Executive Order 9981 was issued by President Harry S. Truman on July 26, 1948 and ordered the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces. The order established the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, which was responsible for ensuring that all members…
On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, creating the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. The order mandated the desegregation of the U.S. military.
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">The “conversion” of Arthur Vandenberg, told by a former Secretary of State, his sometime adversary but also his friend</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> United States policy, Henry Wallace said in his spirited challenge to Truman and Dewey in 1948, should be</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The behind-the-scenes struggle in 1948 between the President and the State Department</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The ex-Presidency now carries perquisites and powers that would have amazed all but the last few who have held that office</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">His newly discovered diary reveals how the President saw the conference that ushered in the Cold War</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Harry Truman’s lifetime correspondence with his adored Bess opens a window on their time</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> A noted historian argues that television, a relative newcomer, has nearly destroyed old—and valuable—political traditions</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> When the President fired the general, civilian control of the military faced its severest test in our history</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="body"><span class="body"><span class="pullquote even">A child of the South's "Lost Cause," Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national government for the first time since Reconstruction. In so doing, he changed the nation forever.</span></span></span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Thus did Franklin Roosevelt characterize the man who was to be his running mate in 1944 and, as everyone at the astonishing Democratic Convention knew, almost certainly the next president. Here is FDR at his most devious, Harry Truman at the pivot of his career, and the old party-boss system at its zenith.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult, and there were plenty of shadows, along with the sunshine.</span></p>
<p><span class="body"><span class="body">Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command that simply was not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later.</span></span></p>
<p><span class="deck">An overheard remark sent the author off on a years-long quest to discover the truth about a man whose power to inspire both rage and reverence has only grown after his death.</span></p>
<p><span class="body">American self-interest was involved, of course, but the Marshall Plan remains what some have referred to as a rare example of “power used to its best end.”</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">David McCullough explains why he thinks that history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">It was a town where the trails started and the buck stopped. Home to a president and an outlaw, it made room for both.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The Korean War erupted 50 years ago this June. Many Americans still believe that it began in debacle (which is true) and ended in a humiliating compromise that changed nothing (which is not).</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Fifty years ago in the frozen mountains of Korea, the Marines endured a campaign as grueling and heroic as any in history.</span></p>
