Recent content by Hawk1981

Actually, the US Mint's 50th Anniversary Moon Landing set of coins does not depict JFK at all. The Mint issued the same design on a $5 gold commemorative, $1 Silver commemorative, and 50 cent clad. The obverse (heads) design features the inscriptions “MERCURY,” “GEMINI,” and “APOLLO,”...

On October 27, 1961, a confrontation developed at the boundary of the United State’s “Checkpoint Charlie” where Soviet and American tanks faced each other. The distance between the two forces was about 100 meters. The confrontation had come about over the increasing difficulties of American and...

The Wall running though the center of Berlin, separating the eastern and western sectors, was 43.1 kilometers long. The border fortifications separating West Berlin from the rest of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were 111.9 kilometers long. Over 100,000 citizens of the GDR tried to escape...

In the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, temporary barriers were put up at the border separating the Soviet sector of East Berlin from West Berlin. Over the next few days and weeks, the coils of barbed wire strung along the border to West Berlin were replaced by a wall of concrete slabs...

It took a little more than two years to go from the “Summer of Love” to the “Days of Rage.” Students for a Democratic Society collapsed in 1969, paralyzed by schism and by its own decadent principles. The New Left came more and more to resemble the old, cheering Marx and Mao, and turning its...

The Students for a Democratic Society was at its most thoughtful and idealistic in the early 1960s. As the decade wore on, the SDS descended into violence and extremism, and its defeat as a political force. The SDS’s campaign against the Vietnam War, which became its focus from 1965 on, did not...

Fred Hampton announced during the Days of Rage that "We believe that the Weathermen’s action is anachronistic, opportunistic, individualistic, chauvinistic, it’s Custeristic. And that’s the bad part about it. It’s Custeristic in that its leaders take their people into situations where the people...

The Vietnam War continued to rage in the summer and fall of 1969. Newly elected President Nixon had embarked on a multi-pronged approach to extricate the United States from the war, in part by announcing the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam and turning the war effort over to the regime in...

Texas applied for annexation to the US in 1836, the same year that it declared independence from Mexico. Congress refused the offer. Leaders of both political parties (Democrat and Whig) opposed annexation at that time because of the complex sectional difficulties involving the slavery issue...

Mexico never recognized the independence of Texas. At the time of annexation by the US, Texas was still considered by Mexico to be a territory in rebellion.

The United States provoked the war with Mexico by annexing the Republic of Texas, which Mexico did not recognize as an independent country and had specifically warned that the annexation would be an act of war. Additionally the first battle of the war where Mexican forces defeated a detachment...

There is a robust Hispanic culture in the Southwestern United States, most prominently in New Mexico and to a lesser extent in western Texas, Arizona, southern Colorado, and southern California. Focusing on the state of New Mexico, there are about 995,000 people in the state who identify as...

At the end of his second term of office, Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the rise of the "Military-Industrial Complex." Since the end of the Second World War the US had been compelled to fight a Cold War and create a permanent armaments industry and large military force supported by...

Even if the United States would arguably be the principal beneficiary of the liberal economic order it helped create, there is no doubt that others would benefit too. Indeed, the period in which the United States provided the aid and investment that facilitated post-war reconstruction in Western...

The Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank (IBRD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – are the most important expressions of America’s post-war dominance and the United State’s desire to create an institutionalized international...