If you have even a perfunctory knowledge of what happened during the Civil Rights Movement in the US, you remember the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The purpose of the act was to end segregation in public places because segregation discriminated so heavily against African Americans living in the South. It also banned segregation in employment […]
Category: United States History
The Boston Tea Party – What You Didn’t Learn
I’ve done some reading about the Boston Tea Party lately and learned a few things I think my readers will find interesting. If you can remember all the way back to high school history and what you learned about the Boston Tea Party, the story probably goes something like this. In 1773 the British Parliament […]
The March on Washington Had Other Speakers
Most of us remember the 1963 March on Washington for one thing only—Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. If you’re like me, you went to school assemblies about this as a kid. You heard the speech, or at least some of the famous lines from it, about King’s dream for America. You […]
The Métis and Manifest Destiny – 3 of 3
Minnesota and the Métis Our last post left our story at the potential of the Red River Rebellion bringing Manitoba into the United States. However, we must now describe the relationship between the Métis and the state of Minnesota. Much of the state’s early commerce involved the Red River Métis. Recall, the Métis sustained themselves […]
The Red River of Manitoba & Manifest Destiny – 2 of 3
The Red River Resistance This is a continuation of the previous post detailing how half of Canada nearly joined the United States in 1869. The theater of action was the Red River of the North, the river dividing North Dakota from Minnesota. We left off by establishing that the Canadian government had a powerful need […]
Manifest Destiny & the Red River of Manitoba – 1 of 3
This is part one of a three-part series on how half of Canada nearly joined the United States in 1869. That year, one of the most underappreciated but vastly important events in the history of North America took place in today’s Canadian province of Manitoba. Because of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the fate of […]