Timelines

Keep in mind. 1619 marks an arrival in English Virginia, not the first African presence or the beginning of slavery in the Americas.

1. 1619
   Captive Africans arrive in VirginiaAn English privateer brings captive Africans to Point Comfort.

   A closer look

   They were forcibly taken from Angola. African presence and enslavement in the Americas predate 1619.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · The first Africans ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1662
   Virginia makes slavery hereditaryVirginia makes a child’s free or enslaved status follow the mother.

   A closer look

   Lawmakers protect enslavers’ claims to children born to enslaved women.

   Virginia Humanities · Virginia’s 1662 hereditary-slavery law ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1863
   The Emancipation ProclamationLincoln declares enslaved people in designated rebelling areas free.

   A closer look

   It does not abolish slavery nationwide; its reach depends on Union victory and enforcement.

   National Archives · Emancipation Proclamation ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1865
   The 13th AmendmentThe Constitution abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, with a criminal-punishment exception.

   A closer look

   A constitutional change is broader and more permanent than the wartime proclamation.

   National Archives · 13th Amendment ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1868
   The 14th AmendmentThe amendment establishes birthright citizenship and equal protection.

   A closer look

   Its citizenship clause covers people born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction.

   National Archives · 14th Amendment ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1896
   Plessy upholds segregationThe Supreme Court upholds Louisiana’s segregated railway-car law.

   A closer look

   The ruling gives constitutional support to the “separate but equal” doctrine.

   National Archives · Plessy v. Ferguson ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1910–1970
   The Great MigrationMillions of Black southerners move to northern, midwestern, and western communities.

   A closer look

   They seek jobs, education, and escape from racial terror; new destinations also contain discrimination.

   National Archives · The Great Migration, 1910–1970 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1954
   Brown challenges school segregationThe Supreme Court rules racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

   A closer look

   The decision does not produce immediate integration; enforcement faces organized resistance.

   National Archives · Brown v. Board of Education ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1964
   The Civil Rights ActFederal law prohibits discrimination in public accommodations and employment.

   A closer look

   Movement pressure helps secure legislation, but passing a law is not the same as ending discrimination.

   National Archives · Civil Rights Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1965
    The Voting Rights ActCongress targets racial discrimination in voting with federal protections.

    A closer look

    Activism, including the Selma campaign, helps force action against exclusion at the polls.

    National Archives · Voting Rights Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. This is a course-focused selection, not a complete history of Mexico. Indigenous histories long predate the Spanish conquest.

1. 1521
   Tenochtitlan fallsSpanish forces and Indigenous allies defeat the Mexica capital.

   A closer look

   Spanish colonial rule grows, but Indigenous peoples, communities, and resistance continue.

   Library of Congress · The conquest of Tenochtitlan ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1810
   Mexico’s independence struggle beginsMiguel Hidalgo’s uprising helps launch the war against Spanish rule.

   A closer look

   The struggle involves competing visions of authority and social change.

   Library of Congress · Independence from Spain ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1821
   Mexico becomes independentMexico gains independence from Spain after years of war.

   A closer look

   Its territory includes lands that later become part of the southwestern United States.

   Library of Congress · Independence from Spain ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1836
   Texas breaks from MexicoTexan rebels establish a republic after fighting Mexico.

   A closer look

   Slavery, settler power, and the central Mexican government’s authority are among the conflicts.

   U.S. Department of State · Annexation of Texas and war with Mexico ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1846
   The U.S.–Mexico War beginsThe United States and Mexico go to war after annexation and a border dispute.

   A closer look

   U.S. expansionists seek western territory, including California and Pacific ports.

   U.S. Department of State · Annexation of Texas and war with Mexico ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1848
   The Treaty of Guadalupe HidalgoMexico cedes a vast northern territory to the United States after the war.

   A closer look

   Mexican residents face a new border and legal order; treaty promises do not prevent later dispossession.

   National Archives · Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1910
   The Mexican Revolution beginsAn uprising against Porfirio Díaz develops into a prolonged revolutionary struggle.

   A closer look

   Demands for land and political change accompany violence that also propels migration north.

   Library of Congress · The Mexican Revolution and the United States ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1930s
   Mexican repatriation campaignsDeportation and pressure to leave force people of Mexican ancestry out of U.S. communities.

   A closer look

   U.S. citizens are among those affected; not every departure is voluntary.

   Library of Congress · Depression and the struggle for survival ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1942–1964
   The Bracero ProgramThe United States recruits Mexican workers on temporary labor contracts.

   A closer look

   The program offers earnings but also exposes workers to exploitation and limited bargaining power.

   Smithsonian · Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program, 1942–1964 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1965
    The Delano grape strike beginsFilipino farmworkers begin the strike; Mexican American organizers and workers join.

    A closer look

    Larry Itliong, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others build a strike and consumer boycott.

    National Park Service · The Delano grape strike and boycott ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. “Indian history” here means Native American history. Native nations are distinct political communities, not a single people, and their histories do not start in 1607.

1. 1607
   Jamestown is establishedEnglish settlers build a colony within the Powhatan peoples’ homeland.

   A closer look

   This is an English colonial beginning—not the beginning of the region’s history.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1680
   The Pueblo RevoltPueblo communities coordinate an uprising against Spanish colonial rule.

   A closer look

   Religious repression and colonial demands help produce resistance; the Spanish are expelled from New Mexico for years.

   National Park Service · Pueblo resistance and the 1680 revolt ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1830
   The Indian Removal ActCongress authorizes removal treaties exchanging Native lands in the East for lands farther west.

   A closer look

   Coercion and forced removals follow. Removal serves settler demand for Native homelands.

   National Archives · Andrew Jackson’s message on Indian removal (1830) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1838–1839
   The Cherokee Trail of TearsU.S. forces remove Cherokee people from their southeastern homeland.

   A closer look

   Thousands die during removal and its surrounding conditions; other Native nations also endure forced removal.

   National Park Service · Trail of Tears history ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1868
   The Fort Laramie TreatyA treaty recognizes a Great Sioux Reservation, including the Black Hills.

   A closer look

   Later U.S. violations show the gap between formal promises and actual power.

   National Archives · Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1876
   The Battle of the Little BighornLakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho fighters defeat Custer’s forces.

   A closer look

   The victory resists a military campaign but does not end U.S. pressure on Native nations.

   National Park Service · Little Bighorn history ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1887
   The Dawes ActFederal policy divides many communally held Native lands into individual allotments.

   A closer look

   Land opened to non-Native ownership produces enormous losses; the policy promotes assimilation.

   National Archives · Dawes Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1890
   The Wounded Knee massacreU.S. soldiers kill Lakota people, including women and children, at Wounded Knee.

   A closer look

   The massacre occurs amid efforts to suppress the Ghost Dance and control reservation communities.

   National Park Service · Black Elk and the Wounded Knee massacre ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1934
   The Indian Reorganization ActFederal policy turns away from allotment and encourages tribal self-government.

   A closer look

   The law does not restore all lost land or erase earlier coercion.

   National Archives · Indian Reorganization Act records ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1975
    Self-determination gains legal supportFederal law expands tribal authority to administer programs serving their communities.

    A closer look

    Native organizing helps press the government toward greater tribal control.

    U.S. Congress · Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. Asian American is a broad category. This timeline offers examples, not the full history of every Asian American community.

1. 1848–1849
   California’s gold rush draws migrantsGold discovery draws people from China, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere.

   A closer look

   California comes under U.S. control after war with Mexico; Native communities face dispossession and violence.

   Library of Congress · The gold rush ↗ (opens in a new tab)National Archives · Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1867
   Chinese railroad workers strikeChinese Central Pacific workers demand higher pay and better working conditions.

   A closer look

   Management cuts off supplies, helping defeat the strike; workers nevertheless demonstrate collective organization.

   Library of Congress · The 1867 Sierra strike ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1882
   The Chinese Exclusion ActFederal law suspends Chinese labor immigration and bars Chinese naturalization.

   A closer look

   Exemptions exist; the act does not prohibit every Chinese person from entering.

   National Archives · Chinese Exclusion Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1898
   Wong Kim Ark wins his citizenship caseThe Supreme Court recognizes the U.S. citizenship of American-born Wong Kim Ark.

   A closer look

   His case tests the 14th Amendment after officials deny his reentry from China.

   National Archives · Wong Kim Ark and birthright citizenship ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1913
   California restricts immigrant landholdingCalifornia’s alien land law targets people ineligible for citizenship.

   A closer look

   Its apparently neutral wording particularly restricts Japanese immigrant farmers.

   Densho Encyclopedia · Alien land laws ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1923
   The Court denies Thind naturalizationThe Supreme Court rules Bhagat Singh Thind ineligible for citizenship as a white person.

   A closer look

   The justices rely on a supposed common understanding of whiteness rather than a consistent scientific category.

   U.S. Supreme Court · United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), via Justia ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1942
   Japanese American exclusion and incarcerationExecutive Order 9066 enables military exclusion; mass forced removal and incarceration follow.

   A closer look

   People are targeted by ancestry, including U.S. citizens, without individual proof of disloyalty.

   National Archives · Executive Order 9066 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1965
   The Delano grape strike beginsFilipino farmworkers begin the strike; Mexican American organizers and workers join.

   A closer look

   Larry Itliong, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others build a strike and consumer boycott.

   National Park Service · The Delano grape strike and boycott ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1965
   National-origins quotas are abolishedA new immigration law prioritizes family ties and employment categories.

   A closer look

   The law reshapes migration while retaining numerical limits; it does not create open borders.

   U.S. House of Representatives · Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1988
    The Civil Liberties ActThe United States apologizes and authorizes redress for eligible surviving incarceration victims.

    A closer look

    Japanese American organizing helps win official recognition of the injustice.

    Densho Encyclopedia · Civil Liberties Act of 1988 ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1100s–1700
   England conquers IrelandBeginning in the twelfth century, Irish land was seized and handed to English colonizers; by 1700 the Irish owned fourteen percent of their own island and rented from English landlords.

   Context from YPT

   Irish emigrants later called themselves exiles "pushed out by English oppressors."

   YPT 106
2. Late 1500s–1594
   "Savages" and "pagans": the English model for conquestElizabeth I's soldiers, including Gilbert and Raleigh, treated Irish Catholics as savages: no property, office, juries, English dress, or intermarriage. In the Nine Years' War villages were burned, families slaughtered, and heads taken as trophies.

   Context from YPT

   Veterans of Ireland later fought the Powhatan and Pequot.

   YPT 27–29
3. 1700s
   Beef for BritainLandlords fenced fields for cattle; ninety percent of laborers lost work; families lived in mud huts on potatoes. Franklin saw it in 1771.

   Context from YPT

   Ireland profited from beef while "the common people had been reduced to wretchedness."

   YPT 106–107
4. 1815–1845
   A million leave; single-son inheritanceLetters told of a country "where no man or woman ever hungered." After 1815 farms passed to one son; non-heirs emigrated, marriage rates fell, cottage weaving collapsed, and women were "shut out of Ireland's economy."

   Context from YPT

   More than half of all Irish immigrants would be women.

   YPT 107YPT 114–115
5. 1845–1855
   The Great FamineA fungus destroyed forty percent of the potato crop the first year and returned until 1854; a million died; landlords evicted tenants and kept shipping food to Britain; a million and a half fled on crowded ships where tens of thousands died.

   Context from YPT

   Families ate seaweed.

   YPT 107–108
6. 1850s
   Listed among the "dangerous classes"Reverend Theodore Parker named "Negroes, Indians, Mexicans, Irish, and the like" as "inferior in nature"; the Irish were called savage, uncivilized, and lacking self-control.

   Context from YPT

   At North Adams the Chinese were held up as harder working than the Irish.

   YPT 111–112
7. 1863
   The draft riotsTold that Republicans would sacrifice Irish soldiers to free slaves who would take their jobs, Irish mobs rioted for four days in New York; more than a hundred died before troops arrived.

   Context from YPT

   The Irish had turned "their rage against others on the lower ranks of society's pecking order."

   YPT 113
8. 1871–1903
   Mother JonesMary Harris of Cork lost her family to disease and her shop to the Chicago Fire, then organized strikes and led the 1903 Children's Crusade to Roosevelt's door: "We Want to Go to School, Not to the Mines!"

   Context from YPT

   "The most dangerous woman in America."

   YPT 121–124
9. 1890
   Irish power in the citiesBecause they were white, the Irish could naturalize and vote; by 1890 they controlled the Democratic organizations of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and rewarded voters with police, fire, and city jobs and contracts.

   Context from YPT

   The Chinese could not naturalize; blacks were losing the vote.

