World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global conflict that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries, including all of the great powers, fought as part of two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. Many participants threw their economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind this total war, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and the delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in an estimated 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, massacres, and disease. In the wake of Axis defeat, Germany, Austria and Japan were occupied, and war crimes tribunals were conducted against German and Japanese leaders.

The causes of World War II are debated, but contributing factors included the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Soviet–Japanese border conflicts, the rise of fascism in Europe, and European tensions in the aftermath of World War I. World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. The United Kingdom and France subsequently declared war on Germany on 3 September. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland and marked out their "spheres of influence" across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, in a military alliance with Italy, Japan and other countries called the Axis. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, and the fall of France in mid-1940, the war continued primarily between the European Axis powers and the British Empire, with war in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz of the United Kingdom, and the Battle of the Atlantic. On 22 June 1941, Germany led the European Axis powers in an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front, the largest land theatre of war in history.

Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with the Republic of China by 1937. In December 1941, Japan attacked American and British territories with near-simultaneous offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific, including an attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor which resulted in the United States and United Kingdom declaring war against Japan. The European Axis powers declared war on the United States in solidarity. Japan soon conquered much of the western Pacific, but its advances were halted in 1942 after losing the critical Battle of Midway; later, Germany and Italy were defeated in North Africa and at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. Key setbacks in 1943—including a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Allied offensives in the Pacific—cost the Axis powers their initiative and forced them into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and pushed Germany and its allies back. During 1944 and 1945, Japan suffered reversals in mainland Asia, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key western Pacific islands. The war in Europe concluded with the liberation of German-occupied territories and the invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the Fall of Berlin to Soviet troops, Hitler's suicide, and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. Following the refusal of Japan to surrender on the terms of the Potsdam Declaration (issued 26 July 1945), the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August. Faced with an imminent invasion of the Japanese archipelago, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, and the Soviet Union's declared entry into the war against Japan on the eve of invading Manchuria, Japan announced on 10 August its intention to surrender, signing a surrender document on 2 September 1945.

World War II changed the political alignment and social structure of the globe and set the foundation for the international order of the world's nations for the rest of the 20th century and into the present day. The United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts, with the victorious great powers—China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—becoming the permanent members of its Security Council. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century-long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia. Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery and expansion. Political and economic integration, especially in Europe, began as an effort to forestall future hostilities, end pre-war enmities, and forge a sense of common identity.

Start and end dates

See also: List of timelines of World War II

Timelines of World War II

Chronological

Prelude

(in Asiain Europe)

1939194019411942

194319441945 onwards

By topic

Diplomacy

Declarations of war

EngagementsOperations

Battle of Europe air operations

Eastern FrontManhattan Project

United Kingdom home front

Surrender of the Axis armies

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It is generally considered that, in Europe, World War II started on 1 September 1939,[1][2] beginning with the German invasion of Poland and the United Kingdom and France's declaration of war on Germany two days later on 3 September 1939. Dates for the beginning of the Pacific War include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937,[3][4] or the earlier Japanese invasion of Manchuria, on 19 September 1931.[5][6] Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously, and the two wars became World War II in 1941.[7] Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935.[8] The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939.[9] Others view the Spanish Civil War as the start or prelude to World War II.[10][11]

The exact date of the war's end is also not universally agreed upon. It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 15 August 1945 (V-J Day), rather than with the formal surrender of Japan on 2 September 1945, which officially ended the war in Asia. A peace treaty between Japan and the Allies was signed in 1951.[12] A 1990 treaty regarding Germany's future allowed the reunification of East and West Germany to take place and resolved most post–World War II issues.[13] No formal peace treaty between Japan and the Soviet Union was ever signed,[14] although the state of war between the two countries was terminated by the Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956, which also restored full diplomatic relations between them.[15]

History

Background

Main article: Causes of World War II

Aftermath of World War I

World War I had radically altered the political European map with the defeat of the Central Powers—including Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire—and the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which led to the founding of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the victorious Allies of World War I, such as France, Belgium, Italy, Romania, and Greece, gained territory, and new nation-states were created out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman and Russian Empires.

The League of Nations assembly, held in Geneva, Switzerland, 1930

To prevent a future world war, the League of Nations was created during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The organisation's primary goals were to prevent armed conflict through collective security, military and naval disarmament, and settling international disputes through peaceful negotiations and arbitration.[16]

Despite strong pacifist sentiment after World War I,[17] irredentist and revanchist nationalism emerged in several European states in the same period. These sentiments were especially marked in Germany because of the significant territorial, colonial, and financial losses imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Under the treaty, Germany lost around 13 percent of its home territory and all its overseas possessions, while German annexation of other states was prohibited, reparations were imposed, and limits were placed on the size and capability of the country's armed forces.[18]

Germany

The German Empire was dissolved in the German Revolution of 1918–1919, and a democratic government, later known as the Weimar Republic, was created. The interwar period saw strife between supporters of the new republic and hardline opponents on both the right and left. Italy, as an Entente ally, had made some post-war territorial gains; however, Italian nationalists were angered that the promises made by the United Kingdom and France to secure Italian entrance into the war were not fulfilled in the peace settlement. From 1922 to 1925, the Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy with a nationalist, totalitarian, and class collaborationist agenda that abolished representative democracy, repressed socialist, left-wing and liberal forces, and pursued an aggressive expansionist foreign policy aimed at making Italy a world power, and promising the creation of a "New Roman Empire".[19]

Adolf Hitler at a German Nazi political rally in Nuremberg, August 1933

Adolf Hitler, after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government in 1923, eventually became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933 when Paul Von Hindenburg and the Reichstag appointed him. Following Hindenburg's death in 1934, Hitler proclaimed himself Führer of Germany and abolished democracy, espousing a radical, racially motivated revision of the world order, and soon began a massive rearmament campaign.[20] Meanwhile, France, to secure its alliance, allowed Italy a free hand in Ethiopia, which Italy desired as a colonial possession. The situation was aggravated in early 1935 when the Territory of the Saar Basin was legally reunited with Germany, and Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, accelerated his rearmament programme, and introduced conscription.[21]

European treaties

The United Kingdom, France and Italy formed the Stresa Front in April 1935 in order to contain Germany, a key step towards military globalisation; however, that June, the United Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany, easing prior restrictions. The Soviet Union, concerned by Germany's goals of capturing vast areas of Eastern Europe, drafted a treaty of mutual assistance with France. Before taking effect, though, the Franco-Soviet pact was required to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations, which rendered it essentially toothless.[22] The United States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August of the same year.[23]

Hitler defied the Versailles and Locarno Treaties by remilitarising the Rhineland in March 1936, encountering little opposition due to the policy of appeasement.[24] In October 1936, Germany and Italy formed the Rome–Berlin Axis. A month later, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy joined the following year.[25]

Asia

The Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese Communist Party allies[26] and new regional warlords. In 1931, an increasingly militaristic Empire of Japan, which had long sought influence in China[27] as the first step of what its government saw as the country's right to rule Asia, staged the Mukden Incident as a pretext to invade Manchuria and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo.[28]

China appealed to the League of Nations to stop the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Japan withdrew from the League of Nations after being condemned for its incursion into Manchuria. The two nations then fought several battles, in Shanghai, Rehe and Hebei, until the Tanggu Truce was signed in 1933. Thereafter, Chinese volunteer forces continued the resistance to Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and Chahar and Suiyuan.[29] After the 1936 Xi'an Incident, the Kuomintang and communist forces agreed on a ceasefire to present a united front to oppose Japan.[30]

Pre-war events

Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935)

Main article: Second Italo-Ethiopian War

Benito Mussolini inspecting troops during the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was a brief colonial war that began in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war began with the invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia) by the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy (Regno d'Italia), which was launched from Italian Somaliland and Eritrea.[31] The war resulted in the military occupation of Ethiopia and its annexation into the newly created colony of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI); in addition it exposed the weakness of the League of Nations as a force to preserve peace. Both Italy and Ethiopia were member nations, but the League did little when the former clearly violated Article X of the League's Covenant.[32] The United Kingdom and France supported imposing sanctions on Italy for the invasion, but the sanctions were not fully enforced and failed to end the Italian invasion.[33] Italy subsequently dropped its objections to Germany's goal of absorbing Austria.[34]

Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

Main article: Spanish Civil War

The bombing of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, sparked fears abroad in Europe that the next war would be based on bombing of cities with very high civilian casualties.

When civil war broke out in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini lent military support to the Nationalist rebels, led by General Francisco Franco. Italy supported the Nationalists to a greater extent than the Nazis did: altogether Mussolini sent to Spain more than 70,000 ground troops and 6,000 aviation personnel, as well as about 720 aircraft.[35] The Soviet Union supported the existing government of the Spanish Republic. More than 30,000 foreign volunteers, known as the International Brigades, also fought against the Nationalists. Both Germany and the Soviet Union used this proxy war as an opportunity to test in combat their most advanced weapons and tactics. The Nationalists won the civil war in April 1939; Franco, now dictator, remained officially neutral during World War II but generally favoured the Axis.[36] His greatest collaboration with Germany was the sending of volunteers to fight on the Eastern Front.[37]

Japanese invasion of China (1937)

Main article: Second Sino-Japanese War

Japanese Imperial Army soldiers during the Battle of Shanghai, 1937

In July 1937, Japan captured the former Chinese imperial capital of Peking after instigating the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which culminated in the Japanese campaign to invade all of China.[38] The Soviets quickly signed a non-aggression pact with China to lend materiel support, effectively ending China's prior co-operation with Germany. From September to November, the Japanese attacked Taiyuan, engaged the Kuomintang Army around Xinkou,[39][unreliable source?] and fought Communist forces in Pingxingguan.[40][41] Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deployed his best army to defend Shanghai, but after three months of fighting, Shanghai fell. The Japanese continued to push the Chinese forces back, capturing the capital Nanking in December 1937. After the fall of Nanking, tens or hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by the Japanese.[42][43]

In March 1938, Nationalist Chinese forces won their first major victory at Taierzhuang, but then the city of Xuzhou was taken by the Japanese in May.[44][unreliable source?] In June 1938, Chinese forces stalled the Japanese advance by flooding the Yellow River; this manoeuvre bought time for the Chinese to prepare their defences at Wuhan, but the city was taken by October.[45] Japanese military victories did not bring about the collapse of Chinese resistance that Japan had hoped to achieve; instead, the Chinese government relocated inland to Chongqing and continued the war.[46][47]

Soviet–Japanese border conflicts

Main article: Soviet–Japanese border conflicts

Red Army artillery unit during the Battle of Lake Khasan, 1938

In the mid-to-late 1930s, Japanese forces in Manchukuo had sporadic border clashes with the Soviet Union and Mongolia. The Japanese doctrine of Hokushin-ron, which emphasised Japan's expansion northward, was favoured by the Imperial Army during this time. With the Japanese defeat at Khalkin Gol in 1939, the ongoing Second Sino-Japanese War[48] and ally Nazi Germany pursuing neutrality with the Soviets, this policy would prove difficult to maintain. Japan and the Soviet Union eventually signed a Neutrality Pact in April 1941, and Japan adopted the doctrine of Nanshin-ron, promoted by the Navy, which took its focus southward, eventually leading to its war with the United States and the Western Allies.[49][50]

European occupations and agreements

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured just before signing the Munich Agreement, 29 September 1938

In Europe, Germany and Italy were becoming more aggressive. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, again provoking little response from other European powers.[51] Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German claims on the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population. Soon the United Kingdom and France followed the appeasement policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and conceded this territory to Germany in the Munich Agreement, which was made against the wishes of the Czechoslovak government, in exchange for a promise of no further territorial demands.[52] Soon afterwards, Germany and Italy forced Czechoslovakia to cede additional territory to Hungary, and Poland annexed the Trans-Olza region of Czechoslovakia.[53]

Although all of Germany's stated demands had been satisfied by the agreement, privately Hitler was furious that British interference had prevented him from seizing all of Czechoslovakia in one operation. In subsequent speeches Hitler attacked British and Jewish "war-mongers" and in January 1939 secretly ordered a major build-up of the German navy to challenge British naval supremacy. In March 1939, Germany invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a pro-German client state, the Slovak Republic.[54] Hitler also delivered an ultimatum to Lithuania on 20 March 1939, forcing the concession of the Klaipėda Region, formerly the German Memelland.[55]

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (right) and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, after signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939

Greatly alarmed and with Hitler making further demands on the Free City of Danzig, the United Kingdom and France guaranteed their support for Polish independence; when Italy conquered Albania in April 1939, the same guarantee was extended to the Kingdoms of Romania and Greece.[56] Shortly after the Franco-British pledge to Poland, Germany and Italy formalised their own alliance with the Pact of Steel.[57] Hitler accused the United Kingdom and Poland of trying to "encircle" Germany and renounced the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact.[58]

The situation reached a general crisis in late August as German troops continued to mobilise against the Polish border. On 23 August, when tripartite negotiations about a military alliance between France, the United Kingdom and Soviet Union stalled,[59] the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany.[60] This pact had a secret protocol that defined German and Soviet "spheres of influence" (western Poland and Lithuania for Germany; eastern Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia for the Soviet Union), and raised the question of continuing Polish independence.[61] The pact neutralised the possibility of Soviet opposition to a campaign against Poland and assured that Germany would not have to face the prospect of a two-front war, as it had in World War I. Immediately after that, Hitler ordered the attack to proceed on 26 August, but upon hearing that the United Kingdom had concluded a formal mutual assistance pact with Poland and that Italy would maintain neutrality, he decided to delay it.[62]

In response to British requests for direct negotiations to avoid war, Germany made demands on Poland, which only served as a pretext to worsen relations.[63] On 29 August, Hitler demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary immediately travel to Berlin to negotiate the handover of Danzig, and to allow a plebiscite in the Polish Corridor in which the German minority would vote on secession.[63] The Poles refused to comply with the German demands, and on the night of 30–31 August in a confrontational meeting with the British ambassador Nevile Henderson, Ribbentrop declared that Germany considered its claims rejected.[64]

Course of the war

For a chronological guide, see List of timelines of World War II.

See also: Diplomatic history of World War II

War breaks out in Europe (1939–1940)

Main article: European theatre of World War II

Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht tearing down the border crossing into Poland, 1 September 1939

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland after having staged several false flag border incidents as a pretext to initiate the invasion.[65] The first German attack of the war came against the Polish defenses at Westerplatte.[66] The United Kingdom responded with an ultimatum to Germany to cease military operations, and on 3 September, after the ultimatum was ignored, Britain and France declared war on Germany,[67] followed by Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. During the Phoney War period, the alliance provided no direct military support to Poland, outside of a cautious French probe into the Saarland.[68] The Western Allies also began a naval blockade of Germany, which aimed to damage the country's economy and the war effort.[69] Germany responded by ordering U-boat warfare against Allied merchant and warships, which would later escalate into the Battle of the Atlantic.[70]

Soldiers of the Polish Army during the defence of Poland, September 1939

On 8 September, German troops reached the suburbs of Warsaw. The Polish counter-offensive to the west halted the German advance for several days, but it was outflanked and encircled by the Wehrmacht. Remnants of the Polish army broke through to besieged Warsaw. On 17 September 1939, two days after signing a cease-fire with Japan, the Soviet Union invaded Poland[71] under the pretext that the Polish state had ostensibly ceased to exist.[72] On 27 September, the Warsaw garrison surrendered to the Germans, and the last large operational unit of the Polish Army surrendered on 6 October. Despite the military defeat, Poland never surrendered; instead, it formed the Polish government-in-exile and a clandestine state apparatus remained in occupied Poland.[73] A significant part of Polish military personnel evacuated to Romania and Latvia; many of them later fought against the Axis in other theatres of the war.[74]

Germany annexed the western and occupied the central part of Poland, and the Soviet Union annexed its eastern part; small shares of Polish territory were transferred to Lithuania and Slovakia. On 6 October, Hitler made a public peace overture to the United Kingdom and France but said that the future of Poland was to be determined exclusively by Germany and the Soviet Union. The proposal was rejected,[64] and Hitler ordered an immediate offensive against France,[75] which was postponed until the spring of 1940 due to bad weather.[76][77][78]

Finnish machine gun nest aimed at Soviet Red Army positions during the Winter War, February 1940

After the outbreak of war in Poland, Stalin threatened Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with military invasion, forcing the three Baltic countries to sign pacts that stipulated the creation of Soviet military bases in these countries. In October 1939, significant Soviet military contingents were moved there.[79][80][81] Finland refused to sign a similar pact and rejected ceding part of its territory to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939,[82] and was subsequently expelled from the League of Nations for this crime of aggression.[83] Despite overwhelming numerical superiority, Soviet military success during the Winter War was modest,[84] and the Finno-Soviet war ended in March 1940 with some Finnish concessions of territory.[85]

In June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied the entire territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,[80] and the Romanian regions of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region. In August 1940, Hitler imposed the Second Vienna Award on Romania which led to the transfer of Northern Transylvania to Hungary.[86] In September 1940, Bulgaria demanded Southern Dobruja from Romania with German and Italian support, leading to the Treaty of Craiova.[87] The loss of one-third of Romania's 1939 territory caused a coup against King Carol II, turning Romania into a fascist dictatorship under Marshal Ion Antonescu with a course set firmly towards the Axis in the hopes of a German guarantee.[88] Meanwhile, German-Soviet political rapprochement and economic co-operation[89][90] gradually stalled,[91][92] and both states began preparations for war.[93]

Western Europe (1940–1941)

Main article: Western Front (World War II)

German advance into Belgium and Northern France, 10 May – 4 June 1940, swept past the Maginot Line (shown in dark red)

In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to protect shipments of iron ore from Sweden, which the Allies were attempting to cut off.[94] Denmark capitulated after six hours, and Norway was conquered within two months[95] despite Allied support. British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the resignation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was replaced by Winston Churchill on 10 May 1940.[96]

On the same day, Germany launched an offensive against France. To circumvent the strong Maginot Line fortifications on the Franco-German border, Germany directed its attack at the neutral nations of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.[97] The Germans carried out a flanking manoeuvre through the Ardennes region,[98] which was mistakenly perceived by the Allies as an impenetrable natural barrier against armoured vehicles.[99][100] By successfully implementing new Blitzkrieg tactics, the Wehrmacht rapidly advanced to the Channel and cut off the Allied forces in Belgium, trapping the bulk of the Allied armies in a cauldron on the Franco-Belgian border near Lille. The United Kingdom was able to evacuate a significant number of Allied troops from the continent by early June, although abandoning almost all their equipment.[101]

