13,000 BCE: Approximate date of the earliest arrival of the first of several waves of Homo sapiens in North America from Siberia across Beringia (the Bering Straits region connecting Siberia with North America) (this date is not accepted by all archeologists, however). 

986 CE: Approximate date when the first Europeans, it is thought, Norsemen Bjarni Herjulfsson and about a decade and a half or so later (around 1000 CE), Leif Eriksson, and their shipmates, land on the North American continent (specifically Newfoundland—named by Eriksson as Vinland).

1452: Pope Nicholas V issues the papal bulls (decrees) titled Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex  (issued in 1455) legitimating the dispossession of indigenous peoples in the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and elsewhere across the world, in order to colonize their lands wherever Europeans encountered them—provided the indigenous peoples were not Christians. (A similar bull was issued by Pope Alexander VI titled Inter Caetera, in 1493.) The underlying doctrine behind these bulls was the bogus concept of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which allowed the European nations to compete with each other to dispossess the indigenous peoples on the basis of whoever could claim that they were the first to “discover” the particular lands in question. This doctrine of essentially “white supremacy” (justified ironically on the basis of a religion of Middle Eastern, that is non-European, origin) abrogated the Natural Law of Prior Claim by relegating the indigenous peoples to the status of beings without any rights in their own lands, as if they were simply exotic fauna. In reality, it was a doctrine of “might is right” underwritten by the superior weapons of the Europeans and sanctified by a corrupted Christian religion. This racist doctrine would be formally and firmly repudiated, some centuries later, by Pope Francis, in 2023. (See Miller’s [2006] excellent work on this subject of Doctrine of Discovery.)

• NOTE:  This bogus doctrine would also, not surprisingly, be incorporated into U.S. Law by Chief Justice John Marshall via the 1823 Johnson v. McIntosh Supreme Court case.

1488: Bartolomeu Dias, Portuguese sea captain, doubles the Cape of Good Hope, thereby inaugurating the Atlantic/Indian Ocean sea route from Europe to Asia. 

1492: On April 30, Christopher Columbus receives the authority (privileges and prerogatives) from the monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, to embark on his quest for a sea route to the East by sailing west with the title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” and the ships Niña, Pinta, and Santa María under his command. He would leave the port of Palos on August 3. 

• NOTE: And so thus began what we may call the Columbian Project, which was a sub-project of the Great European West-to-East Maritime Project launched by the Europeans in the fifteenth century. See the Course Glossary on this portentous maritime project, which over time would turn out to be a horrendous genocidal disaster for millions upon millions of people around the world. 

1492: On October 12, Columbus and his crew, landing first on an island they would name San Salvador (also known as Watling Island), inadvertently stumble upon the islands of the Caribbean. 

1497: Vasco da Gama (Portuguese sea captain) touches the Cape of Good Hope on his way to India—the first European to do so. 

1507: The publication of Cosmographiae Introductio in which for the first time in print the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller names the continent that we now know today as North and South America as “America” on the basis of voyages undertaken to South America (possibly in 1499 and in 1502) by a Florentine merchant and navigator, by the name of Amerigo Vespucci, who, unlike what Columbus believed, determined that this was a different continent and not part of Asia. 

1513: The Spaniard Juan Ponce de León, a plantation owner in Puerto Rico (an is-land which the Spanish under his leadership had helped to conquer as well as en-slave its aboriginal peoples), arrives in April on the shores of the peninsula of Florida (which to this day bears part of the original name he gave it to mark the Easter time Feast of Flowers, Pascua Florida) with the intent of predation; however, the U.S. First Americans (the Calusas) who resided there managed to drive him and his men away but not before violent engagements. Ponce undeterred, would return a few years later in 1521 but again the Spanish would be repulsed—in the process Ponce would be wounded by a poisoned arrow, as a result of which he would die the same year. 

1528: The Spanish, under the leadership of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, landing at place that today is called Tampa, try once again to conquer Florida. They would fail and as a consequence of which almost all would die. To add misfortune to righteous misfortune Cabeza de Vaca and his sixty or so surviving invaders, are shipwrecked on the island of Galveston on the coast of Texas; by the following year only fifteen of them were still alive. Cabeza de Vaca would eventually make his way to Spanish-controlled Mexico in 1536, after having survived among nomadic U.S. First Americans (under the guise, ironically, of a peaceful healer) with his last three remaining companions—among them, incidentally, an enslaved African by the name of Esteban. 

1539–1543: In yet another effort to conquer Florida, Hernando de Soto is dis-patched with some 700 men by the Spanish Crown and they land at a place near, again, present-day Tampa. However, permanent settlement appears not to be on the immediate agenda; instead a feverish quest for gold takes him and his troops on a murderous rampage across the U.S. southeast. While many U.S. First Americans perished in their efforts to defeat them (for example on October 1540 at a town near present-day Mobile, Alabama, called Mauvila), de Soto’s force did not escape unscathed. When the invasionary force he had led reached Mexico in 1543, only half the original number were alive, and he himself was not among them—he had died of fever the year before. 

1540–1543: An expedition from Spanish-controlled Mexico led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, comprising a force of some 300 conquistadors, invades the southeastern United States seeking gold; they would not find it but in the process much violence is inflicted on the aboriginal peoples they come across. In one incident, for example, provoked by the rape of a Pueblo woman by one of his men, the denouement is the capture and systematic burning at the stake of some 200 captured Pueblo First Americans by the Bible-wielding Spanish. The survivors of the invasionary force returned to Mexico empty-handed. 

1565: The first permanent European settlement is established in northeastern Florida by the Spanish under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, at St. Augustine (making it, from the perspective of the present, the oldest continuously settled city in the United States). In the process they embroil themselves in an armed religious conflict with French Huguenots—who are also engaged in efforts to establish a European colonial presence in Florida—that has its origins in Europe (Huguenot Wars). They would soon manage to annihilate their colonial rivals. 

• NOTE:  The continuing relentless infiltration by the Spanish in subsequent years as they militarily gained an upper hand would eventually, over the course of roughly two centuries, lead to the collapse of the Calusa nation as their numbers were reduced to a mere fraction—mainly by disease inadvertently brought in by the Spanish. The small bands of survivors would later merge with other U.S. First Americans migrating from the North to, in time, give rise to new nations, such as the Seminoles. 

1570: The Jesuits attempt to set up a mission station up north among the Kiskiacks in the Chesapeake Bay area; however, they are all killed. In retaliation, the Spanish return two years later to attack the Kiskiacks, killing many, but they give up any idea of settling the region. It is left to the English to follow their example a century and a half later; and they are successful in setting up a settlement as a harbinger of a bigger, permanent, and long-lasting colonization effort unrivaled by any European power on the North American continent. 

1585: The first failed attempt at establishing a colonial settlement in North America by the English on an island known as Roanoke of the coast of North Carolina. Two years later in 1587 a second attempt would be made but it too did not succeed, with the colonists disappearing into the mists of history never to be found again. 

1598–1599: The Spanish, under the leadership of Don Juan Oñate, from Mexico arrive to colonize the territory that would be called New Mexico; in the process they defeat the Acoma First Americans—some 800 of Acoma men, women and children would be slaughtered and about 500 captured. From among the surviving males those above the age of twenty-five had one of their legs hacked off as a permanent reminder of the need to accept Spanish overlordship.

1607: Founding of the first permanent and successful settlement by English colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, after the failures on Roanoke Island (1585). 

1619: About twenty Africans are exchanged for food, water and other supplies at the English colonial settlement of Jamestown, Virginia by a Dutch pirate ship. Their legal status, in terms of law, is that of indentured servants (and not slaves). Gradually, however, the enslavement of Africans in the U.S. would become part of the U.S. economic fabric, especially with the commencement of production of plantation crops such as tobacco and rice, and later cotton. 

1621: On June 3, the States-General of the United Netherlands issues its charter to the Dutch West India Company that grants it authority to conduct business and other operations in the Americas and elsewhere in the Atlantic region. 

1636–1637: The Pequot rebel against encroaching English settlers in Connecticut in defense of their lands giving rise to the Pequot War in which the burning down of one of their towns, Mystic, by the English that consumed the lives of hundreds of women, children, and old men—the fighting men were away—remains to this day an event of gross infamy.  

• NOTE: Many of the defeated Pequot were enslaved; some were shipped out to the Caribbean while others became tributaries of their enemies among fellow U.S. First Americans (the Mohegans and the Narragansetts), who in the war had allied with the English.

1660/1661 (exact year unknown): The Virginia House of Burgesses moves to legislatively recognize the legality of enslaving Africans in the newly established British colony.  