   YPT 119–120
10. 1900
    Into the middle classA third of American seamstresses were Irish immigrants, but only 19 percent of American-born Irish women followed those trades; daughters became teachers, nurses, and secretaries. John Kearney's sons rose from postal clerk to superintendent of streets.

    Context from YPT

    "It seems like a new life."

    YPT 12YPT 117–119

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1879
   Life in the Pale of SettlementConfined to western Russia and barred from owning land, Jews crowded into shtetls as merchants and craftsmen—forty percent in manufacturing or crafts—with "ten times as many tailors, cobblers, barbers" as the towns could support.

   Context from YPT

   A Gentile who failed could move; a Jew "could make the circle of the Pale" and find the same conditions.

   YPT 215–216
2. 1880s
   Pogroms and flightState-encouraged massacres—"every year, there was a pogrom before Pesach"—made Jews political refugees. Women sold beds and tables for passage; families crossed on converted cattle boats.

   Context from YPT

   Emma Goldman, seventeen, saw the Statue of Liberty as "the symbol of hope."

   YPT 216–218
3. 1900–1910
   An army of garment workersStandard sizes from Civil War uniforms plus the sewing machine made New York the garment capital; by 1910 nearly half the city's factories made clothing. Jewish women were a third of the workforce, at eleven to fifteen hours a day in sweatshops.

   Context from YPT

   "Darkness met me when I turned out of the basement."

   YPT 222–224
4. 1905
   Half a million on the Lower East SideTenements six and seven stories high, families with boarders three to a room, landsmanshafts from the old towns, peddlers and delicatessens, "throngs of children."

   Context from YPT

   Chinatown next door was a colony of bachelors.

   YPT 219–221
5. 1909–1910
   The Uprising of the Twenty ThousandClara Lemlich, twenty-three, forced the general-strike vote at Cooper Union; twenty thousand mostly Jewish women struck for a fifty-two-hour week and union recognition; three hundred firms settled by February 1910. Fifty thousand cloak makers followed.

   Context from YPT

   Male unionists had said young women could not sustain a strike.

   YPT 225–227YPT 235–236
6. 1911
   The Triangle fire146 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, died jumping from the ninth floor; news reached the shtetls and caused panic.

   Context from YPT

   Triangle had settled the strike but skipped the safety improvements.

   YPT 224–225
7. 1923
   Harvard's "Jewish problem"President Lowell cut Jewish enrollment with "well-rounded" criteria, regional quotas, and required photographs. Mayor Curley of Boston: "If the Jew is barred today, the Italian will be tomorrow."

   Context from YPT

   Jewish students' high grades "made other students look bad."

   YPT 230–232
8. 1924
   The quota lawTwo percent of each nationality's 1890 population—before mass Jewish immigration—was set as the yearly limit, extending the Chinese Exclusion principle to Europeans.

   Context from YPT

   Russian Jews' strikes and success "seemed threatening."

   YPT 232–233
9. 1933–1945
   Facing genocide from a safe shoreFour and a half million American Jews watched as 66 percent of Americans opposed admitting even Jewish children, the St. Louis was turned away, and Roosevelt refused refugees until a 1944 board admitted one thousand. Six million died.

   Context from YPT

   Auschwitz killed twelve thousand a day.

   YPT 289–291
10. 1963–1964
    The black-Jewish allianceRabbi Prinz, a camp survivor, told the March on Washington that the crime was silence; more than half of the movement's white participants were Jewish; Goodman and Schwerner died with James Chaney in Mississippi.

    Context from YPT

    Jews "saw that racism and anti-Semitism were much alike."

    YPT 308–309

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1848
   Palmer's plan for Chinese laborWeeks after the treaty with Mexico, Aaron Palmer told Congress San Francisco would be a hub of commerce and recommended importing Chinese to build the transcontinental railroad and farm California.

   Context from YPT

   Chinese came the next year "for their own reasons."

   YPT 145
2. 1849
   Gold MountainWar, rebellion, taxes, floods, and famine pushed young men across the Pacific; a railroad wage of thirty dollars a month against three to five at home pulled them. They meant to return rich.

   Context from YPT

   Wives and families stayed behind "for years."

   YPT 146–147
3. 1852
   The miners' tax and seven women"California for Americans!" produced a three-dollar monthly tax on foreign miners who did not intend to naturalize—which Chinese could not do. Of twelve thousand Chinese in California, seven were women.

   Context from YPT

   By 1870 the state had taken five million dollars from them.

   YPT 148YPT 155
4. 1854
   "Chinese and other people not white"The state supreme court ruled Chinese could not testify against whites; the state banned white-Asian marriage.

   Context from YPT

   Images of blacks and Indians—savage, childlike, pagan—were transferred to the Chinese.

   YPT 153YPT 350
5. 1866–1869
   The Central PacificChinese crews drilled and blasted Donner Summit, wintered under snowdrifts, struck for equal pay, and were starved back to work in a week. The road was "a Chinese achievement."

   Context from YPT

   Crocker threatened to fire white workers and hire more Chinese.

   YPT 149–150
6. 1879–1882
   Hayes's warning and the Exclusion ActHayes lumped the Chinese with "the weaker races—the Negroes and Indians"; in 1882 Congress barred laborers for ten years and denied citizenship to residents, in a depression, against 0.002 percent of the population. Renewed 1892, permanent 1902.

   Context from YPT

   Chinese men were seen as "threats to racial purity."

   YPT 153–154
7. 1906
   The earthquake and the paper sonsWith San Francisco's records burned, men claimed American birth and citizenship and brought wives and "sons"—real, pretended, or purchased. Jim Quock memorized a 200-page book and was held three weeks at Angel Island; another applicant explained the missing dog: "we ate the dog."

   Context from YPT

   Fifty thousand entered through Angel Island by 1943.

   YPT 159–162YPT 165–166
8. 1943
   Exclusion repealedJapanese radio broadcast America's anti-Chinese laws; Congress repealed exclusion, set a quota of 105 a year, and allowed naturalization.

   Context from YPT

   Sixty-one years after 1882.

   YPT 283
9. 1965–1980
   The door reopensWith quotas abolished, the Chinese population grew from 237,000 to 812,200 and became majority foreign-born; students set off chain migrations; new immigrant women returned to garment sweatshops at piece rates.

   Context from YPT

   A former professor scrubbed floors until a federal program retrained her.

   YPT 318–320
10. 2010
    3.2 millionChinese Americans were the largest Asian American group in the census.

    Context from YPT

    From 0.002 percent in 1882.

    YPT 328

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1880s
   "In America, money grew on trees"Taxes forced farmers to sell their land; a Hawaii plantation paid six times Japan's wages, and three years there could save what took ten at home. Emigration fever followed.

   Context from YPT

   Between 1885 and 1924, 200,000 went to Hawaii and 180,000 to the mainland.

   YPT 188
2. 1885–1924
   Women and picture bridesJapan promoted women's emigration to avoid the Chinese bachelor problems; girls attended school and learned English; the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement let families join, and sixty thousand women came, many marrying men they knew only from photographs.

   Context from YPT

   By 1920 women were 46 percent of Japanese in Hawaii, against 5 percent for the Chinese.

   YPT 189–191YPT 213–214
3. 1900
   Hawaii's plantationsHawaii became a US territory; planters ran an ethnically divided workforce, reserved skilled jobs for citizens (whites) in 1904, called workers by brass bango numbers, and drove them with whip-swinging lunas through twelve-foot cane.

   Context from YPT

   "You can't go very high up... unless your skin is white."

   YPT 192–196
4. 1900–1920
   Transforming CaliforniaIrrigation, railroads, and refrigerated cars created a market for produce; Japanese farms grew from 4,698 acres to nearly half a million, worth $67 million in 1920. George Shima, the Potato King, drained swamps and died worth $15 million—and was still told to leave his Berkeley neighborhood.

   Context from YPT

   Japanese were 2 percent of California and targets of violent white workers.

   YPT 205–207
5. 1907–1924
   Excluded by law, step by stepThe Gentlemen's Agreement (1907) limited laborers; the Alien Land Law (1913) barred land purchase; the Supreme Court ruled Ozawa "not Caucasian" (1922); the 1924 act barred all ineligible immigrants.

   Context from YPT

   "America... once a dream of hope and longing, now a life of tears."

   YPT 208–209
6. 1909
   The blood-union strikeJapanese workers struck for four months against a lower wage than the Portuguese; leaders were jailed, scabs of four nationalities hired; wages rose and racial pay ended, and planters imported Filipinos.

   Context from YPT

   Strikers declared they wanted to "unite our destiny with that of Hawaii."

   YPT 196–198
7. 1920
   Japanese and Filipinos strike togetherEight thousand shut Oahu's sugar; planters bribed the Filipino leader, called it a plot to "Japanise Hawaii," and evicted families into a flu epidemic that killed 150. Wages rose fifty percent three months later.

   Context from YPT

   The Japanese union proposed one union for all nationalities.

   YPT 198–199
8. 1941–1942
   InternmentAfter Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt exempted Germans and Italians; General DeWitt ordered 120,000 West Coast Japanese, two-thirds citizens, into desert camps behind barbed wire. In Hawaii General Emmons refused mass camps, interned 1,444, and reported no sabotage.

   Context from YPT

   The FBI and the attorney general saw no security reason; the Supreme Court accepted "military necessity" without evidence.

   YPT 274–277
9. 1942–1945
   The 442nd and the translatorsThirty-three thousand Nisei enlisted; the 442nd earned more than 18,000 decorations and 3,600 Purple Hearts in Italy and France; translators crawled close enough to hear Japanese commands and shortened the war by an estimated two years.

   Context from YPT

   Veterans came home to barbershops saying "We don't serve Japs here."

   YPT 277–278
10. 1970s–1988
    Breaking the silence; the apologyThe third generation organized pilgrimages to the camps and demanded hearings; in 1988 Congress apologized and paid $20,000 to each survivor. Reagan called the internment "a sad chapter."

    Context from YPT

    Clinton in 1997 named the 442nd's valor beside their families' internment.

    YPT 300

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1965
   The law that changed the newcomersCongress ended national-origin quotas, which for Asia and Africa had meant racial quotas.

   Context from YPT

   Chinese, then Vietnamese, Afghans, and South Asians followed.

   YPT 318
2. 1975
   The first Vietnamese waveAs Saigon fell, 10,000 to 15,000 allied military families were evacuated and 86,000 more fled by helicopter with under ten hours' notice; 130,000 educated, largely English-speaking refugees were dispersed across the country and regrouped in Orange County.

   Context from YPT

   "Many thought they would be gone for only a month or two."

   YPT 11YPT 320–322
3. 1979–1996
   Afghan exilesSoviet invasion, US-backed militias, a 1989 withdrawal, civil war, and the 1996 Taliban takeover each sent Afghans to America. Sediqullah Rahi: "Our economy is destroyed, our social life is destroyed."

   Context from YPT

   The Cold War ended in 1991.

   YPT 324–325
4. 1979–2000
   The boat peopleMore than 277,000 fled by 1979 in leaky boats through storms and pirates, many ethnic Chinese; 643,200 Vietnamese lived in America by 1985 and 1.4 million by 2000, forty percent in California. Women became wage earners; daughters resisted arranged marriage; children lost the language.

   Context from YPT

   "They just need a home."

   YPT 322–324
5. 1990s–2010
   South AsiansPeople from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan became one of the fastest-growing groups; the 2010 census counted 2.6 million Indian Americans.

   Context from YPT

   The Sikh farmers of 1913 were "not white"; their successors are the second-largest Asian American group.

   YPT 328
6. 1992
   Los Angeles: "a race riot without nationality"After the Rodney King verdict, blacks, Korean store owners, and Hispanic looters were all part of the fires; Richard Rodriguez: "everyone in the city realized—if only in fear—that they were related to one another."

   Context from YPT

   $800 million in losses.

   YPT 313–314
7. 1997–2050
   "We will all be minorities"Takaki told Clinton that whites would become a minority; Clinton told graduates there would be "no majority race." A third of Americans already trace ancestry outside Europe.

   Context from YPT

   Asian Americans projected at ten percent by 2050.

   YPT 7–8YPT 337–340
8. 2000s
   The undocumentedTwelve million undocumented, most Mexican, working and paying taxes; nativists call for fences and troops; Time argued in 2007 that they are "undeportable" and "too enmeshed" in the economy. NAFTA sent 1.5 million ruined farmers north.

   Context from YPT

   After 2008, Arizona, Utah, and Alabama passed crackdown laws.

   YPT 328–331
9. 2001
   September 11After the attacks Afghan Americans feared for their safety; some passed as Mexican or Greek; women in hijab were attacked and mosques burned. Fatema Nourzaie called Afghan Americans "an example of successful integration, not assimilation."

   Context from YPT

   The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2002.

   YPT 15YPT 325–328
10. 2011
    The DREAMers come outStudents in Charlotte and Georgia announced their undocumented status; Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas revealed he had been undocumented since twelve. Roy Beck argued legalization "victimizes our own young adults."

    Context from YPT

    "Today is the day that I am coming out of the shadows and saying I exist."

    YPT 334–336

1. 1612
   Tobacco becomes the cash cropJohn Rolfe develops tobacco that finds a profitable English market.

   A closer look

   Expanding cultivation increases colonists’ demand for land and a large labor force.

   National Park Service · Tobacco and the colony ↗ (opens in a new tab)Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1793
   The cotton gin accelerates productionEli Whitney develops a machine that separates cotton fibers from seeds.

   A closer look

   More profitable cotton production expands demand for enslaved labor rather than making slavery disappear.

   National Archives · Eli Whitney’s cotton gin ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1867
   Chinese railroad workers strikeChinese Central Pacific workers demand higher pay and better working conditions.

   A closer look

   Management cuts off supplies, helping defeat the strike; workers nevertheless demonstrate collective organization.

   Library of Congress · The 1867 Sierra strike ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1877
   The Great Railroad StrikeRailroad wage cuts provoke strikes that spread across the country.

   A closer look

   Militias and federal troops help suppress the unrest.

   Encyclopaedia Britannica · Great Railroad Strike of 1877 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1886
   The Haymarket affairA Chicago labor rally ends in a bombing and deadly violence.

   A closer look

   The aftermath brings a crackdown on radicals during the campaign for an eight-hour workday.

   Library of Congress · Haymarket Square ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1911
   The Triangle factory fireA New York garment-factory fire kills 146 workers, many of them immigrant women.

   A closer look

   The disaster strengthens demands for workplace safety and government inspection.

   Cornell University · Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1935
   The National Labor Relations ActFederal law protects organizing and collective bargaining for many private-sector workers.

   A closer look

   Agricultural and domestic workers are excluded from the act’s original protections.

   National Archives · National Labor Relations Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1938
   The Fair Labor Standards ActFederal law establishes wage, overtime, and child-labor protections for covered workers.

   A closer look

   Its initial coverage excludes many workers; national labor protections are not universal.

   U.S. Department of Labor · Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1965
   The Delano grape strike beginsFilipino farmworkers begin the strike; Mexican American organizers and workers join.

   A closer look

   Larry Itliong, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others build a strike and consumer boycott.

   National Park Service · The Delano grape strike and boycott ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1968
    Memphis sanitation workers strikeBlack sanitation workers demand safer work, better pay, and union recognition.

    A closer look

    Their “I AM A MAN” signs connect economic demands to dignity and racial justice.

    Stanford King Institute · Memphis sanitation workers’ strike ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. Immigration, naturalization, forced migration, and internal migration are different processes. The event notes identify the relevant process.

1. 1790
   Citizenship eligibility is racializedFederal naturalization law limits eligibility to free white persons.

   A closer look

   Naturalization means becoming a citizen; this is not a general ban on entry.

   National Archives / DocsTeach · Naturalization Act of 1790 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1845–1850s
   The Great Famine drives Irish migrationFamine in Ireland, beginning in 1845, helps propel large-scale migration to the United States.

   A closer look

   Migrants seek survival and work while encountering anti-Irish and anti-Catholic hostility.

   Library of Congress · Irish immigration ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1848–1849
   California’s gold rush draws migrantsGold discovery draws people from China, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere.

   A closer look

   California comes under U.S. control after war with Mexico; Native communities face dispossession and violence.

   Library of Congress · The gold rush ↗ (opens in a new tab)National Archives · Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1882
   The Chinese Exclusion ActFederal law suspends Chinese labor immigration and bars Chinese naturalization.

   A closer look

   Exemptions exist; the act does not prohibit every Chinese person from entering.

   National Archives · Chinese Exclusion Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1892
   Ellis Island opensA federal immigration station begins operating in New York Harbor.

   A closer look

   It becomes a major processing center, not the entry point used by every immigrant.

   National Park Service · Ellis Island history ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1917
   A barred zone and literacy testFederal immigration law expands exclusion, including an Asiatic barred zone.

   A closer look

   Nationality and literacy become additional tools for sorting who may enter.

   U.S. Department of State · Immigration Act of 1924 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1924
   National-origins quotas harden exclusionCongress sharply restricts immigration through national-origins quotas.

   A closer look

   The law favors northern and western Europe and bars immigrants ineligible for naturalization, including Japanese immigrants.

   U.S. Department of State · Immigration Act of 1924 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1942–1964
   The Bracero ProgramThe United States recruits Mexican workers on temporary labor contracts.

   A closer look

   The program offers earnings but also exposes workers to exploitation and limited bargaining power.

   Smithsonian · Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program, 1942–1964 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1965
   National-origins quotas are abolishedA new immigration law prioritizes family ties and employment categories.

   A closer look

   The law reshapes migration while retaining numerical limits; it does not create open borders.

   U.S. House of Representatives · Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1980
    The Refugee ActCongress establishes a more uniform system for refugee admission and assistance.

    A closer look

    The law responds to a need for a permanent framework beyond emergency arrangements.

    U.S. Congress · Refugee Act of 1980 ↗ (opens in a new tab)

1. 1662
   Virginia makes slavery hereditaryVirginia makes a child’s free or enslaved status follow the mother.

   A closer look

   Lawmakers protect enslavers’ claims to children born to enslaved women.

   Virginia Humanities · Virginia’s 1662 hereditary-slavery law ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1790
   Citizenship eligibility is racializedFederal naturalization law limits eligibility to free white persons.

   A closer look

   Naturalization means becoming a citizen; this is not a general ban on entry.

   National Archives / DocsTeach · Naturalization Act of 1790 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1830
   The Indian Removal ActCongress authorizes removal treaties exchanging Native lands in the East for lands farther west.

   A closer look

   Coercion and forced removals follow. Removal serves settler demand for Native homelands.

   National Archives · Andrew Jackson’s message on Indian removal (1830) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1857
   Dred Scott v. SandfordThe Supreme Court rejects Scott’s freedom claim and Black citizenship.

   A closer look

   The majority also rules that Congress cannot prohibit slavery in federal territories; the 14th Amendment later overturns its citizenship rule.

   National Archives · Dred Scott v. Sandford ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1865
   The 13th AmendmentThe Constitution abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, with a criminal-punishment exception.

   A closer look

   A constitutional change is broader and more permanent than the wartime proclamation.

   National Archives · 13th Amendment ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1868
   The 14th AmendmentThe amendment establishes birthright citizenship and equal protection.

   A closer look

   Its citizenship clause covers people born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction.

   National Archives · 14th Amendment ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1882
   The Chinese Exclusion ActFederal law suspends Chinese labor immigration and bars Chinese naturalization.

   A closer look

   Exemptions exist; the act does not prohibit every Chinese person from entering.

   National Archives · Chinese Exclusion Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1896
   Plessy upholds segregationThe Supreme Court upholds Louisiana’s segregated railway-car law.

   A closer look

   The ruling gives constitutional support to the “separate but equal” doctrine.

   National Archives · Plessy v. Ferguson ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1954
   Brown challenges school segregationThe Supreme Court rules racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

   A closer look

   The decision does not produce immediate integration; enforcement faces organized resistance.

   National Archives · Brown v. Board of Education ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1964
    The Civil Rights ActFederal law prohibits discrimination in public accommodations and employment.

    A closer look

    Movement pressure helps secure legislation, but passing a law is not the same as ending discrimination.

    National Archives · Civil Rights Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. Resistance is a historical category, not automatic moral approval. Ask who resisted whom, by what means, and with what consequences.

1. 1680
   The Pueblo RevoltPueblo communities coordinate an uprising against Spanish colonial rule.

   A closer look

   Religious repression and colonial demands help produce resistance; the Spanish are expelled from New Mexico for years.

   National Park Service · Pueblo resistance and the 1680 revolt ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1739
   The Stono RebellionEnslaved people in South Carolina organize an armed uprising.

   A closer look

   Colonial forces suppress the rebellion; enslaved people’s resistance challenges the plantation order.

   Dickinson College · Stono Rebellion, 1739 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1831
   Nat Turner leads a revoltTurner and other enslaved people launch an uprising in Virginia.

   A closer look

   Authorities suppress it; retaliation and new restrictions follow.

   Virginia Humanities · Nat Turner’s revolt ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1849
   Harriet Tubman escapes slaveryTubman reaches freedom and later returns to help others escape.

   A closer look

   Her Underground Railroad work depends on courage, planning, and networks of assistance.

   National Park Service · Harriet Tubman ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1867
   Chinese railroad workers strikeChinese Central Pacific workers demand higher pay and better working conditions.

   A closer look

   Management cuts off supplies, helping defeat the strike; workers nevertheless demonstrate collective organization.

   Library of Congress · The 1867 Sierra strike ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1892
   Ida B. Wells challenges lynchingWells investigates lynching after a white mob murders three Black businessmen in Memphis.

   A closer look

   Her journalism exposes the false claims used to justify racial terror.

   National Park Service · Ida B. Wells ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1955–1956
   The Montgomery bus boycottBlack residents organize a sustained boycott of segregated buses.

   A closer look

   Rosa Parks’s arrest sparks collective action supported by organizers, churches, and carpool networks.

   Stanford King Institute · Montgomery bus boycott ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1965
   The Delano grape strike beginsFilipino farmworkers begin the strike; Mexican American organizers and workers join.

   A closer look

   Larry Itliong, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others build a strike and consumer boycott.

   National Park Service · The Delano grape strike and boycott ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1969–1971
   Native activists occupy AlcatrazIndians of All Tribes occupy the former prison island.

   A closer look

   The occupation brings public attention to Native land claims and self-determination.

   National Park Service · We Hold the Rock ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1973
    The Wounded Knee occupationOglala Lakota activists and American Indian Movement supporters occupy Wounded Knee.

    A closer look

    They protest tribal political conditions and federal failures to honor treaty obligations.

    National Park Service · From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. The West was not empty. Beginning this timeline with Jamestown does not make English arrival the beginning of American history.

1. 1607
   Jamestown is establishedEnglish settlers build a colony within the Powhatan peoples’ homeland.

   A closer look

   This is an English colonial beginning—not the beginning of the region’s history.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1763
   Britain restricts western settlementA royal proclamation seeks to limit colonial settlement beyond the Appalachian boundary.

   A closer look

   The policy follows imperial war and Native resistance; settlers and speculators challenge the restriction.

   Yale Avalon Project · Royal Proclamation of 1763 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1787
   The Northwest OrdinanceThe United States creates a process for governing territories and admitting new states.

   A closer look

   The ordinance bans slavery in the Northwest Territory but does not end Native claims to the land.

   National Archives · Northwest Ordinance ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1803
   The Louisiana PurchaseThe United States buys France’s territorial claim to Louisiana.

   A closer look

   The deal does not mean Native nations consent to surrendering their homelands.

   National Archives · Louisiana Purchase Treaty ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1830
   The Indian Removal ActCongress authorizes removal treaties exchanging Native lands in the East for lands farther west.

   A closer look

   Coercion and forced removals follow. Removal serves settler demand for Native homelands.

   National Archives · Andrew Jackson’s message on Indian removal (1830) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1845
   Manifest Destiny receives its nameJohn L. O’Sullivan popularizes the phrase “Manifest Destiny.”

   A closer look

   The language presents U.S. expansion as a rightful national mission, not merely a contest for power.

   Encyclopaedia Britannica · Manifest Destiny ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1848
   The Treaty of Guadalupe HidalgoMexico cedes a vast northern territory to the United States after the war.

   A closer look

   Mexican residents face a new border and legal order; treaty promises do not prevent later dispossession.

   National Archives · Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1862
   The Homestead ActFederal law offers qualifying settlers a path to land ownership through residence and cultivation.

   A closer look

   Land presented as available public land often comes from Native dispossession.

   National Archives · Homestead Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1869
   The transcontinental railroad connectsThe Central Pacific and Union Pacific meet at Promontory Summit, Utah.

   A closer look

   Chinese and other workers build a connection backed by federal land grants and loans.

   National Park Service · Golden Spike history ↗ (opens in a new tab)National Archives · Pacific Railway Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)Library of Congress · The 1867 Sierra strike ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1890
    The Wounded Knee massacreU.S. soldiers kill Lakota people, including women and children, at Wounded Knee.

