Install
The Long Arc: Progressive History
The Long Argument Over Whether the War on Poverty Worked Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964, and Americans have argued about the outcome ever since. Much of the dispute turns on a ruler that never counted the help it was meant to measure. Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Law Signed Five Months Later On March 7, 1965, Alabama troopers beat marchers on a Selma bridge. Five months later the Voting Rights Act was law. How one afternoon became a statute, and what courts have done to it since. Coxey's Army and the 1894 March of the Unemployed on Washington In 1894 an Ohio businessman led the unemployed to the Capitol to demand public works jobs and was arrested for walking on the grass. Forty years later his idea was federal policy. Fannie Lou Hamer's Televised Testimony and the 1964 Convention Credentials Fight A Mississippi sharecropper told the Democratic credentials committee what voting had cost her. The president tried to bury it; the party ended up rewriting its rules because of it. Frances Perkins, the First Woman in the Cabinet, and the List She Handed FDR In 1933 Frances Perkins agreed to be labor secretary only if Roosevelt backed her list of demands. Here is the checklist, item by item: what she won and what she never did. Freedom Summer 1964 and the Mississippi Volunteers Who Changed the Rules How a summer of voter registration and Freedom Schools in Mississippi, begun with three murders in Neshoba County, forced the country and the Democratic Party to change their rules. From Seneca Falls to Harry Burn's Vote, Seventy-Two Years to the Nineteenth Amendment The Nineteenth Amendment came down to one young Tennessee legislator and a letter from his mother, after seventy-two years of conventions, arrests, splits and pickets. How 146 Deaths at the Triangle Factory Rewrote New York's Labor Laws How a 1911 garment factory fire, two Tammany legislators and a young investigator named Frances Perkins turned grief into the laws the New Deal later copied. Ida B. Wells and the Pamphlet That Made Lynching a National Scandal After a mob killed her friend Thomas Moss in 1892, Ida B. Wells counted the dead, published the numbers, lost her press and changed how America saw lynching. Julia Lathrop and the 1912 Children's Bureau That Studied Why Babies Died In 1912 Julia Lathrop became the first woman to run a federal bureau and set out to learn why so many American babies died. Her door-to-door studies led to the Sheppard-Towner Act. South Dakota, Oregon and the Progressive Invention of the Ballot Initiative How South Dakota in 1898 and Oregon's William U'Ren invented the citizen initiative, how the tool works step by step today, and why legislatures keep trying to rein it in. The 1963 March Was for Jobs and Freedom, and the Jobs Part Still Matters The 1963 March on Washington printed ten demands, including a two-dollar minimum wage and a jobs program. The argument: economic and civil rights were always one program.