American Civilization

As I’ve said before, using the internet for political campaigns has become really big this year. Here’s a specific way being used by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Earlier this month, her organization began a contest to select a campaign song. YouTube users voted on a list of titles and could also add their own choices. [...]

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Bill and Hill Both Bill and Hillary Clinton are getting a lot of attention during this pre-election season. One of the big questions about Bill is what role he will take in the campaign. In the 2000 election Al Gore tried to distance himself from Bill Clinton, whose presidency had been tainted by poor personal [...]

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Today, May 27, 2007, the Golden Gate Bridge is 70 years old! Happy Birthday to perhaps one of the most beautiful bridges in the world!

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Okay, so summer doesn’t officially begin until June 21 – well after school is out. But this 3 day weekend is the unofficial beginning of summer. Schools, banks, public institutions are all closed on Monday in observation of Memorial Day. It’s a legal holiday aimed at honoring the members of the nation’s armed services who [...]

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(July 11-13, 1863)   While New York was a “northern” state and, therefore, considered to be against slavery and the South during the Civil War, the city erupted in major riots in July of 1863; those riots targeted the African Americans in the city.   President Abraham Lincoln issued the Enrollment Act of Conscription on [...]

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The Internet is big in this year’s political campaigns already.  Now many of the presidential hopefuls are focusing on social networking sites, like MySpace.  A Youth Radio reporter, Alana Germany, decided to investigate. Check out her Youth Radio report here.

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Deborah Mayer lost her job because she answered her student’s question.   In January of 2003, right before the beginning of the Iraq War, Mayer’s elementary school students in Indiana asked if she would ever take part in a peace march.  Remembering recent peace marches in Bloomington, Indiana, she answered that she blew the horn [...]

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  The military draft, also called conscription, is a system of selecting men – and sometimes women – for required military service. The United States began using a draft during colonial times; the system continued throughout the twentieth century the U.S. Even though the draft was ended in 1946 after World War II, it began [...]

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Most of the news stories I’ve read or heard today have focused on the kind of relationship Nicolas Sarkozy intends to establish with the United States. It was noted that in a relatively short acceptance speech, he did single out U.S. – French relations. His comments were described as both the extension of an olive [...]

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Seventy years ago today – May 6, 1937 – the Hindenburg, the German dirigible (an airship), crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey. It was a rainy day.  The airship, 245 meters long with a capacity to hold 190,000,000 liters of hydrogen,  had already made 10 transatlantic crossings in 1936.  It is still not clear why it [...]

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