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Social Issues

Race, gender, class, immigration, and the social questions Americans have argued over since the founding — and continue to argue over.

Affirmative Action
The Six-Decade Legal and Political Battle Over Race-Conscious Remediation
American Dream
The belief that effort and merit guarantee opportunity in America
American Exceptionalism
The conviction that the United States occupies a unique and exemplary place in world history
American Slavery
The institution that built the republic's wealth, defined its politics, and nearly destroyed the nation
Electoral College
The constitutional mechanism for electing presidents — and the perpetual argument about it
Federalism
The division of power between national and state governments that defines American governance
Gerrymandering
The art of drawing district lines to choose your voters before they choose you
Immigration
The continuous movement of people that built, transformed, and defined the United States
Jim Crow Laws
The system of racial segregation that governed the South from Reconstruction to the 1960s
Segregation
The Legal and Social System That Enforced Racial Separation Across American Life
Social Darwinism
The Gilded Age ideology that dressed inequality in the language of natural law
Sports in America
How games became one of the nation's great stages for race, money, and identity
States' Rights
The constitutional doctrine that shaped — and shadowed — American history
Suburbanization
How Postwar America Built a New Geography — and Who It Left Out
The Environmental Movement
From Theodore Roosevelt's conservation to Rachel Carson's alarm to the unresolved politics of climate
The Lost Cause
The Confederate mythology that rewrote the Civil War — and shaped a century of American race relations
The Middle Passage
The brutal Atlantic crossing that carried millions into American slavery
Underground Railroad
The secret network of routes and safe houses that carried enslaved people to freedom
Urbanization
The great demographic transformation that moved America from a rural to an urban nation
Westward Expansion
The century-long process by which the United States spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific