I Jenims and hot dogs, skyscrapers and supermarkets, mass production and rock music—what do all these have in common? One thing is that they can be found today all over the world. Another is that all of them were born in the United States. The country which for most of its existence had been an […]

In 1938 a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy was forced to Нес from Germany with his parents in order to escape imprisonment in one of Hitler’s concen­tration camps. The family went to live in the United States where the boy got a job cleaning bristles in a shaving-brush factory. He was Clevel­and hardworking, however, and went on […]

“They talk about who lost and who won. Human reason won. Mankind won.” These words were spoken by the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, after the Cuban Missile Crists of 1962. President Kennedy felt the same. Both men knew that for ten days they had been close to bringing death to millions of people. They began working […]

In their rivalry with the Soviet Union, American governments never forgot the lesson of the Marshall Plan. They knew that communism is often most attractive to the people of countries where food is short and life is hard. From the 1950s onwards, therefore, they spent millions of dollars on modernizing farms, constructing power stations and […]

In 1950 the population of the United States included fewer than four million resident “Ilis – panics”-rhat is, people originating from Spanish­speaking countries. By the mid 1980s this number had increased to 17.6 million and was still rising fast. In some parts of the United States, especially in the South and West, it became more […]