On 10 June, Italy invaded France, declaring war on both France and the United Kingdom.[102] The Germans turned south against the weakened French army, and Paris fell to them on 14 June. Eight days later France signed an armistice with Germany; it was divided into German and Italian occupation zones,[103] and an unoccupied rump state under the Vichy Regime, which, though officially neutral, was generally aligned with Germany. France kept its fleet, which the United Kingdom attacked on 3 July in an attempt to prevent its seizure by Germany.[104]

London seen from St. Paul's Cathedral after the German Blitz, 29 December 1940

The air Battle of Britain[105] began in early July with Luftwaffe attacks on shipping and harbours.[106] The United Kingdom rejected Hitler's peace offer,[107] and the German air superiority campaign started in August but failed to defeat RAF Fighter Command, forcing the indefinite postponement of the proposed German invasion of Britain. The German strategic bombing offensive intensified with night attacks on London and other cities in the Blitz, but failed to significantly disrupt the British war effort[106] and largely ended in May 1941.[108]

Using newly captured French ports, the German Navy enjoyed success against an over-extended Royal Navy, using U-boats against British shipping in the Atlantic.[109] The British Home Fleet scored a significant victory on 27 May 1941 by sinking the German battleship Bismarck.[110]

In November 1939, the United States was taking measures to assist China and the Western Allies and amended the Neutrality Act to allow "cash and carry" purchases by the Allies.[111] In 1940, following the German capture of Paris, the size of the United States Navy was significantly increased. In September the United States further agreed to a trade of American destroyers for British bases.[112] Still, a large majority of the American public continued to oppose any direct military intervention in the conflict well into 1941.[113] In December 1940, Roosevelt accused Hitler of planning world conquest and ruled out any negotiations as useless, calling for the United States to become an "arsenal of democracy" and promoting Lend-Lease programmes of military and humanitarian aid to support the British war effort, which was later extended to the other Allies, including the Soviet Union after it was invaded by Germany.[107] The United States started strategic planning to prepare for a full-scale offensive against Germany.[114]

At the end of September 1940, the Tripartite Pact formally united Japan, Italy, and Germany as the Axis powers. The Tripartite Pact stipulated that any country, with the exception of the Soviet Union, which attacked any Axis Power would be forced to go to war against all three.[115] The Axis expanded in November 1940 when Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania joined.[116] Romania and Hungary later made major contributions to the Axis war against the Soviet Union, in Romania's case partially to recapture territory ceded to the Soviet Union.[117]

Mediterranean (1940–1941)

Main article: Mediterranean and Middle East theatre of World War II

Soldiers of the British Commonwealth forces from the Australian Army's 9th Division during the siege of Tobruk; North African campaign, September 1941

In early June 1940, the Italian Regia Aeronautica attacked and besieged Malta, a British possession. From late summer to early autumn, Italy conquered British Somaliland and made an incursion into British-held Egypt. In October, Italy attacked Greece, but the attack was repulsed with heavy Italian casualties; the campaign ended within months with minor territorial changes.[118] Germany started preparation for an invasion of the Balkans to assist Italy, to prevent the British from gaining a foothold there, which would be a potential threat for Romanian oil fields, and to strike against the British dominance of the Mediterranean.[119]

In December 1940, British Empire forces began counter-offensives against Italian forces in Egypt and Italian East Africa.[120] The offensives were highly successful; by early February 1941, Italy had lost control of eastern Libya, and large numbers of Italian troops had been taken prisoner. The Italian Navy also suffered significant defeats, with the Royal Navy putting three Italian battleships out of commission by means of a carrier attack at Taranto, and neutralising several more warships at the Battle of Cape Matapan.[121]

German Panzer III of the Afrika Korps advancing across the North African desert, April–May 1941

Italian defeats prompted Germany to deploy an expeditionary force to North Africa and at the end of March 1941, Rommel's Afrika Korps launched an offensive which drove back the Commonwealth forces.[122] In under a month, Axis forces advanced to western Egypt and besieged the port of Tobruk.[123]

By late March 1941, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact; however, the Yugoslav government was overthrown two days later by pro-British nationalists. Germany responded with simultaneous invasions of both Yugoslavia and Greece, commencing on 6 April 1941; both nations were forced to surrender within the month.[124] The airborne invasion of the Greek island of Crete at the end of May completed the German conquest of the Balkans.[125] Although the Axis victory was swift, bitter and large-scale partisan warfare subsequently broke out against the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, which continued until the end of the war.[126]

In the Middle East in May, Commonwealth forces quashed an uprising in Iraq which had been supported by German aircraft from bases within Vichy-controlled Syria.[127] Between June and July, British-led forces invaded and occupied the French possessions of Syria and Lebanon, assisted by the Free French.[128]

Axis attack on the Soviet Union (1941)

Main article: Eastern Front (World War II)

European theatre of World War II animation map, 1939–1945 – Red: Western Allies and the Soviet Union after 1941; Green: Soviet Union before 1941; Blue: Axis powers

With the situation in Europe and Asia relatively stable, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union made preparations for war. With the Soviets wary of mounting tensions with Germany and the Japanese planning to take advantage of the European War by seizing resource-rich European possessions in Southeast Asia, the two powers signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941.[129] By contrast, the Germans were steadily making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, massing forces on the Soviet border.[130]

Hitler believed that the United Kingdom's refusal to end the war was based on the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would enter the war against Germany sooner or later.[131] On 31 July 1940, Hitler decided that the Soviet Union should be eliminated and aimed for the conquest of Ukraine, the Baltic states and Byelorussia.[132] However, other senior German officials like Ribbentrop saw an opportunity to create a Euro-Asian bloc against the British Empire by inviting the Soviet Union into the Tripartite Pact.[133] In November 1940, negotiations took place to determine if the Soviet Union would join the pact. The Soviets showed some interest but asked for concessions from Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan that Germany considered unacceptable. On 18 December 1940, Hitler issued the directive to prepare for an invasion of the Soviet Union.[134]

German soldiers during the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, 1941

On 22 June 1941, Germany, supported by Italy and Romania, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, with Germany accusing the Soviets of plotting against them. They were joined shortly by Finland and Hungary.[135] The primary targets of this surprise offensive[136] were the Baltic region, Moscow and Ukraine, with the ultimate goal of ending the 1941 campaign near the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line, from the Caspian to the White Seas. Hitler's objectives were to eliminate the Soviet Union as a military power, exterminate Communism, generate Lebensraum ("living space")[137] by dispossessing the native population[138] and guarantee access to the strategic resources needed to defeat Germany's remaining rivals.[139]

Although the Red Army was preparing for strategic counter-offensives before the war,[140] Operation Barbarossa forced the Soviet supreme command to adopt a strategic defence. During the summer, the Axis made significant gains into Soviet territory, inflicting immense losses in both personnel and materiel. By mid-August, however, the German Army High Command decided to suspend the offensive of a considerably depleted Army Group Centre, and to divert the 2nd Panzer Group to reinforce troops advancing towards central Ukraine and Leningrad.[141] The Kiev offensive was overwhelmingly successful, resulting in encirclement and elimination of four Soviet armies, and made possible further advance into Crimea and industrially developed Eastern Ukraine (the First Battle of Kharkov).[142]

Russian civilians leaving destroyed houses after a German bombardment during the Battle of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), 10 December 1942

The diversion of three quarters of the Axis troops and the majority of their air forces from France and the central Mediterranean to the Eastern Front[143] prompted the United Kingdom to reconsider its grand strategy.[144] In July, the UK and the Soviet Union formed a military alliance against Germany[145] and in August, the United Kingdom and the United States jointly issued the Atlantic Charter, which outlined British and American goals for the post-war world.[146] In late August the British and Soviets invaded neutral Iran to secure the Persian Corridor, Iran's oil fields, and preempt any Axis advances through Iran toward the Baku oil fields or India.[147]

By October, Axis operational objectives in Ukraine and the Baltic region were achieved, with only the sieges of Leningrad[148] and Sevastopol continuing.[149] A major offensive against Moscow was renewed; after two months of fierce battles in increasingly harsh weather, the German army almost reached the outer suburbs of Moscow, where the exhausted troops[150] were forced to suspend their offensive.[151] Large territorial gains were made by Axis forces, but their campaign had failed to achieve its main objectives: two key cities remained in Soviet hands, the Soviet capability to resist was not broken, and the Soviet Union retained a considerable part of its military potential. The blitzkrieg phase of the war in Europe had ended.[152]

By early December, freshly mobilised reserves[153] allowed the Soviets to achieve numerical parity with Axis troops.[154] This, as well as intelligence data which established that a minimal number of Soviet troops in the East would be sufficient to deter any attack by the Japanese Kwantung Army,[155] allowed the Soviets to begin a massive counter-offensive that started on 5 December all along the front and pushed German troops 100–250 kilometres (62–155 mi) west.[156]

War breaks out in the Pacific (1941)

Main article: Pacific War

Following the Japanese false flag Mukden Incident in 1931, the Japanese shelling of the American gunboat USS Panay in 1937, and the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre, Japanese-American relations deteriorated. In 1939, the United States notified Japan that it would not be extending its trade treaty and American public opinion opposing Japanese expansionism led to a series of economic sanctions, the Export Control Acts, which banned U.S. exports of chemicals, minerals and military parts to Japan and increased economic pressure on the Japanese regime.[107][157][158] During 1939 Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but was repulsed by late September.[159] Despite several offensives by both sides, the war between China and Japan was stalemated by 1940. To increase pressure on China by blocking supply routes, and to better position Japanese forces in the event of a war with the Western powers, Japan invaded and occupied northern Indochina in September 1940.[160]

Japanese soldiers entering Hong Kong, 8 December 1941

Chinese nationalist forces launched a large-scale counter-offensive in early 1940. In August, Chinese communists launched an offensive in Central China; in retaliation, Japan instituted harsh measures in occupied areas to reduce human and material resources for the communists.[161] The continued antipathy between Chinese communist and nationalist forces culminated in armed clashes in January 1941, effectively ending their co-operation.[162] In March, the Japanese 11th army attacked the headquarters of the Chinese 19th army but was repulsed during Battle of Shanggao.[163][unreliable source?] In September, Japan attempted to take the city of Changsha again and clashed with Chinese nationalist forces.[164][unreliable source?]

German successes in Europe encouraged Japan to increase pressure on European governments in Southeast Asia. The Dutch government agreed to provide Japan with some oil supplies from the Dutch East Indies, but negotiations for additional access to their resources ended in failure in June 1941.[165] In July 1941 Japan sent troops to southern Indochina, thus threatening British and Dutch possessions in the Far East. The United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western governments reacted to this move with a freeze on Japanese assets and a total oil embargo.[166][167] At the same time, Japan was planning an invasion of the Soviet Far East, intending to capitalise off the German invasion in the west, but abandoned the operation after the sanctions.[168]

Since early 1941, the United States and Japan had been engaged in negotiations in an attempt to improve their strained relations and end the war in China. During these negotiations, Japan advanced a number of proposals which were dismissed by the Americans as inadequate.[169] At the same time the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands engaged in secret discussions for the joint defence of their territories, in the event of a Japanese attack against any of them.[170] Roosevelt reinforced the Philippines (an American protectorate scheduled for independence in 1946) and warned Japan that the United States would react to Japanese attacks against any "neighboring countries".[170]

The USS Arizona was a total loss in the Japanese surprise air attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Sunday 7 December 1941.

Frustrated at the lack of progress and feeling the pinch of the American–British–Dutch sanctions, Japan prepared for war. Emperor Hirohito, after initial hesitation about Japan's chances of victory,[171] began to favour Japan's entry into the war.[172] As a result, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe resigned.[173][174] Hirohito refused the recommendation to appoint Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni in his place, choosing War Minister Hideki Tojo instead.[175] On 3 November, Nagano explained in detail the plan of the attack on Pearl Harbor to the Emperor.[176] On 5 November, Hirohito approved in imperial conference the operations plan for the war.[177] On 20 November, the new government presented an interim proposal as its final offer. It called for the end of American aid to China and for lifting the embargo on the supply of oil and other resources to Japan. In exchange, Japan promised not to launch any attacks in Southeast Asia and to withdraw its forces from southern Indochina.[169] The American counter-proposal of 26 November required that Japan evacuate all of China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with all Pacific powers.[178] That meant Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its ambitions in China, or seizing the natural resources it needed in the Dutch East Indies by force;[179][180] the Japanese military did not consider the former an option, and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war.[181]

Japan planned to seize European colonies in Asia to create a large defensive perimeter stretching into the Central Pacific. The Japanese would then be free to exploit the resources of Southeast Asia while exhausting the over-stretched Allies by fighting a defensive war.[182][183] To prevent American intervention while securing the perimeter, it was further planned to neutralise the United States Pacific Fleet and the American military presence in the Philippines from the outset.[184] On 7 December 1941 (8 December in Asian time zones), Japan attacked British and American holdings with near-simultaneous offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific.[185] These included an attack on the American fleets at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, as well as invasions of Guam, Wake Island, Malaya,[185] Thailand, and Hong Kong.[186]

The Japanese invasion of Thailand led to Thailand's decision to ally itself with Japan and the other Japanese attacks led the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia, and several other states to formally declare war on Japan, whereas the Soviet Union, being heavily involved in large-scale hostilities with European Axis countries, maintained its neutrality agreement with Japan.[187] Germany, followed by the other Axis states, declared war on the United States[188] in solidarity with Japan, citing as justification the American attacks on German war vessels that had been ordered by Roosevelt.[135][189]

Axis advance stalls (1942–1943)

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill seated at the Casablanca Conference, January 1943

On 1 January 1942, the Allied Big Four[190]—the Soviet Union, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and 22 smaller or exiled governments issued the Declaration by United Nations, thereby affirming the Atlantic Charter,[191] and agreeing not to sign a separate peace with the Axis powers.[192]

During 1942, Allied officials debated on the appropriate grand strategy to pursue. All agreed that defeating Germany was the primary objective. The Americans favoured a straightforward, large-scale attack on Germany through France. The Soviets were also demanding a second front. The British, on the other hand, argued that military operations should target peripheral areas to wear out German strength, leading to increasing demoralisation, and bolster resistance forces. Germany itself would be subject to a heavy bombing campaign. An offensive against Germany would then be launched primarily by Allied armour without using large-scale armies.[193] Eventually, the British persuaded the Americans that a landing in France was infeasible in 1942 and they should instead focus on driving the Axis out of North Africa.[194]

At the Casablanca Conference in early 1943, the Allies reiterated the statements issued in the 1942 Declaration and demanded the unconditional surrender of their enemies. The British and Americans agreed to continue to press the initiative in the Mediterranean by invading Sicily to fully secure the Mediterranean supply routes.[195] Although the British argued for further operations in the Balkans to bring Turkey into the war, in May 1943, the Americans extracted a British commitment to limit Allied operations in the Mediterranean to an invasion of the Italian mainland and to invade France in 1944.[196]

Pacific (1942–1943)

Map of Japanese military advances through mid-1942

By the end of April 1942, Japan and its ally Thailand had almost fully conquered Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Rabaul, inflicting severe losses on Allied troops and taking a large number of prisoners.[197] Despite stubborn resistance by Filipino and U.S. forces, the Philippine Commonwealth was eventually captured in May 1942, forcing its government into exile.[198] On 16 April, in Burma, 7,000 British soldiers were encircled by the Japanese 33rd Division during the Battle of Yenangyaung and rescued by the Chinese 38th Division.[199] Japanese forces also achieved naval victories in the South China Sea, Java Sea, and Indian Ocean,[200] and bombed the Allied naval base at Darwin, Australia. In January 1942, the only Allied success against Japan was a Chinese victory at Changsha.[201] These easy victories over the unprepared U.S. and European opponents left Japan overconfident, as well as overextended.[202]

In early May 1942, Japan initiated operations to capture Port Moresby by amphibious assault and thus sever communications and supply lines between the United States and Australia. The planned invasion was thwarted when an Allied task force, centred on two American fleet carriers, fought Japanese naval forces to a draw in the Battle of the Coral Sea.[203] Japan's next plan, motivated by the earlier Doolittle Raid, was to seize Midway Atoll and lure American carriers into battle to be eliminated; as a diversion, Japan would also send forces to occupy the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.[204] In mid-May, Japan started the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign in China, with the goal of inflicting retribution on the Chinese who aided the surviving American airmen in the Doolittle Raid by destroying Chinese air bases and fighting against the Chinese 23rd and 32nd Army Groups.[205][206] In early June, Japan put its operations into action, but the Americans, having broken Japanese naval codes in late May, were fully aware of the plans and order of battle, and used this knowledge to achieve a decisive victory at Midway over the Imperial Japanese Navy.[207]

U.S. Marines during the Guadalcanal Campaign, in the Pacific theatre, 1942

With its capacity for aggressive action greatly diminished as a result of the Midway battle, Japan chose to focus on a belated attempt to capture Port Moresby by an overland campaign in the Territory of Papua.[208] The Americans planned a counterattack against Japanese positions in the southern Solomon Islands, primarily Guadalcanal, as a first step towards capturing Rabaul, the main Japanese base in Southeast Asia.[209]

Both plans started in July, but by mid-September, the Battle for Guadalcanal took priority for the Japanese, and troops in New Guinea were ordered to withdraw from the Port Moresby area to the northern part of the island, where they faced Australian and United States troops in the Battle of Buna–Gona.[210] Guadalcanal soon became a focal point for both sides with heavy commitments of troops and ships in the battle for Guadalcanal. By the start of 1943, the Japanese were defeated on the island and withdrew their troops.[211] In Burma, Commonwealth forces mounted two operations. The first, an offensive into the Arakan region in late 1942, went disastrously, forcing a retreat back to India by May 1943.[212] The second was the insertion of irregular forces behind Japanese frontlines in February which, by the end of April, had achieved mixed results.[213]

Eastern Front (1942–1943)

Red Army soldiers on the counterattack during the Battle of Stalingrad, February 1943

Despite considerable losses, in early 1942 Germany and its allies stopped a major Soviet offensive in central and southern Russia, keeping most territorial gains they had achieved during the previous year.[214] In May, the Germans defeated Soviet offensives in the Kerch Peninsula and at Kharkov,[215] and then launched their main summer offensive against southern Russia in June 1942, to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus and occupy the Kuban steppe, while maintaining positions on the northern and central areas of the front. The Germans split Army Group South into two groups: Army Group A advanced to the lower Don River and struck south-east to the Caucasus, while Army Group B headed towards the Volga River. The Soviets decided to make their stand at Stalingrad on the Volga.[216]

By mid-November, the Germans had nearly taken Stalingrad in bitter street fighting. The Soviets began their second winter counter-offensive, starting with an encirclement of German forces at Stalingrad,[217] and an assault on the Rzhev salient near Moscow, though the latter failed disastrously.[218] By early February 1943, the German Army had taken tremendous losses; German troops at Stalingrad had been defeated,[219] and the front-line had been pushed back beyond its position before the summer offensive. In mid-February, after the Soviet push had tapered off, the Germans launched another attack on Kharkov, creating a salient in their front line around the Soviet city of Kursk.[220]