• NOTE: The racialization of the U.S. political economy (meaning almost all aspects of private and public life are permeated by issues of race), has taken different forms; depending upon time period—one can identify at least five: (i) Genocidal racism (targeted at Native Americans). (ii) Dominative rac-ism (e.g. slavery, targeted at African Americans). (iii) Juridical racism (e.g. Jim Crow, targeted at all racial minorities). (iv) Aversive racism (e.g. residential segregation, targeted at all racial minorities). (v) Institutional racism (e.g. “colorblind” racism, targeted at all racial minorities). Today, the domi-nant forms of racism that hold sway in United States in the post-Civil Rights era (1964 to the present) are aversive racism at the interpersonal level and institutional racism (e.g. colorblind racism) at the societal level—even though racist discrimination in public life is supposedly illegal (unlike in the case of the first three forms that were not only legal but brutally enforced). It is important to observe that in these various incarnations that the racialization of U.S. political economy has been manifest, law has always been used to legitimate these incarnations (and this holds true even today in the post-Civil Rights era). That is, from the perspective of race, law has never been neutral in United States; it has a long history of being used against racial minorities to oppress them.

1662: Virginia legislatively adopts the doctrine of Partus sequitur ventrem (from Roman civil law) establishing the rule that if a mother was an enslaved person then so were all her children.

1675–1676: War breaks out again between the English settlers and U.S. First Americans in New England because of increasing settler encroachment. This war is variously known as Metacom’s War, or Metacolm’s Rebellion or more conventionally King Philip’s War (Metacom, the chief of the Wampanoag, was known to the English as King Philip). 

• NOTE:  By the standards of the day this was a bloody war in which many lives were lost on both sides; and again, as in the Pequot War, the battle lines were not clear cut between settlers and the U.S. First Americans (as some of the latter, including, ironically, the Pequot, had allied with the former). The English and their First American allies soon gained an upper hand, though disease and starvation among the Wampanoag and their allies had an important say in the outcome. The war hardened the attitudes of the English colonists toward all U.S. First Americans (allies or not), with the result that enslavement or banishment to “Indian reservations,” coupled with second-class citizenship, was imposed on all U.S. First Americans who came under their sway. 

1680: The Pueblo rebel against Spanish colonial rule (the Pueblo Rebellion) in New Mexico under the leadership of a medicine man of the Ohke Pueblo named Popé. They manage to drive the Spanish out of New Mexico; Popé became the ruler of the Pueblos and remained so until his death in 1688. This event would emerge as the most successful rebellion by First Americans in North America; however, it would last only about a decade. In 1692, the Spanish under Governor Pedro de Vargas re-established their rule, for the most part with minimal bloodshed. 

1680-1682: Virginia adopts the “slaved codes” (rules governing the conduct of the enslaved) that would be the template for slave codes to come in other states.

1699: On July 6, the infamous pirate Captain William Kidd is arrested in Boston. His pirate career included spending time in Madagascar, known at the time as a haven for pirates domiciled in the U.S. and elsewhere preying on Indian Ocean shipping. (He would be executed in London on May 23, 1701.)

1754–1763: The French and Indian War in the United States between principally England and France (and involving First Americans as well). The War is a result of conflicting claims over the Ohio River valley region. The war soon spreads to Eu-rope and Asia and is known there as the Seven Years’ War. England emerges victorious from the war, as a consequence of which Canada also becomes its colony. 

1760s: Whalers from the U.S. begin to visit the coasts of Southern Africa for their catch (the ships’ crews also include among them U.S. blacks). 

1763: Royal Proclamation of 1763 issued by King George III of England. A decree is-sued by the British Crown on October 7, that was aimed at eliminating the ever-escalating and costly armed conflicts between the colonists and U.S. First Americans by, in theory if not in practice, forbidding land-grabs by colonial land speculators of the former’s lands which the Act now specifically designated as lying west of the Appalachian Mountains, the crest of which constituted the border. It was this decree together with such other legislation as the Quartering Act of 1765; the Stamp Act of 1765; and the Townshend Acts of 1767 that helped to precipitate the U.S. War of Independence. (Although some of these measures were repealed the following year because of impudent intransigence on the part of the colonial elites, the damage to the legitimacy of continuing British colonial presence was now irreversible.) In other words, the fundamental source of the grievances of the domestic colonial elites against the British lay in such matters as settlement expansion, taxation, and the like that threatened to undermine their inexorable accumulation-driven greed. Their anti-British ire sprang essentially from the perception that the various measures that the British Parliament had enacted in the aftermath of the costly Seven Years’ War ([1756–63]—also variously known as The French War, The French and Indian War, and The Great War for Empire and which had benefited the colonists greatly by securing the de-feat of French colonial designs in North America—for the purpose, quite reasonably and legitimately, of getting the hitherto lightly taxed U.S. colonists to assist with paying off the huge debts incurred by the British citizenry as a direct consequence of the war (as well as assist with tightening the grip of British suzerainty in the face of an increasingly sullen U.S. colonial elite), were the thin end of a wedge that would lead to unacceptable economic burdens down the road.  

1775: U.S. First Americans at San Diego in southern California rebel against Spanish rule but fail to oust them. 

1775–1783: The U.S. War of Independence (also known as the American Revolutionary War) in which the thirteen participating states emerge victorious to form a new country, the United States of America. (The Declaration of Independence is adopted by the Second Continental Congress, representing the thirteen British North American colonies, on July 4, 1776; while British forces surrender at York-town in 1781. The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 2, 1783, by the U.S. and Britain, formally ends the war.)

• NOTE:   The “American Revolution,” as the War of Independence is also known, was a revolution from above; consequently it had little to do with democracy per se. The Revolution at its core was nothing more than a conflagratory overthrow of the hegemony of one section of the elite (British colonial) in preference for that of another (US domestic), in which the masses, even though participants in the conflagration, did not act to secure their own interests—the existence of the safety valve of abundant lands to pillage having dulled their senses in this regard, coupled with the elite-inspired emergent ideology of nationalism. The socioeconomic and political consequences of this history continue to hound us to the present day; the clearest symptom of which is the constant glorification of the hollow shell of procedural democracy (in lieu of building substantive democracy) by U.S. capital and its allies, even as the masses look on. As Gregg (1997: 273) states pithily: “the endurance of pluralism and the potential for liberal change in the United States appears less likely to be a rule of history than a luxury enjoyed by the lucky few.” 

1776: Adam Smith publishes his magnum opus An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in which he strongly advocates free trade as the basis of any nation’s foreign trade policy. 

1781: On October 19, the British forces surrender at Yorktown (Virginia) with the ratification of the Articles of Capitulation, marking the successful end (with the critical assistance of the French) of the U.S. War of Independence. 

1784: In February, the U.S. merchant ship Empress of China is dispatched for the Far East—inaugurating the U.S.-Asia trade that would involve stops at the Cape of Good Hope. 

1787: Richard Allen founds the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a U.S. African-American-led breakaway church that in a later period would have considerable influence in Africa, including South Africa. 

1789-1790: With Rhode Island joining in as the last of the founding thirteen states to do so, the ratification process that had begun in 1787 of the Constitution of United States was now complete. However, it had already come into force a year earlier with its ratification by the First Congress and the other twelve states.

1790: The Naturalization Act of 1790 is passed by the First Congress restricting U.S. citizenship to only “white persons”; everyone else was excluded. In other words, the supremacy of whiteness was already baked into law with the onset of U.S. independence.

1792–1815: The period of the Napoleonic Wars whereby France under the leader-ship of Napoléon Bonaparte, through a series of wars, attempted to build an empire, primarily in Europe. The USG officially maintained neutrality in these wars.

1793: Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress (mandated the capture and return of escaped slaves from anywhere in the country) in support of the “Fugitive Slave Clause” of the U.S. Constitution.

1794: At the Battle of Fallen Timbers, General Anthony Wayne defeats a confederation of U.S. First Americans led by Weyapiersenwah (also known as Blue Jacket) of the Shawnee. Although he had been an ally of the British during the U.S. War of Independence, they betrayed him when he and his men sought assistance from them. The resulting Treaty of Greenville (1795) forced on the U.S. First Americans led to the alienation of a huge swathe of their territory that would become the state of Ohio. One of the leaders who refused to sign the treaty was the legendary Tecumseh, whose subsequent efforts to unite U.S. First Americans (with the as-sistance of his brother Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet) as a single nation, to better mount resistance against settler encroachment, proved futile in the face of concerted settler aggression—of which the destruction of one of their major towns, called Prophet’s Town (on November 6, 1811), by a force led by Governor William Henry Harrison, was emblematic.

