American Studies Preface and Conclusion Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and most of the other Founders of the country did not intend for it to be a democracy with equal rights for all citizens, although some like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine did. Like the Quakers, they were ahead of their time in supporting human rights for blacks and Native Americans, which did not exist in reality during the 18th and 19th Centuries. Racism and discrimination existed in America since the colonial period, long before it became an urban, industrial economy, and at the time the country was founded, almost all blacks were slaves. Nor did the most of the Founders wish to extend equal voting rights to all whites, but only those who owned property. Real democracy in the U.S. came only very gradually, with the granting of equal voting and civil rights to women, minorities and the lower classes, and this took centuries of struggle. For example, blacks did not obtain voting rights everywhere in the U.S. until 1965, which is not long ago at all by historical standards. Even today, the poor, working class and minorities still have far fewer social, economic and educational opportunities than whites, and indeed the differences between wealth and income between the elites and the lower classes has been increasing greatly over the last thirty years. As the 1992 riots in Los Angeles showed, there were still huge numbers of very poor, alienated and marginalized people in the United States who had no real stake in the political and economic system, and were generally ignored and left to the criminal justice system to deal with unless they rebelled.

Every generation in the U.S., a major reform movement occurs and offers some hope to those...

During the Civil War, for example, the slaves were freed and in the relatively brief Reconstruction era afterward, they were granted equal civil and voting rights. This did not last, and it took another Reconstruction in the 1950s and 1960s to restore the rights that had originally been granted almost 100 years before. In the New Deal of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt led the way in providing Social Security, the eight-hour day, federal protection for labor unions, and more extensive federal regulation of capitalism, while the Great Society of the 1960s provided Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education and civil and voting rights for blacks. A new feminist movement emerged out of this era, as did the counterculture, the antiwar and environmental movements, as well as demands for equal rights for gays and lesbians. All of these have been subject to an extreme conservative backlash over the last thirty years, and indeed the American Right would also repeal the New Deal and Great Society if it could, and simply allow corporate and elite interests to control the country for their own benefit. At the same time, though, the election of a reformist black president in 2008 also signaled that there had indeed been real progress in the U.S. since the 1960s, despite the fact that he has faced intense and overtly racist opposition from the Right wing.
American foreign policy is another area that has changed greatly over 200 years, since the country was not at all a global superpower before World War II. For most of its early history it was preoccupied with Manifest Destiny, frontier wars against Britain, Mexico and Native Americans…