Western Europe/Atlantic and Mediterranean (1942–1943)

American 8th Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombing raid on the Focke-Wulf factory in Germany, 9 October 1943

Exploiting poor American naval command decisions, the German navy ravaged Allied shipping off the American Atlantic coast.[221] By November 1941, Commonwealth forces had launched a counter-offensive, Operation Crusader, in North Africa, and reclaimed all the gains the Germans and Italians had made.[222] In North Africa, the Germans launched an offensive in January, pushing the British back to positions at the Gazala line by early February,[223] followed by a temporary lull in combat which Germany used to prepare for their upcoming offensives.[224] Concerns the Japanese might use bases in Vichy-held Madagascar caused the British to invade the island in early May 1942.[225] An Axis offensive in Libya forced an Allied retreat deep inside Egypt until Axis forces were stopped at El Alamein.[226] On the Continent, raids of Allied commandos on strategic targets, culminating in the disastrous Dieppe Raid,[227] demonstrated the Western Allies' inability to launch an invasion of continental Europe without much better preparation, equipment, and operational security.[228][page needed]

In August 1942, the Allies succeeded in repelling a second attack against El Alamein[229] and, at a high cost, managed to deliver desperately needed supplies to the besieged Malta.[230] A few months later, the Allies commenced an attack of their own in Egypt, dislodging the Axis forces and beginning a drive west across Libya.[231] This attack was followed up shortly after by Anglo-American landings in French North Africa, which resulted in the region joining the Allies.[232] Hitler responded to the French colony's defection by ordering the occupation of Vichy France;[232] although Vichy forces did not resist this violation of the armistice, they managed to scuttle their fleet to prevent its capture by German forces.[232][233] The Axis forces in Africa withdrew into Tunisia, which was conquered by the Allies in May 1943.[232][234]

In June 1943, the British and Americans began a strategic bombing campaign against Germany with a goal to disrupt the war economy, reduce morale, and "de-house" the civilian population.[235] The firebombing of Hamburg was among the first attacks in this campaign, inflicting significant casualties and considerable losses on infrastructure of this important industrial centre.[236]

Allies gain momentum (1943–1944)

U.S. Navy SBD-5 scout plane flying patrol over USS Washington and USS Lexington during the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, 1943

After the Guadalcanal campaign, the Allies initiated several operations against Japan in the Pacific. In May 1943, Canadian and U.S. forces were sent to eliminate Japanese forces from the Aleutians.[237] Soon after, the United States, with support from Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islander forces, began major ground, sea and air operations to isolate Rabaul by capturing surrounding islands, and breach the Japanese Central Pacific perimeter at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands.[238] By the end of March 1944, the Allies had completed both of these objectives and had also neutralised the major Japanese base at Truk in the Caroline Islands. In April, the Allies launched an operation to retake Western New Guinea.[239]

In the Soviet Union, both the Germans and the Soviets spent the spring and early summer of 1943 preparing for large offensives in central Russia. On 5 July 1943, Germany attacked Soviet forces around the Kursk Bulge. Within a week, German forces had exhausted themselves against the Soviets' deeply echeloned and well-constructed defences,[240] and for the first time in the war, Hitler cancelled an operation before it had achieved tactical or operational success.[241] This decision was partially affected by the Western Allies' invasion of Sicily launched on 9 July, which, combined with previous Italian failures, resulted in the ousting and arrest of Mussolini later that month.[242]

Red Army troops in a counter-offensive on German positions at the Battle of Kursk, July 1943

On 12 July 1943, the Soviets launched their own counter-offensives, thereby dispelling any chance of German victory or even stalemate in the east. The Soviet victory at Kursk marked the end of German superiority,[243] giving the Soviet Union the initiative on the Eastern Front.[244][245] The Germans tried to stabilise their eastern front along the hastily fortified Panther–Wotan line, but the Soviets broke through it at Smolensk and by the Lower Dnieper Offensive.[246]

On 3 September 1943, the Western Allies invaded the Italian mainland, following Italy's armistice with the Allies and the ensuing German occupation of Italy.[247] Germany, with the help of fascists, responded to the armistice by disarming Italian forces that were in many places without superior orders, seizing military control of Italian areas,[248] and creating a series of defensive lines.[249] German special forces then rescued Mussolini, who then soon established a new client state in German-occupied Italy named the Italian Social Republic,[250] causing an Italian civil war. The Western Allies fought through several lines until reaching the main German defensive line in mid-November.[251]

German operations in the Atlantic also suffered. By May 1943, as Allied counter-measures became increasingly effective, the resulting sizeable German submarine losses forced a temporary halt of the German Atlantic naval campaign.[252] In November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo and then with Joseph Stalin in Tehran.[253] The former conference determined the post-war return of Japanese territory[254] and the military planning for the Burma campaign,[255] while the latter included agreement that the Western Allies would invade Europe in 1944 and that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's defeat.[256]

Ruins of the Benedictine monastery, during the Battle of Monte Cassino, Italian Campaign, May 1944

From November 1943, during the seven-week Battle of Changde, the Chinese forced Japan to fight a costly war of attrition, while awaiting Allied relief.[257][258][259][unreliable source?] In January 1944, the Allies launched a series of attacks in Italy against the line at Monte Cassino and tried to outflank it with landings at Anzio.[260]

On 27 January 1944, Soviet troops launched a major offensive that expelled German forces from the Leningrad region, thereby ending the most lethal siege in history.[261] The following Soviet offensive was halted on the pre-war Estonian border by the German Army Group North aided by Estonians hoping to re-establish national independence. This delay slowed subsequent Soviet operations in the Baltic Sea region.[262] By late May 1944, the Soviets had liberated Crimea, largely expelled Axis forces from Ukraine, and made incursions into Romania, which were repulsed by the Axis troops.[263] The Allied offensives in Italy had succeeded and, at the expense of allowing several German divisions to retreat, Rome was captured on June 4.[264]

The Allies had mixed success in mainland Asia. In March 1944, the Japanese launched the first of two invasions, an operation against Allied positions in Assam, India,[265] and soon besieged Commonwealth positions at Imphal and Kohima.[266] In May 1944, British and Indian forces mounted a counter-offensive that drove Japanese troops back to Burma by July,[266] and Chinese forces that had invaded northern Burma in late 1943 besieged Japanese troops in Myitkyina.[267] The second Japanese invasion of China aimed to destroy China's main fighting forces, secure railways between Japanese-held territory and capture Allied airfields.[268] By June, the Japanese had conquered the province of Henan and begun a new attack on Changsha.[269]

Allies close in (1944)

American troops approaching Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944

On 6 June 1944 (known as D-Day), after three years of Soviet pressure,[270] the Western Allies invaded northern France. After reassigning several Allied divisions from Italy, they also attacked southern France.[271] These landings were successful and led to the defeat of the German Army units in France. Paris was liberated on 25 August by the local resistance assisted by the Free French Forces, both led by General Charles de Gaulle,[272] and the Western Allies continued to push back German forces in western Europe during the latter part of the year. An attempt to advance into northern Germany spearheaded by a major airborne operation in the Netherlands failed.[273] After that, the Western Allies slowly pushed into Germany, but failed to cross the Rur river in a large offensive. In Italy, Allied advance also slowed due to the last major German defensive line.[274]

German SS soldiers from the Dirlewanger Brigade, tasked with suppressing the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation, August 1944

On 22 June, the Soviets launched a strategic offensive in Belarus ("Operation Bagration") that almost completely destroyed the German Army Group Centre.[275] Soon after that, another Soviet strategic offensive forced German troops from Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland. The Soviets formed the Polish Committee of National Liberation to control territory in Poland and combat the Polish Armia Krajowa; the Soviet Red Army remained in the Praga district on the other side of the Vistula and watched passively as the Germans quelled the Warsaw Uprising initiated by the Armia Krajowa.[276] The national uprising in Slovakia was also quelled by the Germans.[277] The Soviet Red Army's strategic offensive in eastern Romania cut off and destroyed the considerable German troops there and triggered a successful coup d'état in Romania and in Bulgaria, followed by those countries' shift to the Allied side.[278]

In September 1944, Soviet troops advanced into Yugoslavia and forced the rapid withdrawal of German Army Groups E and F in Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia to rescue them from being cut off.[279] By this point, the communist-led Partisans under Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who had led an increasingly successful guerrilla campaign against the occupation since 1941, controlled much of the territory of Yugoslavia and engaged in delaying efforts against German forces further south. In northern Serbia, the Soviet Red Army, with limited support from Bulgarian forces, assisted the Partisans in a joint liberation of the capital city of Belgrade on 20 October. A few days later, the Soviets launched a massive assault against German-occupied Hungary that lasted until the fall of Budapest in February 1945.[280] Unlike impressive Soviet victories in the Balkans, bitter Finnish resistance to the Soviet offensive in the Karelian Isthmus denied the Soviets occupation of Finland and led to a Soviet-Finnish armistice on relatively mild conditions,[281] although Finland was forced to fight their former German allies.[282]

General Douglas MacArthur returns to the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte, 20 October 1944

By the start of July 1944, Commonwealth forces in Southeast Asia had repelled the Japanese sieges in Assam, pushing the Japanese back to the Chindwin River[283] while the Chinese captured Myitkyina. In September 1944, Chinese forces captured Mount Song and reopened the Burma Road.[284] In China, the Japanese had more successes, having finally captured Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang by early August.[285] Soon after, they invaded the province of Guangxi, winning major engagements against Chinese forces at Guilin and Liuzhou by the end of November[286] and successfully linking up their forces in China and Indochina by mid-December.[287]

In the Pacific, U.S. forces continued to press back the Japanese perimeter. In mid-June 1944, they began their offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands and decisively defeated Japanese forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. These defeats led to the resignation of the Japanese Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, and provided the United States with air bases to launch intensive heavy bomber attacks on the Japanese home islands. In late October, American forces invaded the Filipino island of Leyte; soon after, Allied naval forces scored another large victory in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, one of the largest naval battles in history.[288]

Axis collapse and Allied victory (1944–1945)

Yalta Conference held in February 1945, with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin

On 16 December 1944, Germany made a last attempt on the Western Front by using most of its remaining reserves to launch a massive counter-offensive in the Ardennes and along the French-German border to split the Western Allies, encircle large portions of Western Allied troops and capture their primary supply port at Antwerp to prompt a political settlement.[289] By 16 January 1945, the offensive had been repulsed with no strategic objectives fulfilled.[289] In Italy, the Western Allies remained stalemated at the German defensive line. In mid-January 1945, the Red Army attacked in Poland, pushing from the Vistula to the Oder river in Germany, and overran East Prussia.[290] On 4 February Soviet, British, and U.S. leaders met for the Yalta Conference. They agreed on the occupation of post-war Germany, and on when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan.[291]

In February, the Soviets entered Silesia and Pomerania, while the Western Allies entered western Germany and closed to the Rhine river. By March, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine north and south of the Ruhr, encircling the German Army Group B.[292] In early March, in an attempt to protect its last oil reserves in Hungary and to retake Budapest, Germany launched its last major offensive against Soviet troops near Lake Balaton. In two weeks, the offensive had been repulsed, the Soviets advanced to Vienna, and captured the city. In early April, Soviet troops captured Königsberg, while the Western Allies finally pushed forward in Italy and swept across western Germany capturing Hamburg and Nuremberg. American and Soviet forces met at the Elbe river on 25 April, leaving several unoccupied pockets in southern Germany and around Berlin.

Ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin, 3 June 1945.

Soviet troops stormed and captured Berlin in late April.[293] In Italy, German forces surrendered on 29 April. On 30 April, the Reichstag was captured, signalling the military defeat of Nazi Germany,[294] and the Berlin garrison surrendered on 2 May.

Major changes in leadership occurred on both sides during this period. On 12 April, President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by his vice president, Harry S. Truman. Benito Mussolini was killed by Italian partisans on 28 April.[295] On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide in his headquarters, and he was succeeded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and Joseph Goebbels. Total and unconditional surrender in Europe was signed on 7 and 8 May, to be effective by the end of 8 May.[296] German Army Group Centre resisted in Prague until 11 May.[297]

In the Pacific theatre, American forces accompanied by the forces of the Philippine Commonwealth advanced in the Philippines, clearing Leyte by the end of April 1945. They landed on Luzon in January 1945 and recaptured Manila in March. Fighting continued on Luzon, Mindanao, and other islands of the Philippines until the end of the war.[298] Meanwhile, the United States Army Air Forces launched a massive firebombing campaign of strategic cities in Japan in an effort to destroy Japanese war industry and civilian morale. A devastating bombing raid on Tokyo of 9–10 March was the deadliest conventional bombing raid in history.[299]

In May 1945, Australian troops landed in Borneo, overrunning the oilfields there. British, American, and Chinese forces defeated the Japanese in northern Burma in March, and the British pushed on to reach Rangoon by 3 May.[300] Chinese forces started a counterattack in the Battle of West Hunan that occurred between 6 April and 7 June 1945. American naval and amphibious forces also moved towards Japan, taking Iwo Jima by March, and Okinawa by the end of June.[301] At the same time, a naval blockade by submarines was strangling Japan's economy and drastically reducing its ability to supply overseas forces.[302][303]

Japanese foreign affairs minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on board USS Missouri, 2 September 1945.

On 11 July, Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany. They confirmed earlier agreements about Germany,[304] and the American, British and Chinese governments reiterated the demand for unconditional surrender of Japan, specifically stating that "the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction".[305] During this conference, the United Kingdom held its general election, and Clement Attlee replaced Churchill as Prime Minister.[306]

The call for unconditional surrender was rejected by the Japanese government, which believed it would be capable of negotiating for more favourable surrender terms.[307] In early August, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between the two bombings, the Soviets, pursuant to the Yalta agreement, invaded Japanese-held Manchuria and quickly defeated the Kwantung Army, which was the largest Japanese fighting force.[308] These two events persuaded previously adamant Imperial Army leaders to accept surrender terms.[309] The Red Army also captured the southern part of Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. On the night of 9–10 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced his decision to accept the terms demanded by the Allies in the Potsdam Declaration.[310] On 15 August, the Emperor communicated this decision to the Japanese people through a speech broadcast on the radio (Gyokuon-hōsō, literally "broadcast in the Emperor's voice").[311] On 15 August 1945, Japan surrendered, with the surrender documents finally signed at Tokyo Bay on the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, ending the war.[312]

Aftermath

Main articles: Aftermath of World War II and Consequences of Nazism

Ruins of Warsaw in 1945, after the deliberate destruction of the city by the occupying German forces

The Allies established occupation administrations in Austria and Germany, both initially divided between western and eastern occupation zones controlled by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, respectively. However, their paths soon diverged. In Germany, the western and eastern occupation zones controlled by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union officially ended in 1949, with the respective zones becoming separate countries, West Germany and East Germany.[313] In Austria, however, occupation continued until 1955, when a joint settlement between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union permitted the reunification of Austria as a neutral democratic state, officially non-aligned with any political bloc (although in practice having better relations with the Western Allies). A denazification program in Germany led to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials and the removal of ex-Nazis from power, although this policy moved towards amnesty and re-integration of ex-Nazis into West German society.[314]

Germany lost a quarter of its pre-war (1937) territory. Among the eastern territories, Silesia, Neumark and most of Pomerania were taken over by Poland,[315] and East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, followed by the expulsion to Germany of the nine million Germans from these provinces,[316][317] as well as three million Germans from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. By the 1950s, one-fifth of West Germans were refugees from the east. The Soviet Union also took over the Polish provinces east of the Curzon line,[318] from which 2 million Poles were expelled;[317][319] north-east Romania,[320][321] parts of eastern Finland,[322] and the three Baltic states were annexed into the Soviet Union.[323][324] Italy lost its monarchy, colonial empire and some European territories.[325]

Defendants at the Nuremberg trials, where the Allied forces prosecuted prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity

In an effort to maintain world peace,[326] the Allies formed the United Nations,[327] which officially came into existence on 24 October 1945,[328] and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as a common standard for all member nations.[329] The great powers that were the victors of the war—France, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States—became the permanent members of the UN's Security Council.[330] The five permanent members remain so to the present, although there have been two seat changes, between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China in 1971, and between the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation, following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had begun to deteriorate even before the war was over.[331]

Post-war border changes in Central Europe and creation of the Communist Eastern Bloc

Besides Germany, the rest of Europe was also divided into Western and Soviet spheres of influence.[332] Most eastern and central European countries fell into the Soviet sphere, which led to establishment of Communist-led regimes, with full or partial support of the Soviet occupation authorities. As a result, East Germany,[333] Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Albania[334] became Soviet satellite states. Communist Yugoslavia conducted a fully independent policy, causing tension with the Soviet Union.[335] A Communist uprising in Greece was put down with Anglo-American support and the country remained aligned with the West.[336]

Post-war division of the world was formalised by two international military alliances, the United States-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.[337] The long period of political tensions and military competition between them, the Cold War, would be accompanied by an unprecedented arms race and number of proxy wars throughout the world.[338]

In Asia, the United States led the occupation of Japan and administered Japan's former islands in the Western Pacific, while the Soviets annexed South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.[339] Korea, formerly under Japanese colonial rule, was divided and occupied by the Soviet Union in the North and the United States in the South between 1945 and 1948. Separate republics emerged on both sides of the 38th parallel in 1948, each claiming to be the legitimate government for all of Korea, which led ultimately to the Korean War.[340]

David Ben-Gurion proclaiming the Israeli Declaration of Independence at the Independence Hall, 14 May 1948

In China, nationalist and communist forces resumed the civil war in June 1946. Communist forces were victorious and established the People's Republic of China on the mainland, while nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949.[341] In the Middle East, the Arab rejection of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine and the creation of Israel marked the escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict. While European powers attempted to retain some or all of their colonial empires, their losses of prestige and resources during the war rendered this unsuccessful, leading to decolonisation.[342][343]

The global economy suffered heavily from the war, although participating nations were affected differently. The United States emerged much richer than any other nation, leading to a baby boom, and by 1950 its gross domestic product per person was much higher than that of any of the other powers, and it dominated the world economy.[344] The Allied occupational authorities pursued a policy of industrial disarmament in Western Germany from 1945 to 1948.[345] Due to international trade interdependencies, this policy led to an economic stagnation in Europe and delayed European recovery from the war for several years.[346][347]

At the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, the Allied nations drew up an economic framework for the post-war world. The agreement created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which later became part of the World Bank Group. The Bretton Woods system lasted until 1973.[348] Recovery began with the mid-1948 currency reform in Western Germany, and was sped up by the liberalisation of European economic policy that the U.S. Marshall Plan economic aid (1948–1951) both directly and indirectly caused.[349][350] The post-1948 West German recovery has been called the German economic miracle.[351] Italy also experienced an economic boom[352] and the French economy rebounded.[353] By contrast, the United Kingdom was in a state of economic ruin,[354] and although receiving a quarter of the total Marshall Plan assistance, more than any other European country,[355] it continued in relative economic decline for decades.[356] The Soviet Union, despite enormous human and material losses, also experienced rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era,[357] having seized and transferred most of Germany's industrial plants and exacted war reparations from its satellite states.[b][358] Japan recovered much later.[359] China returned to its pre-war industrial production by 1952.[360]

Impact

Main article: Historiography of World War II

Casualties and war crimes

Main article: World War II casualties

Further information: List of war crimes committed during World War II

World War II deaths

Estimates for the total number of casualties in the war vary, because many deaths went unrecorded.[361] Most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians.[362][363][364] Many of the civilians died because of deliberate genocide, massacres, mass bombings, disease, and starvation.