1803–1806: The Lewis and Clark Expedition (led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) is sent out by President Jefferson to explore and report back on the territory the United States had purchased from the French in 1803 in a deal that has come to be known as the Louisiana Purchase—despite the fact that this vast territory belonged to and was occupied by U.S. First Americans.  The expedition received considerable assistance from the First Americans they met along their route but they (the First Americans) were of course completely unaware that the people they were assisting constituted a reconnaissance party of sorts for the cycle of deceit, treachery, violence, murder, and mayhem that would be visited on them in decades to come as European settlers engineered the theft of their lands on a scale similar to the one other U.S. First Americans had experienced in their eastern homelands over a century earlier (beginning with the arrival of the Spanish in Florida and the English in Jamestown, Virginia). 

• NOTE: The territory acquired via the Louisiana Purchase comprised the western half of the Mississippi River Basin (an 828,000 square-mile area then known as Louisiana) longitudinally stretching from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. The roots of the purchase lay in the French and Indian War in which England had emerged victorious. Now, the 1763 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war, not only made Canada its colony, but in addition, gave Florida, a colony of Spain, to England (Spain had joined in the war on the side of the French). However, to forestall further English colonial expansion in North America, a huge swathe of territory roughly between the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and stretching from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico over which France had historically laid claim, named Louisiana (after King Louis IX), was ceded by France to Spain—against the protests of the First Americans of the region. However, some decades later this territory would be reluctantly retro-ceded to France by Spain’s King Charles IV (but with compensation) via the 1801 Treaty of San Ildefonso which included a provision that barred France from relinquishing the territory to a third power. Two years later, in 1803, France, strapped for cash, amidst renewed hostilities with Eng-land (and against the backdrop of its embarrassing failure to crush the slave rebellion in Haiti) ignored the treaty and sold the territory to the United States. With this purchase, which came to be known as the “Louisiana Purchase,” the United States would double its land area; in fact, so vast was the territory involved that it would come to hold wholly or almost wholly the states of Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming, put together. While the purchase was viewed as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy in which over 2,000,000 square kilometers of lands belonging to U.S. First Americans was acquired from the French at a cost of an obscenely paltry sum of $27 million dollars (includes interest payments), it was not entirely a blessing. Thousands would lose their lives in decades to come as a consequence of two sets of events that had their roots in that purchase: the violent struggle for the dispossession of the acquired lands of the U.S. First Americans, its original rightful inhabitants—ideologically premised on the racist concept of so-called Manifest Destiny which itself had roots in another much older whiteness-based racist concept concocted in Europe called the Doctrine of Discovery (see above) Miller’s [2006] excellent work on this subject)—and the U.S. Civil War. 

1807: The international slave trade, but not slavery, abolished by Britain (followed a year later by the United States). 

1812–1814: The period of armed conflict between the United States and Britain known as the War of 1812 that arose out of U.S. grievances with the maritime high-handedness of the British during the Napoleonic Wars (1792 to 1815). 

1821: Under the Adams-Onis Treaty Spain cedes Florida to the United States. It was the denouement of the First Seminole War (1817–1818) in which U.S. forces, under the command of one Andrew Jackson (who would later become a U.S. president), launched a war of aggression on the Seminole and the Spanish upon the orders of President James Monroe.  

• NOTE: The principal objective of the war was to satisfy the ever-escalating lust for U.S. First American lands in Florida among the encroaching U.S. settlers by forcing the Spanish out and moving the surviving Seminoles out west beyond the Mississippi. The latter part of the plan, however, was not so easily achieved. The Seminole, who included among them significant numbers of the Creek from Georgia and runaway enslaved U.S. African Americans, under the leadership of Osceola, mounted a retaliatory war (Second Seminole War) in 1835 and it would last until 1842—the guerrilla tactics they used in the Florida swamps proved to be a formidable match for the U.S. forces. However, by means of such tactics as targeting war leaders (Osceola was among the captured; he was betrayed by the flag of truce such was the morality of the U.S. general, Thomas Jessup), destroying food crops, and promising freedom to the escaped slaves if they changed sides, the Seminole were eventually defeated and the bulk of them transferred west. A few, however, who remained were able to regroup so that when encroachments into part of the territory to which they had retreated (beyond the Caloosahatchee River) proved unbearable, they launched the Third Seminole War (1855–58) under the leadership of Billy Bowlegs, and again they faced defeat; and they too were promptly removed out west upon their surrender. 

1823: The infamous Johnson v. M'Intosh [McIntosh] case is decided by the Supreme Court in which it establishes the bogus principle of “Doctrine of Discovery” (which held that all Native American lands belonged to the Federal government as the representative of the European colonists who had “discovered” these lands—regardless of the fact that the original inhabitants, Native Americans, were still living there.) 

1830: Indian [Native American] Removal Act passed by Congress—leads to the in-famous ethnic cleansing of 1838-39 known as the “Trail of Tears.”

1832: The U.S. Supreme Court in its ruling in the case Worcester v. Georgia (31 U.S. 515 [1832]) establishes the principle of the sovereignty of First American nations in the United States. However, President Andrew Jackson would pay no heed to the court in ordering the 1838–39 ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee nation from the state of Georgia. 

1838–1839: The Cherokees are literally corralled in stockades and then, under armed escort (commanded by General Winfield Scott), forcibly marched out of their ancestral homeland in Georgia, as part of a process that today we may call “ethnic cleansing,” to out West in the dark days of winter—with inadequate food and other necessities—as part of a great settler land-grab that President Andrew Jackson (whose career, lest we forget, was studded with such highlights as land-speculation, slave-trading, and warfare against U.S. First Americans) deliberately aided and abetted, and in total violation of a Supreme Court ruling (Worcester v. Georgia [31 U.S. 515 (1832)]). Dubbing the march as the “Trail of Tears,” the Cherokees died by the thousands, both during and after the march.  They, of course, were not the only ones who would become the target of “Indian Removal” (or “ethnic cleansing” as it would be called today); many other eastern nations among U.S. First Americans also fall victim to the European colonization of their lands around this time; they include the Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles.  It goes without saying, that even after this major injustice, removal to the western part of the country did not imply that they were left alone thereafter. 

• NOTE: Since no work about the United States spanning a period as long as this one does would be complete without an obligatory quote from its adopted son, Alexis de Tocqueville, that young nineteenth-century French chronicler of the rise of U.S. democracy, we may note here that he was, in actuality, a living witness to the horrendously painful tragedy of the ethnic cleansing of one of these nations:

At the end of the year 1831, I stood on the left bank of the Mississippi at a spot the Europeans called Memphis. While I was there a numerous band of Choctaws (or Chactas as the French in Louisiana call them) arrived… It was then the depths of winter and the cold was exceptionally severe that year; the snow had frozen hard on the ground; the river was drifting with huge ice-floes. The Indians had brought their families with them, and hauled along the wounded, the sick, new born babies, and old men on the verge of death. They had neither tents nor wagons, simply a few provisions and arms. I saw them embark to cross the wide river and that solemn spectacle will never be erased from my memory. Not a sob or complaint could be heard from this assembled crowd; they stood silent. Their afflictions were of long-standing and they considered them beyond remedy (Tocqueville, 2003 [1835–40]: 380)

Tocqueville, however, is, in fact, and ironically, especially relevant here given the long hold he has had on the imagination of U.S. Americans on the right (and to a lesser extent on the left too). While the right has often turned to him for validation for parts of their political agenda there is a cacophonic silence among them on the matter of discussing the elephant in the room: Tocqueville’s bitter and trenchant critique of a democracy that, on one hand, not only ignored but thrived on the enslavement of human beings, and on the other, was inflicting violence, terror, and destitution on an unimaginable scale on the original owners of the land. This point is not lost on everyone, however. Kramnick, for example, in his well-written introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Democracy in America (Tocqueville 2003) correctly points out: “Tocqueville’s recurring depiction of American inquisitiveness and ‘grasping search for gain’ is rendered in its bitterest and most pathological terms in his evocations of the sufferings of Native Americans.… He assails the hypocrisy of Americans who proclaim all men brothers while brutalizing native peoples with liquor and wine. Even more to their shame,” he further paraphrases Tocqueville, “as Americans ‘exterminate the Indian race’ they claim not to violate fundamental principles of morality. Yet, their fraudulent and unjust policies defy all notions of reason and natural right (p. xxxv).” To quote Tocqueville’s brilliant observation on this misuse of the rule of law:

The Spanish, using unparalleled atrocities which bring an indelible shame upon themselves, have not succeeded in exterminating the Indian race, nor even in preventing them from sharing their rights; the Americans of the United States have attained both these results with amazing ease, quietly, legally, and generously, with no spilling of blood, with no violation to the great moral principles in the eyes of the world. Men could not be destroyed with more respect for the laws of humanity (p. 397, emphasis added).

