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100 Cards in this Set

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J. Edgar Hoover
A law enforcement official of the twentieth century. Hoover became the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1924 and stayed in the position until his death in 1972. His time as director was marked by vigorous investigation and prosecution of gangsters, kidnappers, and foreign spies. Hoover’s activities remain controversial.
Iran-Contra affair
A scandal in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, which came to light when it was revealed that in the mid-1980s the United States secretly arranged arms sales to Iran in return for promises of Iranian assistance in securing the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon. Proceeds from the arms sales then were covertly and illegally funneled to the Contras, rebels fighting the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Iwo Jima
An island in the Pacific Ocean, taken from the Japanese by United States Marines near the end of World War II after a furious battle. The battle has been immortalized by a famous photograph and a sculpture based on the photograph of half a dozen Marines raising the flag of the United States on a summit on Iwo Jima.
Jesse James
An outlaw of the nineteenth century. Jesse, his brother Frank, and their gang committed many daring robberies of banks and trains, especially in the 1870s. After a reward had been offered for James’s capture, one of his own gang shot him in the back and collected the money.
John Birch Society
A conservative organization prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. The society was particularly concerned with the dangers of communism, and its views were considered extreme by most Americans.
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
An agreement made in 1963 by Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States not to test nuclear weapons in the air, in outer space, or under the sea. Underground testing was permitted under the treaty.
Kent State
A controversial incident in 1970, in which unarmed students demonstrating against United States involvement in the Vietnam War were fired on by panicky troops of the National Guard. Four students were killed and nine wounded. The shooting occurred at Kent State University in Ohio. The troops were subsequently absolved of responsibility by the government, but their action turned many moderates against the Vietnam War and the Richard Nixon administration.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
An African-American clergyman and political leader of the twentieth century; the most prominent member of the civil rights movement. King became famous in the 1950s and 1960s through his promotion of nonviolent methods of opposition to segregation. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” defended this kind of direct, nonviolent action as a way of forcing people to take notice of injustice. King helped organize the march on Washington in 1963. At this march, he described a possible future of racial harmony in his most famous speech, which had the refrain “I have a dream.” In 1964, he received the Nobel Prize for peace. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray in 1968.
Henry Kissinger
A scholar and government official of the twentieth century. As an adviser and later secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, Kissinger prepared for the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. During the Vietnam War, he helped Nixon plan and execute a secret bombing of Cambodia, and his negotiations with the government of North Vietnam helped produce a cease-fire in that war. He was cowinner of the Nobel Prize for peace in 1973.
Fiorello La Guardia
A political leader of the twentieth century. A beloved mayor of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, La Guardia worked to free the city of corruption and began a great number of construction projects.
Charles A. Lindbergh
An aviator of the twentieth century. In 1927, Lindbergh flew alone from New York City to Paris across the Atlantic Ocean, traveling nonstop in The Spirit of St. Louis. His was the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic and the first solo flight across the ocean. Young, and engaging in manner, he became an instant hero. After World War II had begun but before the United States entered the war, he urged American neutrality and was heavily criticized for his stand. The kidnapping and murder of Lindbergh’s infant son in 1932 gained attention around the world and led to the strengthening of federal laws against kidnapping.
Huey Long
A political leader of the 1920s and 1930s who served as governor of Louisiana and represented that state in the Senate. He promised every family enough money for a home, car, radio, pension, and college education. A demagogue, Long dominated Louisiana’s politics and pushed aside opposition. He planned to run for president but was assassinated before he could do so.
Joe Louis
An African-American boxer of the twentieth century, who held the world championship in the heavyweight class from 1937 to 1949.
Malcolm X
An African-American political leader of the twentieth century. A prominent Black Muslim, Malcolm X explained the group’s viewpoint in a book written by Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He was assassinated in 1965.
George C. Marshall
A soldier and diplomat of the twentieth century. He was a leading planner of strategy for the Allies in World War II. Marshall served as secretary of state from 1947 to 1949, during which time he put forth the Marshall Plan. In 1953, he received the Nobel Prize for peace.
