Portland, Oregon's name was determined by a coin flip. Portland is the largest city in Oregon with a population of about 600,000 as of 2013. The city was named in 1845. Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettygrove had to make the…
Anyone who watched media reports from August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, will remember the images of water flooding over the levees which were designed to protect the city. A number of factors caused the levees…
The oldest American cities are all on the Atlantic Coast. European settlers first arrived on the East Coast, establishing towns as early as the beginning of the 16th century. Not only are the oldest cities all in the East Coast,…
By the 1600s, Africans were being transported to America as slaves, and eventually the African slave trade became a major part of the economy in North America. The governing bodies in North American jurisdictions developed laws that were referred to…
The majority of US presidents have been either first-born children or first-born sons. Out of the first 44 presidents of the United States, 24 were first-born children or first-born sons, including Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. No US…
The muckrakers were a group of journalists from the 1890s to the 1920s who turned American society upside down by exposing corruption and informing readers about important social issues. Journalists who follow in their footsteps by publishing exposes and fighting…
The primary effects for children of the American Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s were hard labor, malnutrition and hunger, and displacement. Many young people also developed emotional and psychological problems as a result of living in constant uncertainty…
As civil rights struggles became more and more prevalent in the United States during the last part of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, state and local laws known as Jim Crow laws defined what many U.S.…
The New Deal was a series of social, economic and governmental reforms initiated from 1933 to 1938 by the administration of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. At the time, Roosevelt's reforms were met with…
The Marshall Plan, also called the European Recovery Plan, was enacted by the US in 1947 as a way to help rebuild Europe after World War II. The mind behind the plan was George Marshall, who was the US Secretary…