• Obviously, the no violence and no spilling of blood was an exaggeration on his part, but the basic thrust of his point was certainly on the mark. (For more on the “Trail of Tears” and the agony of the Cherokees see also Ehle [1988].) 

1845: The phrase “manifest destiny” makes its appearance in an editorial by John O’Sullivan in the Democratic Review, thereby giving a name to the ideological justification for the colonization of U.S. First American lands in the west by the administration of James K. Polk, including his deliberate provocation of the Mexican-American War.

1846–1848: The Mexican War (also known as the Mexican-American War) provoked by the illegal U.S. annexation of the Mexican territory of Texas, culminates with the tragic defeat of Mexico, as a result of which Mexico loses most of the territory that is today occupied by the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah; the western portion of Colorado is also part of this territory. (Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the war is signed on February 2, 1848.)

1849: U.S. Euro-American philosopher, naturalist, and writer, Henry David Thoreau publishes his “civil disobedience” essay titled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government,” which would come to influence such diverse world-renowned luminaries as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

1849: The commencement of the California Gold Rush that draws thousands upon thousands of fortune seekers from across the United States and around the world; in the process U.S. First Americans in the West come under further pressure prompted by land alienation and a massive loss of life—in fact the only appropriate word for what befalls them (especially in California) is nothing less than genocide.

1850: California legislates the Indenture Act (euphemistically titled An Act for the Government and Protection of the Indian) that allows for the semi-enslavement of Native American children for a period up to the age of eighteen.

1850: Fugitive Slave Act adopted by Congress (it strengthened the original 1793 Act). 

1851: Congress adopts the Appropriation Bill for Indian [Native American] Affairs that mandates the transfer of Native Americans on to reservations on an unprecedented scale. 

1854: California Supreme Court decides The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall, an appealed murder case, ruling that Chinese Americans and Immigrants could not testify against Euro-Americans. (This case involved the murder of a Chinese American by a Euro-American—the decision would effectively legitimate Euro-American race riots targeting Asian Americans.) 

1857: Ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford case (60 U.S. [19 Howard] 393 [1857]) that, in its legal implications, legalized slavery throughout the U.S., and established the noncitizenship status of all U.S. African Americans, slave or free. 

• NOTE:  In presenting this chronology, it is necessary to highlight the special role of the U.S. Supreme Court in legitimating not only the surplus appropriation activities of the capitalist class but the racialization of the U.S. political system. This, perhaps, is not surprising because while the Court likes to project itself as an institution above politics, it is very much a political institution given the modality of its composition—via presidential nominations (or to be correct “appointments,” as Congress very rarely fails to confirm the nominations) to the Court is the prerogative of the president. (This is one of the reasons why voting in a U.S. presidential election can have a very meaningful impact long into the future—sadly, many among the lower classes appear to unaware of this fact.) Yes, it is true that the Court has also been responsible, at certain rare moments in its history, in the effort to de-legitimate institutional racism (as well as support the class struggle to expand authentic democracy), but the record here has usually been of one step forward, two steps back. Here is an example: the appointment by the conservative president George H. W. Bush in 1991 of the relatively unknown and inexperienced African American by the name of Clarence Thomas—to replace a fellow African American (that brilliant intellectual and indefatigable champion of civil rights, Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was retiring from the Court)—amidst a scandalous charge against Thomas of sexual-harassment that grew out of a leaked FBI report on him, and who, most tellingly, had at one time worked for that giant U.S. agro-business with pernicious tentacles all across the planet called Monsanto, has been a tremendous boon to both the bourgeoisie and those conservatives opposed to civil rights for racial minorities and other marginalized groups. To date, his record has been, with rarest of exceptions, full and complete support of their interests; saying that it is a most shameful record would be a gross understatement. In almost every case he has ever sat on that involves a plaintiff petitioning for redress in matters of civil/human rights (and authentic democracy in general) you will find that his vote in the case is against the plaintiff. Without a doubt, he has firmly secured himself a seat in that pantheon of misguided right-wing African American luminaries (others include Ward Connerly, Stanley Crouch, Alan Keyes, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Shelby Steele, and so on) who while personally reaping the benefits accruing from the legacy of the struggles of countless people in the Civil Rights Movement, hypocritically turned their backs on carrying that struggle forward. And as if that has not been enough, they have actively championed (probably unknowingly through their ignorance of the difference between structural or institutional racism and interpersonal aversive racism—if not racial/ethnic “self-hate,” a universal byproduct of a long history of marginalization and oppression confronting any group of people, and/or simply crass Uncle Tomist opportunism) the maintenance of institutional racism and a deeper level of surplus appropriation by the bourgeoisie.

1861–1865: U.S. Civil War between the North and the South, in which the South is defeated which facilitates the abolition of slavery throughout the nation. The war also results in a further loss of lands in the West as U.S. First Americans are forced to align on either side of the conflict.  

• NOTE: In fact, immediately upon the conclusion of the war, Union troops were sent west to deal with the “Indian problem” in a manner best summarized by the triumphant conqueror of the South, General William T. Sherman, in 1867, with these oft-quoted words: “The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous” (from Danziger 2007: 313). Note too that it is Sherman who is supposed to have coined the phrase “[t]he only good Indian is a dead Indian.” 

1862: Congress passes the Homestead Act that further dispossessed Native Americans of their lands to allow settlement (at almost no cost) to outsiders—at about 160 acres (65 hectares) a piece.

1863–1865: Partial emancipation of enslaved U.S. African Americans in the United States as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, and full emancipation after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865. 

1864: Colonel John Chivington slaughters (on November 29) Southern Cheyennes and Arapahoes at Sand Creek in Colorado (Sand Creek Massacre). Hundreds, including women and children, are massacred for no apparent reason, despite their attempts to negotiate for peace. Four years later, in 1868, the survivors of this massacre are again attacked, and many are killed, by Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a case of (supposedly) mistaken identity. 

1866: The founding of the secretive vigilante terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan which quickly adopts the practice of extra-judicial murders called lynching as a mechanism of political and social control in which the ordinary white public, reveling in the public murders, would become co-conspirators and perpetrators. This gruesome practice would lead to the murder of thousands, mostly blacks (but many whites would be killed too), during the period in which it was in vogue (up to the 1950s). 

1867: A major treaty, the Medicine Lodge Treaty, is forced upon the plains U.S. First American nations to facilitate further alienation of their lands. A year later another similar treaty, the Fort Laramie Treaty, would be signed with the Lakota people led by Chief Red Cloud, ending what is known as Red Cloud’s War. As a result of these two treaties, a reservation system is created for the Plains Nations to restrict open access to their traditional homelands in order to make way for European settlers, thereby setting in motion yet another cycle of warfare between them and the settlers. 

1867–1877: Commencing with the passage of the Reconstruction Act in March (over the presidential veto of the racist Andrew Johnson), the period of U.S. history known as “Reconstruction” in which there is a genuine commitment on the part of the U.S. Congress, under the leadership of the Radical Republicans, to help the recently freed enslaved U.S. African Americans take their place in society as full citizens. The withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, by which time the Democrats are back in power in the South (by means of widespread terror and fraud, including the barbaric practice of lynching) marks the end of this period. It would also mark the beginning of the “Jim Crow” era (1877–1954). 

1868: Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that grants citizenship rights to all formerly enslaved U.S. African Americans, establishes the concept of equality of protection of all citizenry under the law, and pro-scribes the denial of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. 

1869: On May 10, the “golden spike” is ceremonially hammered into place at Promontory Summit, Utah, marking the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. Built partly on the backs of super exploited Chinese immigrant labor, the railway accelerates the settler colonization of the West—in the process inaugurating the further decimation of the U.S. First Americans, the massive pilfering of their lands, and the wanton destruction of the chief source of their livelihood, a magnificent herbivore: the buffalo. 

1870: Adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that gives U.S. African American males the right to vote. 

1870: The Naturalization Act of 1870 updates the exclusionary provisions of previous legislation to now also include African Americans, besides Euro-Americans, but all others are excluded.  

1870: A massive campaign of avarice-driven wanton destruction of the vast, as-far-as-the-eye-could-see, herds of buffalo begins on a systematic scale by European hunters (who use the completed transcontinental railroad [1869] to access the buffalo rangeland). This destruction, which put this magnificent herbivore on the path to near certain extinction within no more than a decade, put a severe toll on the food supply of the plains U.S. First Americans who depended on the buffa-lo for their sustenance, further hastening their demise. 

1871: Indian [Native American] Appropriation Act passed by Congress that strips the Native Americans of claims to any form of sovereignty that required signing treaties with them; henceforth they were no longer an “independent nation, tribe, or power,” but mere wards of the Federal government.

