On May 17th, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional.

The excerpted words were delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his famous "I have a dream" speech.

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment established that the voting age should be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. The movement to lower the voting age grew out of student activism during the Vietnam War. Many students, along with many people aged younger than twenty-one, were being drafted to fight in the war, and the slogan “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” caught on across the country. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was passed by overwhelming majority in the Senate, the House, and a vote of the States and adopted on July 1^st, 1971. 

The Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961, to head to New Orleans on Greyhound and Trailways buses. The Freedom Riders were made up of both black and white activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Director James Farmer, seeking to integrate interstate bus lines throughout the South. The Supreme Court had ruled, in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), that racial segregation was illegal on interstate bus lines, but the order was widely ignored throughout the South. In Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, both the Ku Klux Klan and police forces attacked the bus, while many Freedom Riders were arrested and sent to prison in Mississippi. The Kennedy Administration notably refused to involve itself either on behalf of the Freedom Riders or the local police. The action of the Freedom Riders brought national attention to segregation policies and the brutality of Southern police forces, initiating widespread change in service throughout the South.

The term "Muckraker" is used to refer to a series of progressively-minded investigative journalists and authors at the turn of the twentieth century. They focused on exposing social and economic injustices, with the intent to affect change in the government policy of the United States. Upton Sinclair wrote his famous book, The Jungle, in 1906. In it he exposed the illicit practices of the meatpacking industry, in both Chicago and the rest of the country. His work caused a public outcry, and he is generally credited with inspiring the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drug Acts through Congress. Sinclair was also an early American socialist.

A speakeasy is an establishment illegally set up to supply alcohol. Speakeasies were particularly influential in American society during the prohibition years, where they served as the only place in America one could go to drink.

Loving v. Virginia was brought before the Supreme Court in 1967. The Lovings were a married couple, one black and one white, who lived in the state of Virginia and were imprisoned for violating the state’s laws against interracial marriage. In a unanimous verdict, the Court ruled that such laws were inherently unequal and unconstitutional. The case overturned the Pace v. Alabama ruling—which had stated, in 1883, that interracial marriage was not protected under the Constitution. 

Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants who worked as fishmongers in the Boston area in the 1910s and 1920s, who were arrested, tried and convicted for a murder during an armed robbery of a shoe factory in Braintree, MA.

The police investigating the crime began to focus on the Italian immigrant community, particularly the anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani. Sacco and Vanzetti, while having no criminal background, were well known Galleanisti, and were convicted quickly of the crime and sentenced to be executed. A controversy quickly arose about the manner of their trial and conviction, and they became a cause celebre around the country. Despite this, both men were executed on August 23, 1927.

The "Baby Boomers" were the product of the conditions of America in the years immediately after World War II. Many young people had delayed marriage due to the War, and laws like the GI Bill helped many people start careers and families. Between 1946 and 1964, the birth rate grew exponentially. This "Baby Boom" generation helped foment Second Wave Feminisim, the 1960s Counterculture, and the anti-Vietnam movements. 

The Twenty-First Amendment, passed in Congress on February 20, 1933 and ratified by the states on December 5, 1933, served just one function: to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment that enacted Prohibition. Over the 24 years Prohibition had been in effect, it had been a disaster. Alcohol was still pervasive in the country, and its illegal status had merely encouraged a spread in criminal activity producing it. By Franklin Roosevelt's election, the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment seemed inevitable.