Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Essays

Since its earliest days, capitalism has been plagued by cycles of boom and bust. Nineteenth Century America frequently suffered "Panics" as stock markets temporarily declined, and industrial production experienced…

President Roosevelt's New Deal Program failed to do enough for those hit hardest by the Depression: Impoverished Afro-American and white citizens working in the rural areas of the U.S., the elderly, and the working class.

Elections of 1932 go down as one of the most important elections in American history. The decade of 20s ended with the stock market crash and 'Great Depression ensued. President Herbert Clark Hoover was in charge of the…

The stakes were never so high and if things had gone just slightly different, the outcome of the Second World War might have been drastically different had it not been for the clandestine work of William J.

We know Lyndon B. Johnson to have been a hard-nosed smooth-operating arm-twisting Senator from Texas who became John Kennedy's Vice President and then a one-term President. What occurred during his administration…

¶ … American presidents in history. Specifically it will compare and contrast the lives and legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democratic) and Ronald Reagan (Republican). Two of the best-known and respected American…

Today's global economic crisis frequently has been related to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many of the symptoms appear to be the same -- stock market volatility, credit crunch and rapidly escalating unemployment…

Joe Kennedy was highly influential in the career of politics pursued by Joe's son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It is not easy to distinguish that career from the familial favors and legacy of the Kennedy Clan in general, particularly those that lived and operated in the 20th century. Several sources prove the veracity of these statements.

The bipartisan structure which defines the American system of democratic governance is premised on the notion that informed voters, when provided with an opportunity to select their own leadership, will invariably alternate between candidates with whom they identify closely, and members of the opposing party who offer meaningful reform. This maxim of American politics has resulted in a pattern of Presidential ascendency whereby neither party has captured the White House in three consecutive elections since the four consecutive campaign victories notched by Franklin Delano Roosevelt more than a half-century ago. Nonetheless, there are still pockets of provincial loyalty which still exist throughout the national electorate, with family histories and cultural touchstones serving to elevate one party above its competition in the hearts and minds of voters. In the second congressional district of Tennessee – an area which spans the metropolitan borders of Knoxville, as well as the surrounding suburbs of Farragut, Maryville and Powell – this curious phenomenon of local politics has become engrained in the societal structure, forming a continuous chain of leadership from the district's current representative to his Republican predecessors in 1855. With the election of John James "Jimmy" Duncan, Jr. (R-Knoxville) in 1988 – and his successful reelection every two years afterward to this day – the second congressional district of Tennessee has maintained a steady state of Republican representation for more than 150 years. However, this unbroken line of succession has not been mirrored in Tennessee's delegation of U.S. Senators throughout the years, as current Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) is just the third GOP member to represent Tennessee in the Senate during the last 100 years. The following analysis of Tennessee's electoral machinations, both on the Congressional and Senatorial level, is intended to examine the array of sociocultural factors which have contributed to the state's decidedly conservative political leaning.

Vann Woodward and Jim Crow Evaluating the impact of Reconstruction social policy on blacks is more controversial due to the issue of segregation. Until the publication of C. Vann Woodward Strange Career of Jim Crow in 1955, the traditional view was that after the gains of Reconstruction, Conservative Democrats clamped down on the blacks by instituting an extensive system of segregation and disfranchisement (Woodward, 1974). Woodward, however, argued that there was a period of fluidity in race relations between the end of Reconstruction and the 1890s. Woodward concentrated on de jure segregation rather than de facto segregation, in part because he was influenced by the Brown v. Board of Education decision ( 1954) and the growing agitation over desegregation. In still another example of current affairs influencing a historian's viewpoint, Woodward wanted to show that segregation was not an irrevocable folkway of Southern life, but actually a rather recent innovation. Despite attacks from a number of scholars who pointed to the existence of segregation during the antebellum period in both the North and South, and, most pointedly, even during Reconstruction, Woodward's view was widely accepted. Woodward's critics were limited by their own desire to make history conform to their expectations and as a result simply searched for proof that segregation represented the norm in Southern life (Dailey, et al 2000). As a result their work lacked a dynamic approach which would emphasize process (Rabinowitz, 1978).