1876: As part of the Sioux War of 1876, the U.S. Cavalry under the command of George A. Custer suffer an unexpected defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The War itself grew out of the discovery of gold in 1874 in the Black Hills that be-longed to the Sioux and which the U.S. government sought to possess against the wishes of a section of the Sioux—those who had not signed the Treaty of 1868 that established the Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota, and in which they had re-fused to domicile; preferring to remain free in the Powder River country further to the west. The defeat of Custer (in which his entire command of 250 men was wiped out by the Sioux) unleashed a vengeful military campaign against those First Americans of the northern plains who refused to come to heel on reservations. 

1876: The Court issues its decision in United States v. Reese stating that the 15th Amendment that had granted voting rights to all males in United States regard-less of their color, or whether they had been former slaves, etc. did not automatically confer the right to vote. Through this judicial skullduggery, the Court opened the sluice gates of racially-motivated voter-suppression of minority voters that would only be closed via the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

1877: The process begun a few years earlier by white racists, the so-called Bourbon Redeemers (Democrats), of recapturing power in all the southern states, by means of nothing less than widespread terror and election fraud, is now complete. The icing on the cake is that in this same year the Compromise of 1877 that gave the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, in exchange for a complete withdrawal of federal troops from the South, is concluded—thereby leaving blacks and their allies with no protection from white racist violence and terror. 

1877–1954: The period of the de jure Jim Crow era in which the civil rights of U.S. African Americans guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution are rolled back under a variety of apartheid-like laws, and legitimated under the bogus doctrine of “separate but equal” enunciated in the 1896 Plessy case.  

• NOTE: The de jure era would end with the successive 1954 and 1955 Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483 [1954], and 349 U.S. 294 [1955]); however, de facto Jim Crow would continue and it would only come to an end with the launch of the civil rights movement by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others—beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 and culminating about a decade later in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

1879: On November 1, the government system off-reservation boarding schools for U.S. First American children—involving, more often than not, their forcible and heart-wrenching seizure from the bosom of their families and their transportation hundreds of miles away from home—designed to help wipe out U.S. Native American culture (in the words of its founder: “kill the Indian, save the man”—constituting no less than an effort at cultural genocide) commences with the opening of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania at the site of an abandoned U.S. military barracks. 

• NOTE: The school was modeled on the Hampton/Tuskegee model (in fact, in the preceding year, Hampton Institute had enrolled its first contingent of U.S. First Americans) and was the brainchild of its founder Richard Henry Pratt, a well-meaning but misguided individual who had been the commander of the U.S. African American unit of the U.S. 10th Cavalry, “Buffalo Soldiers.” Pratt’s missionary-like zeal in launching the school was based on his abiding belief that schools were the ideal medium for “taming” U.S. First Americans—a view best captured by the oft-quoted line “kill the Indian in him and save the man” he had once articulated (Adams 1995: 52; for more on this one of the many dark chapters of U.S. history see also Child [1998] and Fear-Segal [2007]). Incidentally, a glimpse of what many of the children and their families had to endure in the process of the children being “impressed” for this boarding school system, as well as the ideological rationale behind it, may be had from a motion picture (Rabbit-Proof Fence [2002]) featuring a similar educational system, but in a different settler-colonial land: Australia. 

1880–1881: The period of the little-known First Anglo-Boer War, comprising mainly skirmishes between Afrikaners of the Transvaal and the British. 

1881: The Tuskegee Institute, a state vocational educational institution for U.S. African Americans, is founded in Tuskegee, Alabama, and Booker T. Washington is hired as its first principal (he would remain in this position, making the institution his life’s vocation, until his death in 1915). The institute, under his leader-ship, gained wide prominence within and without the U.S. for its advocacy of an educational philosophy that suited the tenor of the times: black subservience to white supremacy. Although founded as a higher education institution, the institute became a full university only in 1985. 

1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act is adopted by Congress prohibiting Chinese immigration and retained Chinese exclusion from U.S. citizenship for those who were already living in United States.

1883: In the Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S. 1 [1883]) the U.S. Supreme Court takes a major reactionary step backward in striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that sought to prohibit racist discrimination in public places (hotels, restaurants, transportation, etc.) on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. 

1887: The Dawes Severalty Act is passed by Congress that under the guise of creating a freehold land tenureship for U.S. First Americans (in order to destroy their thousands of years old communal way of life) reduces their lands from 138 million acres to less than 50 million by 1934. 

1889: The infamously perfidious Oklahoma Land Rush is instigated by the authority of President Benjamin Harrison with a gunshot at midday that signaled the permission to land-hungry European settlers lined up on the state border (though many had sneaked across even before then) to commence their rush to stake claims on U.S. First American reservation territory. Within about ten hours the settlers would manage to alienate nearly two millions acres of this territory! It would mark the beginning in the West of a systematic U.S. government-approved theft of the already much-reduced U.S. First American lands they had been allowed to retain under various treaties and undertakings. 

1889: The launch of the National Geographic Magazine (in 1959 renamed simply as National Geographic) in the U.S. that would contribute greatly to shaping the negative stereotypes of Africa among U.S. Americans in general, as an exotic, primitive, and uncivilized continent.  

• NOTE: In fact, in its very second issue, it publishes a lengthy feature article on Africa and which is peppered with such nuggets of wisdom as these:

In passing from the equator south, the tribes become more degraded.… It is the land of the gorilla, and there seems to be little difference between the man and the ape, and both are hunted and shot by the Boers.… The Negro has never developed any high degree of civilization; and even if, when brought into contact with civilization, he has made considerable progress, when that contact ceased he has deteriorated into barbarism. But, on the other hand, he has never faded away and disappeared, like the Indian of America and the natives of the Southern Archipelago. Nature has spread a bountiful and never-ending harvest before the Negro, and given to him a climate where neither labor of body or mind, neither clothing nor a house, is essential to his comfort. All nature invites to an idle life; and it is only through compulsion, and contact with a life from without, that his condition can be improved. (Du Chaillu 1889: 111, 123)

1890: The Wounded Knee Massacre of a band of Lakota led by Big Foot is prompted by the Ghost Dance (mentioned earlier) that the Europeans mistakenly thought was the harbinger of a rebellion by U.S. First Americans.

• NOTE: This event is generally considered by U.S. Euro-American historians as marking the end of the European settler frontier in the territory that became the United States, because thereafter all surviving U.S. First Americans over the nearly four-hundred-year period of the European colonization project had either been exterminated or militarily defeated, and except for the isolated pockets of reservation lands all their lands alienated. 

1895: On September 18, U.S. African American Booker T. Washington delivers his Atlanta Compromise speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia in which he sets out the principle of black accommodation with what is in effect a “neofascist” U.S. South. 

1896: Ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson case (163 U.S. 537 [1896]) in favor of racial segregation under the bogus doctrine of “separate but equal,” which becomes the basis for the enactment of a plethora of Jim Crow laws, and thereby nullifying the intent of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. 

1898: The United States annexes Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. 

1899: Beginning in September, Secretary of State John Hay of the McKinley Ad-ministration outlines a policy in relation to China calling for nonexclusionary commercial access to that country—meaning no colonization of China—by means of a series of diplomatic notes to various European powers that comes to be known as the “Open Door Policy.” (The public airing of this important foreign policy that would put other world powers of the day on notice that the United States was an emerging power with its own “neoimperial” agenda takes place on January 2, 1900.)

1899–1902 [1913]: The period of Philippine-U.S. War precipitated by the U.S. imperial occupation of the Philippines. (Although the war was declared officially over on July 4, 1902, in reality the conflict transmuted into a low-intensity con-flict, involving guerilla warfare on the part of the Filipinos against U.S. forces that did not end until 1913.

1904: In what would turn out to be a dress rehearsal for the Nazi Holocaust to come, the Germans perpetrate genocide of the Herrero people in Namibia; it is estimated that the German colonial army (with the willing assistance of German settlers) managed to slaughter more than three quarters of the total Herrero pop-ulation. 

1909: On February 12, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded in New York City by an interracial group of civil rights supporters and activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, Ida Wells-Barnett.  

1910–1970: The period of the First (1910–1940) and Second (1940–1970) “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to the North, and from the countryside to the city, that leads to the massive urbanization of millions of African Americans and sets the stage for the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement.

1913: Upon his election to the U.S. presidency, Woodrow Wilson, a racist southerner, formalizes segregation in the Federal government. 

