Amending the MCCARRAN-WALTER IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION ACT (1952), the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments of 1986 specified a two-year residency requirement for alien spouses and children before obtaining permanent resident status.

The Connecticut colony, chartered by Charles II in 1662, was an outgrowth of the great Puritan migration of the 1630s.

The disintegration of the Yugoslav state in 1991 led to persistent ethnic violence and two major conflicts in Bosnia- Herzegovina and in Kosovo.

The cataclysm of World War II (1937–45) had a profound effect on immigration to North America.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 was seen by most Americans and many Canadians as a distinctly European problem.

As Puritan leader and first governor of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop played a fundamental role in establishing both the Puritan cultural ethos that characterized the leading English colonists in America and England’s actual political control of the Atlantic seaboard.

Post–World War I (1914–18) ethnic tensions, economic conditions, and the fear of bolshevism all contributed to the Winnipeg general strike of May 15 to June 28, 1919.

West Indians are of mixed racial and ethnic background.

More formally the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the Welfare Reform Act reflected the anti-immigrant mood of the 1990s and frustration over the mounting costs of providing social services to both citizens and immigrants.

Washington, D.C., is unlike any other city in the United States. Having been established in the 1790s specifically as a new capital city for a new republic, it had no long-standing commercial base.

The War Brides Act was the first of several related measures to allow United States soldiers to bring their alien brides and families into the United States following World War II (1941–45).

Lillian Wald was a pioneer in the field of public health nursing.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a doctrinaire and eccentric visionary, who did much to shape the British ideal of selfgovernment in white colonies, particularly Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Waipahu Plantation strike of 1906 was one of the earliest collective labor actions in the face of state intervention and sugar industry bosses.

The Voting Rights Act, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965, suspended literacy tests and nationally prohibited abridgment of the right to vote based on race or color.