The Soviet Union alone lost around 27 million people during the war,[365] including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths.[366] A quarter of the total people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed.[367] Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.[368]

An estimated 11[369] to 17 million[370] civilians died as a direct or as an indirect result of Hitler's racist policies, including mass killing of around 6 million Jews, along with Roma, homosexuals, at least 1.9 million ethnic Poles[371][372] and millions of other Slavs (including Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians), and other ethnic and minority groups.[373][370] Between 1941 and 1945, more than 200,000 ethnic Serbs, along with gypsies and Jews, were persecuted and murdered by the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustaše in Yugoslavia.[374] Concurrently, Muslims and Croats were persecuted and killed by Serb nationalist Chetniks,[375] with an estimated 50,000–68,000 victims (of which 41,000 were civilians).[376] Also, more than 100,000 Poles were massacred by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Volhynia massacres, between 1943 and 1945.[377] At the same time, about 10,000–15,000 Ukrainians were killed by the Polish Home Army and other Polish units, in reprisal attacks.[378]

Bodies of Chinese civilians killed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Nanking Massacre in December 1937

In Asia and the Pacific, the number of people killed by Japanese troops remains contested. According to R.J. Rummel, the Japanese killed between 3 million and more than 10 million people, with the most probable case of almost 6,000,000 people.[379] According to the British historian M. R. D. Foot, civilian deaths are between 10 million and 20 million, whereas Chinese military casualties (killed and wounded) are estimated to be over five million.[380] Other estimates say that up to 30 million people, most of them civilians, were killed.[381][382] The most infamous Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which fifty to three hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered.[383] Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported that 2.7 million casualties occurred during the Sankō Sakusen. General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung.[384]

Axis forces employed biological and chemical weapons. The Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during its invasion and occupation of China (see Unit 731)[385][386] and in early conflicts against the Soviets.[387] Both the Germans and the Japanese tested such weapons against civilians,[388] and sometimes on prisoners of war.[389]

The Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers,[390] and the imprisonment or execution of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners by the NKVD secret police, along with mass civilian deportations to Siberia, in the Baltic states and eastern Poland annexed by the Red Army.[391] Soviet soldiers committed mass rapes in occupied territories, especially in Germany.[392][393] The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million,[394] while figures for women raped by German soldiers in the Soviet Union go as far as ten million.[395][396]

The mass bombing of cities in Europe and Asia has often been called a war crime, although no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed before or during World War II.[397] The USAAF bombed a total of 67 Japanese cities, killing 393,000 civilians, including from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and destroying 65% of built-up areas.[398]

Genocide, concentration camps, and slave labour

Main articles: The Holocaust, Nazi concentration camps, Extermination camp, Forced labour under German rule during World War II, Kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany, Nazi human experimentation, Soviet war crimes § World War II, and Japanese war crimes

Schutzstaffel (SS) female camp guards removing prisoners' bodies from lorries and carrying them to a mass grave, inside the German Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 1945

Nazi Germany, under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, was responsible for murdering about 6 million Jews in what is now known as the Holocaust. They also murdered an additional 4 million others who were deemed "unworthy of life" (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jehovah's Witnesses) as part of a program of deliberate extermination, in effect becoming a "genocidal state".[399] Soviet POWs were kept in especially unbearable conditions, and 3.6 million Soviet POWs out of 5.7 million died in Nazi camps during the war.[400][401] In addition to concentration camps, death camps were created in Nazi Germany to exterminate people on an industrial scale. Nazi Germany extensively used forced labourers; about 12 million Europeans from German-occupied countries were abducted and used as a slave work force in German industry, agriculture and war economy.[402]

The Soviet Gulag became a de facto system of deadly camps during 1942–43, when wartime privation and hunger caused numerous deaths of inmates,[403] including foreign citizens of Poland and other countries occupied in 1939–40 by the Soviet Union, as well as Axis POWs.[404] By the end of the war, most Soviet POWs liberated from Nazi camps and many repatriated civilians were detained in special filtration camps where they were subjected to NKVD evaluation, and 226,127 were sent to the Gulag as real or perceived Nazi collaborators.[405]

Prisoner identity photograph taken by the German SS of a Polish Catholic girl who was murdered in Auschwitz.[406] Approximately 230,000 children were held prisoner and used in forced labour and Nazi medical experiments.

Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many of which were used as labour camps, also had high death rates. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found the death rate of Western prisoners was 27 percent (for American POWs, 37 percent),[407] seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians.[408] While 37,583 prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from the Netherlands, and 14,473 from the United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number of Chinese released was only 56.[409]

At least five million Chinese civilians from northern China and Manchukuo were enslaved between 1935 and 1941 by the East Asia Development Board, or Kōain, for work in mines and war industries. After 1942, the number reached 10 million.[410] In Java, between 4 and 10 million rōmusha (Japanese: "manual labourers"), were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese labourers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in Southeast Asia, and only 52,000 were repatriated to Java.[411]

Occupation

Main articles: German-occupied Europe, Resistance during World War II, Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Collaboration with Imperial Japan, and Nazi plunder

Polish civilians wearing blindfolds photographed just before being massacred by German soldiers in Palmiry forest, 1940

In Europe, occupation came under two forms. In Western, Northern, and Central Europe (France, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and the annexed portions of Czechoslovakia) Germany established economic policies through which it collected roughly 69.5 billion reichsmarks (27.8 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of the war; this figure does not include the sizeable plunder of industrial products, military equipment, raw materials and other goods.[412] Thus, the income from occupied nations was over 40 percent of the income Germany collected from taxation, a figure which increased to nearly 40 percent of total German income as the war went on.[413]

Soviet partisans hanged by the German army. The Russian Academy of Sciences reported in 1995 that civilian victims in the Soviet Union at German hands totalled 13.7 million dead, twenty percent of the 68 million people in the occupied Soviet Union.

In the East, the intended gains of Lebensraum were never attained as fluctuating front-lines and Soviet scorched earth policies denied resources to the German invaders.[414] Unlike in the West, the Nazi racial policy encouraged extreme brutality against what it considered to be the "inferior people" of Slavic descent; most German advances were thus followed by mass atrocities and war crimes.[415] The Nazis killed an estimated 2.77 million ethnic Poles during the war in addition to Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.[416][better source needed] Although resistance groups formed in most occupied territories, they did not significantly hamper German operations in either the East[417] or the West[418] until late 1943.

In Asia, Japan termed nations under its occupation as being part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, essentially a Japanese hegemony which it claimed was for purposes of liberating colonised peoples.[419] Although Japanese forces were sometimes welcomed as liberators from European domination, Japanese war crimes frequently turned local public opinion against them.[420] During Japan's initial conquest, it captured 4,000,000 barrels (640,000 m3) of oil (~550,000 tonnes) left behind by retreating Allied forces; and by 1943, was able to get production in the Dutch East Indies up to 50 million barrels (7,900,000 m3) of oil (~6.8 million tonnes), 76 percent of its 1940 output rate.[420]

Home fronts and production

Main articles: Military production during World War II and Home front during World War II

Graphs are temporarily unavailable due to technical issues.

Allies to Axis GDP ratio between 1938 and 1945

In Europe, before the outbreak of the war, the Allies had significant advantages in both population and economics. In 1938, the Western Allies (United Kingdom, France, Poland and the British Dominions) had a 30 percent larger population and a 30 percent higher gross domestic product than the European Axis powers (Germany and Italy); if colonies are included, the Allies had more than a 5:1 advantage in population and a nearly 2:1 advantage in GDP.[421] In Asia at the same time, China had roughly six times the population of Japan but only an 89 percent higher GDP; this is reduced to three times the population and only a 38 percent higher GDP if Japanese colonies are included.[421]

The United States produced about two-thirds of all the munitions used by the Allies in World War II, including warships, transports, warplanes, artillery, tanks, trucks, and ammunition.[422] Though the Allies' economic and population advantages were largely mitigated during the initial rapid blitzkrieg attacks of Germany and Japan, they became the decisive factor by 1942, after the United States and Soviet Union joined the Allies, as the war largely settled into one of attrition.[423] While the Allies' ability to out-produce the Axis is often attributed[by whom?] to the Allies having more access to natural resources, other factors, such as Germany and Japan's reluctance to employ women in the labour force,[424] Allied strategic bombing,[425] and Germany's late shift to a war economy[426] contributed significantly. Additionally, neither Germany nor Japan planned to fight a protracted war, and had not equipped themselves to do so.[427] To improve their production, Germany and Japan used millions of slave labourers;[428] Germany used about 12 million people, mostly from Eastern Europe,[402] while Japan used more than 18 million people in Far East Asia.[410][411]

Advances in technology and its application

Main article: Technology during World War II

B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers on the Boeing assembly line in Wichita, Kansas, 1944

Aircraft were used for reconnaissance, as fighters, bombers, and ground-support, and each role developed considerably. Innovations included airlift (the capability to quickly move limited high-priority supplies, equipment, and personnel);[429] and strategic bombing (the bombing of enemy industrial and population centres to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war).[430] Anti-aircraft weaponry also advanced, including defences such as radar and surface-to-air artillery, in particular the introduction of the proximity fuze. The use of the jet aircraft was pioneered and, though late introduction meant it had little impact, it led to jets becoming standard in air forces worldwide.[431]

Advances were made in nearly every aspect of naval warfare, most notably with aircraft carriers and submarines. Although aeronautical warfare had relatively little success at the start of the war, actions at Taranto, Pearl Harbor, and the Coral Sea established the carrier as the dominant capital ship (in place of the battleship).[432][433][434] In the Atlantic, escort carriers became a vital part of Allied convoys, increasing the effective protection radius and helping to close the Mid-Atlantic gap.[435] Carriers were also more economical than battleships because of the relatively low cost of aircraft[436] and not requiring to be as heavily armoured.[437] Submarines, which had proved to be an effective weapon during the First World War,[438] were expected by all combatants to be important in the second. The British focused development on anti-submarine weaponry and tactics, such as sonar and convoys, while Germany focused on improving its offensive capability, with designs such as the Type VII submarine and wolfpack tactics.[439][better source needed] Gradually, improving Allied technologies such as the Leigh light, hedgehog, squid, and homing torpedoes proved effective against German submarines.[440]

A V-2 rocket launched from a fixed site in Peenemünde, 21 June 1943

Land warfare changed from the static frontlines of trench warfare of World War I, which had relied on improved artillery that outmatched the speed of both infantry and cavalry, to increased mobility and combined arms. The tank, which had been used predominantly for infantry support in the First World War, had evolved into the primary weapon.[441] In the late 1930s, tank design was considerably more advanced than it had been during World War I,[442] and advances continued throughout the war with increases in speed, armour and firepower.[443][444] At the start of the war, most commanders thought enemy tanks should be met by tanks with superior specifications.[445] This idea was challenged by the poor performance of the relatively light early tank guns against armour, and German doctrine of avoiding tank-versus-tank combat. This, along with Germany's use of combined arms, were among the key elements of their highly successful blitzkrieg tactics across Poland and France.[441] Many means of destroying tanks, including indirect artillery, anti-tank guns (both towed and self-propelled), mines, short-ranged infantry antitank weapons, and other tanks were used.[445] Even with large-scale mechanisation, infantry remained the backbone of all forces,[446] and throughout the war, most infantry were equipped similarly to World War I.[447] The portable machine gun spread, a notable example being the German MG 34, and various submachine guns which were suited to close combat in urban and jungle settings.[447] The assault rifle, a late war development incorporating many features of the rifle and submachine gun, became the standard post-war infantry weapon for most armed forces.[448]

Nuclear Gadget being raised to the top of the detonation "shot tower", at Alamogordo Bombing Range; Trinity nuclear test, New Mexico, July 1945

Most major belligerents attempted to solve the problems of complexity and security involved in using large codebooks for cryptography by designing ciphering machines, the most well-known being the German Enigma machine.[449] Development of SIGINT (signals intelligence) and cryptanalysis enabled the countering process of decryption. Notable examples were the Allied decryption of Japanese naval codes[450] and British Ultra, a pioneering method for decoding Enigma benefiting from information given to the United Kingdom by the Polish Cipher Bureau, which had been decoding early versions of Enigma before the war.[451] Another aspect of military intelligence was the use of deception, which the Allies used to great effect, such as in operations Mincemeat and Bodyguard.[450][452]

Other technological and engineering feats achieved during, or as a result of, the war include the world's first programmable computers (Z3, Colossus, and ENIAC), guided missiles and modern rockets, the Manhattan Project's development of nuclear weapons, operations research, the development of artificial harbours and oil pipelines under the English Channel.[453] Penicillin was first developed, mass-produced and used during the war.[454]

See also

Opposition to World War II

World War III

Notes

 While various other dates have been proposed as the date on which World War II began or ended, this is the time span most frequently cited.

 Reparations were exacted from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. The USSR also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favour the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Historian Mark Kramer concludes: "The net outflow of resources from eastern Europe to the Soviet Union was approximately $15 billion to $20 billion in the first decade after World War II, an amount roughly equal to the total aid provided by the United States to western Europe under the Marshall Plan."

African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly called Afro-Americans, or, historically, Negroes or Colored (both now considered to be pejorative), are an American racial and ethnic group who, as defined by the United States census, consists of Americans who have ancestry from "any of the Black racial groups of Africa".[3] African Americans constitute the second largest racial and ethnic group in the U.S. after White Americans.[4] The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States.[5][6] According to annual estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2024, the overall Black population was estimated at 42,951,595, representing approximately 12.63% of the total U.S. population.[7]

African-American history began in the 16th century, when mainly West African and Central African slave traders sold African artisans, farmers, and warriors to European slave traders, who transported them across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. They were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies. A few were able to achieve freedom through manumission or escape, and founded independent communities before and during the American Revolution. After the United States was founded in 1783, most American Black people continued to be enslaved, primarily in the American South, with four million enslaved people only liberated after the Northern victory over the South in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.[8]

During Reconstruction, African Americans gained citizenship and adult-males the right to vote; however, due to widespread belief in White supremacy, they were treated as second-class citizens and soon effectively disenfranchised in the South. These circumstances changed due to participation in the military conflicts of the United States, substantial migration out of the South, the elimination of legal racial segregation, and the civil rights movement which sought political and social freedom. However, racism against African Americans and racial socioeconomic disparity remain a problem into the 21st century.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, immigration has played an increasingly significant role in the African-American community. As of 2022, 10% of the U.S. Black population were immigrants, and 20% were either immigrants or the children of immigrants.[9] While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African American, the majority of first-generation immigrants do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin.[10][11] Most African Americans are of West African and coastal Central African ancestry, with varying amounts of Western European and Native American ancestry.[12]

African-American culture has had a significant influence on worldwide culture, making numerous contributions to the English language, literature, politics, cuisine, sports, and music. The African-American contribution to popular music is so profound that most American popular music, including gospel, blues, jazz, rock and roll, R&B, soul, funk, disco, hip hop, and house has its origins either partially or entirely in the African-American community.[13][14]

History

Main article: African American history

See also: African immigration to the United States

Colonial era

Main article: Slavery in the colonial history of the United States

See also: Atlantic slave trade

Major slave trading regions of Africa, 15th?19th centuries

The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from several Central and West African ethnic groups. They had been captured directly by European slave traders in coastal raids,[15] or captured and sold by West African slave traders or by half-European "merchant princes"[16] to European slave traders, who brought them to the Americas.[17]

The first African slaves in what is now the United States arrived in the early 16th century. Africans were among Juan Ponce de León's 1513 voyage that landed in what would become Spanish Florida, and enslaved Africans arrived around the same time to Spanish Puerto Rico.[18][19]

Africans also came via Santo Domingo in the Caribbean to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina), founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526.[20] The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterward, due to an epidemic and the colony was abandoned. The settlers and the slaves who had not escaped returned to the Island of Hispaniola, whence they had come.[20]

The enslaved explorer Esteban arrived in Florida with the Narváez expedition in 1528, a journey that first landed in Santo Domingo and later traveled into Spanish Texas and the Southwest before ending in Mexico.[21]

The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free Black domestic servant from Seville, and Miguel Rodríguez, a White Segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine (Spanish Florida), is the first known and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in what is now the continental United States.[22]

Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia, illustration from 1670

The first recorded Africans in English America (including most of the future United States) were "20 and odd negroes" who arrived in Jamestown, Virginia via Cape Comfort in August 1619 as indentured servants.[23] As many Virginian settlers began to die from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers.[24]

An indentured servant (who could be White or Black) would work for several years (usually four to seven) without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased, and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or attempting to running away. Unlike slaves, they were freed after their term of service expired or if their freedom was purchased. Their children did not inherit their status, and on their release from contract they received "a year's provision of corn, double apparel, tools necessary", and a small cash payment called "freedom dues".[25] Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom.[26] They raised families, married other Africans and sometimes intermarried with Native Americans or European settlers.[27]

The first slave auction at New Amsterdam in 1655; illustration from 1895 by Howard Pyle[28]

By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown, and some became wealthy by colonial standards and purchased indentured servants of their own. In 1640, the Virginia General Court recorded the earliest documentation of lifetime slavery when they sentenced John Punch, a Negro, to lifetime servitude under his master Hugh Gwyn, for running away.[29][30]

In Spanish Florida, some Spanish married or had unions with Pensacola, Creek or African women, both enslaved and free, and their descendants created a mixed-race population of mestizos and mulattos. The Spanish encouraged slaves from the colony of Georgia to come to Florida as a refuge, promising freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism. King Charles II issued a royal proclamation freeing all slaves who fled to Spanish Florida and accepted conversion and baptism. Most went to the area around St. Augustine, but escaped slaves also reached Pensacola. St. Augustine had mustered an all-Black militia unit defending Spanish Florida as early as 1683.[31]

Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769

One of the Dutch African arrivals, Anthony Johnson, would later own one of the first Black "slaves", John Casor, resulting from the court ruling of a civil case.[32][33]

The popular conception of a race-based slave system did not fully develop until the 18th century. The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery in 1625 with the importation of eleven Black slaves into New Amsterdam (present-day New York City). All the colony's slaves, however, were freed upon its surrender to the English.[34]

Massachusetts was the first English colony to legally recognize slavery in 1641. In 1662, Virginia passed a law that children of enslaved women would take the status of the mother, rather than that of the father, as was the case under common law. This legal principle was called partus sequitur ventrum.[35][36]

By an act of 1699, Virginia ordered the deportation of all free Blacks, effectively defining all people of African descent who remained in the colony as slaves.[37] In 1670, the colonial assembly passed a law prohibiting free and baptized Blacks (and Native Americans) from purchasing Christians (in this act meaning White Europeans) but allowing them to buy people "of their owne nation".[38]

1774 image of a fugitive slave in a New York newspaper, offering a $10 reward (equivalent to $288 in 2024). Slave owners, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, placed around 200,000 runaway slave adverts in newspapers across the US before slavery ended in 1865.[39][40]

In Spanish Louisiana, although there was no movement toward abolition of the African slave trade, Spanish rule introduced a new law called coartación, which allowed slaves to buy their freedom, and that of others.[41] Although some did not have the money to do so, government measures on slavery enabled the existence of many free Blacks. This caused problems to the Spaniards with the French creoles (French who had settled in New France) who had also populated Spanish Louisiana. The French creoles cited that measure as one of the system's worst elements.[42]

First established in South Carolina in 1704, groups of armed White men?slave patrols?were formed to monitor enslaved Black people.[43] Their function was to police slaves, especially fugitives. Slave owners feared that slaves might organize revolts or slave rebellions, so state militias were formed to provide a military command structure and discipline within the slave patrols. These patrols were used to detect, encounter, and crush any organized slave meetings which might lead to revolts or rebellions.[43]

The earliest African American congregations and churches were organized before 1800 in both northern and southern cities following the Great Awakening. By 1775, Africans made up 20% of the population in the American colonies, which made them the second largest ethnic group after English Americans.[44]

From the American Revolution to the Civil War

Main article: Slavery in the United States

Crispus Attucks, the first "martyr" of the American Revolution. He was of Native American and African American descent.