    A closer look

    The massacre occurs amid efforts to suppress the Ghost Dance and control reservation communities.

    National Park Service · Black Elk and the Wounded Knee massacre ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. Bacon was a wealthy colonist, not simply a poor farmer. The rebellion attacked Native communities and did not “invent race” or slavery overnight.

1. 1675
   Frontier violence escalatesDisputes involving settlers and Native communities develop into widening violence.

   A closer look

   Tax burdens, land hunger, and competing trade interests also feed discontent.

   Virginia Humanities · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1676
   Berkeley backs a defensive policyVirginia’s assembly approves frontier forts rather than an unrestricted war.

   A closer look

   Bacon and his supporters reject the governor’s approach to Native relations.

   Virginia Humanities · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1676
   Bacon attacks the OccaneechiBacon’s forces attack Native people despite Berkeley’s orders.

   A closer look

   The Occaneechi are among his targets; hostility reaches communities not responsible for earlier attacks.

   National Park Service · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)Virginia Humanities · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1676
   Armed pressure wins a commissionIn June, Bacon returns to Jamestown with armed supporters.

   A closer look

   Berkeley yields to his demand for authority to wage war against Native people.

   Virginia Humanities · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1676
   Bacon issues his declarationOn July 30, Bacon publicly accuses Berkeley of corruption and favoritism.

   A closer look

   His anti-elite claims accompany—not cancel—his campaign against Native communities.

   National Park Service · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1676
   The rebels burn JamestownBacon’s forces burn the colonial capital in September.

   A closer look

   The conflict now directly threatens the seat of English colonial government.

   National Park Service · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1676
   Bacon diesBacon dies of illness on October 26.

   A closer look

   Rebels continue fighting after his death; the revolt does not immediately end.

   National Park Service · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)Virginia Humanities · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1677
   The rebellion is suppressedColonial authorities regain control and execute rebel leaders.

   A closer look

   The Crown investigates and Berkeley leaves office; Native communities have also suffered heavily.

   National Park Service · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)Virginia Humanities · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1705
   Virginia consolidates its slave lawsA comprehensive law strengthens distinctions between enslaved people and servants.

   A closer look

   Racial slavery developed through multiple laws before and after Bacon’s Rebellion—not in one sudden invention.

   Virginia Humanities · An act concerning servants and slaves (1705) ↗ (opens in a new tab)

1. 1607
   Jamestown is establishedEnglish settlers build a colony within the Powhatan peoples’ homeland.

   A closer look

   This is an English colonial beginning—not the beginning of the region’s history.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1608
   John Smith takes chargeSmith becomes president of the colony’s governing council.

   A closer look

   Work rules and negotiations for food become central to the struggling settlement.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1609–1610
   The Starving TimeHunger, disease, and war devastate the people inside James Fort.

   A closer look

   The colony survives after relief arrives in 1610; survival was not inevitable.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1612
   Tobacco becomes the cash cropJohn Rolfe develops tobacco that finds a profitable English market.

   A closer look

   Expanding cultivation increases colonists’ demand for land and a large labor force.

   National Park Service · Tobacco and the colony ↗ (opens in a new tab)Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1613
   Pocahontas is taken captiveSamuel Argall kidnaps Pocahontas and holds her for ransom.

   A closer look

   English leaders use her captivity to pressure Powhatan; this is not a romance story.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Pocahontas ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1614
   A marriage helps establish a trucePocahontas marries John Rolfe after her captivity and baptism.

   A closer look

   The marriage helps end the First Anglo-Powhatan War, but peace does not last.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Pocahontas ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1619
   The first General Assembly meetsRepresentatives of Virginia’s English settlements gather to make laws.

   A closer look

   This limited representative government does not represent everyone living in the colony.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · The first General Assembly ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1619
   Captive Africans arrive in VirginiaAn English privateer brings captive Africans to Point Comfort.

   A closer look

   They were forcibly taken from Angola. African presence and enslavement in the Americas predate 1619.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · The first Africans ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1622
   Opechancanough organizes an attackPowhatan forces attack English settlements; the English retaliate.

   A closer look

   Continued colonial expansion intensifies the struggle over land and sovereignty.

   Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1624
    Virginia becomes a royal colonyThe Crown revokes the Virginia Company’s charter.

    A closer look

    The company loses control, but English settlement and tobacco cultivation continue.

    Jamestown Rediscovery · Historical timeline ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. The picture combines different places and historical processes. It is an argument about expansion—not a literal snapshot of the continent in 1872.

Find an element

What does Gast put in the light—and what does he push into the dark?

• Columbia, star, light and darkness
• Sailing ships, steamships and harbor
• Native people retreating
• Mountains, prospectors and California
• Rider, stagecoach and telegraph wire
• Wagons, plow, farms, fences and cabin
• Trains and tracks
• Distant bridge / Brooklyn Bridge
• Bison and other wildlife
• Schoolbook and the published image

Choose an element to open its historical connection below. Tap the painting for a larger view.

Look first; infer second. These are historical connections, not claims that every figure, place, or event is literally depicted. The Brooklyn Bridge opened after this painting was made. Bison flee in the image; mass killing is part of the history outside its frame.

1. 1807
   Commercial steam travel expandsRobert Fulton’s steamboat begins successful Hudson River service.

   A closer look

   Steam transportation helps connect places and markets; Gast’s ships stand for broader networks, not this one voyage.

   New York State · First commercially successful passenger steamboat ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1830
   The Indian Removal ActCongress authorizes removal treaties exchanging Native lands in the East for lands farther west.

   A closer look

   Coercion and forced removals follow. Removal serves settler demand for Native homelands.

   National Archives · Andrew Jackson’s message on Indian removal (1830) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1845
   Manifest Destiny receives its nameJohn L. O’Sullivan popularizes the phrase “Manifest Destiny.”

   A closer look

   The language presents U.S. expansion as a rightful national mission, not merely a contest for power.

   Encyclopaedia Britannica · Manifest Destiny ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1848–1849
   California’s gold rush draws migrantsGold discovery draws people from China, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere.

   A closer look

   California comes under U.S. control after war with Mexico; Native communities face dispossession and violence.

   Library of Congress · The gold rush ↗ (opens in a new tab)National Archives · Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1860–1861
   From Pony Express to telegraphHorse relays carry mail west; a transcontinental telegraph connection soon overtakes the service.

   A closer look

   The Pony Express operates from 1860 to 1861. In October 1861, the telegraph links California to the eastern network; stagecoaches continue carrying people and goods.

   National Park Service · Pony Express history ↗ (opens in a new tab)California Trail Interpretive Center · First transcontinental telegraph ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1862
   The Homestead ActFederal law offers qualifying settlers a path to land ownership through residence and cultivation.

   A closer look

   Land presented as available public land often comes from Native dispossession.

   National Archives · Homestead Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1869
   The transcontinental railroad connectsThe Central Pacific and Union Pacific meet at Promontory Summit, Utah.

   A closer look

   Chinese and other workers build a connection backed by federal land grants and loans.

   National Park Service · Golden Spike history ↗ (opens in a new tab)National Archives · Pacific Railway Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)Library of Congress · The 1867 Sierra strike ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1869–1883
   The Brooklyn Bridge is builtWork begins on a suspension bridge across the East River between New York and Brooklyn.

   A closer look

   The bridge opens in 1883—eleven years after Gast’s painting. The pictured bridge is symbolic, not a photograph of a finished 1872 project.

   NYC Department of Transportation · Brooklyn Bridge ↗ (opens in a new tab)Wikimedia Commons · Public-domain reproduction of American Progress ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1870s–1880s
   Mass bison killing devastates the PlainsCommercial hunting drives Plains bison toward extinction.

   A closer look

   The destruction undermines Native food systems and independence. Gast shows bison fleeing, not the slaughter itself.

   National Park Service · Bison, hunting, and near extinction ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1872
    Gast paints American ProgressA floating female figure leads settlers, technology, and light toward the West.

    A closer look

    Commissioned for publisher George Crofutt, the image frames expansion as progress while Native people and animals retreat.

    Autry Museum · American Progress, 1872 (92.126.1) ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1607–1613
   Jamestown discovers tobaccoThe first four barrels of Virginia tobacco reached London in 1613; seven years later the colony shipped sixty thousand barrels. Profit from tobacco is the engine behind everything that follows in Virginia.

   Context from YPT

   The original 120 colonists barely survived the "starving time" and were fed by the Powhatan. Once tobacco paid, the colony's population exploded from 400 to 4,500 in five years (1618–1623).

   YPT 5–6YPT 33YPT 47
2. 1676
   Bacon's Rebellion and the planters' "crossroads"Five hundred armed men, black and white, burned Jamestown. After it was crushed, the planters chose to replace armed white labor with enslaved Africans who could not legally carry guns.

   Context from YPT

   Virginia's black population went from 5 percent in 1675 to 25 percent by 1715 and over 40 percent by 1750.

   YPT 55–59
3. 1830s
   Indian removal builds the cotton kingdomJackson uprooted seventy thousand Native Americans and moved them west of the Mississippi. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were carved out of Indian land.

   Context from YPT

   Choctaw farmers were removed even though they farmed "like whites," and some owned slaves. Farming offered no protection.

   YPT 70–71
4. 1845–1855
   The Great Famine as a market eventWhile a million Irish died, landlords evicted tenants who could not pay rent and kept shipping beef and grain to Britain. A million and a half fled to the United States.

   Context from YPT

   Between 1815 and 1845 a million Irish had already emigrated; two million more came between 1855 and 1900.

   YPT 107–108
5. 1846–1848
   The war with Mexico is really about CaliforniaThe border dispute was the excuse; the goal was California's cattle hides for New England shoe factories and its harbors for Pacific whalers and the China trade.

   Context from YPT

   Polk told Congress the harbors would become centers of "an extensive and profitable commerce with China."

   YPT 128–130
6. 1866–1869
   The Central Pacific runs on cheap Chinese laborChinese workers blasted tunnels through Donner Summit and lived under sixty-foot snowdrifts for lower wages than whites. When they struck for equal pay, Charles Crocker cut off their food for a week.

   Context from YPT

   White workers demanded the Chinese be fired; Crocker answered that he would fire the whites instead.

   YPT 22YPT 149–150
7. 1887–1933
   The Dawes Act as a land-transfer machineAllotment broke reservations into 160-acre plots and sold the "surplus" to whites. By 1933 Native Americans had lost about sixty percent of the 138 million acres they held in 1887.

   Context from YPT

   Secretary Schurz predicted in 1880 the land would open to white settlement; Congress handed railroads twenty-nine rights-of-way through Indian country in 1886–1889; a 1902 law forced heirs' land to auction.

   YPT 173–177
8. 1929–1933
   The Depression sorts people by raceMexican farm wages fell from 35 to 14 cents an hour; four hundred thousand Mexicans were "repatriated"; more than half of blacks in Southern cities were unemployed; college-educated Nisei became "professional carrot washers."

   Context from YPT

   Federal aid paid whites at higher rates than blacks. Black workers were the first fired.

   YPT 210–211YPT 242YPT 249YPT 267
9. 1941–1947
   War labor shortage forces the door openRoosevelt's 1941 order banned discrimination in defense jobs; a million African Americans, half of them women, worked in war plants. Mexican Americans in Los Angeles shipyards went from zero to 17,000; two hundred thousand braceros were imported by 1947.

   Context from YPT

   The book credits the need for labor in steel, shipbuilding, and aircraft more than the threat of a march.

   YPT 280YPT 283YPT 285
10. 1960s–1992
    Deindustrialization and the underclassPlants moved to suburbs and offshore; auto, rubber, and steel jobs vanished; black America split into a rising middle class and a trapped underclass. Los Angeles exploded in April 1992 with $800 million in losses.

    Context from YPT

    The civil rights laws of 1964–1965 could end legal discrimination but not poverty: "many did not have the money" to order the hamburger.

    YPT 312–314

Keep in mind. “Socially constructed” does not mean unreal. The categories are human-made; their material effects are real.

1. 1662
   Virginia makes slavery hereditaryVirginia makes a child’s free or enslaved status follow the mother.

   A closer look

   Lawmakers protect enslavers’ claims to children born to enslaved women.

   Virginia Humanities · Virginia’s 1662 hereditary-slavery law ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1705
   Virginia consolidates its slave lawsA comprehensive law strengthens distinctions between enslaved people and servants.

   A closer look

   Racial slavery developed through multiple laws before and after Bacon’s Rebellion—not in one sudden invention.

   Virginia Humanities · An act concerning servants and slaves (1705) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1790
   Citizenship eligibility is racializedFederal naturalization law limits eligibility to free white persons.

   A closer look

   Naturalization means becoming a citizen; this is not a general ban on entry.

   National Archives / DocsTeach · Naturalization Act of 1790 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1848
   The Treaty of Guadalupe HidalgoMexico cedes a vast northern territory to the United States after the war.

   A closer look

   Mexican residents face a new border and legal order; treaty promises do not prevent later dispossession.

   National Archives · Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1857
   Dred Scott v. SandfordThe Supreme Court rejects Scott’s freedom claim and Black citizenship.

   A closer look

   The majority also rules that Congress cannot prohibit slavery in federal territories; the 14th Amendment later overturns its citizenship rule.

   National Archives · Dred Scott v. Sandford ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1882
   The Chinese Exclusion ActFederal law suspends Chinese labor immigration and bars Chinese naturalization.

   A closer look

   Exemptions exist; the act does not prohibit every Chinese person from entering.

   National Archives · Chinese Exclusion Act ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1896
   Plessy upholds segregationThe Supreme Court upholds Louisiana’s segregated railway-car law.

   A closer look

   The ruling gives constitutional support to the “separate but equal” doctrine.

   National Archives · Plessy v. Ferguson ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1923
   The Court denies Thind naturalizationThe Supreme Court rules Bhagat Singh Thind ineligible for citizenship as a white person.

   A closer look

   The justices rely on a supposed common understanding of whiteness rather than a consistent scientific category.

   U.S. Supreme Court · United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), via Justia ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1942
   Japanese American exclusion and incarcerationExecutive Order 9066 enables military exclusion; mass forced removal and incarceration follow.

   A closer look

   People are targeted by ancestry, including U.S. citizens, without individual proof of disloyalty.

   National Archives · Executive Order 9066 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1954
    Brown challenges school segregationThe Supreme Court rules racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

    A closer look

    The decision does not produce immediate integration; enforcement faces organized resistance.

    National Archives · Brown v. Board of Education ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Keep in mind. Ideas can defend domination or challenge it. Ask what the idea does, for whom, and with what evidence.

1. 1606
   The Virginia Company receives a charterEngland authorizes a company to colonize part of North America.

   A closer look

   The charter joins commercial opportunity to a stated Christianizing mission.

   Yale Avalon Project · First Virginia Charter (1606) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
2. 1676
   Bacon issues his declarationOn July 30, Bacon publicly accuses Berkeley of corruption and favoritism.

   A closer look

   His anti-elite claims accompany—not cancel—his campaign against Native communities.

   National Park Service · Bacon’s Rebellion ↗ (opens in a new tab)
3. 1776
   The Declaration asserts equalityThe Declaration of Independence announces a break from British rule and a claim of human equality.

   A closer look

   Slavery and exclusion persist; later movements use that contradiction to demand change.

   National Archives · Declaration of Independence ↗ (opens in a new tab)
4. 1829
   David Walker publishes his AppealWalker urges Black people to oppose slavery and racist oppression.

   A closer look

   He challenges a nation that claims liberty while sustaining enslavement.

   National Park Service · David Walker ↗ (opens in a new tab)
5. 1845
   Manifest Destiny receives its nameJohn L. O’Sullivan popularizes the phrase “Manifest Destiny.”

   A closer look

   The language presents U.S. expansion as a rightful national mission, not merely a contest for power.

   Encyclopaedia Britannica · Manifest Destiny ↗ (opens in a new tab)
6. 1872
   Gast paints American ProgressA floating female figure leads settlers, technology, and light toward the West.

   A closer look

   Commissioned for publisher George Crofutt, the image frames expansion as progress while Native people and animals retreat.

   Autry Museum · American Progress, 1872 (92.126.1) ↗ (opens in a new tab)
7. 1892
   Ida B. Wells challenges lynchingWells investigates lynching after a white mob murders three Black businessmen in Memphis.

   A closer look

   Her journalism exposes the false claims used to justify racial terror.

   National Park Service · Ida B. Wells ↗ (opens in a new tab)
8. 1942
   Japanese American exclusion and incarcerationExecutive Order 9066 enables military exclusion; mass forced removal and incarceration follow.

   A closer look

   People are targeted by ancestry, including U.S. citizens, without individual proof of disloyalty.

   National Archives · Executive Order 9066 ↗ (opens in a new tab)
9. 1965
   The Delano grape strike beginsFilipino farmworkers begin the strike; Mexican American organizers and workers join.

   A closer look

   Larry Itliong, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others build a strike and consumer boycott.

   National Park Service · The Delano grape strike and boycott ↗ (opens in a new tab)
10. 1968
    Memphis sanitation workers strikeBlack sanitation workers demand safer work, better pay, and union recognition.

    A closer look

    Their “I AM A MAN” signs connect economic demands to dignity and racial justice.

    Stanford King Institute · Memphis sanitation workers’ strike ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1939–1957
   A working-class multicultural childhood in HawaiiTakaki grew up the son of a Japanese immigrant father and a plantation-born mother, among Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and Hawaiian playmates; his stepfather was a Chinese cook. He wanted to be a surfer.

   Context from YPT

   "We did not use the word multicultural, but that's what we were."

   YPT 1
2. 1957
   College in Ohio: "How long have you been in this country?"A teacher who asked "How do you know what you know?" sent him to the College of Wooster, where classmates asked where he learned English and his future father-in-law opposed the marriage because of race—then, years later, said "You can call me Dad."

   Context from YPT

   "His racist attitudes, it turned out, were not frozen."

   YPT 2
3. 1971
   Berkeley and a new field of studyAfter teaching UCLA's first African American history course, Takaki moved to Berkeley to teach comparative ethnic studies; his own family came to include seven heritages.

   Context from YPT

   "As the time approaches when all Americans will be minorities."

   YPT 3

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1607–1619
   Multicultural from the beginningA taxi driver's "How long have you been in this country?" leads Takaki to Jamestown: land taken from Indians, tobacco profit, and in 1619 a Dutch ship bringing twenty Africans a year before Plymouth Rock.

   Context from YPT

   The driver saw him through the "Master Narrative."

   YPT 5–6
2. 1676
   Why African Americans became "the central minority"Planters preferred white workers until an armed uprising in 1676; then they turned to enslaved Africans who could be kept from guns. After emancipation came segregation, lynching, and riots—and King's "our destiny is tied up with America's destiny."

   Context from YPT

   A one-paragraph preview of Chapters 3, 5, and 15.

   YPT 9–10
3. 1790–1900
   The Irish: despised, but whiteFour million Irish fled starvation into a Protestant country that scorned Catholics; because the 1790 Naturalization Act let white immigrants naturalize, they could vote, and by 1900 they were entering the middle class.

   Context from YPT

   Asians could not become citizens under the same law.

   YPT 11–12
4. 1848 and 1898–1917
   Mexicans and Puerto Ricans: the border movedMexicans became Americans when the war moved the border; most today have immigrant roots and cross for work. Puerto Rico became a colony in 1898 and its people citizens in 1917; 4.7 million now live stateside.

   Context from YPT

   "What to do with them?" is "a burning political question."

   YPT 13–14
5. 1857–1951
   Whose stories countAn Irish maid in 1900 asked why anyone would want her story; Harriet Jacobs, a Chinese immigrant, a Jewish immigrant, Silko, and Langston Hughes answer: stories "aren't just entertainment." An incomplete history is a mirror that leaves people invisible.

   Context from YPT

   Hughes: "Let America be America again."

   YPT 18–21
6. 1880s–1940s
   Jews: from pogroms to the HolocaustRussian Jews fled massacres to the Lower East Side and rose through education; in the 1930s their demands that America rescue Hitler's victims met indifference and anti-Semitism, producing "a strong wave of Jewish American activism."

   Context from YPT

   "To these Jews, America represented the Promised Land."

   YPT 12–13
7. 1882 and 1942
   Asian Americans: wanted, never welcomedChinese came as prospectors and railroad builders and were excluded in 1882, the first nationality ban; 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds citizens, were interned in the 1940s. Congressman Matsui: "How could I as a six-month-old child... be declared... an enemy alien?"

   Context from YPT

   Vietnamese refugees arrived in 1975; Asian Americans are projected at ten percent by 2050.

   YPT 10–11
8. 1903, 1920, 1930s
   Shared dreams, shared exploitation, shared strikesIrish, Japanese, and Jewish immigrants all sang of hope; all were exploited; in 1903 Mexicans and Japanese struck together in California, Japanese and Filipinos in Hawaii in 1920, and the CIO called for "absolute racial equality."

   Context from YPT

   "Differences do not have to keep people apart."

   YPT 17–18
9. 1951
   Handlin's The Uprooted and the Master NarrativeThe prize-winning "epic story" of immigration covered only Europeans. The Master Narrative says Americans are white; demography now says "not all of us came originally from Europe."

   Context from YPT

   Minorities are the majority in California and in Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

   YPT 6–8
10. 2001
    Afghan Americans after 9/11Refugees from Afghanistan were hardly noticed until the attacks, then lived with fear of anti-Muslim violence and the knowledge they could not go home.

    Context from YPT

    Al-Qaeda was traced to Afghanistan; the United States invaded.

    YPT 15

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. c. 1000
   Vikings and BeothukThorvald Eiriksson's men killed the Beothuk they met; Thorvald died of a Beothuk arrow; the Vikings abandoned Vinland. Ruins were found in Newfoundland in 1960.

   Context from YPT

   Columbus's accident of history, five hundred years later, brought colonists who stayed.

   YPT 25–26
2. 1492–1611
   Indians as curiosities and "savages"Captives displayed in Europe; Waymouth's 1605 kidnapping; the 1611 "monster" in London; Johnson's "herds of deer" (1609). London planners still planned to "civilize" Indian children, and the 1606 Virginia contract promised Christian teaching.

   Context from YPT

   The English "were defining the Indians as savages, too" because they resembled "the wild Irish."

   YPT 29–31
3. 1594
   English over IrishElizabeth I sent Gilbert and Raleigh to colonize Catholic Ireland; the Irish were called savages and pagans, barred from property, office, juries, English dress, and intermarriage; the Nine Years' War brought burned crops, reservations, slaughtered families, and a "lane of heads."

   Context from YPT

   Empty land was "vacant" and ready to settle.

   YPT 27–29
4. 1607–1629
   Virginia: from starving time to "root out"The Powhatan fed thirty-eight survivors; the English then demanded corn and deerskins, burned villages, and grew from 400 to 4,500 on tobacco. After the 1622 attack killed three hundred, they poisoned two hundred Powhatan at a treaty toast and by 1629 aimed to end the Powhatan as a people.

   Context from YPT

   Percy killed children in the water; Tucker's men brought home parts of heads.

   YPT 31–34
5. 1616–1676
   New England turns Indians into demonsSmith found a farmed "paradise"; smallpox killed 95 percent of some communities; Pilgrims lived on corn from graves; the English called farmers "foxes and wild beasts"; the Pequot War burned seven hundred; King Philip's War nearly won and then thousands were enslaved; Mather called Indians devil worshippers. Mary Rowlandson's 1682 narrative recorded their kindness anyway.

   Context from YPT

   Less than a fifth of the land was farmable.

   YPT 35–38
6. 1755–1824
   Mary Jemison staysCaptured at fifteen, adopted by Seneca sisters who were "kind good natured women," married among the Indians, and lived with them until nearly ninety; her narrative (1824) shows "right and wrong... on both sides."

   Context from YPT

   Her family had settled on Indian land.

   YPT 43–45
7. 1776–1824
   Jefferson's two facesFriendship to the Kaskaskia and Cherokee; extermination for hostile tribes; trading posts on credit to force land sales; a final letter looking forward to the day "savages" and "wild beasts" were gone.

   Context from YPT

   Indians "could not be allowed to remain within society as Indians."

   YPT 40–42
8. 1789
   "The times have turned everything upside down"After independence the Mohegan told Connecticut they were starving on fenced lots where once there had been plenty.

   Context from YPT

   Progress for whites was poverty for Indians.

   YPT 39–40

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1613–1620
   Tobacco and the demand for laborFour barrels to sixty thousand in seven years; the crop needed hands for clearing, tending, curing, and packing.

   Context from YPT

   Planters built "a complicated social structure" to get them.

   YPT 47–48
2. 1619
   Slave or servant?The twenty Africans were sold as indentured servants for a term of years, like whites, because Virginia had no slave law.

   Context from YPT

   Indentures ran four to seven years and ended in freedom.

   YPT 48–49
3. 1640–1669
   Slavery becomes lawJohn Punch, life servitude (1640); Jowan sold "forever" (1653); lifetime servitude legalized (1661); slave as property (1669). Blacks were forbidden guns and served longer terms first.

