When Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern whites used violence, economic exploitation, discriminatory laws called Black Codes, and political disenfranchisement to subjugate African Americans and undo their gains during Reconstruction. Kansas and other destinations on the Great Plains represented a chance to start a new life. Kansas had fought to be a free state and, with the Homestead Act of 1862, the region offered lots of land at low cost. As a result, between the late 1870s and early 1880s, more than 20,000 African Americans left the South for Kansas, the Oklahoma Territory, and elsewhere on the Great Plains in a migration known as the “Great Exodus.”

Frank Lloyd Wright is regarded by many as the greatest American architect. In his effort to develop an American style of architecture, he designed over 1,100 buildings. Wright is most noted for developing the distinctive Prairie School style of architecture.

John Brown first made a name for himself as a militant abolitionist in 1854, when Brown traveled to Kansas following the Kansas-Nebraska Act, intent on defending the territory from the scourge of slavery. It was in “Bleeding Kansas,” named for violent conflicts between proslavery and antislavery settlers there, that John Brown led a guerilla warfare campaign against the territory’s proslavery settlers, including a deadly attack against residents of Pottawatomie Creek. By 1859, fueled by donations from wealthy abolitionists, Brown was again ready to strike a blow against slavery and slaveholders—this time in the South.

John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Smalls, two migrant ranch workers in Salinas, California. Published in 1937 and set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Of Mice and Men explores the themes of loneliness and isolation. In a time when every man is for himself to survive, George and Lennie travel together and take responsibility for each other. They are seeking their version of the American Dream: to own a farm together “an' live off the fatta the lan’.” However, dreaming becomes desperation as circumstances continually conspire to rip it away. Because the novella is told in six parts, where each scene has a specific setting and the plot is chronological and dialogue driven, it has also been frequently adapted for the stage. Its first production in 1937 was written and produced by Steinbeck, himself.

In 1900, the federal census recorded just over 200,000 American Indian people living in the United States. Most lived on reservations—parcels of land that Indian people had retained in treaty negotiations—over which the federal government claimed jurisdiction. By 1900, the policy of the federal government was that American Indian people needed to assimilate into white society, giving up their traditional ways to become like Euro-Americans in their living arrangements, dress, pastimes, religious expression, and work.

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is a historically violent American organization that has operated in three periods to promote white supremacy and white nationalism and resist immigration. Founded after the Civil War as a secret society by Confederate generals, the First Klan’s primary focus was subverting Republican Reconstruction policies and preventing emancipated African Americans from receiving the benefits of citizenship. Despite its success disrupting black political participation through threats and actual violence, federal government efforts to suppress the Klan in 1870-1871 forced in a major decline in its activities.

From 1945 to 1991, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) engaged in the Cold War, a conflict in which the communist Soviet Union and the democratic United States competed for influence over countries around the world. During this era, the US and USSR also took their rivalry beyond earth into space through a series of aeronautic developments and flight tests known as the Space Race. After advances in defense technology during World War II and the United States’ use of atomic bombs, each side looked to propel its scientific and technological capability forward by building new missiles, rockets, and spacecraft. The Soviets had many early successes in the Space Race, including the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik (1957), and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin (1961). However, the United States caught up and eventually overtook the Soviet Union, particularly when American astronaut Neil Armstrong and the crew of the Apollo 11 mission became the first humans to land on the moon in 1969.

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser, an influential and at times infamous author of literary naturalism, was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1871. The eleventh of thirteen children, he had an unhappy childhood shaped by poverty. At age fifteen, he left home. After several years of menial labor and some college, in 1892 he started as a journalist at the Chicago Globe. Interested in the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Dreiser began writing fiction that explored ideas of social determinism and the “survival of the fittest,” particularly during a period of intense urbanization across the country.

On June 28, 1919, Germany and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors at the famous Palace of Versailles, officially ending World War I. World War I, or the Great War, lasted from 1914 to 1918, and claimed the lives of nearly ten million soldiers and approximately thirteen million civilians. Germany and its allies in the Central Powers had lost the war, so representatives of the victorious Allied Powers including the United States, France, and Britain negotiated the terms of the treaty. President Woodrow Wilson and his allies wanted the treaty to provide a lasting peace following Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech delivered on January 8, 1918. European powers sought peace but also wanted to punish Germany, who they blamed for causing the war. Germans also expected that the Fourteen Points would be the basis for the peace talks when they signed the armistice in November 1918. When the Allied Powers met in Paris to discuss the world after the war, however, a much more punitive plan emerged.

Queen Victoria of England reigned over a vast British empire from 1837 until her death in 1901. During her rule, England rapidly transformed into a modern, technologically-based economy exercising global military and cultural power, roiling with class and racial conflict. Victorianism extended far beyond the boundaries of Britain and informed international movements of the same period, including in the United States.