During the 1770s, Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious American colonists secure their independence by defeating the British in the American Revolutionary War.[45] Blacks played a role in both sides in the American Revolution. Activists in the Patriot cause included James Armistead, Prince Whipple, and Oliver Cromwell.[46][47] Around 15,000 Black Loyalists left with the British after the war, most of them ending up as free Black people in England[48] or its colonies, such as the Black Nova Scotians and the Sierra Leone Creole people.[49][50]

In the Spanish Louisiana, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez organized Spanish free Black men into two militia companies to defend New Orleans during the American Revolution. They fought in the 1779 battle in which Spain captured Baton Rouge from the British. Gálvez also commanded them in campaigns against the British outposts in Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. He recruited slaves for the militia by pledging to free anyone who was seriously wounded and promised to secure a low price for coartación (buy their freedom and that of others) for those who received lesser wounds. During the 1790s, Governor Francisco Luis Héctor, baron of Carondelet reinforced local fortifications and recruit even more free Black men for the militia. Carondelet doubled the number of free Black men who served, creating two more militia companies?one made up of Black members and the other of pardo (mixed race). Serving in the militia brought free Black men one step closer to equality with Whites, allowing them, for example, the right to carry arms and boosting their earning power. However, actually these privileges distanced free Black men from enslaved Blacks and encouraged them to identify with Whites.[42]

Slavery had been tacitly enshrined in the US Constitution through provisions such as Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, commonly known as the 3/5 compromise. Due to the restrictions of Section 9, Clause 1, Congress was unable to pass an Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves until 1807.[51] Fugitive slave laws (derived from the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution?Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) were passed by Congress in both 1793 and 1850, guaranteeing the right of a slaveholder to recover an escaped slave anywhere within the US.[40] Slave owners, who viewed enslaved people as property, ensured that it became a federal crime to aid or assist those who had fled slavery or to interfere with their capture.[39] By that time, slavery, which almost exclusively targeted Black people, had become the most critical and contentious political issue in the Antebellum United States, repeatedly sparking crises and conflicts. Among these were the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the infamous Dred Scott decision, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.

Frederick Douglass, c.?1850

Prior to the Civil War, eight serving presidents had owned slaves, a practice that was legally protected under the US Constitution.[52] By 1860, the number of enslaved Black people in the US had grown to between 3.5 and 4.4 million, largely as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. In addition, 488,000?500,000 Black people lived free (with legislated limits)[53] across the country.[54] With legislated limits imposed upon them in addition to "unconquerable prejudice" from Whites according to Henry Clay.[55] In response to these conditions, some free Black people chose to leave the US and emigrate to Liberia in West Africa.[53] Liberia had been established in 1821 as a settlement by the American Colonization Society (ACS), with many abolitionist members of the ACS believing Black Americans would have greater opportunities for freedom and equality in Africa than they would in the US.[53]

Slaves not only represented a significant financial investment for their owners, but they also played a crucial role in producing the country's most valuable product and export: cotton. Enslaved people were instrumental in the construction of several prominent structures such as, the United States Capitol, the White House and other Washington, D.C.?based buildings.[56] Similar building projects existed in the slave states.

Slaves Waiting for Sale: Richmond, Virginia, 1853. Note the new clothes. The domestic slave trade broke up many families, and individuals lost their connection to families and clans.

By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a significant and major economic activity in the United States, continuing to flourish until the 1860s.[57] Historians estimate that nearly one million individuals were subjected to this forced migration, which was often referred to as a new "Middle Passage". The historian Ira Berlin described this internal forced migration of enslaved people as the "central event" in the life of a slave during the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Berlin emphasized that whether enslaved individuals were directly uprooted or lived in constant fear that they or their families would be involuntarily relocated, "the massive deportation traumatized Black people" throughout the US.[58] As a result of this large-scale forced movement, countless individuals lost their connection to families and clans, and many ethnic Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa.[57]

The 1863 photograph of Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana, along with the famous image of Gordon and his scarred back, served as two of the earliest and most powerful examples of how the newborn medium of photography could be used to visually document and encapsulate the brutality and cruelty of slavery.[59]

Slave trader's business on Whitehall Street Atlanta, Georgia, 1864 during the American Civil War with a Union corporal of the United States Colored Troops sitting by the door

Emigration of free Blacks to their continent of origin had been proposed since the Revolutionary war. After Haiti became independent, it tried to recruit African Americans to migrate there after it re-established trade relations with the United States. The Haitian Union was a group formed to promote relations between the countries.[60] After riots against Blacks in Cincinnati, its Black community sponsored founding of the Wilberforce Colony, an initially successful settlement of African American immigrants to Canada. The colony was one of the first such independent political entities. It lasted for a number of decades and provided a destination for about 200 Black families emigrating from a number of locations in the United States.[60]

In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared that all slaves in Confederate-held territory were free.[61] Advancing Union troops enforced the proclamation, with Texas being the last state to be emancipated, in 1865.[62]

Harriet Tubman, c.?1869

Slavery in a few border states continued until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.[63] While the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship to Whites only,[64][65] the 14th Amendment (1868) gave Black people citizenship, and the 15th Amendment (1870) gave Black men the right to vote.[66]

Reconstruction era and Jim Crow

Main articles: Reconstruction era and Jim Crow laws

African Americans quickly set up congregations for themselves, as well as schools and community/civic associations, to have space away from White control or oversight. While the post-war Reconstruction era was initially a time of progress for African Americans, that period ended in 1876. By the late 1890s, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement.[67] Segregation was now imposed with Jim Crow laws, using signs used to show Blacks where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.[68] For those places that were racially mixed, non-Whites had to wait until all White customers were dealt with.[68] Most African Americans obeyed the Jim Crow laws, to avoid racially motivated violence. To maintain self-esteem and dignity, African Americans such as Anthony Overton and Mary McLeod Bethune continued to build their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.[69]

In the last decade of the 19th century, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom in the United States, a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations". These discriminatory acts included racial segregation?upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896?which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disenfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities.[70]

Great migration and civil rights movement

Main articles: Great Migration and civil rights movement

A group of White men pose for a 1919 photograph as they stand over the Black victim, Will Brown, who had been lynched and had his body mutilated and burned during the Omaha race riot of 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the US.[71]

The desperate conditions of African Americans in the South sparked the Great Migration during the first half of the 20th century which led to a growing African American community in Northern and Western United States.[72] The rapid influx of Blacks disturbed the racial balance within Northern and Western cities, exacerbating hostility between both Blacks and Whites in the two regions.[73] The Red Summer of 1919 was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the US as a result of race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919 and the Omaha race riot of 1919. Overall, Blacks in Northern and Western cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life. Within employment, economic opportunities for Blacks were routed to the lowest-status and restrictive in potential mobility. At the 1900 Hampton Negro Conference, Reverend Matthew Anderson said: "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South."[74] Within the housing market, stronger discriminatory measures were used in correlation to the influx, resulting in a mix of "targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining and racial steering".[75] While many Whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics toward African Americans, many other Whites migrated to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions, a process known as White flight.[76]

Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after being arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a White person

Despite discrimination, drawing cards for leaving the hopelessness in the South were the growth of African American institutions and communities in Northern cities. Institutions included Black oriented organizations (e.g., Urban League, NAACP), churches, businesses, and newspapers, as well as successes in the development in African American intellectual culture, music, and popular culture (e.g., Harlem Renaissance, Chicago Black Renaissance). The Cotton Club in Harlem was a Whites-only establishment, with Blacks (such as Duke Ellington) allowed to perform, but to a White audience.[77] Black Americans also found a new ground for political power in Northern cities, without the enforced disabilities of Jim Crow.[78][79]

By the 1950s, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. A 1955 lynching that sparked public outrage about injustice was that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago. Spending the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi, Till was killed for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a White woman. Till had been badly beaten, one of his eyes was gouged out, and he was shot in the head. The visceral response to his mother's decision to have an open-casket funeral mobilized the Black community throughout the US.[80] Vann Newkirk wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of White supremacy".[80] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted by an all-White jury.[81] One hundred days after Emmett Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama?indeed, Parks told Emmett's mother Mamie Till that "the photograph of Emmett's disfigured face in the casket was set in her mind when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus."[82]

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, shows civil rights leaders and union leaders.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson put his support behind passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which expanded federal authority over states to ensure Black political participation through protection of voter registration and elections.[83] By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded upon the aims of the civil rights movement to include economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from White authority.[84]

During the post-war period, many African Americans continued to be economically disadvantaged relative to other Americans. Average Black income stood at 54 percent of that of White workers in 1947, and 55 percent in 1962. In 1959, median family income for Whites was $5,600 (equivalent to $60,405 in 2024), compared with $2,900 (equivalent to $31,281 in 2024) for non-White families. In 1965, 43 percent of all Black families fell into the poverty bracket, earning under $3,000 (equivalent to $29,933 in 2024) a year. The 1960s saw improvements in the social and economic conditions of many Black Americans.[85]

From 1965 to 1969, Black family income rose from 54 to 60 percent of White family income. In 1968, 23 percent of Black families earned under $3,000 (equivalent to $27,126 in 2024) a year, compared with 41 percent in 1960. In 1965, 19 percent of Black Americans had incomes equal to the national median, a proportion that rose to 27 percent by 1967. In 1960, the median level of education for Blacks had been 10.8 years, and by the late 1960s, the figure rose to 12.2 years, half a year behind the median for Whites.[85]

Post?civil rights era

Main article: Post?civil rights era in African-American history

U.S. President Barack Obama's official photograph in the Oval Office on 6 December 2012.

Politically and economically, African Americans have made substantial strides during the post?civil rights era. In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Supreme Court Justice. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the US Congress. In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African American elected governor in US history. Clarence Thomas succeeded Marshall to become the second African American Supreme Court Justice in 1991. In 1992, Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African American woman elected to the US Senate. There were 8,936 Black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001, there were 484 Black mayors.[86]

In 2005, the number of Africans immigrating to the United States, in a single year, surpassed the peak number who were involuntarily brought to the United States during the Atlantic slave trade.[87] On November 4, 2008, Democratic Senator Barack Obama?the son of a White American mother and a Kenyan father?defeated Republican Senator John McCain to become the first African American to be elected president. At least 95 percent of African American voters voted for Obama.[88][89] He also received overwhelming support from young and educated Whites, a majority of Asians,[90] and Hispanics,[90] picking up a number of new states in the Democratic electoral column.[88][89] Obama lost the overall White vote, although he won a larger proportion of White votes than any previous non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter.[91] Obama was reelected for a second and final term, by a similar margin on November 6, 2012.[92] In 2021, Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, became the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to serve as Vice President of the United States.[93][failed verification] In June 2021, Juneteenth, a day which commemorates the end of slavery in the US, became a federal holiday.[94]

Demographics

Further information: Historical racial and ethnic demographics of the United States § Black population as a percentage of the total population by U.S. region and state (1790?2010), List of U.S. communities with African-American majority populations, List of U.S. counties with African-American majority populations, and List of U.S. states by African-American population

Black Americans (alone) population pyramid in 2020

Proportion of African Americans in each US state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as of the 2020 United States Census

Proportion of Black Americans (alone or in combination) in each county of the fifty states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as of the 2020 United States census

Majority Black American counties in the United States according to the 2020 census

US census map indicating US counties with fewer than 25 Black or African American inhabitants

Graph showing the percentage of the African American population living in the American South, 1790?2010. Note the major declines between 1910 and 1940 and 1940?1970, and the reverse trend post-1970. Nonetheless, the absolute majority of the African American population has always lived in the American South.

In 1790, when the first US census was taken, Africans (including slaves and free people) numbered about 760,000?about 19.3% of the population. In 1860, at the start of the Civil War, the African American population had increased to 4.4 million, but the percentage rate dropped to 14% of the overall population of the country. The vast majority were slaves, with only 488,000 counted as "freemen". By 1900, the Black population had doubled and reached 8.8 million.[95]

In 1910, about 90% of African Americans lived in the South. Large numbers began migrating north looking for better job opportunities and living conditions, and to escape Jim Crow laws and racial violence. The Great Migration, as it was called, spanned the 1890s to the 1970s. From 1916 through the 1960s, more than 6 million Black people moved north. But in the 1970s and 1980s, that trend reversed, with more African Americans moving south to the Sun Belt than leaving it.[96]

The African American population in the United States declined over time as a percentage of the total population until 1930, and has been rising since then:

African Americans in the United States[97]

Year Number % of total

population % Change

(10 yr) Slaves % in slavery

1790 757,208 19.3% (highest) ? 697,681 92%

1800 1,002,037 18.9% 32.3% 893,602 89%

1810 1,377,808 19.0% 37.5% 1,191,362 86%

1820 1,771,656 18.4% 28.6% 1,538,022 87%

1830 2,328,642 18.1% 31.4% 2,009,043 86%

1840 2,873,648 16.8% 23.4% 2,487,355 87%

1850 3,638,808 15.7% 26.6% 3,204,287 88%

1860 4,441,830 14.1% 22.1% 3,953,731 89%

1870 4,880,009 12.7% 9.9% ? ?

1880 6,580,793 13.1% 34.9% ? ?

1890 7,488,788 11.9% 13.8% ? ?

1900 8,833,994 11.6% 18.0% ? ?

1910 9,827,763 10.7% 11.2% ? ?

1920 10.5 million 9.9% 6.8% ? ?

1930 11.9 million 9.7% (lowest) 13% ? ?

1940 12.9 million 9.8% 8.4% ? ?

1950 15.0 million 10.0% 16% ? ?

1960 18.9 million 10.5% 26% ? ?

1970 22.6 million 11.1% 20% ? ?

1980 26.5 million 11.7% 17% ? ?

1990 30.0 million 12.1% 13% ? ?

2000 34.6 million 12.3% 15% ? ?

2010 38.9 million 12.6% 12% ? ?

2020 41.1 million 12.4% 5.6% ? ?

By 1990, the African American population reached about 30 million and represented 12% of the US population, roughly the same proportion as in 1900.[98]

African American groups in the USA

Years Non-Hispanic Blacks Black Hispanics Total

# % # %

2020 39,940,338 12.1% 1,163,862 0.3% 41,104,200

At the time of the 2000 US census, 54.8% of African Americans lived in the South. In that year, 17.6% of African Americans lived in the Northeast and 18.7% in the Midwest, while only 8.9% lived in the Western states. The west does have a sizable Black population in certain areas, however. California, the nation's most populous state, has the fifth largest African American population, only behind New York, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. According to the 2000 census, approximately 2.05% of African Americans identified as Hispanic or Latino in origin,[99] many of whom may be of Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Haitian, or other Latin American descent. The only self-reported ancestral groups larger than African Americans are the Irish and Germans.[100]

Band rehearsal on 125th Street in Harlem, the historic epicenter of African American culture. New York City is home by a significant margin to the world's largest Black population of any city outside Africa, at over 2.2 million. African immigration to New York City is now driving the growth of the city's Black population.[101]

According to the 2010 census, nearly 3% of people who self-identified as Black had recent ancestors who immigrated from another country. Self-reported non-Hispanic Black immigrants from the Caribbean, mostly from Jamaica and Haiti, represented 0.9% of the US population, at 2.6 million.[102] Self-reported Black immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa also represented 0.9%, at about 2.8 million.[102] Additionally, self-identified Black Hispanics represented 0.4% of the United States population, at about 1.2 million people, largely found within the Puerto Rican and Dominican communities.[103] Self-reported Black immigrants hailing from other countries in the Americas, such as Brazil and Canada, as well as several European countries, represented less than 0.1% of the population. Mixed-race Hispanic and non-Hispanic Americans who identified as being part Black, represented 0.9% of the population. Of the 12.6% of United States residents who identified as Black, around 10.3% were "native Black American" or ethnic African Americans, who are direct descendants of West/Central Africans brought to the US as slaves. These individuals make up well over 80% of all Blacks in the country. When including people of mixed-race origin, about 13.5% of the US population self-identified as Black or "mixed with Black".[104] However, according to the US Census Bureau, evidence from the 2000 census indicates that many African and Caribbean immigrant ethnic groups do not identify as "Black, African Am., or Negro". Instead, they wrote in their own respective ethnic groups in the "Some Other Race" write-in entry. As a result, the census bureau devised a new, separate "African American" ethnic group category in 2010 for ethnic African Americans.[105] Nigerian Americans and Ethiopian Americans were the most reported sub-Saharan African groups in the United States.[106]

In the 2020 census, the African American population was undercounted at an estimated rate of 3.3%, up from 2.1% in 2010.[107]

Proportion in each county

African American (Alone) population distribution over time

1790

1790

 

1800

1800

 

1810

1810

 

1820

1820

 

1830

1830

 

1840

1840

 

1850

1850

 

1860

1860

 

1870

1870

 

1880

1880

 

1890

1890

 

1900

1900

 

1910

1910

 

1920

1920

 

1930

1930

 

1940

1940

 

1970

1970

 

1980

1980

 

1990

1990

 

2000

2000

 

2010

2010

 

2020

2020

Texas has the largest African American population by state with approximately 4 million.[108] Followed by Texas is Florida, with 3.8 million, and Georgia, with 3.6 million.[109] Mississippi is the state with the highest African American share of the population at 39%. Followed by Mississippi is Louisiana at 34%, and Georgia at 32%.[108]

US cities

Further information: List of U.S. cities with large Black populations and List of U.S. metropolitan areas with large African-American populations

After 100 years of African Americans leaving the south in large numbers seeking better opportunities and treatment in the west and north, a movement known as the Great Migration, there is now a reverse trend, called the New Great Migration. As with the earlier Great Migration, the New Great Migration is primarily directed toward cities and large urban areas, such as Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Huntsville, Raleigh, Tampa, San Antonio, New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, Jacksonville, and so forth.[110] A growing percentage of African Americans from the west and north are migrating to the southern region of the US for economic and cultural reasons. In 2020, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles metropolitan areas had the highest decline in African Americans, while Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston had the highest increase respectively.[111][112] Despite recent declines, as of 2020, the New York City metropolitan area still has the largest African American metropolitan population in the United States and the only to have over 3 million African Americans.[113][114]

Among cities of 100,000 or more, South Fulton, Georgia had the highest percentage of Black residents of any large US city in 2020, with 93%. Other large cities with African American majorities include Jackson, Mississippi (80%), Detroit, Michigan (80%), Birmingham, Alabama (70%), Miami Gardens, Florida (67%), Memphis, Tennessee (63%), Montgomery, Alabama (62%), Baltimore, Maryland (60%), Augusta, Georgia (59%), Shreveport, Louisiana (58%), New Orleans, Louisiana (57%), Macon, Georgia (56%), Baton Rouge, Louisiana (55%), Hampton, Virginia (53%), Newark, New Jersey (53%), Mobile, Alabama (53%), Cleveland, Ohio (52%), and Brockton, Massachusetts (51%).