   Context from YPT

   Imports did not surge until the 1680s.

   YPT 51–52
4. 1650–1675
   Why so few Africans?Barbados had a black majority; Virginia had 2 to 5 percent because its family colonists wanted a white society. Three-quarters of arrivals before 1700 were white indentured servants: convicts, the homeless, the kidnapped.

   Context from YPT

   Servants of both races shared collars, passes, beatings, and escapes.

   YPT 49–50
5. 1660s–1670
   "Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed"A land boom, lengthened indentures, servant plots (Friend; nine laborers in 1663), and a 1670 law limiting the vote to landowners while every white man kept a gun. Berkeley counted six of seven as dangerous.

   Context from YPT

   Freed servants were owed fifty acres they could not find.

   YPT 53–55
6. 1676
   Bacon's RebellionBacon's militia killed friendly and hostile Indians; declared a rebel, he marched five hundred men including armed blacks on Jamestown and burned it. Grantham tricked the rebels; eighty blacks and twenty whites held out; several dozen leaders hanged; Bacon died of disease.

   Context from YPT

   The largest colonial uprising before the Revolution; planters begged the king for troops.

   YPT 55–58
7. 1680–1750
   The crossroadsPlanters chose African slavery over opportunity for poor whites; blacks rose from 5 to 40-plus percent; laws banned gathering, travel, weapons, and interracial unions and made mixed-race children slaves.

   Context from YPT

   "A choice that would have tragic consequences for centuries."

   YPT 58–59
8. 1780s
   Jefferson and "the ears of the wolf"A slaveholder who called slavery immoral, Jefferson proposed gradual abolition and removal of freed blacks, feared race war, and concluded it was too late: "we have the wolf by the ears."

   Context from YPT

   A slave-owner "who bought and sold black people."

   YPT 59–62
9. 1789
   Equiano's Middle PassageThe chained hold, the stench, the fainting, the fear of being eaten, the words "not to be eaten, but to work."

   Context from YPT

   Whether or not he was born in Africa, "those horrors did exist."

   YPT 63–65

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1787–1814
   Jackson, speculator and Indian fighterChickasaw land bought for $100 and sold for $5,312; Horseshoe Bend, eight hundred Creek killed, skin for bridle reins, "fiends" who had "disappeared from the face of the Earth."

   Context from YPT

   Fort Mims had cost two hundred white lives.

   YPT 67–69
2. 1803
   Jefferson writes to JacksonEncourage Indians to sell forests and farm like whites. Three decades later Jackson removed even the farmers.

   Context from YPT

   "Farming offered no protection."

   YPT 67
3. 1828–1832
   President Jackson and the broken treatiesJackson backed Georgia and Mississippi in breaking federal treaties, ignored the 1832 Supreme Court ruling, promised land "as long as the grass grows," and uprooted seventy thousand. Cotton states were carved from Indian Territory.

   Context from YPT

   "All Jackson had to do was stay out of the way."

   YPT 69–71
4. 1830–1832
   The ChoctawMississippi ended Choctaw self-rule; Dancing Rabbit Creek took ten million acres under threat; land grants vanished to loans and squatters; families crossed the frozen Mississippi. Harkins: "wanderers in a strange land."

   Context from YPT

   Some Choctaw farmed cotton and owned slaves.

   YPT 71–74
5. 1830–1845
   The Pawnee: fur trade and smallpoxThe Pawnee had farmed corn and hunted buffalo in Nebraska and Kansas, killing only what they could eat; the fur trade made hunting commercial, and traders' smallpox cut them from ten thousand to four thousand in fifteen years.

   Context from YPT

   "The buffalo hunt was a sacred activity."

   YPT 76–77
6. 1831–1871
   Railroads and the Indian Appropriation ActJackson's 1831 message promised rails; 73 miles of track in 1831 became 30,636 in 1860; a 1853 editorial and an 1867 headline asked "What shall we do with the Indians?"; railroads lobbied for the 1871 act ending treaties; buffalo carcasses lined the tracks.

   Context from YPT

   Railroads "deliberately planned the settlement of the West."

   YPT 76–79
7. 1835–1839
   The Cherokee and the Trail of TearsRoss resisted; Ridge signed for three million; the militia jailed Ross and silenced the newspaper; Congress called the fraud legal; Scott's seven thousand troops marched the nation west in winter; more than four thousand died.

   Context from YPT

   The Cherokee had a written constitution, a newspaper, and farms.

   YPT 74–76
8. 1838–1909
   The BushyheadsJesse Bushyhead, a Baptist minister, led a thousand Cherokee west and lost eighty-two, including his daughter; Dennis went to Princeton and the Gold Rush; Carrie taught and became "Aunt Carrie" to generations of students.

   Context from YPT

   "Looks like maybe all be dead before we get to new Indian country."

   YPT 82–84
9. 1873
   Massacre Canyon and the Kansas reservationSettlers demanded removal; the Sioux, pushed south by the same settlers, burned Pawnee crops and killed more than a hundred hunters at Massacre Canyon; the Pawnee retreated to a reservation in Kansas. Overtakes the Enemy: "why should we want to be like them, cheaters and greedy?"

   Context from YPT

   Railroad tracks "cut across their land like long gashes."

   YPT 80–81

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1785–1829
   David Walker's AppealFree-born in North Carolina, self-taught, Walker found Northern "freedom" a pretense and in 1829 argued slavery could only be destroyed by violence. The South banned his book.

   Context from YPT

   Blacks were "slaves in the South and outcasts in the North."

   YPT 85–86
2. 1818–1895
   Frederick DouglassReading lessons banned by Hugh Auld; the fight with slave-breaker Covey; escape in 1838; a lifetime as abolitionist spokesman who believed blacks would be "blended and absorbed" into the American people.

   Context from YPT

   Baltimore's urban slavery was less strict; free blacks planted the idea of escape.

   YPT 93–94
3. 1832
   Nat TurnerSeventy slaves, two days, almost sixty whites dead, a religious vision, and a leader who had seemed "humble, obedient, and well behaved."

   Context from YPT

   "Even a seemingly 'good' slave could be planning their destruction."

   YPT 91–92
4. 1834–1860
   Northern freedom?225,000 free blacks faced segregated theaters, inferior schools, slums, and menial jobs (ninety percent in New York); property tests for black voters; Pennsylvania's white-only vote (1838); Philadelphia mobs (1834); interracial marriage bans in Indiana and Illinois.

   Context from YPT

   "They were not slaves, but they were hardly free."

   YPT 86–88
5. 1860
   On Southern plantationsFour million slaves, 35 percent of the South, worked dawn to dark; Hammond relied on "the power of fear"; masters held two images—the smiling "Sambo" and the savage who might revolt.

   Context from YPT

   The Sambo was propaganda for a world that "disapproved of American slavery."

   YPT 88–91
6. 1860
   Urban slaves and hiring outSeventy thousand slaves in mills, furnaces, and factories; a Savannah man bought his time for $250 a year and hired others; hiring out "weakened the slave system."

   Context from YPT

   Slaves learned "what it meant to be free" from free coworkers.

   YPT 92
7. 1860
   J. W. Loguen answers his mistressAsked for a thousand dollars for the "property" he stole—himself—Loguen replied: "Did you raise your own children for the market?" He ran an Underground Railroad stop in Syracuse.

   Context from YPT

   He had told his master he would never leave.

   YPT 101–103
8. 1861–1865
   The Civil War brings freedomA planter class of five percent took the South out; Lincoln enlisted blacks only in 1863's manpower crisis; 186,000 served; the Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery; slaves left "without even a good-bye."

   Context from YPT

   "Without the help of African American soldiers... the war would have been lost."

   YPT 95–97
9. 1865–1900
   The "New South"Freedmen wanted land; Sherman's forty acres were seized back after Johnson's pardons; sharecropping trapped them in debt; blacks became industrial labor (41 percent in Birmingham); Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement, and hundreds of lynchings a year followed.

   Context from YPT

   "Keep the Negroes landless, and as nearly in a condition of slavery as it is possible."

   YPT 97–100

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1100s–1830s
   Beef for BritainConquest since the twelfth century left the Irish owning fourteen percent by 1700; cattle ranching threw ninety percent of laborers out of work; Franklin saw mud hovels in 1771; by the 1830s Ireland exported beef while families slept on straw and ate potatoes.

   Context from YPT

   Immigrants saw themselves as exiles "pushed out by English oppressors."

   YPT 105–107
2. 1815–1855
   The Great FamineA million came before the blight; from 1845 the fungus destroyed the crop yearly; a million died by 1855; landlords evicted and exported; a million and a half fled; two million more followed by 1900.

   Context from YPT

   Families ate seaweed; tens of thousands died in passage.

   YPT 107–108
3. 1830s–1860s
   An army of workersThe "immortal Irish brigade" built the National Road, the Erie Canal, and the railways in the most dangerous jobs; miners' lungs; "an Irishman is buried under every tie"; a song of no gold on the street corners.

   Context from YPT

   Treated "like dogs, or worse."

   YPT 109–110
4. 1830–1867
   A massive migration of womenIrish women replaced black servants (1830 to 1850); single-son inheritance and lost cottage weaving shut women out of Ireland; by 1867 women outnumbered men in New York; maids gained an inside view of the middle class and "awful lonesomeness"; the Lowell mill collapse killed eighty-eight; by 1900 a third of seamstresses were Irish.

   Context from YPT

   "This is a good place and a good country."

   YPT 114–117
5. 1837–1903
   Mother JonesBorn in Cork, widowed and childless by disease, burned out by the Chicago Fire, she organized strikers' families and in 1903 led child workers from Philadelphia to Oyster Bay: "the white child is sold for $2 a week."

   Context from YPT

   Georgia had just protected songbirds, not children.

   YPT 121–124
6. 1842–1863
   Becoming antiblackParker's "dangerous classes"; the 1842 Irish antislavery petition; in America the demand that a "country of the whites" prefer white workers; John E. Bruce's reply; the draft riots of July 1863, four days, more than a hundred dead.

   Context from YPT

   "Identifying African Americans as 'the other' was a way for the Irish to assimilate."

   YPT 111–113
7. 1870
   The Crispins and North AdamsFifty thousand shoemakers struck; seventy-five Chinese replaced them behind locked gates; nearby strikers took a ten-percent cut; the Chinese were praised as "harder working" than the Irish.

   Context from YPT

   A magazine offered Chinese labor as the cure for unions.

   YPT 110–111
8. 1890–1900
   Irish powerDaughters entered teaching and nursing (61 percent of immigrant women in needle trades, 19 percent of the American-born); whiteness meant naturalization, college, and the vote; by 1890 the Irish ran Northern Democratic machines and city jobs. Some urged Gaelic; others "left the old world behind."

   Context from YPT

   Kearney's sons rose from clerks to city officials.

   YPT 117–120

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1769–1846
   The taking of CaliforniaSpanish settlement from 1769; Mexican independence in 1821 with three thousand settlers; Anglos as illegal aliens in the 1840s; hides, harbors, and China trade; the Bear Flag at Sonoma; the navy at Monterey.

   Context from YPT

   Polk promised "an extensive and profitable commerce with China."

   YPT 129–130
2. 1820s–1835
   TejasAmerican slaveholders entered Texas; Adams offered a million dollars (1826); Mexico banned slavery and immigration (1830); illegal aliens kept coming until twenty thousand Americans faced four thousand Mexicans; Austin called for war against the "mongrel" race.

   Context from YPT

   Sanchez predicted the "spark" at Austin's colony.

   YPT 125–127
3. 1836–1846
   War breaks outThe Alamo, Goliad's four hundred executed prisoners, 630 Mexican soldiers killed, the Lone Star Republic; annexation in 1845; the Rio Grande–Nueces dispute; Taylor's blockade; Polk's declaration after a May 1846 skirmish.

   Context from YPT

   "The border dispute hid the real reason... California."

   YPT 127–128
4. 1846–1848
   American conquest and Guadalupe HidalgoGrant and Scott recorded murder, robbery, and rape by volunteers; the treaty took more than half of Mexico for $15 million; Mexicans who stayed were promised citizens' rights; Whitman scorned "miserable, inefficient Mexico"; Pablo de la Guerra: "foreigners in their own land."

   Context from YPT

   The Senate removed the land-title guarantee.

   YPT 131–133
5. 1846–1850
   Mariano VallejoArrested by Los Osos at Sonoma; livestock stolen; land lost to courts and squatters (100,000 acres to 280); elected to the legislature in 1850. "What does that matter to the conqueror?"

   Context from YPT

   He donated land for a state capital that was built elsewhere.

