Before he became President, Reagan set the tone for relations with the Soviet Union by labeling the USSR an "evil empire." Around the world, communism seemed to be spreading. Soviet troops were in Afghanistan. Nicaragua was led by a Soviet-backed Sandinista government. Communist guerillas threatened to take over in neighboring El Salvador. Cuban-backed troops waged a successful insurgency in Angola. The age of détente was over.

Americans enjoyed many fundamental changes in their standard of living in the 1980s. One major transformation was the new, expanded role of television. Cable television, although available in the 1970s, became standard for most American households. This change ushered in a whole host of new programming. Personal computers and VCRs also opened doors for many Americans. The 80s also saw the hedonism of the seventies give way to caution in the face of AIDS and the crack cocaine epidemic.

The unraveling of the Soviet Bloc began in Poland in June 1989. Despite previous Soviet military interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland itself, Polish voters elected a noncommunist opposition government to their legislature. The world watched with anxious eyes, expecting Soviet tanks to roll into Poland preventing the new government from taking power.

Virginia was the first successful southern colony. While Puritan zeal was fueling New England's mercantile development, and Penn's Quaker experiment was turning the middle colonies into America's bread basket, the South was turning to cash crops. Geography and motive rendered the development of these colonies distinct from those that lay to the North.

New England was not the only destination sought by those fleeing religious persecution. In 1632, Cecelius Calvert, known as Lord Baltimore, was granted possession of all land lying between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. Lord Baltimore saw this as an opportunity to grant religious freedom to the Catholics who remained in Anglican England. Although outright violence was more a part of the 1500s than the 1600s, Catholics were still a persecuted minority in the seventeenth century. For example, Catholics were not even permitted to be legally married by a Catholic priest. Baltimore thought that his New World possession could serve as a refuge. At the same time, he hoped to turn a financial profit from the venture.

The growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America. Without the aid of modern machinery, human sweat and blood was necessary for the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of these cash crops. While slaves existed in the English colonies throughout the 1600s, indentured servitude was the method of choice employed by many planters before the 1680s. This system provided incentives for both the master and servant to increase the working population of the Chesapeake colonies.

While wayward English migrants worked to build the new American colonies, mother England experienced the greatest turmoil in her history in the middle of the 1600s. The Stuart King, Charles I, was beheaded as the result of a civil war in 1649. A dictatorship led by Oliver Cromwell ruled England until 1660. This represented the only break in the hereditary line dating from 1066 until the present day. Cromwell was a brutal leader, so the return of the English monarchy was well received by the public. This disruption caused a temporary distraction from colonizing the New World. When Charles II assumed the throne, it was business as usual. The colonies that were created under his rule were known as Restoration colonies. It was in this environment that the Carolinas were created.

The development of Georgia was unlike all the other British colonies. First of all, it was the last to be created. Georgia was founded in 1733, 126 years after Jamestown was successfully planted. England and Europe as a whole were in the midst of an intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment. Enlightened thinkers championed the causes of liberty and progress. Many believed in the innate goodness of human beings. They asserted that even the worst elements of society might prosper if given the right set of circumstances. James Oglethorpe was such a thinker. He and a group of charitable investors asked King George for permission to create a utopian experiment for English citizens imprisoned for debt. England's prison population could be decreased, and thousands of individuals could be given a new chance at life. With these lofty goals, Georgia was created.

Plantation life created a society with clear class divisions. A lucky few were at the top, with land holdings as far as the eyes could see. Most Southerners did not experience this degree of wealth. The contrast between rich and poor was greater in the South than in the other English colonies, because of the labor system necessary for its survival. Most Southerners were yeoman farmers, indentured servants, or slaves. The plantation system also created changes for women and family structures as well.

The last decade of the 20th century was marked with dizzying change for the United States. With the Soviet Union out of the picture, American diplomats sought to create a "new world order" based on democracy, free-market capitalism and the Western lifestyle.

The first major foreign crisis for the United States after the end of the Cold War presented itself in August 1990. Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, ordered his army across the border into tiny Kuwait. This was no ordinary act of aggression.

Describes the presidential elections of 1992, outlining the campaigns of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and H. Ross Perot.

As the year 2000 approached, partisan politics were as toxic as ever. Republicans claimed that they fixed the economy and Clinton got the credit. Regardless of who gets the credit or blame, the 1990s were a decade of very steady economic growth. The crippling budget deficits of the 1980s were finally brought under control, and Americans enjoyed low inflation, low unemployment, low interest rates and a booming stock market. Even the bad blood between the two parties could not change that.

Some have begun to call it the Information Revolution. Technological changes brought dramatic new options to Americans living in the 1990s. From the beginning of the decade until the end, new forms of entertainment, commerce, research, work, and communication became commonplace in the United States. The driving force behind much of this change was an innovation popularly known as the Internet.

Will the 21st century also be an American century? Or will the United States be eclipsed by new superpowers like China or the European Union? Only time will reveal the answers.

Even before the Mayflower touched ground off Cape Cod, African Americans were living in British North America. Although slavery itself was not foreign to West Africans, the brutal nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the nature of colonial slavery was without parallel in African history. Millions of people deemed savages by their new "masters" were uprooted from their ways of life and forced to adopt new ones. Europeans and even some Africans would participate in the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the New World. African slave traders would ruthlessly bring their captives from the interior of the continent where they would await the business transaction that would take them thousands of miles from their homeland.

Powerful kingdoms, beautiful sculpture, complex trade, tremendous wealth, centers for advanced learning — all are hallmarks of African civilization on the eve of the age of exploration. Hardly living up to the "dark continent" label given by European adventurers, Africa's cultural heritage runs deep. The empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay are some of the greatest the world has ever known. Timbuktu, arguably the world's oldest university, was the intellectual center of its age.

Some will die of disease, some of starvation, and some simply of despair. This was the fate of millions of West Africans across three and a half centuries of the slave trade on the voyage known as the "middle passage."

Africans were the immigrants to the British New World that had no choice in their destinations or destinies. The first African Americans that arrived in Jamestown in 1619 on a Dutch trading ship were not slaves, nor were they free. They served time as indentured servants until their obligations were complete. Although these lucky individuals lived out the remainder of their lives as free men, the passing decades would make this a rarity. Despite the complete lack of a slave tradition in mother England, slavery gradually replaced indentured servitude as the chief means for plantation labor in the Old South.

What was it like to live in bondage? The experiences of slaves in captivity varied greatly. Indeed, Puritan merchants and Southern planters have as much in common as their slaves. The type of life slaves could expect to live depended first and foremost on whether they lived on farms or in towns.