Claiborne County, Mississippi is the Blackest county in the U.S. at 87% Black in 2020. Cook County, Illinois has the largest Black population in the U.S. with 1,185,601 Black residents in 2020.

The nation's most affluent community with an African American majority resides in View Park?Windsor Hills, California, with an annual median household income of $159,618 and median home price of about $1.5 million in 2025.[115][116] Other largely affluent and African American communities include Prince George's County (namely Mitchellville, Woodmore, Upper Marlboro) and Charles County in Maryland,[117] DeKalb County (namely Stonecrest, Lithonia, Smoke Rise) and South Fulton in Georgia, Charles City County in Virginia, Baldwin Hills in California, Hillcrest and Uniondale in New York, and Cedar Hill, DeSoto, and Missouri City in Texas. Additionally, there is a significant affluent Black presence in the southern Chicago suburbs of Cook County, Illinois. A report from the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) indicated that 5 of the top 10 municipalities nationwide (with at least 500 Black households) registering the highest Black homeownership rates were in this area - including Olympia Fields, South Holland, Flossmoor, Matteson, and Lynwood.[118] In 2006, Queens County, New York was the only county with a population of 65,000 or more where African Americans had a higher median household income than White Americans.[119]

Seatack, Virginia is currently the oldest African American community in the United States.[120] It survives today with a vibrant and active civic community.[121]

Education

Main article: History of African-American education

Former slave reading, 1870

During slavery, anti-literacy laws were enacted in the US that prohibited education for Black people. Slave owners saw literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery. As a North Carolina statute stated, "Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion."[122]

When slavery was finally abolished in 1865, public educational systems were expanding across the country. By 1870, around seventy-four institutions in the south provided a form of advanced education for African American students. By 1900, over a hundred programs at these schools provided training for Black professionals, including teachers. Many of the students at Fisk University, including the young W. E. B. Du Bois, taught school during the summers to support their studies.[123]

African Americans were very concerned to provide quality education for their children, but White supremacy limited their ability to participate in educational policymaking on the political level. State governments soon moved to undermine their citizenship by restricting their right to vote. By the late 1870s, Blacks were disenfranchised and segregated across the American South.[124] White politicians in Mississippi and other states withheld financial resources and supplies from Black schools. Nevertheless, the presence of Black teachers, and their engagement with their communities both inside and outside the classroom, ensured that Black students had access to education despite these external constraints.[125][126]

During World War II, demands for unity and racial tolerance on the home front provided an opening for the first Black history curriculum in the country.[127] For example, during the early 1940s, Madeline Morgan, a Black teacher in the Chicago public schools, created a curriculum for students in grades one through eight highlighting the contributions of Black people to the history of the United States. At the close of the war, Chicago's Board of Education downgraded the curriculum's status from mandatory to optional.[128]

Predominantly Black schools for kindergarten through twelfth grade students were common throughout the US before the 1970s. By 1972, however, desegregation efforts meant that only 25% of Black students were in schools with more than 90% non-White students. However, since then, a trend towards re-segregation affected communities across the country: by 2011, 2.9 million African American students were in such overwhelmingly minority schools, including 53% of Black students in school districts that were formerly under desegregation orders.[129][130]

As late as 1947, about one third of African Americans over 65 were considered to lack the literacy to read and write their own names. By 1969, illiteracy as it had been traditionally defined, had been largely eradicated among younger African Americans.[131]

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium.

Between 1995 and 2009, freshmen college enrollment for African Americans increased by 73 percent and only 15 percent for Whites.[132] Black women are enrolled in college more than any other race and gender group, leading all with 9.7% enrolled according to the 2011 US census.[133][134] The average high school graduation rate of Blacks in the United States has steadily increased to 71% in 2013.[135] Separating this statistic into component parts shows it varies greatly depending upon the state and the school district examined. 38% of Black males graduated in the state of New York but in Maine 97% graduated and exceeded the White male graduation rate by 11 percentage points.[136] In much of the southeastern United States and some parts of the southwestern United States the graduation rate of White males was in fact below 70% such as in Florida where 62% of White males graduated from high school. Examining specific school districts paints an even more complex picture. In the Detroit school district, the graduation rate of Black males was 20% but 7% for White males. In the New York City school district 28% of Black males graduate from high school compared to 57% of White males. In Newark County[where?] 76% of Black males graduated compared to 67% for White males. Further academic improvement has occurred in 2015. Roughly 23% of all Blacks have bachelor's degrees. In 1988, 21% of Whites had obtained a bachelor's degree versus 11% of Blacks. In 2015, 23% of Blacks had obtained a bachelor's degree versus 36% of Whites.[137] Foreign born Blacks, 9% of the Black population, made even greater strides. They exceed native born Blacks by 10 percentage points.[137]

College Board, which runs the official college-level advanced placement (AP) programs in American high schools, have has received criticism in recent years that its curricula have focused too much on Euro-centric history.[138] In 2020, College Board reshaped some curricula among history-based courses to further reflect the African diaspora.[139] In 2021, College Board announced it would be piloting an AP African American Studies course between 2022 and 2024. The course officially launched in August 2024.[140][141]

In June 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-based affirmative action at American colleges and universities. This landmark Supreme Court decision is widely believed to contribute to a decline in African American enrollment at the nation's most selective and prominent colleges and universities, where African American applicants often have, on average, lower standardized test scores and GPAs compared to the overall applicant pool. In response, many of the nation's most popular historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have reported a significant surge in applications and enrollment.[142][143][144][145]

According to a 2025 study, African Americans have the highest average student debt. African Americans with bachelor's degrees owe an average of $52,726 in student loans. Nearly 70% of African Americans took out a loan to fund their undergraduate education.[146]

Historically Black colleges and universities

Main articles: Historically black colleges and universities, List of historically black colleges and universities, and African American student access to medical schools

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which were founded when segregated institutions of higher learning did not admit African Americans, continue to thrive and educate students of all races today. There are 107 HBCUs representing three percent of the nation's colleges and universities with the majority established in the Southeast.[147][148] HBCUs have been largely responsible for establishing and expanding the African American middle-class by providing more career opportunities for African Americans.[149][150]

Economic status

Further information: Black-owned business

The economic disparity between the races in the US has marginally improved since the end of slavery. In 1863, two years prior to emancipation, Black people owned 0.5 percent of the national wealth, while in 2019 it is just over 1.5 percent.[151] Racial disparity in poverty rates has narrowed since the civil rights era, with the poverty rate among African Americans decreasing from 24.7% in 2004 to 18.8% in 2020, compared to 10.5% for all Americans.[152][153] Poverty is associated with higher rates of marital stress and dissolution, physical and mental health problems, disability, cognitive deficits, low educational attainment, and crime.[154]

African Americans have a long and diverse history of business ownership. Although the first African American business is unknown, slaves captured from West Africa are believed to have established commercial enterprises as peddlers and skilled craftspeople as far back as the 17th century. Around 1900, Booker T. Washington became the most famous proponent of African American businesses. His critic and rival W. E. B. DuBois also commended business as a vehicle for African American advancement.[155]

This graph shows the real median US household income by race: 1967 to 2011, in 2011 dollars.[156]

African Americans had a combined buying power of over $1.6 trillion as of 2021, a 171% increase of their buying power in 2000 but lagging significantly in growth behind American Latinos and Asians in the same timer period (with 288% and 383%, respectively; for reference, US growth overall was 144% in the same period); however, African American net worth had shrunk 14% in the previous year despite strong growth in property prices and the S&P 500. In 2002, African American-owned businesses accounted for 1.2 million of the US's 23 million businesses.[157] As of 2011, African American-owned businesses account for approximately 2 million US businesses.[158] Black-owned businesses experienced the largest growth in number of businesses among minorities from 2002 to 2011.[158]

Twenty-five percent of Blacks had white-collar occupations (management, professional, and related fields) in 2000, compared with 33.6% of Americans overall.[159][160] In 2001, over half of African American households of married couples earned $50,000 or more.[160] Although in the same year African Americans were over-represented among the nation's poor, this was directly related to the disproportionate percentage of African American families headed by single women; such families are collectively poorer, regardless of ethnicity.[160]

In 2006, the median earnings of African American men was more than Black and non-Black American women overall, and in all educational levels.[161][162][163][164][165] At the same time, among American men, income disparities were significant; the median income of African American men was approximately 76 cents for every dollar of their European American counterparts, although the gap narrowed somewhat with a rise in educational level.[161][166]

Overall, the median earnings of African American men were 72 cents for every dollar earned of their Asian American counterparts, and $1.17 for every dollar earned by Hispanic men.[161][164][167] On the other hand, by 2006, among American women with post-secondary education, African American women have made significant advances; the median income of African American women was more than those of their Asian-, European- and Hispanic American counterparts with at least some college education.[162][163][168]

The US public sector is the single most important source of employment for African Americans.[169] During 2008?2010, 21.2% of all Black workers were public employees, compared with 16.3% of non-Black workers.[169] Both before and after the onset of the Great Recession, African Americans were 30% more likely than other workers to be employed in the public sector.[169] The public sector is also a critical source of decent-paying jobs for Black Americans. For both men and women, the median wage earned by Black employees is significantly higher in the public sector than in other industries.[169]

In 1999, the median income of African American families was $33,255 compared to $53,356 of European Americans. In times of economic hardship for the nation, African Americans suffer disproportionately from job loss and underemployment, with the Black underclass being hardest hit. The phrase "last hired and first fired" is reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment figures. Nationwide, the October 2008 unemployment rate for African Americans was 11.1%,[170] while the nationwide rate was 6.5%.[171] In 2007, the average income for African Americans was approximately $34,000, compared to $55,000 for Whites.[172] African Americans experience a higher rate of unemployment than the general population.[173]

The income gap between Black and White families is also significant. In 2005, employed Blacks earned 65% of the wages of Whites, down from 82% in 1975.[152] The New York Times reported in 2006 that in Queens, New York, the median income among African American families exceeded that of White families, which the newspaper attributed to the growth in the number of two-parent Black families. It noted that Queens was the only county with more than 65,000 residents where that was true.[119] In 2011, it was reported that 72% of Black babies were born to unwed mothers.[174] The poverty rate among single-parent Black families was 39.5% in 2005, according to Walter E. Williams, while it was 9.9% among married-couple Black families. Among White families, the respective rates were 26.4% and 6% in poverty.[175]

Collectively, African Americans are more involved in the American political process than other minority groups in the United States, indicated by the highest level of voter registration and participation in elections among these groups in 2004.[176] African Americans also have the highest level of Congressional representation of any minority group in the US.[177]

African American homeownership

The US homeownership rate according to race[178]

Homeownership in the US is the strongest indicator of financial stability and the primary asset most Americans use to generate wealth. African Americans continue to lag behind other racial groups in homeownership.[179] In the first quarter of 2021, 45.1% of African Americans owned their homes, compared to 65.3% of all Americans.[180] The African American homeownership rate has remained relatively flat since the 1970s despite an increase in anti-discrimination housing laws and protections.[181] The African American homeownership rate peaked in 2004 at 49.7%.[182]

The average White high school drop-out still has a slightly better chance of owning a home than the average African American college graduate usually due to unfavorable debt-to-income ratios or credit scores among most African American college graduates.[183][184] Since 2000, fast-growing housing costs in most cities have made it even more difficult for the US African American homeownership rate to significantly grow and reach over 50% for the first time in history. From 2000 to 2022, the median home price in the US grew 160%, outpacing average annual household income growth in that same period, which only grew about 30%.[185][186][187] South Carolina is the state with the most African American homeownership, with about 55% of African Americans owning their own homes.[188][189]

Black people, who make up 12% of the total U.S. population, make up 32% of all people experiencing homelessness, according to the data.[190]

Politics

Year Candidate of

the plurality Political

party % of

Black

vote Result

1980 Jimmy Carter Democratic 83% Lost

1984 Walter Mondale Democratic 91% Lost

1988 Michael Dukakis Democratic 89% Lost

1992 Bill Clinton Democratic 83% Won

1996 Bill Clinton Democratic 84% Won

2000 Al Gore Democratic 90% Lost

2004 John Kerry Democratic 88% Lost

2008 Barack Obama Democratic 95% Won

2012 Barack Obama Democratic 93% Won

2016 Hillary Clinton Democratic 88% Lost

2020 Joe Biden Democratic 87% Won

2024 Kamala Harris Democratic 85% Lost

Since the mid 20th century, a large majority of African Americans support the Democratic Party. In the 2024 Presidential election, 86% of African American voters supported Democrat Kamala Harris, while 13% supported Republican Donald Trump.[191] Although there is an African American lobby in foreign policy, it has not had the impact that African American organizations have had in domestic policy.[192]

Many African Americans were excluded from electoral politics in the decades following the end of Reconstruction. For those that could participate, until the New Deal, African Americans were supporters of the Republican Party because it was Republican President Abraham Lincoln who helped in granting freedom to American slaves; at the time, the Republicans and Democrats represented the sectional interests of the North and South, respectively, rather than any specific ideology, and both conservative and liberal were represented equally in both parties.

The African American trend of voting for Democrats can be traced back to the 1930s during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program provided economic relief to African Americans. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition turned the Democratic Party into an organization of the working class and their liberal allies, regardless of region. The African American vote became even more solidly Democratic when Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pushed for civil rights legislation during the 1960s. In 1960, nearly a third of African Americans voted for Republican Richard Nixon.[193]

Conservatism has been growing among African Americans, particularly since the 2020 Presidential election. In the 2024 election, Trump secured a slightly larger share of the African American vote compared to his 2020 performance.[194][195][196]

Black national anthem

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" being sung by the family of Barack Obama, Smokey Robinson and others in the White House in 2014

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" is often referred to as the Black national anthem in the United States.[197] In 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had dubbed it the "Negro national anthem" for its power in voicing a cry for liberation and affirmation for African-American people.[198]

Religion

Religious affiliation of African Americans in 2007[199]

Black Protestant (59.0%)

Evangelical Protestant (15.0%)

Mainline Protestant (4.00%)

Roman Catholic (5.00%)

Jehovah's Witness (1.00%)

Other Christian (1.00%)

Muslim (1.00%)

Other religion (1.00%)

Unaffiliated (11.0%)

Atheist or agnostic (2.00%)

Main article: Religion of Black Americans

Further information: Black church, Hoodoo (folk magic), and Louisiana Voodoo

Mount Zion United Methodist Church is the oldest African American congregation in Washington, D.C.

Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in Harlem, New York City

The majority of African Americans are Protestant, many of whom follow the historically Black churches.[200] The term Black church refers to churches which minister to predominantly African American congregations. Black congregations were first established by freed slaves at the end of the 17th century, and later when slavery was abolished more African Americans were allowed to create a unique form of Christianity that was culturally influenced by African spiritual traditions.[201] One of these early African American Christian cultural traditions in the Black Church is the Watchnight service, also called Freedom's Eve, where African American congregations all over the nation come together on New Year's Eve through New Years morning in remembrance of the eve and New Year of their emancipation, sharing testimonies, being baptized and partaking in praise and worship.[202]

According to a 2007 survey, more than half of the African American population are part of the historically Black churches.[203] The largest Protestant denomination among African Americans are the Baptists,[204] distributed mainly in four denominations, the largest being the National Baptist Convention, USA and the National Baptist Convention of America.[205] The second largest are the Methodists,[206] the largest denominations are the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.[205][207]

Pentecostals are distributed among several different religious bodies, with the Church of God in Christ as the largest among them by far.[205] About 16% of African American Christians are members of White Protestant communions,[206] these denominations (which include the United Church of Christ) mostly have a 2 to 3% African American membership.[208] There are also large numbers of Catholics, constituting 5% of the African American population.[203] Of the total number of Jehovah's Witnesses, 22% are Black.[200]

Some African Americans follow Islam. Historically, between 15 and 30% of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslims, but most of these Africans were converted to Christianity during the era of American slavery.[209] During the twentieth century, some African Americans converted to Islam, mainly through the influence of Black nationalist groups that preached with distinctive Islamic practices; including the Moorish Science Temple of America, and the largest organization, the Nation of Islam, founded in the 1930s, which attracted at least 20,000 people by 1963.[210][211] Prominent members included activist Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali.[212]

Muhammad Ali converted to Islam in 1964.

