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President Washington
George Washington (1732-99) was commander in chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War (1775-83) and served two terms as the first U.S. president, from 1789 to 1797. The son of a prosperous planter, Washington was raised in colonial Virginia. As a young man, he worked as a surveyor then fought in the French and Indian War (1754-63). During the American Revolution, he led the colonial forces to victory over the British and became a national hero. In 1787, he was elected -
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught Illinois lawyer and legislator with a reputation as an eloquent opponent of slavery, shocked many when he overcame several more prominent contenders to win the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860. His election that November pushed several Southern states to secede by the time of his inauguration in March 1861, and the Civil War began barely a month later. Contrary to expectations, Lincoln proved to be a shrewd military strategist and a savvy leader -
Govenor John A. Winston
John A. Winston (1812-1871) was Alabama's first native-born governor. After his election to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1840 and again in 1842, he served in the state senate from 1843 to 1853. In the decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, he emerged as the leader of the states' rights wing of the Alabama Democratic Party. As governor between 1853 and 1857, he established a forceful record on behalf of the strict states' rights doctrines of Jacksonian democracy. -
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), America’s 31st president, took office in 1929, the year the U.S. economy plummeted into the Great Depression. Although his predecessors’ policies undoubtedly contributed to the crisis, which lasted over a decade, Hoover bore much of the blame in the minds of the American people. As the Depression deepened, Hoover failed to recognize the severity of the situation or leverage the power of the federal government to squarely address it. A successful mining engineer before -
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The Great Depression by Willy Pacheco
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the stock market crash
On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday hit Wall Street as investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression (1929-39), the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world up to that time. -
the great depression
The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By -
Benjamin Meek Miller
BENJAMIN MEEK MILLER was born in Oak Hill in Wilcox County, Alabama, on March 13, 1864. He attended schools in Oak Hill and Camden, and graduated from Erskine College, South Carolina, in 1884. In 1884 Miller became principal of Lower Peachtree Academy, leaving in 1887 to study law at the University of Alabama. He was admitted to the bar in 1888, and started a law practice in Camden, Alabama. Miller entered politics serving on the Democratic Executive Committee from 1901 to 1902. He was a judge o -
Roosevelt new deal
The Great Depression in the United States began on October 29, 1929, a day known forever after as “Black Tuesday,” when the American stock market–which had been roaring steadily upward for almost a decade–crashed, plunging the country into its most severe economic downturn yet. Speculators lost their shirts; banks failed; the nation’s money supply diminished; and companies went bankrupt and began to fire their workers in droves. Meanwhile, President Herbert Hoover urged patience and self-relianc -
The bankhead tunnel
Construction of the Bankhead Tunnel began in 1938. It was named for John Hollis Bankhead, an Alabama native and speaker of the House of Representatives, who was also the grandfather of Tallulah Bankhead. Built at a cost of $4 million (or more than $65 million today), it cut 7 1/2 miles off the time needed to cross from Mobile to the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. The tunnel opened February 20, 1941. On that first day, and for the only time in its history, bicycles and pedestrians were allowed to t -
Barack Obama
Obama’s parents later separated, and Barack Sr. went back to Kenya; he would see his son only once more before dying in a car accident in 1982. After remarrying an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, Ann moved with her young son to Jakarta in the late 1960s, where she worked at the U.S. embassy. In 1970, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents.
