“Pilgrims” are people who make a journey for religious reasons. But for Americans the word has a special meaning. To them it means a small group of English men and women who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1620. The group’s members came to be called the Pilgrims because they went to America […]

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights illustrated two different sides of American political life. On the one hand people saw that the country needed a strong and efficient central authority. On the other hand they wanted to protect individual rights and freedoms. Differing ideas about the importance of these issues gave birth to the […]

Walt Whitman is perhaps the most famous Amer­ican poet of the nineteenth century. During the Civil War he worked in military hospitals, helping to take care of wounded soldiers. Whitman was a great admirer of Lincoln and in 1865 he expressed О Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every […]

In the early 1900s the leading American labor organization was the American Federation of Labor (A. F.L.). The A. F.L. was formed in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, a leader of the Cigarmakers’ Union. Cigarmaking was a skilled job. Gompers believed that unions of skilled workers were the only ones with a real chance of success. […]

The ’ ennessee is one of the great rivers of America, к drains an area of the eastern United States almost as large as West Germany. The valley of the Tennessee was once a country of tr£e – covered slopes, but generations of farmers cut down the trees and ploughed the slopes to grow com, […]