Thurgood Marshall
A judge of the twentieth century; the first black appointed to the Supreme Court. Before his appointment to the Court in 1967, Marshall served as a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in 1954 he argued before the Court against segregation in the case of Brown versus Board of Education. As a Supreme Court justice, he was known for his consistently liberal record and for advocating the rights of women and minorities.
Joseph R. McCarthy
A political leader of the twentieth century. McCarthy, a Republican, represented Wisconsin in the Senate from 1947 until his death in 1957. He led an effort to identify communists who, he said, had infiltrated the federal government by the hundreds, although he never supplied any of their names. One of McCarthy’s tactics was to establish guilt by association: to brand as communists people who merely had known a communist or who had agreed with the communists on some issue such as racial equality. His critics called him a demagogue who exploited people’s concerns about communism. He was also feared, however, because of the mass of information he had put together on people in the government. The Senate censured him in 1954, saying that his actions were “contrary to senatorial traditions.”
George McGovern
A political leader of the twentieth century, who, after representing South Dakota in the Senate, lost the presidential election of 1972 to President Richard Nixon. McGovern, a liberal Democrat, was an outspoken opponent of the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War.
anarchism
The belief that all existing governmental authority should be abolished and replaced by free cooperation among individuals
jingoism
Extreme and emotional nationalism, or chauvinism, often characterized by an aggressive foreign policy, accompanied by an eagerness to wage war.
Battle of Midway Island
A naval and air battle fought in World War II in which planes from American aircraft carriers blunted the Japanese naval threat in the Pacific Ocean after Pearl Harbor.
muckrakers
Authors who specialize in exposing corruption in business, government, and elsewhere, especially those who were active at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Some famous muckrakers were Ida M. Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair. President Theodore Roosevelt is credited with giving them their name.
Edward R. Murrow
A highly respected radio and television commentator who, during World War II, reported from London on German air raids against that city and who attacked Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the 1950s as a threat to civil liberties. Murrow also created a show that first brought television cameras into the homes of celebrities for interviews.
My Lai massacre
A mass killing of helpless inhabitants of a village in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, carried out in 1968 by United States troops under the command of Lieutenant William Calley. Calley was court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment, but he only served a few years before parole. The massacre, horrible in itself, became a symbol for those opposed to the war in Vietnam.
Carry Nation
A social reformer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who argued forcefully for abstinence from alcohol. Known for taking direct action, she and her followers often used hatchets to smash beer kegs and liquor bottles in saloons.
National Origins Act
A 1924 law that severely restricted immigration by establishing a system of national quotas that blatantly discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and virtually excluded Asians. The policy stayed in effect until the 1960s.
New Frontier
A slogan used by President John F. Kennedy to describe his goals and policies. Kennedy maintained that, like the Americans of the frontier in the nineteenth century, Americans of the twentieth century had to rise to new challenges, such as achieving equality of opportunity for all.
New Left
A radical movement of the 1960s and 1970s. New Leftists opposed the military-industrial complex and involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War; they urged more public attention to conditions of black people and the poor. New Leftists were less theoretical than communists and generally did not admire the Soviet Union. But many of them were interested in Maoism, and they spoke strongly for “participatory democracy.”
Admiral Chester Nimitz
The commander of the United States Pacific Fleet during World War II.
Nisei
Persons whose parents were born in Japan but who were themselves born outside Japan. Many Nisei were moved by force in the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.
Annie Oakley
A performer in Wild West shows around the turn of the twentieth century, famous for her marksmanship. In one of her acts, she would flip a playing card into the air and then perforate it with bullets before it hit the ground. The musical Annie Get Your Gun is loosely based on her experiences.
Sandra Day O’Connor
The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Oklahoma City Bombing
The destruction of a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 by a truck loaded with explosives; the blast killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. soldier, and two conspirators were convicted of the crime; McVeigh was executed. McVeigh and his conspirators had vague ties to the militia movement of the 1990s.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself
A statement from the first inaugural address of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt was speaking at one of the worst points of the Great Depression.
