It was one of the worst examples in American history of paranoia run amok. During the early 1950s U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the careers and lives of many decent, loyal Americans by investigating them on bogus charges of supporting the Communist Party and being enemies of the United States. He had Americans convinced there were communists in the federal government and the Army, lurking around every corner and hiding behind every door. The end to his reign of terror began on June 9, 1954, when a special counsel to the U.S. read more...
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On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, granting U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. As with most things having to do with white society, the federal government, and Native Americans, the act was controversial. Supporters praised the brave fighting many Indians performed for the United States during World War I, and pointed out that by 1924 over two-thirds of all Native Americans had gained citizenship already. read more...
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It was the bridge they said could not be built. Perched at the tip of a peninsula, San Francisco was separated from the rest of northern California by the 6,700-foot-wide “Golden Gate,” an opening where San Francisco Bay flows into the Pacific Ocean. With a channel 500 feet deep, strong tides and currents, occasional fierce storms, and the threat of earthquakes, the Golden Gate seemed unbridgeable. read more...
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NewsInHistory is continually adding more content to our historical newspaper archive—titles new to our collection as well as expanding the date ranges and number of issues for titles already in our archive. New titles are indicated by an asterisk (*). This current addition involves 40 newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia. A total of 5,555 issues have been added in this release! Here are the details:
Alabama
Mobile Register (Mobile). 6 issues: 1984 to 1985 read more...
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On May 26, 1830, Congress passed one of the most infamous pieces of legislation in American history: the Indian Removal Act, designed to kick the “Five Civilized Tribes” out of their ancestral lands in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. President Andrew Jackson, who had urged Congress to pass a removal act in an 1829 speech, signed the act into law two days after Congress passed it, on May 28. read more...
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On May 25, 1925, a thirteen-member grand jury in Rhea County, Tennessee, indicted science teacher John Thomas Scopes for the crime of teaching evolution to his high school biology class. This legal action set in motion one of the most notorious trials of the 20th century, one famously nicknamed the Scopes “Monkey Trial” by the Baltimore Sun’s acerbic journalist, H. L. Mencken. Newspapers across the nation closely followed Scopes’s trial, and thousands of Americans tuned in to hear the first trial in the United States broadcast on national radio. read more...
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Amelia Earhart, the pioneering female pilot, achieved enduring fame with the many aviation records she set during the 1920s and ’30s. Early in her career she achieved an impressive first when she became the first woman to receive a pilot’s license from the distinguished National Aeronautic Association, on May 16, 1923. In 1928 she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by plane when she flew as part of the crew (her duty was to keep the flight log) with Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon. read more...
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Immigration reform is an intractable problem facing Congress and the Obama Administration today, just as it has confronted Congresses and Administrations ever since the Page Act was passed in 1875—the first legislation in U.S. history designed to restrict immigration. On May 19, 1921, Congress took a far-reaching, brand new approach to immigration reform when it passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921—which President Harding promptly signed. The core of this new legislation was a quota system to limit the number of European immigrants allowed per country—a system that governed U.S. read more...
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In what the press called the “Crime of the Century,” the murdered infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh was found in the woods near Hopewell, New Jersey, on May 12, 1932. The body was discovered just a few miles from the Lindbergh’s home. The 20-month-old infant had been kidnapped from the second-story nursery of his parents’ home 10 weeks prior, sparking a nationwide search and causing worldwide expressions of concern. read more...
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NewsInHistory is continually adding more content to our historical newspaper archive—titles new to our collection as well as expanding the date ranges and number of issues for titles already in our archive. New titles are indicated by an asterisk (*). This current addition involves 61 newspapers from 28 states and the District of Columbia. A total of 8,121 issues have been added in this release! Here are the details:
Alabama
Mobile Register (Mobile). 6 issues: 1984 to 1985 read more...
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I understand that when writing a blog, it’s necessary to show a picture and say a few words about yourself, so that people don’t think a nameless, faceless committee or advisory board is running the show. Here I am, a real person. My name is Tony Pettinato, and I live in Deerfield, Mass. I did my undergraduate studies in English at Oberlin College, my graduate work in Journalism at UC Berkeley, and have been a reporter for six newspapers. For the past fourteen years I have worked at NewsBank, six of those as a managing editor for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set project – NewsBank’s acclaimed effort that digitized and indexed twelve million pages of primary source documents – that gratified my lifelong interest in American history. And that led me to editing this history blog!
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