1914: U.S. Novelist Edgar R. Burroughs publishes his first “Tarzan” novel, Tarzan of the Apes, which had first appeared as a serial in the pages of Argosy All Story in 1912. It would have many sequels as the series would enjoy great popularity in the U.S. and elsewhere. The novels and the subsequent cinematic rendition of them (effectively beginning in 1932), would help to contribute to the stereotypes of Africa as an exotic, primitive and uncivilized continent—with all the attendant consequences for the aboriginal African peoples. 

1914: On August 1, Black Jamaican Marcus Mosiah Aurelius Garvey establishes his Pan-Africanist Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association (UNIA). 

1914–1919: The period of the First World War. 

1915: U.S. filmmaker D. W. Griffith releases his highly racist film, the Birth of a Nation (originally titled the Clansman), based on a play by an ex-Baptist minister Thomas Dixon, in which the racist terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan is portrayed as a heroic organization that had saved the South from the tyr-anny and corruption of U.S. African-American-dominated state governments during the Reconstruction era (1865–77).  

1915: On November 14, U.S. African American educator and founder of the famous Tuskegee Institute, Booker Taliaferro Washington, passes away. The influence of his accommodationist ideas in its heyday would reach as far as South Africa. 

1917: The overthrow of the autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II in Russia, in March, marks the beginning of the Russian Revolution comprising a series of political upheav-als that would eventually lead to the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922—the world’s first Marxist-inspired socialist nation—under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. 

1918: In February, Marcus Garvey organizes in Harlem, New York the first U.S. branch of a black nationalist organization that he and others had first founded (but without much success) in his home country of Jamaica on August 1, 1914 called the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League but more well-known by the shorter name of Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). 

1919: The League of Nations is born at the conclusion of the November 11, 1918–June 28, 1919 Paris Peace Conference that leads to the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War. The League was disbanded on April 18, 1946. 

1924: Virginia passes the Racial Integrity Act that creates only two racial classifications: “white” and “colored” and establishes the principle of hypodescent; it would be a template for similar legislation adopted by other states.  

1923: In United States v. Thind the Supreme Court defines who a “white” person is and proceeds to overturn the lower court’s ruling that Bhagat Singh Thind, a South East Asian from India, could be classified as “white” for naturalization purposes. 

1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 is legislated that specifically added Arabs and other Asians (East Indians, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc.) to the exclusionary provisions of earlier legislation, such as the Immigration Act of 1917, regarding immigration and citizenship—that is they were barred from immigrating to the United States or being eligible for citizenship. (Note: the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, adopted in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, swept away all race-based restrictions of earlier legislation on immigration and citizenship.) 

1927: In Gong Lum v. Rice, the Supreme Court moved to undermine the intent of the 14th Amendment by stating that children of racial minorities (in this case a Chinese American, Martha Lum) could be excluded on racial grounds from schools designated by their localities for Euro-Americans.

1930s: The period of the Great Depression, set in motion in part by the Wall Street Crash of October 24, 1929, which would engulf almost the entire planet, including South Africa. 

1933: Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democratic Party) becomes the thirty-second president of the United States (and immediately sets about implementing his “New Deal” program, aimed at alleviating the ravages of the Great Depression suffered by the vast majority of the citizenry, that among other things would bring the U.S. economy under greater government influence.) 

1934: As in an earlier effort (the 1922 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill), the U.S. Senate fails to pass the Wagner-Constigan Anti-Lynching Bill because of opposition from some conservative Senators (the murder by lynch-mobs of persons of color, and some Euro-Americans too, would continue without fear of prosecution).

1939–1945: The approximate period of the Second World War. (The war officially ended on September 2, 1945 with the capitulation of the Axis powers.)

1940: On June 10, Marcus Mosiah Aurelius Garvey, the founder of the largest mass movement of Pan-Africanism of his day, passes away in London. The influence of his ideas would reach almost every corner of the black world, including South Africa. 

1941: On June 25, under pressure from the U.S. African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph (with his threat of organizing a “March on Washington”) and others opposed to racial discrimination, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 8802—“Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Indus-try”—constituting the first major (albeit limited) governmental action since Re-construction in support of freedom from racial discrimination in the United States. 

1941: On August 14, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, following a secret conference off the coast of Newfound-land, issue an eight-point joint declaration that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter spelling out their vision of a post-World War II world.

1942: On February 19, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Oder 9066 authorizing the imprisonment of U.S. Japanese Americans in concentration camps on spurious and racially motivated grounds that they posed a security threat.  

1944: Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark and influential study, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, on the race question in United States (titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy) is published. 

1944: The Supreme Court issues its decision in Korematsu v. United States siding with the government in its blatantly racist and unconstitutional strategy of rounding up thousands of Japanese American citizens and immigrants and imprisoning them in concentration camps—popularly supported by the Euro-American citizenry, especially on the West Coast—during the Second World War; note, however, that this fate did not befall Italian Americans or German Americans whose ancestral countries were also at war with United States. (Question to ponder: who among the masses would have opposed a decision, if it had been made, to simply murder the Japanese Americans after they had been rounded up?)

1945: Harry S. Truman (Democratic Party) becomes the thirty-third president of the United States. 

1945: On August 6, US Government drops the first atomic bombs on a people, the Japanese—at Hiroshima, and at Nagasaki three days later (on August 9). It would inaugurate the nuclear age and a worldwide race to acquire this deadly weapon, in which apartheid South Africa would also be a participant. 

1945: On October 24, the United Nations is founded—following a conference in San Francisco from April 25 to June 26 to draft its charter—as a structural continuation of the League of Nations but with a different and expanded mission: to maintain international peace while at the same time promoting social and economic development of member nations. Among the representatives accorded prominence at the conference is the South African foreign minister Jan C. Smuts.  

1945: On November 14, commencement of a series of trials of a high-ranking Nazi military and other officials on charges of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” held before the International Military Tribunal that would last until 1949 in the city of Nuremberg, Germany. The trials came to be known as the “Nuremberg Trials” and they would help establish in international law, among other concepts, the concept of “crimes against humanity” (which would include juridical racism).

1946: On March 5, in a speech titled “Sinews of Peace” delivered at Westminster College (a private liberal arts college in Fulton, Missouri), which was honoring him with a degree, Winston Churchill helps to popularize the phrase “Iron Curtain,” with the words “[a] shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies.… From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.”  

1947: On March 12, as if on cue from the Churchill “Sinews of Peace” speech deliv-ered about a year earlier, President Harry S. Truman in an address before the joint session of Congress heralds the beginning of the cold war with his decision to support Greece and Turkey with military and other aid so that they would not succumb to “outside pressures” (read the Soviet Union). This policy decision that would come to be known as the “Truman Doctrine.”

1947: On August 15, India achieves formal independence from British colonial rule after a spirited nationalist struggle spearheaded by Mahatma (Mohandas Karamchand) Gandhi who had helped pioneer the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience--based in part on the Hindu religion and informed by such philosophical sources as Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau.

1947–1991: The period of the “cold war,” a low-level conflict between the United States and its allies and the former Soviet Union and its allies for global ideological and economic dominance—but involving very real and highly destructive proxy wars in many countries of the Afro-Asian and South American ecumene (including the Caribbean), which would consume the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians.  

1947: On October 23, W. E. B. Du Bois presents his report, written under the auspices of the NAACP, to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (via the mediation of the Soviet Union, as the U.S. delegation refuses to have anything to do with it), detailing the gross violations of the human rights of U.S. African Americans in the United States. The report is titled An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. 

1947: On October 29, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights that had been en-trusted by the Truman Administration to make a comprehensive investigation of the state of discrimination against racial minorities in the United States, releases its report To Secure These Rights. 

1948: On January 30, Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by a Hindu religious fanatic, Nathuram Godse. 

1948: On May 14, the establishment, with U.S. support, of the state of Israel (referred to by Palestinians as Al-Nakbah, the Catastrophe) with the demise of the former British Mandate of Palestine, a League of Nations entity, thereby inaugurating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that persists to the present day. 

1948: On December 10, the United Nations adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The United States is among the forty-eight who vote in favor of the adoption (none vote against), while South Africa is among the eight who ab-stain from voting. 

1950–1953: From June 1950 to July 1953: Period of the Korean War, in which China intervenes on the side of the North Koreans (Democratic People’s Republic of Ko-rea) who are also supported and supplied by the Soviet Union), and the United States and its allies fight on the side of South Korea (Republic of Korea). 

1950: The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded for the first time to a black person (defined here as anyone who is a descendant of peoples native to the PQD world). The recipient is U.S. African American Ralph Bunche, who is being honored for his mediation efforts in the 1948–1949 Israeli-Arab War.

