants worldwide, according to the GlobalData company, reaches 40,031, covering 119 countries: 66.4 per cent of these are outside the US, with especially valuable markets in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.
Exporting the Coffee Experience
The website of Starbucks, the self-styled 'premier roaster and retailer of speciality coffee in the world', states that the company has over 32,000 stores, spread across more than eighty countries.