Malcolm X is considered the first person to start the movement among African Americans towards mainstream Islam, after he left the Nation and made the pilgrimage to Mecca.[213] In 1975, Warith Deen Mohammed, the son of Elijah Muhammad took control of the Nation after his father's death and guided the majority of its members to orthodox Islam.[214]

African American Muslims constitute 20% of the total US Muslim population,[215] the majority are Sunni or orthodox Muslims, some of these identify under the community of W. Deen Mohammed.[216][217] The Nation of Islam led by Louis Farrakhan has a membership ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 members.[218]

There is also a small but growing group of African American Jews, making up less than 0.5% of African Americans or about 2% of the Jewish population in the United States. The majority of African-American Jews are Ashkenazi, while smaller numbers identify as Sephardi, Mizrahi, or other.[219][220][221] Many African-American Jews are affiliated with denominations such as the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or Orthodox branches of Judaism, but the majority identify as "Jews of no religion", commonly known as secular Jews. A significant number of people who identify themselves as "Black Jews" are affiliated with syncretic religious groups, largely the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose beliefs include the claim that African Americans are descended from the Biblical Israelites.[222] Jews of all races typically do not accept Black Hebrew Israelites as Jews, in part because they are usually not Jewish according to Jewish law,[223] and in part because these groups are sometimes associated with antisemitism.[224][225] African-American Jews have criticized the Black Hebrew Israelites, regarding the movement as primarily composed of Black non-Jews who have appropriated Black-Jewish identity.[226]

Confirmed atheists are less than one half of one percent, similar to numbers for Hispanics.[227][228][229]

Sexuality

See also: African-American LGBT community

According to a Gallup survey, 4.6% of Black or African Americans self-identified as LGBT in 2016,[230] while the total portion of American adults in all ethnic groups identifying as LGBT was 4.1% in 2016.[230] African Americans are more likely to identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States.[231]

Health

Further information: Race and health in the United States § African Americans

See also: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on black people § United States

General health

See also: Alzheimer's disease in African Americans

The life expectancy for Black men in 2008 was 70.8 years.[232] Life expectancy for Black women was 77.5 years in 2008.[232] In 1900, when information on Black life expectancy started being collated, a Black man could expect to live to 32.5 years and a Black woman 33.5 years.[232] In 1900, White men lived an average of 46.3 years and White women lived an average of 48.3 years.[232] African American life expectancy at birth is persistently five to seven years lower than European Americans.[233] Black men have shorter lifespans than any other group in the US besides Native American men.[234]

Black people have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension than the US average.[232] For adult Black men, the rate of obesity was 31.6% in 2010.[235] For adult Black women, the rate of obesity was 41.2% in 2010.[235] African Americans have higher rates of mortality than any other racial or ethnic group for 8 of the top 10 causes of death.[236] In 2013, among men, Black men had the highest rate of getting cancer, followed by White, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander (A/PI), and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) men. Among women, White women had the highest rate of getting cancer, followed by Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native women.[237] African Americans also have higher prevalence and incidence of Alzheimer's disease compared to the overall average.[238][239]

Black women lead the nation in abortions. According to a 2022 report, Black women made up 40% of abortions despite making up 13% of the U.S. woman population.[240][241] African-Americans are more likely than White Americans to die due to health-related problems developed by alcoholism. Alcohol abuse is the main contributor to the top 3 causes of death among African Americans.[242]

In December 2020, African Americans were less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 due to mistrust in the US medical system. From 2021 to 2022, there was an increase in African Americans who became vaccinated.[243][244][245] Still, in 2022, COVID-19 complications became the third leading cause of death for African Americans.[246]

Violence is a major problem within the African American community.[247][248] A report from the US Department of Justice states "In 2005, homicide victimization rates for Blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for Whites".[249] The report also found that "94% of Black victims were killed by Blacks."[249] Of the nearly 20,000 recorded US homicides in 2022, African Americans made up the majority of offenders and victims despite making up less than 15% of the population.[250] In 2024, all of the top 5 most dangerous US cities have a significant Black population and highly concerning Black-on-Black violent crime rate.[251] Black males age 15?44 are the only race/sex category for which homicide is a top 5 cause of death.[234] Black women are 3 times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than White women.[247] Black children are 3 times more likely to die due to parental abuse and neglect than White children.[252]

Sexual health

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African Americans have higher rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) compared to Whites, with 5 times the rates of syphilis and chlamydia, and 7.5 times the rate of gonorrhea.[253]

The disproportionately high incidence of HIV/AIDS among African Americans has been attributed to homophobic influences, lack of condom usage, and lack of proper healthcare.[254] The prevalence of HIV/AIDS among Black men is seven times higher than the prevalence for White men, and Black men are more than nine times as likely to die from HIV/AIDS-related illness than White men.[234] The prevalence of HIV/AIDS among Black women is 20 times higher than White women, and Black women are more than 15 times as likely to die from HIV/AIDS-related illness than White women.[255][256]

Mental health

African Americans have several barriers for accessing mental health services. Counseling has been frowned upon and distant in utility and proximity to many people in the African American community. In 2004, a qualitative research study explored the disconnect with African Americans and mental health. The study was conducted as a semi-structured discussion which allowed the focus group to express their opinions and life experiences. The results revealed a couple key variables that create barriers for many African American communities to seek mental health services such as the stigma, lack of four important necessities; trust, affordability, cultural understanding and impersonal services.[257]

Historically, many African American communities did not seek counseling because religion was a part of the family values.[258] African American who have a faith background are more likely to seek prayer as a coping mechanism for mental issues rather than seeking professional mental health services.[257] In 2015 a study concluded, African Americans with high value in religion are less likely to utilize mental health services compared to those who have low value in religion.[259]

In the United States, counseling approaches are based on the experience of White Americans and do not fit within the African American culture. African American families tend to resolve concerns within the family, and it is viewed by the family as a strength. On the other hand, when African Americans seek counseling, they face a social backlash and are criticized. They may be labeled "crazy", viewed as weak, and their pride is diminished.[257] Because of this, many African Americans instead seek mentorship within communities they trust.

Terminology is another barrier in relation to African Americans and mental health. There is more stigma on the term psychotherapy versus counseling. In one study, psychotherapy is associated with mental illness whereas counseling approaches problem-solving, guidance and help.[257] More African Americans seek assistance when it is called counseling and not psychotherapy because it is more welcoming within the cultural and community.[260] Counselors are encouraged to be aware of such barriers for the well-being of African American clients. Without cultural competency training in health care, many African Americans go unheard and misunderstood.[257]

In 2021, African Americans had the third highest suicide rate trailing American Indians/Alaska Natives and White Americans. However, African Americans had the second highest increase of its suicide rate from 2011 to 2021, growing 58%.[261] As of 2024, suicide is the second leading cause of death among African-Americans between the ages of 15 and 24, with Black men being four times more likely to kill themselves than Black women.[262]

Genetics

See also: Genetic history of the African diaspora

Genome-wide studies

Genetic clustering of 128 African Americans, by Zakharia et al. (2009). Each vertical bar represents an individual. The color scheme of the bar plot matches that in the PCA plot.[263]

Recent studies of African Americans using genetic testing have found ancestry to vary by region and sex of ancestors. These studies found that on average, African Americans have 73.2?82.1% Sub-Saharan African, 16.7?24% European, and 0.8?1.2% Native American genetic ancestry, with large variation between individuals.[264][265][266] Commercial testing services have reported similar variation, with ranges from 0.6 to 2 percent Native American, 19 to 29 percent European, and 65 to 80 percent Sub-Saharan African ancestry.[267]

According to a genome-wide study by Bryc et al. (2009), the mixed ancestry of African Americans in varying ratios came about as the result of sexual contact between West/Central Africans (more frequently females) and Europeans (more frequently males). This can be understood as being the result of enslaved African American females being raped by White males.[268] Consequently, the 365 African Americans in their sample have a genome-wide average of 78.1% West African ancestry and 18.5% European ancestry, with large variation among individuals (ranging from 99% to 1% West African ancestry). The West African ancestral component in African Americans is most similar to that in present-day speakers from the non-Bantu branches of the Niger-Congo family.[264][note 2]

Correspondingly, Montinaro et al. (2014) observed that around 50% of the overall ancestry of African Americans traces comes from a population similar to the Niger-Congo-speaking Yoruba of southern Nigeria and southern Benin, reflecting the centrality of this West African region in the Atlantic slave trade. The next most frequent ancestral component found among African Americans was derived from Great Britain, in keeping with historical records. It constitutes a little over 10% of their overall ancestry and is most similar to the Northwest European ancestral component also carried by Barbadians.[270] Zakharia et al. (2009) found a similar proportion of Yoruba-like ancestry in their African American samples, with a minority also drawn from Mandenka and Bantu populations. Additionally, the researchers observed an average European ancestry of 21.9%, again with significant variation between individuals.[263] Bryc et al. (2009) note that populations from other parts of the continent may also constitute adequate proxies for the ancestors of some African American individuals; namely, ancestral populations from Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone in West Africa and Angola in Southern Africa.[264] An individual African American person can have over fifteen African ethnic groups in their genetic makeup alone due to the slave trade covering such vast areas.[271]

Altogether, genetic studies suggest that African Americans are a genetically diverse people. According to DNA analysis led in 2006 by Penn State geneticist Mark D. Shriver, around 58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5% European ancestry (equivalent to one European great-grandparent and their forebears), 19.6 percent of African Americans have at least 25% European ancestry (equivalent to one European grandparent and their forebears), and 1 percent of African Americans have at least 50% European ancestry (equivalent to one European parent and their forebears).[272][273] According to Shriver, around 5 percent of African Americans also have at least 12.5% Native American ancestry (equivalent to one Native American great-grandparent and their forebears).[274][275] Research suggests that Native American ancestry among people who identify as African American is a result of relationships that occurred soon after slave ships arrived in the American colonies, and European ancestry is of more recent origin, often from the decades before the Civil War.[276]

Y-DNA

Africans bearing the E-V38 (E1b1a) likely traversed across the Sahara, from east to west, approximately 19,000 years ago.[277] E-M2 (E1b1a1) likely originated in West Africa or Central Africa.[278] According to a Y-DNA study by Sims et al. (2007), the majority (?60%) of African Americans belong to various subclades of the E-M2 (E1b1a1, formerly E3a) paternal haplogroup. This is the most common genetic paternal lineage found today among West/Central African males and is also a signature of the historical Bantu migrations. The next most frequent Y-DNA haplogroup observed among African Americans is the R1b clade, which around 15% of African Americans carry. This lineage is most common today among Northwestern European males. The remaining African Americans mainly belong to the paternal haplogroup I (?7%), which is also frequent in Northwestern Europe.[279]

mtDNA

According to an mtDNA study by Salas et al. (2005), the maternal lineages of African Americans are most similar to haplogroups that are today especially common in West Africa (>55%), followed closely by West-Central Africa and Southwestern Africa (<41%). The characteristic West African haplogroups L1b, L2b,c,d, and L3b,d and West-Central African haplogroups L1c and L3e in particular occur at high frequencies among African Americans. As with the paternal DNA of African Americans, contributions from other parts of the continent to their maternal gene pool are insignificant.[280]

Racism and social status

See also: Income inequality in the United States

Formal political, economic and social discrimination against minorities has been present throughout American history. Leland T. Saito, Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, writes, "Political rights have been circumscribed by race, class and gender since the founding of the United States, when the right to vote was restricted to White men of property. Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by Whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion."[65]

Those who economically gained the most from slavery were the planter class, owners of large-scale plantations where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for a White elite.[281] Having a prominent role in politics with eight presidents owning slaves while in office, upon the end of the Civil War the planter class kept control of their land and remained politically influential, with the London School of Economics stating, "this persistence in "de facto power" in turn allowed them to block economic reforms, disenfranchise Black voters, and restrict the mobility of workers."[282]

Although they have gained a greater degree of social equality since the civil rights movement, African Americans have remained stagnant economically, which has hindered their ability to break into the middle class and beyond. As of 2020, the racial wealth gap between Whites and Blacks remains as large as it was in 1968, with the typical net worth of a White household equivalent to that of 11.5 Black households.[283] Despite this, African Americans have increased employment rates and gained representation in the highest levels of American government in the post?civil rights era.[284] However, widespread racism remains an issue that continues to undermine the development of social status.[284][285]

Economically, of all the racially Black ethnic groups on the globe, African Americans are the wealthiest and most successful, with one in every fifty African American families being millionaires.[286] This equates in 2023 to approximately 1.79 million African American millionaires in the United States,[287][288] which is more than the number of millionaires in any racially Black country, and many other countries, around the world.

Policing and criminal justice

See also: Race and crime in the United States and Racial profiling in the United States

In the US, which has the largest per-capita prison population in the world, African Americans are overrepresented as the second largest population of prison inmates (38%) in 2023, coming second to Whites who made up 57% of the prison population.[289] According to the National Registry of Exonerations, Blacks are roughly 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder in the US than Whites.[290] In 2012, the New York City Police Department detained people more than 500,000 times under the city's stop-and-frisk law. Of the total detained, 55% were African-Americans, while Black people made up 20% of the city's population.[291]

Al Sharpton led the Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks protest on August 28, 2020.

African American males are more likely to be killed by police when compared to other races.[292] This is one of the factors that led to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013.[293] A historical issue in the US where women have weaponized their White privilege in the country by reporting on Black people, often instigating racial violence,[294][295] difficult White women?who have been given a different name over the centuries by African Americans?calling the police on Black people became widely publicized in 2020.[296][297] According to The Guardian, "The specter of Karen persisted as Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest spread around the country following Floyd's murder and reckonings with racism began to roil institutions, toppling careers as well as statues".[298]

In the aftermath of the peak Black Lives Matter protests and widespread police reform efforts in the early 2020s, crime rates surged across the nation, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Many cities experienced near-record or record levels of violence and other criminal activity. As a result, numerous municipalities scaled back police reform initiatives and increased funding for law enforcement.[299][300][301]

Social issues

After over 50 years, marriage rates for all Americans began to decline while divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births have climbed.[302] These changes have been greatest among African Americans. After more than 70 years of racial parity Black marriage rates began to fall behind Whites.[302] Single-parent households have become common, and according to US census figures released in January 2010, only 38 percent of Black children live with both their parents.[303] In 2021, statistics show that over 80 percent marriages in the African American ethnic group marry within their ethnic group.[304]

Although the ban on interracial marriage ended in California in 1948, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with a White woman in 1957.

The first ever anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage.[305] In a speech in Charleston, Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people".[306] By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes.[305] By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states.[305] While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with White actress Kim Novak.[307] Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures, with whom Novak was under contract, gave in to his concerns that a racist backlash against the relationship could hurt the studio.[307] Davis briefly married Black dancer Loray White in 1958 to protect himself from mob violence.[307] Inebriated at the wedding ceremony, Davis despairingly said to his best friend, Arthur Silber Jr., "Why won't they let me live my life?" The couple never lived together, and commenced divorce proceedings in September 1958.[307] In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"?or vice versa?each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years.[305] In 1967 the law was ruled unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) by the US Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.[305]

In 2008, Democrats overwhelmingly voted 70% against California Proposition 8, African Americans voted 58% in favor of it while 42% voted against Proposition 8.[308] On May 9, 2012, Barack Obama, the first Black president, became the first US president to support same-sex marriage. Since Obama's endorsement there has been a rapid growth in support for same-sex marriage among African Americans. As of 2012, 59% of African Americans support same-sex marriage, which is higher than support among the national average (53%) and White Americans (50%).[309]

Polls in North Carolina,[310] Pennsylvania,[311] Missouri,[312] Maryland,[313] Ohio,[314] Florida,[315] and Nevada[316] have also shown an increase in support for same sex marriage among African Americans. On November 6, 2012, Maryland, Maine, and Washington all voted for approve of same-sex marriage, along with Minnesota rejecting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Exit polls in Maryland show about 50% of African Americans voted for same-sex marriage, showing a vast evolution among African Americans on the issue and was crucial in helping pass same-sex marriage in Maryland.[317]

Black Americans hold far more conservative opinions on abortion, extramarital sex, and raising children out of wedlock than Democrats as a whole.[318] On financial issues, however, African Americans are in line with Democrats, generally supporting a more progressive tax structure to provide more government spending on social services.[319]

Political legacy

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remains the most prominent political leader in the American civil rights movement and perhaps the most influential African American political figure in general.

African Americans have fought in every war in the history of the United States.[320]

The gains made by African Americans in the civil rights movement and in the Black Power movement not only obtained certain rights for African Americans but changed American society in far-reaching and fundamentally important ways. Prior to the 1950s, Black Americans in the South were subject to de jure discrimination, or Jim Crow laws. They were often the victims of extreme cruelty and violence, sometimes resulting in deaths: by the post World War II era, African Americans became increasingly discontented with their long-standing inequality. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., African Americans and their supporters challenged the nation to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed that all men are created equal ..."[321]

The civil rights movement marked an enormous change in American social, political, economic and civic life. It brought with it boycotts, sit-ins, nonviolent demonstrations and marches, court battles, bombings and other violence; prompted worldwide media coverage and intense public debate; forged enduring civic, economic and religious alliances; and disrupted and realigned the nation's two major political parties.

Over time, it has changed in fundamental ways the manner in which Blacks and Whites interact with and relate to one another. The movement resulted in the removal of codified, de jure racial segregation and discrimination from American life and law, and heavily influenced other groups and movements in struggles for civil rights and social equality within American society, including the Free Speech Movement, the disabled, the women's movement, and migrant workers. It also inspired the Native American rights movement, and in King's 1964 book Why We Can't Wait he wrote the US "was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race."[322][323]

Media and coverage

See also: Representation of African Americans in media and African-American newspapers

BET founder Robert L. Johnson with former US President George W. Bush

Some activists and academics contend that American news media coverage of African American news, concerns, or dilemmas is inadequate,[324][325][326] or that the news media present distorted images of African Americans.[327]

To combat this, Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television (BET), a network that targets young African Americans and urban audiences in the United States. Over the years, the network has aired such programming as rap and R&B music videos, urban-oriented movies and television series, and some public affairs programs. On Sunday mornings, BET would broadcast Christian programming; the network would also broadcast non-affiliated Christian programs during the early morning hours daily. According to Viacom, BET is now a global network that reaches households in the United States, Caribbean, Canada, and the United Kingdom.[328] The network has gone on to spawn several spin-off channels, including BET Her (originally launched as BET on Jazz).[329]

Another network targeting African Americans is TV One. TV One is owned by Urban One, founded and controlled by Catherine Hughes. Urban One is one of the nation's largest radio broadcasting companies and the largest African American-owned radio broadcasting company in the United States.[330]

In June 2009, NBC News launched a new website named TheGrio.[331] It is the first African American video news site that focuses on underrepresented stories in existing national news.[332]

Black-owned and oriented media outlets

The Africa Channel ? Dedicated to programming about African culture.

aspireTV ? a digital cable and satellite channel owned by businessman and former basketball player Magic Johnson.