1950: On September 23: The 81st U.S. Congress adopts Public Law no 831, popularly known as the McCarran Act (or the McCarran-Wood Act, after its sponsors Republican Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada and Democrat John S. Wood of Georgia, chair of the so-called House UnAmerican Activities Committee [HUAC]; or the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950) over the veto of President Harry S. Truman. The purpose of the Act was to stem and eliminate the alleged infiltration of the U.S. government by communists or communist sympathizers. The hysteria and the investigations that ensue as a result, followed by yet more hysteria and investigations under McCarthyism (1952–54) help to further bolster the ideology of the cold war in the U.S. 

1952–1954: The period of McCarthyism when Joseph R. McCarthy, a little known glory-seeking Republican senator from Wisconsin, took over the chairship of the Government Committee on Operations in the U.S. Senate and began a series of bogus investigative hearings into the alleged infiltration of the U.S. government by communists which soon took an aura of a national witch-hunt in which the lives and livelihood of hundreds of U.S. Americans (most were never communists) were disrupted.  

1953: Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican Party) becomes the thirty-fourth president of the United States. 

1953: On June 20, commencement of a bus boycott by U.S. African Americans—under the leadership of Reverend T. J. Jemison of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church—in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in support of the enforcement of a previously negotiated local ordinance that allowed for the occupation of seats reserved for whites by blacks if the seats were vacant (a protocol that would be the target of the more well-known Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955). The boycott succeeded and was called off a few days later, on June 24. 

1954: Unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case (347 U.S. 483 [1954]) that ends de jure racial segregation in schooling, and overturns the bogus doctrine of “separate but equal” that the Court had advanced in the 1896 Plessy case. 

1955–1956: On December 5, 1955, U.S. African Americans in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, launch under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., a bus boycott (the Montgomery Bus Boycott) against the city’s racially segregated buses following the arrest of Rosa Parks a few days earlier (on December 1) for refusing to cooperate with a segregation protocol on a bus.  

1957: Formation of the predominantly black church-based umbrella organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, under the leadership of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) to spearhead the emerging U.S. civil rights movement.  

1959: Leader of the U.S. civil rights movement, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., undertakes a five-week visit to India. The visit helps to acquaint him further with Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience. 

1959: On January 8, with the defeat of Fulgencio Batista’s army, the Cuban Revolution is born¬—with Fidel Castro installing himself the new leader of Cuba, a position he would not vacate until almost half a century later in 2008. 

1960: In June, the opening salvo of words is publicly fired at the congress of the Romanian Communist Party by the Chinese and the Russians at each other that would eventually lead to a formal rupturing of diplomatic relations between the two a couple of years or so thereafter, and which came to be known as the “Sino-Soviet Split.”

1961: John F. Kennedy (Democratic Party) becomes the thirty-fifth president of the United States. 

1961–1973: Beginning of a foolhardy large-scale U.S. involvement in the civil war in Vietnam that would come to be known as the Vietnam War, and in which the United States would fail to gain an upper hand. 

1963: On August 27, the U.S. African American intellectual, activist, and Pan-Africanist, W. E. B. Du Bois, passes away in Ghana where he had gone two years earlier to work on an Africana encyclopedia (a project dear to his heart) at the invitation of that country’s president, Kwame Nkrumah. He was the founding member of both the NAACP and its precursor, the Niagara Movement. 

1963: On August 28, the legendary March on Washington takes place organized by Civil Rights activists and at which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his now famous “I Have a Dream” oration. 

1963: Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson becomes the thirty-sixth president of the United States upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, in Dallas, Texas. 

1964: The prominent U.S. African American leader of the U.S. civil rights movement, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

1964: On July 2, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination based on color, national origin, race, religion, and sex.  

1965: On February 21, in New York City, U.S. African American nationalist Malcolm X (also known as Malcolm Little, or el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) is assassinated at the age of thirty-nine. 

1965: On August 6, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the Voting Rights Act that restores to U.S. African Americans and other minorities their suffrage rights. 

1966: India awards Martin Luther King, Jr., posthumously, the Nehru Award (Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding)—established in the pre-ceding year, with the Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant, its first recipient. 

1966: On June 17, at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, the Trinidadian-born and Howard University-trained Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), consciously or un-consciously drawing upon a tradition that went back to Marcus Garvey and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the AME, promulgates the rallying cry of “Black Power” (which a decade or so later would also serve to inspire young South African blacks). 

1966: In October, founding of the radical Black Panther Party by U.S. African Americans Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. 

1967: Ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia case (388 U.S. 1 [1967]) in which the court unanimously rules as unconstitutional any law that proscribed interracial marriages in the United States. The plaintiffs were Mildred Jeter (a U.S. African American) and Richard Perry Loving (a Euro-American) and the defendant was the state of Virginia.

1967: On June 5, commencement of the Six-Day War (also known variously as an-Naksah, the Third Arab-Israeli War, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, etc.) with a preemptive strike by Israel on the Egyptian air force. By the conclusion of the war on June 10, the Israelis are now in control of eastern Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 

1968: On April 4, in Memphis (Tennessee), Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated at the age of thirty-nine. 

1968: On June 6, in Los Angeles, California, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy (brother of President John F. Kennedy) is assassinated.  

1968: Two U.S. Athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, give a black power salute (in protest at the awful state of civil rights for U.S. racial minorities) while receiving their medals at the 1968 Olympics Games in Mexico City that electrifies both the right and the left across the United States, and the world. 

1969: Richard M. Nixon (Republican Party) becomes the thirty-seventh president of the United States. 

1972: Shirley Chisholm becomes the first U.S. African American to run for the presidency of the United States; though unsuccessful she manages to garner 10% of the vote at the Democratic National Convention. She was also the first U.S. African American woman to be voted to Congress (representing from 1969 to 1982 the 12th district of New York). 

1972: From February 21 to February 28, President Richard Nixon visits Communist China, the first U.S. president ever to do so, marking the beginning of the U.S./China détente between these two one-time arch foes (recall the Korean War, for example).

1973: On January 27, the combatants in the Vietnam War, including the United States, would sign a peace agreement in Paris; two months later, on March 29, 1973, the last unit of U.S. troops would leave Vietnam.  

1973: On October 6, commencement of the October War between Israel and Egypt (together with a number of Arab allies) with a surprise joint attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria. The war, also known as the Yom Kippur War, would officially end on October 26 with Israel emerging, once again, as the victor (as on other occasions, superior U.S.-supplied weaponry and intelligence would prove decisive). 

1974: Gerald R. Ford (Republican Party) becomes the thirty-eighth president of the United States upon the resignation of Richard M. Nixon on August 8 amidst a political scandal that has come to be known as the “Watergate Scandal.” 

1974: The Supreme Court decides the Milliken v. Bradley case; its decision begins the process of reversing the intent of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case to desegregate public schooling, by stating that the creation of segregated school districts was legal so long as the intent was not deliberate segregation. The decision reflected the ongoing process of Euro-American flight from inner cities to what were effectively white suburbs, in part to escape school integration efforts in the cities.

1976: On December 16, President-elect Jimmy Carter selects Andrew Young to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; following Congressional confirmation Young becomes the first U.S. African American to ever hold such a position. 

1977: In January, Jimmy Carter (Democratic Party) becomes the thirty-ninth president of the United States. 

1977: The Supreme Court, in its Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. decision sides with the village in preventing the construction of an apartment complex in an area zoned for single-family houses that would have allowed families of different races/ethnicities to move in. The Court based its decision on the argument that an intention to racially discriminate had not been proven in the decision to maintain the zoning. 

1978: The Supreme Court, in its decision in the University of California Regents v. Bakke sides with the Euro-American plaintiff Alan P. Bakke that he was a victim of an affirmative action policy aimed at encouraging the enrollment of historically discriminated applicants. (In other words, Bakke argued that he was a victim of something called “reverse discrimination” and the Court tragically agreed with him, even though reverse discrimination can only apply in circumstances where there is at least relative equality of power among those involved.)

1981: Ronald Reagan (Republican Party) becomes the fortieth president of the United States. 

1982: On June 6, Israel inaugurates the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese War that would eventually consume scores of thousands of civilian lives (perhaps totaling a mil-lion) by invading, with the blessing and support of the Reagan Administration, southern Lebanon with the aim of driving the Palestine Liberation Organization out.  Among the outcomes of the war would be the rise of the Iranian-supported Lebanese paramilitary organization the Hezbollah in the effort to end the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (accomplished in 2000). 

1987: In McCleskey v. Kemp decision the Supreme Court rules that in the absence of proof of intention to discriminate, demonstration by means of bona fide research that there was a severe racial bias (against racial minorities) in who got the death-penalty in murder cases was irrelevant! (Obviously, the Court in its eternal wisdom failed to recognize that those who engage in racial discrimination of any kind, overtly or subconsciously, do not always announce their intention to discriminate. The Court, however, would recognize this fact in a different case, involving residential segregation, in its 2015 Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. decision—not surprisingly, among the dissenting Justices was Clarence Thomas.)  