Lee Harvey Oswald
The presumed assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Oswald allegedly shot Kennedy from a high window of a building in Dallas on November 22, 1963, as Kennedy rode down the street in an open car. Oswald was captured the day of the assassination but was never tried; two days after Kennedy’s death, as Oswald was being moved by police, a nightclub owner from Dallas, Jack Ruby, shot and killed him. A government commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded later that Oswald, though active in communist causes, was not part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Many have questioned the findings of the commission.
Jesse Owens
An African-American athlete of the twentieth century. He won four gold medals in track and field events at the Olympic Games of 1936, held in Germany when Adolf Hitler was leader. His victories were a source of pride to the United States and also—because Owens was black—a blow to the Nazi notions of a master race.
Rosa Parks
A black seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, who, in 1955, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white person, as she was legally required to do. Her mistreatment after refusing to give up her seat led to a boycott of the Montgomery buses by supporters of equal rights for black people. This incident was the first major confrontation in the civil rights movement.
George Patton
A general in World War II, known for his expertise at warfare using tanks and other vehicles. He led operations in north Africa and in the Battle of the Bulge. A few months after the end of the war, he was fatally injured in a car accident in Germany.
Alice Paul
An American feminist and suffragist of the early twentieth century; she founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916 and led protests at the White House and before Congress on behalf of women’s rights. Her tactics led to her imprisonment but also contributed to President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to make an amendment giving women the right to vote a priority. In 1923 she proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution but encountered opposition from various groups, including women’s organizations, which feared the loss of protective legislation if the amendment were ratified. Although the ERA has continued to be proposed, it has never been ratified.
Pentagon Papers
A classified study of the Vietnam War that was carried out by the Department of Defense. An official of the department, Daniel Ellsberg, gave copies of the study in 1971 to the New York Times and Washington Post. The Supreme Court upheld the right of the newspapers to publish the documents. In response, President Richard Nixon ordered some members of his staff, afterward called the “plumbers,” to stop such “leaks” of information. The “plumbers,” among other activities, broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for damaging information on him.
Frances Perkins
A political leader and reformer of the twentieth century. After briefly serving at Jane Addams’s Hull House, she worked in various reform activities and government positions. In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt made her the first woman to hold a cabinet position when he appointed her secretary of labor. She assisted in drafting much of the New Deal legislation, including that which created the Social Security System.
John Pershing
A military leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1916, General Pershing commanded the United States troops that pursued the Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa into Mexico. In 1917, he was made commander of the United States troops sent to Europe to fight in World War I.
Plessy versus Ferguson
A case decided by the Supreme Court in the 1890s. The Court held that a state could require racial segregation in public facilities if the facilities offered the two races were equal. The Court’s requirement became known as the “separate but equal” doctrine. It was overturned by the Court in 1954 in Brown versus Board of Education.
Populist party
A third-party movement that sprang up in the 1890s and drew support especially from disgruntled farmers. The Populists were particularly known for advocating the unlimited coinage of silver. The party endorsed William Jennings Bryan, a champion of free silver, in the presidential election of 1896.
progressive education
A broad movement for educational reform in the twentieth century. Progressive education is principally associated with John Dewey, but it contains many different and often conflicting ideas. In general, progressive educators view existing schools as too rigid, formal, and detached from real life. They prefer informal classroom arrangements and informal relations between pupils and teachers. They also prefer that schools teach useful subjects (including occupations) and emphasize “learning by doing” rather than instruction purely from textbooks. Some place the developing personality of the child at the center of educational thinking and insist, “teach the child, not the subject.”
Prohibition
The outlawing of alcoholic beverages nationwide from 1920 to 1933, under an amendment to the Constitution. The amendment, enforced by the Volstead Act, was repealed by another amendment to the Constitution in 1933.
Jeanette Rankin
A suffragist and pacifist (see pacifism), Rankin in 1917 became the first woman to serve in Congress. She has the distinction of being the only member of Congress to vote against American entry into both World Wars.