   YPT 143–144
6. 1848–1891
   Anglo over MexicanGold flipped the population (100,000 to 13,000); the foreign miners' tax; mobs in the diggings; Texas primaries and poll taxes; the Court of Private Land Claims (two million confirmed, thirty-three million denied); lawyers' quarter-shares; drought and bank credit.

   Context from YPT

   "They got much of our lands."

   YPT 133–136
7. 1880s–1910
   From landholders to laborersVaqueros vanished with the cattle drives; Mexicans dug irrigation, laid rails, and mined in jobs ranked by race and paid less; Mowry's "natural" peons.

   Context from YPT

   A 1910 Laredo paper: day laborers "on what once belonged to them."

   YPT 137–139
8. 1903–1915
   Mexican workers get organizedOxnard's JMLA, the AFL's refusal, the Mexican refusal in return; Arizona's 1903 and 1915 strikes; mutualistas; the myth of the "siesta-loving" Mexican blown away.

   Context from YPT

   "Our Japanese brothers here were the first to recognize the importance of cooperating."

   YPT 140–142

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1848–1849
   Pioneers from AsiaPalmer's plan; push from war and famine, pull of Gold Mountain and thirty-dollar wages; sojourning men; 63,000 by 1870, 29 percent of Idaho; 400,000 crossings by 1930 and no path to citizenship under the 1790 Act.

   Context from YPT

   "They could not hope to become US citizens."

   YPT 145–148
2. 1850s–1882
   A colony of bachelorsChinatown six blocks long by the 1870s; tongs, fongs, and clans; theaters and holidays; men gambling and reading letters from home.

   Context from YPT

   Exclusion made bachelorhood permanent.

   YPT 158–159
3. 1852–1869
   Working in AmericaThe miners' tax; five million dollars by 1870; the Central Pacific's tunnels and snowdrifts; Crocker's food cutoff; San Francisco's Chinese industries after 1869.

   Context from YPT

   Half the workforce in four key industries was Chinese.

   YPT 148–150
4. 1852–1875
   Chinese women in AmericaSeven women among twelve thousand; tradition, cost, and hostility kept them home; some wives came (Chin Gee Hee's, 1862); most women came alone into prostitution and many bought their way out.

   Context from YPT

   Whites feared Chinese families would threaten "a white man's country."

   YPT 155–157
5. 1854–1893
   Targets of resentmentDepression riots (1893); the retreat into laundries; the debate over a "permanent class of foreign laborers"; People v. Hall (1854); the marriage ban; Hayes's warning (1879); the Exclusion Act (1882), renewed 1892 and made permanent 1902; court victories under the 1870 Civil Rights Act; Kin Huie's fear of being shot in the back.

   Context from YPT

   Chinese were 0.002 percent of the population.

   YPT 151–155
6. 1880
   Teaching the state to farmTenant farmers taught employers to grow fruit and built irrigation; two-thirds of farm workers in three counties were Chinese.

   Context from YPT

   California was shifting from wheat to orchards.

   YPT 150–151
7. 1900s–1940
   Paper sons at Angel IslandCoaching books thrown overboard; Jim Quock's three weeks of questions; the dog "we ate"; those who failed sent back.

   Context from YPT

   "Their citizenship existed only on paper."

   YPT 165–166
8. 1900–1940
   "Caught in between"Children became common; the American-born rose from 11 to 52 percent; parents worked long hours and demanded study; Victor Wong's "marginal man."

   Context from YPT

   Chinatowns became business districts, tourist centers, and homes.

   YPT 162–164
9. 1906–1943
   An earthquake brings a change in fortuneRecords burned; citizenship claimed; wives and paper sons admitted; Angel Island's barracks; fifty thousand entries by 1943.

   Context from YPT

   Women rose to one in four immigrants.

   YPT 159–162

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1863–1940s
   The Navajos' Long Walk and the sheepKit Carson, Bosque Redondo, the return; Navajo refusal of reorganization; Collier's stock reduction of 400,000 animals for Boulder Dam; seventeen flights to persuade them; a herder's curse; dependency on wages; science later blaming drought.

   Context from YPT

   "The most devastating experience in their tribal history since the Long Walk."

   YPT 178–183
2. 1868–1876
   Custer and the frontierWashita: a dawn attack, a hundred dead, scalps paraded, Black Kettle killed; the Little Big Horn: Custer and all his men dead. Custer loved the plains he was closing.

   Context from YPT

   He said he would choose "the free open plains" over a reservation.

   YPT 170–171
3. 1870s
   The reservation systemWalker's "Peace Policy": no night attacks, buy the Indians off, confine them to giant reservations, school and train them, and shoot any found outside.

   Context from YPT

   Social engineering "for their own good."

   YPT 172–173
4. 1887
   The Dawes ActAllotments of 160 acres, surplus sold, citizenship on acceptance; Dawes on "savage habits"; Schurz's 1880 prediction; twenty-nine railroad rights-of-way.

   Context from YPT

   "The Dawes Act gave Indians what they already owned: their land. But it also took land away."

   YPT 173–175
5. 1889–1890
   Wounded KneeWovoka's Ghost Dance; the panicked agent at Pine Ridge; Sitting Bull killed; Big Foot's surrender; the disarming, the shot, the artillery; Black Elk's account; a mass trench and ghost shirts as souvenirs.

   Context from YPT

   "Only about a hundred warriors and... nearly five hundred soldiers."

   YPT 168–170
6. 1891–1893
   The end of the frontierThe Census declared the continent settled; Turner's thesis made the frontier "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" and the maker of American character.

   Context from YPT

   It matched the Master Narrative: conquest was "necessary."

   YPT 167–168
7. 1891–1933
   Land changes handsOne-seventh sold in 1891; the 1902 auction law; Lone Wolf's defeat at the Supreme Court; sixty percent of 138 million acres gone by 1933.

   Context from YPT

   An official: without the Court "it might have taken as long as fifty years to get rid of the reservations."

   YPT 175–177
8. 1917
   Last-Arrow pageantsCompetency commissions, the last arrow shot, the plow, purse, and flag, the English name, and an article that never asked what the Indians thought.

   Context from YPT

   "To modernize the race."

   YPT 184–186
9. 1934
   A change in directionCollier's Indian Reorganization Act ended allotment, funded land purchase and tribal governments, and let tribes vote: 172 accepted, 73 refused.

   Context from YPT

   "We should be proud and glad to have this different and native culture going on by the side of ours."

   YPT 177–178

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1853–1885
   Push from JapanPerry's ships, the 1868 government, heavy taxes, farmers selling land, wages six times higher in Hawaii, "money grew on trees"; 200,000 to Hawaii and 180,000 to the mainland by 1924.

   Context from YPT

   "Huge dreams of fortune go with me to foreign lands."

   YPT 187–188
2. 1875–1904
   Working in HawaiiCane acreage from 12,000 to 214,000; a deliberately mixed workforce; the 1904 citizens-only rule for skilled jobs; sirens, lunas, bango numbers, whips, twelve-foot cane; women at 55 cents to men's 78.

   Context from YPT

   "Keep a variety of laborers... and thus prevent any concerted action."

   YPT 192–196
3. 1876–1920
   Picture bridesJapan promoted women's emigration; girls were schooled and learned English; the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement let families join; sixty thousand women came, many as picture brides like Ai Miyasaki and Riyo Orite.

   Context from YPT

   "Be patient for twenty years."

   YPT 189–191YPT 213–214
4. 1885–1924
   Ethnic communities and a new generationTemples, language schools, obon, Pidgin English; 55 percent returned but nearly half stayed; children under twenty were half the population by 1920; the Inouye and Fukuda families chose Hawaii; the second generation chose school over the fields.

   Context from YPT

   "With one woven basket alone I came; now I have children and even grandchildren too."

   YPT 200–204
5. 1887–1926
   Transforming CaliforniaA barbershop's "yellow race"; Japanese as 2 percent of California; irrigation and refrigerated cars; farms from 4,698 acres to half a million; George Shima's $15 million and his unwelcome Berkeley house.

   Context from YPT

   "Their very success as farmers sparked a backlash."

   YPT 204–207
6. 1907–1924
   An end to immigrationGentlemen's Agreement (1907), Alien Land Law (1913), Ozawa (1915–1922), the 1924 ban; "now a life of tears."

   Context from YPT

   All rested on the 1790 whiteness rule.

   YPT 207–209
7. 1909–1920
   Workers united; divide and controlThe 1909 blood-union strike (four months, wages raised, Filipinos imported); the 1920 joint strike (8,000 workers, Manlapit bribed, "Japanise Hawaii," evictions, 150 flu deaths, a fifty-percent raise three months later).

   Context from YPT

   The Japanese union proposed one union for "laborers of all nationalities."

   YPT 196–199
8. 1920–1940
   Nisei: Americans by birthFrom a quarter to two-thirds American-born; two years of college on average; "Japs" and thrown rocks; the Depression's carrot washers; Monica Sone's twoness; a secretarial school's quota of six.

   Context from YPT

   "They wanted to embrace both of them, to be both Japanese and American."

   YPT 209–212

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1860s–1910
   An army of garment workersCivil War standard sizes; the sewing machine; half of New York's factories; sweatshops of fewer than thirty; team piece rates; eleven-to-fifteen-hour days; women a third of the workforce.

   Context from YPT

   "Skilled tailors and seamstresses felt like slaves."

   YPT 222–224
2. 1879–1914
   Persecution in the Old WorldThe Pale, no land, crowded shtetls, ten tailors for every one needed, yearly pogroms; a third of Eastern Europe's Jews gone by 1914; beds sold for passage; cattle boats; Emma Goldman and the Statue of Liberty; literate, skilled, family migrants who returned at three percent.

   Context from YPT

   "They knew there would be no going back."

   YPT 215–219
3. 1880s–1908
   A shtetl in AmericaEllis Island to the Lower East Side; half a million by 1905; tenements, boarders, landsmanshafts, peddlers; most working in garments.

   Context from YPT

   "Throngs of children," unlike Chinatown.

   YPT 219–221
4. 1886–1982
   Clara LemlichA secret reader barred from Russian school, an immigrant at seventeen, the voice that called the general strike at twenty-three, blacklisted, then a lifetime for suffrage, tenants, consumers, and against nuclear weapons; she organized her nursing-home orderlies at ninety-six.

   Context from YPT

   "I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities."

   YPT 235–236
5. 1900s–1920s
   From "greenhorns" to AmericansNew clothes, English over Yiddish, Buckley for Bochlowitz, Christmas presents, the Catskills, wives leaving work.

   Context from YPT

   "She says it is not nice to talk Yiddish and I am a greenhorn."

   YPT 228–229
6. 1909–1911
   The Great Strike and the Triangle fireCooper Union, fifteen thousand then twenty thousand strikers, three hundred settlements by February 1910, fifty thousand cloak makers; then 146 dead at Triangle, which had settled but not fixed its shop; by 1918 the best-organized workers in America.

   Context from YPT

   "Their dead bodies were the answer."

   YPT 224–228
7. 1910–1923
   Ambition, education, and Harvard's "Jewish problem"Daughters' wages funding sons; Hunter, City College, a fifth of Harvard; the 1923 backlash, Lowell's quotas and photographs; Curley's warning.

   Context from YPT

   "More dirty Jews and tactless Jews in college than... Italians, Armenians, or Slovaks."

   YPT 230–232
8. 1924
   A new nativismThe two-percent-of-1890 quota law; the Chinese Exclusion principle extended to Europeans; restrictive covenants; a hundred thousand Jews leaving the Lower East Side.

   Context from YPT

   "The more the Jews succeeded... the more American nativists disliked them."

   YPT 232–234

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1895–1914
   Crossing the Rio GrandeEntry was easy—Calleros's family simply walked across the river; letters and returning workers advertised El Norte; a 1914 reporter saw the roads full of walkers; the 1910 Revolution and the 1895 Eagle Pass–Durango railroad pushed and carried them.

   Context from YPT

   Landowners had already uprooted peasants from village land.

   YPT 237–239
2. 1900–1924
   Tortillas and turbansPunjabi Sikhs, 6,400 by 1920, marrying Mexican women and holding land in their names; rotis and tortillas, Spanish-speaking Punjabi fathers, Catholic children.

   Context from YPT

   "Your land law can't get rid of me now."

   YPT 244–246
3. 1900–1930
   Wanted for low wagesThe Mexican-born population rose from 375,000 to 1,160,000; three-quarters of Texas construction workers, two-thirds of California's 200,000 farmworkers, and 85 percent of Texas farm labor were Mexican.

   Context from YPT

   "His strongest point with his employers is his willingness to work for a low wage."

