Engagements Archives | What It Means to Be American

The Black Women Soldiers Who Demanded Opportunities

During World War II, Four African Americans at Fort Devens, Massachusetts Went on Strike to Do Skilled Jobs Instead of ‘Maid Work’

By Sandra M. Bolzenius
November 15, 2018

In late 1944, four African-American women—Mary Green, Anna Morrison, Johnnie Murphy and Alice Young—enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps, or WAC, the newly established military branch for women. All were eager to help the nation’s fight for democracy by learning skills the army desperately needed, and all believed that later these skills would improve their employment prospects for the future. Instead, within a year after reporting for duty, the young women stood in the dock at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, charged …

The Midwest Farmers Movement That Challenged Gilded Age Capitalism

In the 19th Century, the Grange Was an Agricultural Brotherhood That Sought to Foster Mutual Self-Reliance and Free Themselves From Middlemen and Monopolies

By Jenny Bourne
November 12, 2018

Perhaps you’ve seen them on a leisurely weekend drive through the countryside—small white structures with the sign “Grange Hall.” Although the Grange is now a mere shadow of its former self, its legacy looms large in American history. As one of the largest grassroots movements in 19th-century America, the Grange left a broad imprint, including laws that still undergird modern governmental regulation of private enterprise.

Minnesotan Oliver Hudson Kelley, along with several colleagues, formed the Grange shortly after the Civil …

Suppressing Voting Rights Is as Old as the Republic—But the Tactics Keep Changing

Discriminatory State Constitutions, Poll and Literacy Taxes, and Now Photo ID Laws All Have Been Used to Keep Ballots From the Less Powerful

By Allan J. Lichtman
October 8, 2018

The more that efforts to suppress voting rights in America change, the more they remain the same.

From the earliest days of the republic to the present, politicians have sought to limit the ability of non-whites to vote. What has changed is the nature of suppression—either the addition of regulations, or the deregulation of parts of the process—as well as the degree to which would-be vote suppressors reveal their intentions.

The American problem with voter suppression started with a void in the …

How Midwestern Suffragists Used Anti-Immigrant Fervor to Help Gain the Vote

Women Fighting for the Ballot Saw German Men as Backward, Ignorant, and Less Worthy of Citizenship Than Themselves

By Sara Egge
September 17, 2018

In September 1914, the nationally renowned suffragist Anna Howard Shaw spoke to a large crowd at a Congregational Church in Yankton County, South Dakota. Shaw, a slight but charismatic 67-year-old, was a masterful speaker who could be both reserved and lively. She was there to support an amendment on the ballot that would give women in the state the right to vote. It was neither her first visit to South Dakota nor even to Yankton County; during South Dakota’s 1890 …

How the Suffragists Used a Few Good Men to Help Get the Vote

Lampooned as Hen-Pecked Wimps, Male Supporters of Crusading Women Reinvented Themselves as Dashing Trophy Spouses

By Brooke Kroeger
March 5, 2018

The early rap on men who found themselves married to hard-working, hard-core suffragists must have been downright humiliating. Cartoonists portrayed them as gents in tie-and-starched-collared misery, shirtsleeves up, infants in tow, forced to scrub clothes at a washtub or toe-rock a cradle while they flattened dough with a rolling pin. That changed completely in the 1910s, as American men who had been roped to the votes-for-women movement by wedlock reinvented themselves with dashing post-chivalrous aplomb.

Gone were the hen-pecked, emasculated …

The Jewish Immigrant Philanthropist Who Didn’t Like the Word “Charity”

Julius Rosenwald Made Sears a Retail Giant and Used His Wealth to Give the Poor Tools for Upward Mobility

By Hasia Diner
February 2, 2018

The biography of Julius Rosenwald, one of the most thoughtful and transformative philanthropists in American history, parallels the life experiences of many Jewish immigrant families of the mid-19th century—women and men who left German-speaking lands, relied heavily on family and community networks, and arrived in America with commercial skills that served them well.

Enjoying the benefits of whiteness, they arrived just in time for the physical expansion of the United States across the continent, referred to by patriotic orators as …

The Humble but Hardy Leaf That Defines Our National Character

The Collard Green, Born of Trans-Atlantic Trading, Embodies the Mix of European and African Cultures

By Edward H. Davis
January 25, 2018

Driving the Deep South’s back roads in late fall or winter offers glimpses of a shade of green bluer and darker than most of the vegetation you’ll see, arranged in garden rows with hints of purple and yellow. The untrained viewer—just trying to keep eyes on the road, for goodness’ sake—may not realize that these verdant patches are in fact a unique marker of American history: the beloved, if at times belittled, collard green.

Collards are unknown in most of the …

When the Great War Reached Wisconsin, Free Speech Was the First Casualty

President Wilson's Government Criminalized Dissenters, Socialists, and German Immigrants as Traitors

By Richard L. Pifer
January 18, 2018

Woodrow Wilson did not want to go to war. On two different occasions during the weeks leading to the 1917 declaration of war that brought the United States into World War I, the president expressed reservations regarding the course he was contemplating.

Because war is autocratic, he feared that free speech and other rights would be endangered. The President told Frank Cobb of the New York World: “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such …

Can a Corrupt Politician Become a Good President?

A Mysterious Woman’s Letters Made Chester Arthur Fit for the White House

By Scott S. Greenberger
November 16, 2017

“Who you are, what you are, it doesn’t change after you occupy the Oval Office,” President Barack Obama said during the 2016 election campaign. “It magnifies who you are. It shines a spotlight on who you are.”

But at least one man was transformed by the presidency: Chester Alan Arthur. Arthur’s redemption is all the more remarkable because it was spurred, at least in part, by a mysterious young woman who implored him to rediscover his better self.

Arthur, the country’s …

For the Female Phone Operators of World War I, a Woman’s Place Was on the Front Lines

By Making the World Safe for Democracy, the "Hello Girls" Boosted Suffrage Back Home

By Elizabeth Cobbs
June 1, 2017

In 1917, U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker disliked the idea of female workers on Army bases so intensely that he didn’t even want to build toilets for them. They might tarry. Females did not belong in the Army, Baker thought, though the more forward-thinking U.S. Navy already had welcomed women into its ranks to replace men in landlubber assignments.

Many adventurous and patriotic young women longed to defend their country during the Great War. They discovered that if they wanted …