ATTV ? an independent public affairs and educational channel.

BET Media Group ? The most prominent multimedia outlet targeting Afro-Americans.

BET

BET Her

VH1 ? Originally a MTV spin-off focused on light genres of music, the network's programming became slanted towards African American culture during the 2010s.[333]

Bounce TV ? a digital multicast network owned by the E. W. Scripps Company.

Fox Soul ? a digital television and streaming network primarily airing original talk shows and syndicated programming

Oprah Winfrey Network ? a cable and satellite network founded by Oprah Winfrey and jointly owned by Warner Bros. Discovery and Harpo Studios. While not exclusively targeting African Americans, much of its original programming is geared towards a similar demographic.

Revolt ? a music channel and media company founded by Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs.

Soul of the South Network ? a regional broadcast network.

TheGrio ? a digital multicast network focused on news and opinion-based programming.

TV One ? a general entertainment network targeting adults.

Cleo TV ? a sister network targeting millennial and Generation X women

We TV ? Owned by AMC Networks, became slanted towards Black women during the 2010s

Culture

Further information: African-American culture

See also: African-American art

A traditional soul food dinner consisting of fried chicken with macaroni and cheese, collard greens, breaded fried okra, and cornbread

From their earliest presence in North America, African Americans have significantly contributed literature, art, agricultural skills, cuisine, clothing styles, music, language, and social and technological innovation to American culture. The cultivation and use of many agricultural products in the United States, such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra, sorghum, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to West African and African American influences. Notable examples include George Washington Carver, who created nearly 500 products from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pecans.[334] Soul food is a variety of cuisine popular among African Americans. It is closely related to the cuisine of the Southern United States. The descriptive terminology may have originated in the mid-1960s, when soul was a common definer used to describe African American culture (for example, soul music). African Americans were the first peoples in the United States to make fried chicken, along with Scottish immigrants to the South. Although the Scottish had been frying chicken before they emigrated, they lacked the spices and flavor that African Americans had used when preparing the meal. The Scottish American settlers therefore adopted the African American method of seasoning chicken.[335] However, fried chicken was generally a rare meal in the African American community and was usually reserved for special events or celebrations.[336]

Language

Main article: African-American English

See also: Black American Sign Language, Gullah language, Afro-Seminole Creole, and Louisiana Creole

African-American English is a variety (dialect, ethnolect, and sociolect) of American English, commonly spoken by urban working-class and largely bi-dialectal middle-class African Americans.[337] It shares parts of its grammar and phonology with the Southern American English dialect. African American English differs from Standard American English (SAE) in certain pronunciation characteristics, tense usage, and grammatical structures, which were derived from West African languages (particularly those belonging to the Niger?Congo family).[338]

Virtually all habitual speakers of African American English can understand and communicate in Standard American English. As with all linguistic forms, AAVE's usage is influenced by various factors, including geographical, educational and socioeconomic background, as well as formality of setting.[338] Additionally, there are many literary uses of this variety of English, particularly in African American literature.[339]

Other languages are spoken by specific sub-communities. The Gullah language is an English-based creole language spoken mostly in the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia by the Gullah;[340] an off-shoot of this is Afro-Seminole Creole spoken by Black Seminoles mostly now in Mexico and Brackettville, Texas.[341] Louisiana Creole is a French-based creole and spoken mostly in Louisiana.[342]

Traditional names

Main article: African-American names

African-American names are part of the cultural traditions of African Americans, most of these cultural names having no connection to Africa but strictly an African American cultural practice that developed in the United States during enslavement.[343] This new evidence became apparent by census records which show African Americans and White Americans, though they spoke the same language, chose to use different names even during times of enslavement, which is where and when the development of African American cultural names began.[343]

Prior to this newer information, it was only thought that before the 1950s, and 1960s, most African-American names closely resembled those used within European-American culture.[344] Babies of that era were generally given a few common names, with children using nicknames to distinguish the various people with the same name. With the rise of 1960s civil rights movement, there was a dramatic increase in names of various origins.[345]

By the 1970s, and 1980s, it had become common among African Americans to invent new names for themselves, although many of these invented names took elements from popular existing names. Prefixes such as La/Le, Da/De, Ra/Re and Ja/Je, and suffixes like -ique/iqua, -isha and -aun/-awn are common, as are inventive spellings for common names. The book Baby Names Now: From Classic to Cool?The Very Last Word on First Names places the origins of "La" names in African-American culture in New Orleans.[346]

Even with the rise of inventive names, it is still common for African Americans to use biblical, historical, or traditional European names. Daniel, Christopher, Michael, David, James, Joseph, and Matthew were thus among the most frequent names for African-American boys in 2013.[344][347][348]

The name LaKeisha is typically considered American in origin but has elements that were drawn from both French and West/Central African roots. Names such as LaTanisha, JaMarcus, DeAndre, and Shaniqua were created in the same way. Punctuation marks are seen more often within African American names than other American names, such as the names Mo'nique and D'Andre.[344]

Music

The King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra photographed in Houston, Texas, January 1921

Chuck Berry is considered a pioneer of rock and roll.

African American music is one of the most pervasive African American cultural influences in the United States today and is among the most dominant in mainstream popular music. Hip hop, R&B, funk, rock and roll, soul, blues, and other contemporary American musical forms originated in Black communities and evolved from other Black forms of music, including blues, doo-wop, barbershop, ragtime, bluegrass, jazz, and gospel music.

African American-derived musical forms have also influenced and been incorporated into virtually every other popular music genre in the world, including country and techno. African American genres are the most important ethnic vernacular tradition in America, as they have developed independent of African traditions from which they arise more so than any other immigrant groups, including Europeans; make up the broadest and longest lasting range of styles in America; and have, historically, been more influential, interculturally, geographically, and economically, than other American vernacular traditions.[349]

Dance

African Americans have also had an important role in American dance. Bill T. Jones, a prominent modern choreographer and dancer, has included historical African American themes in his work, particularly in the piece "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land". Likewise, Alvin Ailey's artistic work, including his "Revelations" based on his experience growing up as an African American in the South during the 1930s, has had a significant influence on modern dance. Another form of dance, stepping, is an African American tradition whose performance and competition has been formalized through the traditionally Black fraternities and sororities at universities.[350]

Sports

This section is an excerpt from African Americans in sports.[edit]

Discussions of race and sports in the United States, where the two subjects have always been intertwined in American history, have focused to a great extent on African Americans. Depending on the type of sport and performance level, African Americans are reported to be over- or under-represented. African Americans compose the highest percentage of the minority groups active at the professional level, but are among those who show the lowest participation overall. And though the list of African Americans in professional sports remains high, it only represents a small fraction of aspiring black athletes.

Literature and academics

Toni Morrison, recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature

Many African American authors have written stories, poems, and essays influenced by their experiences as African Americans. African American literature is a major genre in American literature. Famous examples include Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou.

African American inventors have created many widely used devices in the world and have contributed to international innovation. Norbert Rillieux created the technique for converting sugar cane juice into white sugar crystals. Moreover, Rillieux left Louisiana in 1854 and went to France, where he spent ten years working with the Champollions deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone.[351] Most slave inventors were nameless, such as the slave owned by the Confederate President Jefferson Davis who designed the ship propeller used by the Confederate navy.[352]

By 1913, over 1,000 inventions were patented by Black Americans. Among the most notable inventors were Jan Matzeliger, who developed the first machine to mass-produce shoes,[353] and Elijah McCoy, who invented automatic lubrication devices for steam engines.[354] Granville Woods had 35 patents to improve electric railway systems, including the first system to allow moving trains to communicate.[355] Garrett A. Morgan developed the first automatic traffic signal and gas mask.[356]

Lewis Howard Latimer invented an improvement for the incandescent light bulb.[357] More recent inventors include Frederick McKinley Jones, who invented the movable refrigeration unit for food transport in trucks and trains.[358] Lloyd Quarterman worked with six other Black scientists on the creation of the atomic bomb (code named the Manhattan Project)[359] and helped develop the first nuclear reactor.[360]

As part of the preservation of their culture, African Americans have continuously launched their own publications and publishing houses, such as Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender newspaper, and Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Black History Month who spent over thirty years documenting and publishing African American history in journals and books. The Johnson Publishing Company, founded by John H. Johnson in 1942, is a National Historic Landmark.[361]

Terminology

General

This parade float displayed the word "Afro-Americans" in 1911.

The term African American was popularized by Jesse Jackson in the 1980s,[6] although there are recorded uses from the 18th and 19th centuries,[362] for example, in post-emancipation holidays and conferences.[363][364] Earlier terms also used to describe Americans of African ancestry referred more to skin color than to ancestry. Other terms (such as colored, person of color, or negro) were included in the wording of various laws and legal decisions which some thought were being used as tools of White supremacy and oppression.[365]

Michelle Obama was the First Lady of the United States; she and her husband, President Barack Obama, are the first African Americans to hold these positions.

A 16-page pamphlet entitled "A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis" is notable for the attribution of its authorship to "An African American". Published in 1782, the book's use of this phrase predates any other yet identified by more than 50 years.[366]

In the 1980s, the term African American was advanced to give descendants of American slaves, and other American Blacks who lived through the slavery era, a heritage and a cultural base.[365] The term was popularized in Black communities around the country via word of mouth and ultimately received mainstream use after Jesse Jackson's use in 1988. Subsequently, major media outlets adopted it.[365]

Surveys in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century showed that the majority of Black Americans had no preference for African American versus Black American,[367] although they had a slight preference for the latter in personal settings and the former in more formal settings.[368] By 2021, according to polling from Gallup, 58% of Black Americans expressed no preference for what their group should be called, with 17% each preferring Black and African-American. Among those with no preference, Gallup found a slight majority favored Black "if [they] had to choose."[369]

In 2020, the Associated Press updated its AP Stylebook to direct its writers to capitalize the first letter of Black when it is used "in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa."[370] The New York Times and other outlets made similar changes at the same time.[371]

In 2023, the government released a new more detailed breakdown due to the rise in racially Black immigration into the US, listing African American as a compound termed ethnicity, distinguished from other racially Black ethnicities such as Nigerian, Jamaican etc.[372]

The term African American embraces pan-Africanism as earlier enunciated by prominent African thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and George Padmore. The term Afro-Usonian, and variations of such, are more rarely used.[373][374]

Official identity

Racially segregated Negro section of keypunch operators at the US Census Bureau

Since 1977, in an attempt to keep up with changing social opinion, the United States government has officially classified Black people (revised to Black or African American in 1997) as "having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa."[375] Other federal offices, such as the US Census Bureau, adhere to the Office of Management and Budget standards on race in their data collection and tabulation efforts.[376] In preparation for the 2010 US census, a marketing and outreach plan called 2010 Census Integrated Communications Campaign Plan (ICC) recognized and defined African Americans as Black people born in the United States. From the ICC perspective, African Americans are one of three groups of Black people in the United States.[377]

The ICC plan was to reach the three groups by acknowledging that each group has its own sense of community that is based on geography and ethnicity.[378] The best way to market the census process toward any of the three groups is to reach them through their own unique communication channels and not treat the entire Black population of the US as though they are all African Americans with a single ethnic and geographical background. The Federal Bureau of Investigation of the US Department of Justice categorizes Black or African American people as "[a] person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa" through racial categories used in the UCR Program adopted from the Statistical Policy Handbook (1978) and published by the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards, US Department of Commerce, derived from the 1977 Office of Management and Budget classification.[379]

Admixture

See also: Interracial marriage in the United States, Miscegenation § United States, Multiracial American, One-drop rule, and hypodescent

Historically, "race mixing" between Black and White people was taboo in the United States. So-called anti-miscegenation laws, barring Blacks and Whites from marrying or having sex, were established in colonial America as early as 1691,[380] and endured in many Southern states until the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia (1967). The taboo among American Whites surrounding White-Black relations is a historical consequence of the oppression and racial segregation of African Americans.[381] Historian David Brion Davis notes the racial mixing that occurred during slavery was frequently attributed by the planter class to the "lower-class white males" but Davis concludes that "there is abundant evidence that many slaveowners, sons of slaveowners, and overseers took Black mistresses or in effect raped the wives and daughters of slave families."[382] A famous example was Thomas Jefferson's mistress, Sally Hemings.[383] Although publicly opposed to race mixing, Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia published in 1785, wrote: "The improvement of the Blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life".[384]

Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 2009 that "African Americans...are a racially mixed or mulatto people?deeply and overwhelmingly so". After the Emancipation Proclamation, Chinese American men married African American women in high proportions to their total marriage numbers due to few Chinese American women being in the United States.[385] African slaves and their descendants have also had a history of cultural exchange and intermarriage with Native Americans,[386] although they did not necessarily retain social, cultural or linguistic ties to Native peoples.[387] There are also increasing intermarriages and offspring between non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics of any race, especially between Puerto Ricans and African Americans.[388]

Racially mixed marriages have become increasingly accepted in the United States since the civil rights movement.[389] Approval in national opinion polls has risen from 36% in 1978, to 48% in 1991, 65% in 2002, 77% in 2007.[390] A Gallup poll conducted in 2013 found that 84% of Whites and 96% of Blacks approved of interracial marriage, and 87% overall.[391] Black men are more than twice as likely to date and marry interracially than Black women.[392]

At the end of World War II, some African American military men stationed in Japan and Germany impregnated local non-Black women, resulting in the birth of thousands of mixed-race children. Many of these families later immigrated to the United States.[393][394]

Terminology dispute

Author Debra Dickerson has argued that the term Black should refer strictly to the descendants of Africans who were brought to America as slaves, and not to the sons and daughters of Black immigrants who lack that ancestry. Thus, under her definition, President Barack Obama, who is the son of a Kenyan, is not Black.[395][396] She makes the argument that grouping all people of African descent together regardless of their unique ancestral circumstances would inevitably deny the lingering effects of slavery within the American community of slave descendants, in addition to denying Black immigrants recognition of their own unique ancestral backgrounds. "Lumping us all together", Dickerson wrote, "erases the significance of slavery and continuing racism while giving the appearance of progress."[395] Similar comments have been made concerning Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Caribbean immigrant, who was elected vice president in 2020.[397][398][399]

Similar viewpoints to Dickerson's have been expressed by author Stanley Crouch in a New York Daily News piece, Charles Steele Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference[400] and African American columnist David Ehrenstein of the Los Angeles Times, who accused White liberals of flocking to Blacks who were Magic Negros, a term that refers to a Black person with no past who simply appears to assist the mainstream White (as cultural protagonists/drivers) agenda.[401] Ehrenstein went on to say "He's there to assuage white 'guilt' they feel over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history."[401]

The American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement coalesces around this view, arguing that Black descendants of American slavery deserve a separate ethnic category that distinguishes them from other Black groups in the United States.[402] Their terminology has gained popularity in some circles, but others have criticized the movement for a perceived bias against (especially poor and Black) immigrants, and for its often inflammatory rhetoric.[397][403][404] Politicians such as Obama and Harris have received especially pointed criticism from the movement, as neither are ADOS and have spoken out at times against policies specific to them.[398][399]

Many Pan-African movements and organizations that are ideologically Black nationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, and Scientific socialist like The All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), have argued that African (relating to the diaspora) or New Afrikan should be used instead of African American.[405] Most notably, Malcolm X and Kwame Ture expressed similar views that African Americans are Africans who "happen to be in America", and should not claim or identify as being American if they are fighting for Black (New Afrikan) liberation. Historically, this is due to the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade, ongoing anti-Black violence, and structural racism in countries like the United States.[406][407]

Terms no longer in common use

Before the independence of the Thirteen Colonies until the abolition of slavery in 1865, an African American slave was commonly known as a negro. Free negro was the legal status in the territory of an African American person who was not enslaved.[408] In response to the project of the American Colonization Society to transport free Blacks to the future Liberia, a project most Blacks strongly rejected, the Blacks at the time said they were no more African than White Americans were European, and referred to themselves with what they considered a more acceptable term, "colored Americans". The term was used until the second quarter of the 20th century, when it was considered outmoded ? although it was retained in the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) ? and generally gave way again to the exclusive use of negro,. By the 1940s, the term was commonly capitalized (Negro); but by the mid-1960s, it was considered disparaging. By the end of the 20th century, negro had come to be considered inappropriate and was rarely used and perceived as a pejorative.[409][410] The term is rarely used by younger Black people, but remained in use by many older African Americans who had grown up with the term, particularly in the Southern US.[411] The term remains in use in some contexts, such as the United Negro College Fund, an American philanthropic organization.

There are many other deliberately insulting terms, many of which were in common use (e.g., nigger), but had become unacceptable in normal discourse before the end of the 20th century. One exception is the use, among the Black community, of the slur nigger rendered as nigga, representing the pronunciation of the word in African American English. This usage has been popularized by American rap and hip-hop music cultures and is used as part of an in-group lexicon and speech. It is not necessarily derogatory and, when used among Black people, the word is often used to mean "homie" or "friend".[412] Acceptance of intra-group usage of the word nigga is still debated, although it has established a foothold among younger generations. The NAACP denounces the use of both nigga and nigger.[413]

See also

flag United States portal

African-American art

African American cinema

African-American middle class

African-American neighborhood

African-American politics:

African-American leftism

African-American socialism

Black anarchism

Black conservatism in the United States

Black liberalism

Black populism

Black women in American politics

African-American upper class

African diaspora in the Americas

Afrophobia

AP African American Studies

Black Belt in the American South

Black Hispanic and Latino Americans

Black mecca

Black Ozarkers

Black Southerners

Brown Babies

Civil rights movement (1865?1896)

Civil rights movement (1896?1954)

Juneteenth

National Museum of African American History and Culture

North Africans in the United States

Society and Black people in the Spanish Colonial Americas

South African Americans

Stereotypes of African Americans

Timeline of the civil rights movement

African immigration to the United States

West Indian Americans

African American?Jewish relations

African American?Korean American relations

Diaspora

African Americans in Africa

African Americans in Ghana

Americo-Liberian people

Sierra Leone Creole people

Nigerian Americans

Ethiopian Americans

Afro-Caribbean people

Bahamian Americans

Barbadian Americans

Grenadian Americans

Haitian Americans

Jamaican Americans

Trinidadian and Tobagonian Americans

African Americans in Canada

African Americans in France

African Americans in Israel

Black Nova Scotians

Samaná Americans

Haitian emigration

Merikins

Lists

Index of articles related to African Americans

List of African-American neighborhoods

List of majority-Black counties in the United States

List of African-American newspapers and media outlets