Reconstruction
The period after the Civil War in which the states formerly part of the Confederacy were brought back into the United States. During Reconstruction, the South was divided into military districts for the supervision of elections to set up new state governments. Once a state approved the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, it was to be readmitted to the United States and again represented in Congress. The official end of Reconstruction came in 1877, when the last troops were withdrawn from the South.
Red Scare
The rounding up and deportation of several hundred immigrants of radical political views by the federal government in 1919 and 1920. This “scare” was caused by fears of subversion by communists in the United States after the Russian Revolution.
Remember the Maine
A slogan of the Spanish-American War. The United States battleship Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, in 1898. Stirred up by the yellow press, the American public blamed the sinking on Spain, which then owned Cuba. President William McKinley, who had opposed war, yielded to public pressure and asked Congress to declare war.
Jackie Robinson
An African-American athlete of the twentieth century. In 1947, he became the first black person to play baseball in the major leagues.
Nelson Rockefeller
A political leader of the twentieth century, and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller. He was governor of New York from 1957 to 1971 and sought the Republican nomination for president several times. Rockefeller was known as a moderate or liberal Republican. He served as vice president under President Gerald Ford.
Roe versus Wade
An extremely controversial Supreme Court decision in 1973 that, on the basis of the right to privacy, gave women an unrestricted right to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. Pro-choice forces have hailed the decision, whereas those associated with the “right-to-life” (pro-life) movement have opposed it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her humanitarian and diplomatic efforts were known and respected all over the world. She represented the United States in the General Assembly of the United Nations from 1949 to 1952.
Panama Canal
Waterway across the Isthmus of Panama. The canal connects the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. The United States built it from 1904 to 1914 on territory leased from Panama. Conflict between the United States and Panama has centered on control of the canal; a treaty was signed in 1977 returning control of the Canal Zone to Panama in 2000. Since that time, Panama has agreed to neutral operation of the canal.
Rose Bowl
The oldest and most famous of the “bowl games”—college football games held after the regular college football season between teams that are invited on the basis of their record in the regular season. The Rose Bowl game is played in Pasadena, California, on New Year’s Day, and is preceded by the Tournament of Roses Parade of floats adorned with roses.
Rosenberg case
A court case involving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American couple who were executed in 1953 as spies for the Soviet Union. Some have argued that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of McCarthy-era hysteria against communists or of anti-Semitism (they were Jewish). Others contend that they were indeed Soviet spies.
Sacco and Vanzetti
Two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of a robbery and two murders in Massachusetts in the early 1920s and sentenced to death. Sacco and Vanzetti were born in Italy but had been living in the United States for years when they were tried. Several faulty procedures took place in the trial. Many people have thought that Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted because of their political views and/or origins and not because of the evidence against them. They were put to death in 1927. Liberals and radicals all over the world were outraged by the execution.
Margaret Sanger
The founder in the 1910s and 1920s of the birth control movement (she coined the term). Sanger overcame the initial hostility of the medical profession and combatted laws that in most states prohibited contraception. She later headed the Planned Parenthood Federation.
silent majority
A term used by President Richard Nixon to indicate his belief that the great body of Americans supported his policies and that those who demonstrated against the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War amounted to only a noisy minority.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A reformer and feminist who joined with Lucretia Mott in issuing the call for the first women’s rights convention in America, which was held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Stanton later worked in close partnership with Susan B. Anthony for women’s suffrage.
Seneca Falls Convention
The first convention in America devoted to women’s rights. It met in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and passed several resolutions, including a demand that women be given the right to vote.
Shays’s Rebellion
An uprising led by a former militia officer, Daniel Shays, which broke out in western Massachusetts in 1786. Shays’s followers protested the foreclosures of farms for debt and briefly succeeded in shutting down the court system. Although the rebellion was easily overcome, it persuaded conservatives of the need for a strong national government and contributed to the movement to draft the Constitution.
shot heard round the world
A phrase from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson about the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Emerson’s words read, “Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.” In other words, the determination of the colonists at Concord led to the establishment of a new nation on Earth and encouraged worldwide movements toward democracy.
Adlai E. Stevenson
A political leader of the twentieth century, who served as governor of Illinois and as the United States ambassador to the United Nations. The Cuban missile crisis occurred during his ambassadorship. He was nominated for president twice by the Democratic party against Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, and lost both times.
Stonewall Riot
A disturbance that grew out of a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular hang-out for gays in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1969. Such raids long had been routine, but this one provoked a riot as the crowd fought back. The riot led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and to a new level of solidarity among homosexuals.
dollar diplomacy
The use of diplomatic influence, economic pressure, and military power to protect a nation’s economic and business interests abroad. The term was first used to describe the exploitative nature of United States involvement in Latin America.
Taft-Hartley Act
A major law concerning labor, passed by Congress in 1947. President Harry S. Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, but it became law by a two-thirds vote of Congress. It marked a reversal of the pro-labor policies pursued under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For example, the law prohibited a list of “unfair” labor practices and restricted the political activities of labor unions.
Tet offensive
A series of major attacks by communist forces in the Vietnam War. Early in 1968, Vietnamese communist troops seized and briefly held some major cities at the time of the lunar new year, or Tet. The Tet offensive, a turning point in the war, damaged the hopes of United States officials that the combined forces of the United States and South Vietnam could win.
Jim Thorpe
An athlete of the twentieth century, known for his ability in several sports. A Native American, he was a leading college football player and also the best performer in track and field events at the 1912 Olympic Games.
Three Mile Island
The location of an accident in 1979 in a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The plant underwent a partial meltdown that resulted in some radiation leakage into the atmosphere, panic among nearby residents, losses of billions of dollars, and intense criticism of nuclear power programs in general.
William Marcy Tweed
A New York City political leader, known as Boss Tweed, who in the late 1860s ran a network of corrupt city officials called the Tweed Ring. Under Tweed, city officials extorted kickbacks from contractors and others doing business with the city. His name is synonymous with municipal corruption.
Vietnam War
A war in Southeast Asia, in which the United States fought in the 1960s and 1970s. The war was waged from 1954 to 1975 between communist North Vietnam and noncommunist South Vietnam, two parts of what was once the French colony of Indochina. Vietnamese communists attempted to take over the South, both by invasion from the North and by guerrilla warfare conducted within the South by the Viet Cong. American troops were withdrawn in 1973, and South Vietnam was completely taken over by communist forces in 1975.
Korean War
A war fought in the early 1950s between the United Nations, supported by the United States, and the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). The war began in 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea. In 1953, with neither side having a prospect of victory, a truce was signed.
World War I
A war fought from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies, notably Britain, France, Russia, and Italy (which entered in 1915), and the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. In 1917, the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies and helped to tip the balance in their favor. Germany asked for an armistice, which was granted on November 11, 1918.
World War II
A war fought from 1939 to 1945 between the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies, including France and Britain, and later the Soviet Union and the United States. The United States was drawn into the war in 1941, when the Japanese suddenly attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Germany surrendered in May 1945. The war in the Pacific ended in September 1945.
Voting Rights Act
A law passed in 1965 at the time of the civil rights movement. It eliminated various devices, such as literacy tests, that had traditionally been used to restrict voting by black people. It authorized the enrollment of voters by federal registrars in states where fewer than fifty percent of the eligible voters were registered or voted. All such states were in the South.
George Wallace
A political leader of the twentieth century. As governor of Alabama in the 1960s, he resisted integration and promised to “stand at the schoolhouse door” to bar black people from admission to the University of Alabama. The National Guard eventually forced him to back down. In 1968, he was nominated for president by a third party, the American Independent party, and came in third, behind Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. In 1972, he ran for president again, but was shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin during the campaign. Wallace presented himself as a populist, who championed poor and middle-income whites against blacks and wealthy, liberal whites. In a remarkable reversal of positions, he endorsed integration in the 1980s and was again elected governor of Alabama for four years.
War on Poverty
A set of government programs, designed to help poor Americans, begun by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The War on Poverty included measures for job training and improvement of housing.