   YPT 240–241
4. 1919–1933
   Sprinkling the fields with sweatAnastacio Torres following the crops; canvas camps; "my obligation is ended"; wages cut to 14 cents; the 1933 San Joaquin strike, "we herd them like pigs," women pickets, a raise; Juan Berzunzolo's "sweat of my brow."

   Context from YPT

   Growers reacted "with alarm" to Mexican militancy.

   YPT 241–244
5. 1920s
   On the other side of the tracksSaturday-only shopping, counter-only cafés, barrios across the tracks, segregated schools meant to produce obedient workers, teachers who said "dig ditches," Galarza's proud principal; nativists' "half-breeds" and the AFL's complaints.

   Context from YPT

   Growers feared educated Mexicans would not pick beets.

   YPT 246–248
6. 1920s–1930s
   The barrio and Spanish HarlemThe barrio was an ethnic island: job networks, mutual aid, asistencia for those in need; in New York, Puerto Ricans built Spanish Harlem and the second generation became Nuyoricans.

   Context from YPT

   "For many Mexicans, the border was only an imaginary line."

   YPT 250–251
7. 1929–1935
   RepatriationFour hundred thousand Mexicans and Mexican Americans were removed by threats, boxcars, and raids; sixty percent of the children were citizens.

   Context from YPT

   Relief agencies and employers wanted them gone once the Depression hit.

   YPT 249
8. 1931–1947
   Ignacio PiñaSix years old in Montana, seized at gunpoint without his birth certificate, ten days in jail, a train to Mexico, typhoid, his father's death, sixteen years before he could prove he was born in Utah.

   Context from YPT

   "We were misfits there. We weren't welcome."

   YPT 252–253

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1790–1920s
   Black pride in HarlemBlack Harlem under the Dutch; white by 1890; the collapsed housing boom; black agents; 118,000 whites out and 87,000 blacks in; rats, rents, and menial jobs; Hughes, Toomer, Lawrence, Calloway, and the New Negro Renaissance.

   Context from YPT

   "Negro Capital of the World."

   YPT 263–266
2. 1865–1914
   Pushed and pulledSharecropping as debt slavery; World War I's labor shortage; recruiters and free train fare; $1.50 in Georgia versus $2.75 in Newark; a young man's hundred dollars and bank deposit.

   Context from YPT

   "Never own no part of earth nor sky."

   YPT 256–258
3. 1900s–1930
   The new generationThose born after the Civil War refused their "place"; the Chicago Defender asked why stay where mothers are "burned at the stake"; two million went north by 1930.

   Context from YPT

   "Their migration was their own choice."

   YPT 258–260
4. 1900–1919
   African American ChicagoThe Illinois Central; 30,000 to 109,000; "the districts which are now white must remain white"; ten thousand arrivals a month in 1917; factory jobs for most black men by 1920; Richard Parker's paid black union; bombings; the beach drowning and the riot (23 blacks, 15 whites dead); black banks and stores.

   Context from YPT

   "The old strategy of divide and control again."

   YPT 260–263
5. 1910–1920
   "The wind said North"Detroit's black population from 5,700 to 40,800; Cleveland 8,400 to 34,400; Chicago 44,000 to 109,400; New York 91,700 to 152,400.

   Context from YPT

   Hurston: "men moved like the great herds before the glaciers."

   YPT 255–256
6. 1914–1927
   Marcus GarveyJamaica; the friend's parents; Black Nationalism; the UNIA (1914) in Harlem (1916); parades and the Black Star Line; the weak fraud case (1922), two years in prison, deportation; "thousands who merely dreamed dreams, now see visions."

   Context from YPT

   "Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will."

   YPT 269–271
7. 1929–1930s
   The Great DepressionHarlem's squalor revealed; more than half of Southern urban blacks jobless by 1932; unequal federal aid; Du Bois's voluntary segregation versus the NAACP's united labor; the UMW, CIO, and UAW; the shift to the Democrats.

   Context from YPT

   "First to be fired when times got tough."

   YPT 266–268

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1933–1948
   Jewish Americans: facing genocide4.5 million American Jews; 66 percent of Americans against admitting children; the St. Louis; 1942 news of the camps; the 1944 board's one thousand; six million dead; Zionism's growth; Israel recognized in 1948.

   Context from YPT

   "The only way to aid the Jews of Europe was to win the war."

   YPT 289–291
2. 1939–1941
   War and the "master race"Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941; Allies and Axis; Nazi fascism and its "us and them"; Americans forced to ask how they could fight racism abroad with racism at home.

   Context from YPT

   "The beginning of a new stage in the struggle at home."

   YPT 273–274
3. 1941–1943
   African Americans: a Jim Crow army900,000 in segregated units; Tuskegee, the 761st, black WACs; Roosevelt's refusal to integrate; the 1941 defense-jobs order; a million war workers; the 1943 Detroit riot; the eight-ethnicity soldiers' letter.

   Context from YPT

   "The war for freedom still needed to be won at home."

   YPT 278–281
4. 1941–1943
   Chinese Americans: an explosion of patriotismChinatown cheered draftees; 13,499 served; defense jobs; the China Victory; Alice Yick; exclusion repealed with a quota of 105 and the right to naturalize.

   Context from YPT

   "We became part of an American dream."

   YPT 281–283
5. 1941–1945
   Japanese Americans: a hole in the ConstitutionFewer than 2,100 initial arrests; Germans and Italians cleared; Emmons's "American Way" in Hawaii (1,444 interned); DeWitt's order for 120,000; property sold at bargain prices; barbed wire; "military necessity" without evidence; 33,000 enlistees; translators; the 442nd's 18,000 decorations; "No Japs allowed" on return.

   Context from YPT

   Hoover and Biddle opposed internment.

   YPT 274–278
6. 1941–1946
   Native Americans: the white man's war?Navajo enlistment; income of $128; code talkers at Iwo Jima; four killed; "Without the Navajos, the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima"; return to under $100 a year; Teddy Draper on the language boarding schools tried to kill.

   Context from YPT

   "Why fight the white man's war?"

   YPT 286–289
7. 1941–1947
   Mexican Americans: up from the barrioAlex Romandia and his Jewish friends enlisting "to show that we were more American than the Anglos"; 500,000 in service; Guy Gabaldon's eight hundred prisoners; braceros; 17,000 in Los Angeles shipyards; riveters; Antonia Molina's lunch table.

   Context from YPT

   "We knew what it was like to be discriminated against."

   YPT 284–286
8. 1942
   The Double VJames G. Thompson, twenty-six, a cafeteria worker in a Kansas aircraft plant, asked in the Pittsburgh Courier, "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?" and proposed victory over "enemies within."

   Context from YPT

   Double V clubs and pins spread through the black press.

   YPT 293–296
9. 1945
   A holocaust called HiroshimaTruman's "savages" diary; unconditional surrender; two bombs; Japan's one condition; Du Bois: democracy "for yellow, brown, and black."

   Context from YPT

   "A war of racial hatreds."

   YPT 291–292

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1946–1948
   Protest in the barriosJuana Caudillo's "totally unfair"; the GI Forum; Cesar Chavez; women refusing to "turn the clock back"; Mendez v. Westminster and the Fourteenth Amendment; California's repeal of Asian school segregation.

   Context from YPT

   Eight years before Brown.

   YPT 300–303
2. 1948
   Randolph and Truman desegregate the military"Negroes are in no mood to shoulder guns for democracy abroad"; facing a march, Truman ordered equal treatment.

   Context from YPT

   Three years after the war.

   YPT 297–298
3. 1948–1988
   Japanese Americans raise their voicesThe Oyamas beat the Alien Land Law at the Supreme Court; the law fell in 1952 along with the whiteness clause; 46,000 took the oath by 1965; pilgrimages; the 1988 apology and $20,000.

   Context from YPT

   Reagan: "a sad chapter in American history."

   YPT 298–300
4. 1954–1956
   The civil rights movement beginsBrown v. Board; Marshall's faith in wartime service; integration "on paper"; Rosa Parks; the boycott; King's leadership.

   Context from YPT

   Half of Montgomery was black and nearly all were servants or laborers.

   YPT 303–305
5. 1955–1960s
   Gladis Williams and the MIAAfter-school organizing in mixed groups, "girl/boy," next-of-kin lists, sit-ins at "Whites Only" counters, arrests as "a badge of honor." "We just had our minds set on freedom."

   Context from YPT

   The MIA won the buses in 1956 and kept going.

   YPT 315–316
6. 1960–1963
   "I have a dream"Greensboro and SNCC's sit-ins; CORE's freedom rides; Medgar Evers murdered; 200,000 at the March; King's speech; Rabbi Prinz on silence; the black-Jewish alliance; Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

   Context from YPT

   "Little me."

   YPT 305–309
7. 1964–1965
   The laws, and the alliance breaksPublic accommodations, equal employment, literacy tests removed, federal contractors required to hire minorities; Black Power's rejection of white allies; Jewish store ownership in ghettos.

   Context from YPT

   "Discrimination was no longer woven into law and habit."

   YPT 309–311
8. 1965–1992
   Economic inequalityWatts; Malcolm X's "American nightmare" and assassination; JFK, King, and RFK killed; riots in Detroit, Chicago, and Newark; SDS bombings; two black classes; factories to suburbs and offshore; Los Angeles 1992; Rodriguez's "riot without nationality."

   Context from YPT

   "Laws could end discrimination, but they could not end poverty."

   YPT 311–314
9. 2008
   Barack ObamaThe first nonwhite president, elected in an economic downturn.

   Context from YPT

   Race "remained a thorny issue."

   YPT 314

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1965–1980
   The door opens to the ChineseQuotas that meant race abolished; 237,000 to 812,200; students and chain migration; new sweatshops; a professor turned librarian.

   Context from YPT

   "Just as we sought to end discrimination... through the Civil Rights Act."

   YPT 318–320
2. 1975
   The fall of Saigon and the first waveTen to fifteen thousand were evacuated in the last days; 86,000 more left by helicopter with less than ten hours' notice; 130,000 arrived in 1975, two-thirds speaking English, many settling in Orange County.

   Context from YPT

   A twenty-year American war ended in a day.

   YPT 320–322
3. 1977–2007
   Twelve million undocumentedNativists demanded removal; Time argued for amnesty; Reagan warned in 1977 that apples would rot without pickers; by 2006 seventy percent of Mexicans in California were citizens; Roselia Aguilar took the oath with 450 people from 57 nations.

   Context from YPT

   "Beneath this nativist speech is a fear of the 'browning' of America."

   YPT 328–329YPT 332–333
4. 1978–2000
   The boat people and a Vietnamese AmericaA second wave of 277,000 by 1979, many ethnic Chinese; 643,200 by 1985; gender roles and generations shifted; 1.4 million by 2000, forty percent in California.

   Context from YPT

   A veteran: "They just need a home."

   YPT 322–324
5. 1979–2007
   Terrorism and Afghan refugeesThe Soviet war, the Taliban, 9/11, the 2002 invasion; fear, passing as Mexican, flags on houses; Nourzaie's "integration, not assimilation"; South Asians' growth; 2.6 million Indian Americans.

   Context from YPT

   "An American or a terrorist."

   YPT 324–328
6. 1994–2011
   NAFTA, recession, and the state lawsNAFTA's cheap corn bankrupted 1.5 million Mexican farmers and sent six million north; the 2008 recession brought Arizona's and Utah's laws and Alabama's, the strictest, requiring schools to check status.

   Context from YPT

   1882, 1924, 1930, 2011.

   YPT 329–331
7. 2011
   The DREAMersCharlotte and Georgia rallies; Alicia Torres and Dulce Guerrera; Jose Antonio Vargas's confession; Roy Beck's objection.

   Context from YPT

   "I am no longer going to be afraid."

   YPT 334–336

Facts and interpretation. The center column paraphrases the book and links to its pages. The margin offers one possible interpretation to test against the evidence.

1. 1997
   At the White HouseTakaki told Clinton "we will all be minorities"; Clinton told San Diego graduates of a Declaration of equality and a Constitution that enshrined slavery, of Indians pushed off land, of the 442nd and the Tuskegee Airmen, and asked whether America would become "the world's first truly multi-racial democracy."

   Context from YPT

   "A half-century from now... there will be no majority race."

   YPT 337–338
2. The present
   Diversity as destinyBacon's Rebellion, the Civil War, and World War II as crossroads; Ellis Island, Angel Island, Chinatown, Harlem, "White Christmas"; the victories won—abolition, integrated schools and armed forces, citizenship regardless of race, interracial marriage legal, the internment apology.

   Context from YPT

   "America's dilemma has been the denial of its diversity."

   YPT 339–340