1984: Reverend Jesse Jackson becomes only the second U.S. African American to ever run for the presidency of United States (and he would do so again in 1988). In the course of this effort he draws attention to the issue of apartheid in South Africa as an important U.S. foreign policy concern. 

1988: The Supreme Court in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio sides with the packing company stating that the company was not guilty of discriminating against minority workers (in this instance mainly Alaskan Native Americans) because it was not intentional; it’s how the labor market worked. 

1988: The decision in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union case is issued by the Supreme Court in favor of the employer, the credit union, whom the petitioner, Brenda Patterson, had accused of racial harassment, lack of promotion, and eventually her firing from her job. The Court’s outrageous reasoning was that even if an employer engages in discriminatory conduct there is no remedy for it under existing law because an employee could choose to terminate her employment and find a job elsewhere.  

1989: George Bush, Sr. (Republican Party) becomes the forty-first president of the United States. 

1989: From April 15 to June 4: The period of the peaceful Tienanmen Square pro-tests by students against the totalitarianism and corruption of the communist party-led Chinese government that morphs into a brutal suppression of the pro-tests (the Tienanmen Square Massacre, also known as the June Fourth Incident) by the Chinese leaders involving the massacre of tens of hundreds of protesters and the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of many more in subsequent days and months. All Chinese foreign students studying in United States are granted temporary permits to remain in United States on completion of their studies. 

1989: In the City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. the Supreme Court’s decision overturns the city’s affirmative action policy of attempting to increase the representation of businesses owned by racial minorities within the total universe of businesses awarded contracts by the city (over fifty percent of whose population comprised African Americans) by setting aside a percentage of the awards for that purpose. Its spurious reasoning was that “To accept Richmond's claim that past societal discrimination alone can serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to open the door to competing claims for "remedial relief" for every dis-advantaged group. The dream of a Nation of equal citizens in a society where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.” In other words, the Court recycled the myth of building a colorblind society by ignoring race in a circumstance where affirmative action for Euro-Americans has always been (and continues to be) the rule ever since European colonial settlement began in United States.

1989–1990: On November 9, 1989, the East German Communist government effectively “dismantles”the Berlin Wall that it had put up in 1961 to prevent East Germans from defecting to West Germany, by allowing East Germans who wished, to travel to West Germany; it also opened all border points.  

1990: On August 2, the commencement of the First Gulf War (also known as the Persian Gulf War) in which the United States (armed with a U.N. mandate) leads a group of allies on a mission to roll back Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait a week earlier. 

1991: On January 16–17, the U.S. led international offensive commences against Iraq to force it to relinquish its annexation on August 8, 1990 of Kuwait (the latter had invaded the country on August 2, amidst worldwide condemnation). That offensive which culminated in Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait by late February (the U.S. declared a ceasefire on February 28), has come to be known as the First Persian Gulf War. 

1992: Carol Moseley Braun is elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming in the process the first and only U.S. African American woman senator in the history of the U.S. congress to date (she represented, as a Democrat, the State of Illinois from 1993–99). She would also attempt an unsuccessful run for the U.S. presidency in the elections of 2004. 

1993: In January, Bill Clinton (Democratic Party) becomes the forty-second president of the United States. 

1993: On August 20, the Oslo Accords (Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements) are finalized and ratified a month later—in Washington, D.C. on September 13—by the two principal parties, Israel and the Pales-tine Liberation Organization (PLO), which were supposed to serve as a road map to permanent peace between the belligerents.

2001: George W. Bush (Republican Party) becomes the forty-third president of the United States. 

2001: From August 31 to September 7, South Africa is host to the U.N.-sponsored “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance,” held in the city of Durban. The Conference was mandated by the U.N. General Assembly on December 12, 1997 (resolution 52/111). Although the United States is a participant in the conference, it withdraws from the conference on Monday, September 3 (together with Israel) in anger over language in the conference relating to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that it erroneously interprets as delegitimating the state of Israel. 

2001: On September 11, four large domestic airline passenger planes bound for the West Coast are hijacked from airports on the East Coast by suicidal terrorists and used as missiles against targets in New York (the World Trade Center), and Washington, D. C. (the Pentagon). One of them however, as a result of passenger interventions, does not make it to its intended target; it crashes instead in a field in Pennsylvania. (The events together have come to be known as “9/11” and it would inaugurate the era of the so-called “war on terror”)

2002: On July 1, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court comes into force establishing a long awaited and welcome milestone in international law, a permanent court to prosecute the scums and thugs of the world for their crimes against humanity.  

2003: On March 20, the Bush-Cheney Administration (together with U.K.’s Tony Blair and his Labor government, but in opposition to much of the rest of the world), launch the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq—on the basis of fabricated evidence that Iraq had nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, coupled with a masterful orchestration of jingoism and politics of fear among their publics—thereby setting in motion the ongoing Iraq War (or the Second Gulf War as it is also known).  

2004: In late April, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal becomes public where symptomatic of a deliberate Bush-Cheney Administration policy of condoning torture—in contravention of not only human decency, but both international and U.S. laws—Iraqi prisoners at the notorious Saddam-Hussein-era Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were systematically murdered, tortured, and sexually exploited by their U.S. captors. To date, no one has been indicted or convicted for the murders that took place there, neither has any high-level U.S. official been brought to ac-count (for the full story see, for example, Gourevitch and Morris [2008]; and visit www.salon. com). 

2005: In January, President George W. Bush begins his second term after being re-elected in the 2004 presidential election. 

2005: On January 26, Condoleezza Rice replaces Colin Powell as U.S. Secretary of State; she is the first U.S. African American woman to hold such a high-ranking office in the U.S. government. Prior to this appointment she was from January 2001 the National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush.

2005: The U.S. Senate issues an apology for not passing anti-lynching laws (e.g. the 1922 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill) when it had the opportunity to do so in the 1920s and 30s (however, quite a few of the conservatives were unwilling to avail themselves of even this most modest of opportunities decades later, after all, words are cheap, to indicate their abhorrence of racism). 

2006: Supreme Court rules in the combined cases of Parents Involved in Commu-nity Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education in support of Euro-American conservative opposition to vol-untary (repeat, voluntary) school desegregation/integration initiatives in public schools. 

2008: In January, the English translation of Fidel Castro’s definitive autobiog-raphy (Castro 2007) is published in the United States; it is generally ignored by the U.S. media. 

2008: The United Nations celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of its adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sadly, the full intent of the Declara-tion remains unfulfilled across the planet; in fact, on the contrary, under the leadership of the West (most especially the United States) there is an effort to propagate an illusory and highly dangerous notion: that the flagrant and massive violation of the human rights of others can be the basis for the protection of the human rights of one’s own citizens. 

2008: On February 19, Fidel Castro, who had overseen Cuba’s involvement in the liberation struggle in southern Africa and other conflicts elsewhere on the African continent—and who has survived the administrations of ten different U.S. presi-dents (from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, Jr.) despite several attempts by the CIA to assassinate him—announces that after almost a half a century at the helm he is stepping down as president and commander-in-chief, effective February 24, on grounds of poor health. He is replaced by his brother Raúl.  

2008: On March 8, even in its waning days, the Bush-Cheney Administration, harking to the moral bankruptcy of many of its policies, is adamant in continuing to propel the United States onto the international forefront of legitimating the use of torture; it (in the person of George W. Bush, Jr.) vetoes an intelligence au-thorization bill passed by the U.S. Congress that among its provisions would have prevented the CIA from resorting to torture among its arsenal of interrogation techniques.  

2008: This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel (referred to by Palestinians as Al-Nakbah [the Catastrophe]). And one of the tragic ironies of this anniversary is that just as a U.S. African American, Nobel Laureate Ralph Bunche, had played a prominent role in efforts to mediate peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict decades ago, so today another prominent U.S. African American, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is attempting (but with less integrity some have charged) to broker a peace settlement in this as yet unresolved—thanks to the independent but destructive nefarious agendas of a powerful extreme right wing minority in Israel, Palestine, and the United States—world-reverberating life-and-treasure-wasting conflict, in which South Africa as a member of the United Nations also has a stake. 

2008: In September, the beginning of a worldwide economic recession that has its roots in the U.S. housing market against a backdrop of unbridled capitalist greed and, to some extent, corrupt practices in the financial markets. (As of this writing the recession is yet to play out in full.) 

2008: In November, the election to the presidency of United States of the first U.S. African American, Barack H. Obama.