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J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-Year Career of Blackmail, Entrapment, and Taking Down Communist Spies

American History


Lend Lease Act Definition

The Lend Lease Act – Definition

The Lend-Lease Act policy, which was formally titled "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States," was a WW2-era program in the early 1940s under which the United States supplied the United Kingdom, Free France, the Republic of China, and later the Soviet Union and other Allied nations…

Neutrality Acts Definition

Neutrality Acts: Definition

To involve America in World War Two, FDR had to overcome two major obstacles: American public opinion and a consistent body of neutrality legislation. By the 1930s, 70 percent of Americans polled said that U.S. involvement in World War I had been a mistake. When war broke out again in…

Senator Joseph Mccarthy

Senator Joseph Mccarthy

Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarth in the early 1950s famously called attention to a major security problem within the American government? (Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with investigations into Hollywood, which were carried out by the House of Representatives; he was concerned exclusively with Communists or Communist sympathizers in government.)…

FDR New Deal Policies

FDR’s New Deal Policies: The Constitutional Argument

FDR's New Deal policies were far-reaching and widely restructured the American economy after its most devastating decade in the twentieth century. But the policies were not universally popular. In the 1930s there were Supreme Court justices who interpreted the Constitution in a way that they argued that programs like the…

FDR's Economic Recovery

FDR’s Economic Recovery: The Political Dimensions

FDR's economic recovery as part of his New Deal policies is a hotly contested part of his legacy. The first challenge is that FDR’s public-works projects were rife with corruption. Economic historians have been at pains to account for the distribution of these projects around the country—why, for example, did…

Large Dams and Reservoirs

Large Dams and Reservoirs of the New Deal

The Public Works Administration (PWA), part of the New Deal of 1933, was a large-scale public works construction agency in the United States headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. It was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933 in response to the Great Depression.…

Executive Agreement Definition

Executive Agreement Definition: Bypassing Congress for Peace

An executive agreement is an agreement between the United States and a foreign government that is less formal than a treaty and is not subject to the constitutional requirement for ratification by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. Many such agreements were issued by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the run-up…

John D Rockefeller Accomplishments

John D Rockefeller’s Accomplishments

John D Rockefeller's accomplishments include Standard Oil Company and ongoing philanthropic causes. John D Rockefeller's Accomplishments Rockefeller was committed to streamlining production and eliminating waste. This paid off for him and for consumers: He managed to reduce the price of kerosene, which was a dollar per gallon when he began selling…

Standard Oil Company Monopoly

Standard Oil Company’s Monopoly—True or Not?

Although John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company Monopoly is sometimes accused even today of having engaged in predatory pricing, honest scholars stopped making the accusation after John W. McGee’s classic 1958 article in the Journal of Law and Economics. Rockefeller acquired his position, McGee showed, by means of mergers and…

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