Earl Warren
A political leader and judge of the twentieth century. Warren was governor of California before being named chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1953, and he served on the Court until 1969. His time as chief justice was marked by boldness in interpreting the Constitution; the “Warren Court” often brought the Constitution to the support of the disadvantaged. Warren also led a government commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Booker T. Washington
An African-American educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who headed Tuskegee Institute, a college for African-Americans in Alabama. Washington urged African-Americans to concentrate on economic gains rather than on the pursuit of social and political equality with whites. The best known of his many books is Up from Slavery.
Watts riots
A group of violent disturbances in Watts, a largely black section of Los Angeles, in 1965. Over thirty people died in the Watts riots, which were the first of several serious clashes between black people and police in the late 1960s.
Gloria Steinem
A twentieth-century American author, journalist, and advocate of women’s rights; one of the leaders of the women’s movement.
Horatio Alger, Jr.
A nineteenth-century American author known for his many books in which poor boys become rich through their earnest attitudes and hard work.
Willa Cather
An American author of the early twentieth century, known for My Ántonia and other novels of frontier life.
Raymond Chandler
A twentieth-century American writer known for his hard-boiled mysteries featuring private detective Philip Marlowe, whose adventures chronicle the seamy underside of southern California. Many of his works, including The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely have been adapted for films.
James Fenimore Cooper
An American author of the early nineteenth century, known for his works set on the American frontier, such as the series The Leatherstocking Tales and The Last of the Mohicans.
e. e. cummings
A twentieth-century American author who spurned the use of many conventions of standard written English in his poetry. He often avoided using capital letters, even in his name, and experimented freely with typographic conventions, grammar, and syntax. He wrote poetry on love, the failings of public institutions, and many other subjects.
Death of a Salesman
(1949) A Pulitzer Prize–winning play by the American writer Arthur Miller. Willy Loman, a salesman who finds himself regarded as useless in his occupation because of his age, kills himself. A speech made by a friend of Willy’s after his suicide is well known and ends with the lines: “Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”
Emily Dickinson
A nineteenth-century American poet, famous for her short, evocative poems. Some of her best-known poems begin, “There is no frigate like a book,” “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me,” “I never saw a moor,” and “I’m nobody! Who are you?”
John Dos Passos
A twentieth-century American author best known for the three novels that make up U.S.A., a complex and technically innovative portrait of the United States in which the country itself acts as a protagonist.
Theodore Dreiser
A twentieth-century American writer who was one of the major exponents of literary naturalism. His first novel, Sister Carrie, and his later masterwork, An American Tragedy, are noted for their frankness and unconventional morality.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
An American poet of the late nineteenth century, regarded as the premier African-American poet until the advent of Langston Hughes. From one of his poems came the title of Maya Angelou’s book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
William Faulkner
A twentieth-century American author. His works, mostly set in the South, include the novels The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949.
Allen Ginsberg
A twentieth-century American poet who was a leading figure among the beatniks during the 1950s. His long, loosely structured works include Howl. When his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was tried (and acquitted) for printing obscene material, Ginsberg became for many a hero.
Give me your tired, your poor
A line from a poem, “The New Colossus,” by the nineteenth-century American poet Emma Lazarus. “The New Colossus,” describing the Statue of Liberty, appears on a plaque at the base of the statue.
Dashiell Hammett
A twentieth-century American writer of finely crafted detective fiction. His novel The Maltese Falcon introduced Sam Spade, a tough, cynical, “hard-boiled” type of private eye. Hammett was jailed briefly and blacklisted after the infamous “red-baiting” hearings of the early 1950s. The popular 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon starred Humphrey Bogart with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.
Lillian Hellmann
A twentieth-century American playwright and memoirist. Her plays, such as The Children’s Hour and Toys in the Attic, often deal with controversial social and psychological themes. Hellmann’s memoirs include Pentimento and Scoundrel Time, an account of the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.
O. Henry
A twentieth-century American author known for “The Gift of the Magi” and other short stories. He specialized in surprise endings. His real name was William Sydney Porter.
The Song of Hiawatha
(1855) An epic by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, based on the story of an actual Native American hero. The historical Hiawatha was an Onondaga from what is now New York state, but Longfellow makes him an Ojibwa living near Lake Superior.