PRESENTATION OUTLINE
In the 50 years following the end of Reconstruction, African Americans transformed American life once more: They moved. Driven in part by economic concerns, and in part by frustration with the straitened social conditions of the South, in the 1870s African Americans began moving North and West in great numbers. In the 1890s, the number of African Americans moving to the Northeast and the Midwest was double that of the previous decade. In 1910, it doubled again, then again in 1920. In the 1920s, more than 750,000 African Americans left the South--a greater movement of people than had occurred in the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.
The Sun Belt
The Sun Belt is a region of the United States generally considered to stretch across the Southeast and Southwest (the geographic southern United States). Another rough boundary of the region is the area south of the 36th parallel, north latitude. The main defining feature of the Sun Belt is its warm climate with extended summers and brief, relatively mild winters.
THE SUBURBS
Prior to the 19th century, the term suburb often referred to the outlying areas of cities where work was most inaccessible—implicitly, where the poorest people had to live. The modern American usage of the term came about during the course of the 19th century, as improvements in transportation and sanitation made it possible for wealthy developments to exist on the outskirts of cities, for example in Brooklyn Heights.
The growth of suburbs was facilitated by the development of zoning laws, redlining, and numerous innovations in transport. After World War II availability of FHA loans stimulated a housing boom in American suburbs. In the older cities of the northeast U.S., streetcar suburbs…
For the United States of America, 1945 to 1964 was a time of high economic growth and general prosperity. It was also a time of confrontation as the liberal, capitalist United States and its allies politically opposed the Soviet Union and other communist countries; the Cold War had begun. African Americans united and organized, and a triumph of the Civil Rights Movement ended Jim Crow segregation in the South. [1] Further laws were passed that made discrimination illegal and helped to secure voting rights.
Early in the period, an active foreign policy was pursued to assist Western Europe and Asia recover from the devastation of World War II.
