During the U.S. war in the Philippines between 1899 and 1904 (which grew out of the Spanish-American War that had erupted in 1898), ordinary American soldiers shared the nationalist zeal of their commanders and pursued the Filipino "enemy" with brutality and sometimes outright lawlessness. Racism, which flourished in the United States in this period, led American soldiers to repeatedly assert their desire "to get at the niggers." An anti-imperialist movement, which rejected annexation by the United States of former Spanish colonies like Puerto Rico and the Philippines, attempted to build opposition at home to the increasingly brutal war. Although few soldiers joined the anti-imperialist cause, their statements did sometimes provide ammunition for the opponents of annexation and war. In 1899, the Anti-Imperialist League published a pamphlet of Soldiers Letters, with the provocative subtitle: "Being Materials for a History of a War of Criminal Aggression." Historian Jim Zwick notes that the publication "was immediately controversial. Supporters of the war discounted the accounts of atrocities as the boasting of soldiers wanting to impress their friends and families at home or, because the identities of some of the writers were withheld from publication, as outright fabrications." But the brutal portrayal of the war that is found in these letters (excerpts from twenty-seven of them are included here) is supported in other accounts.

This is a seminar course that explores the history of selected features of the physical environment of urban America. Among the features considered are parks, cemeteries, tenements, suburbs, zoos, skyscrapers, department stores, supermarkets, and amusement parks. The course gives students experience in working with primary documentation sources through its selection of readings and class discussions. Students then have the opportunity to apply this experience by researching their own historical questions and writing a term paper.

This course is a seminar on the history of institutions and institutional change in American cities from roughly 1850 to the present. Among the institutions to be looked at are political machines, police departments, courts, schools, prisons, public authorities, and universities. The focus of the course is on readings and discussions.

The rise of a new Northern middle class brought with it new ideals of family life and gender roles. While men worked outside the home, women were to preside over the domestic sphere, not only by performing household labor but also by setting a moral example for children and creating a haven that was protected from the outside world. This frontispiece and title page came from a popular 1869 guide to the formation and Maintenance of Economical

The American Yawp is a collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for general readers and college-level history courses. Over three hundred academic historians—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have come together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century readers. The project is freely accessible online at www.AmericanYawp.com, and in addition to providing a peer review of the text, Stanford University Press has partnered with The American Yawp to publish a low-cost print edition. Furthermore, The American Yawp remains an evolving, collaborative text: you are encouraged to help us improve by offering comments on our feedback page, available through AmericanYawp.com.

Combatants in World War II possessed far greater firepower than ever before. Consequently, the incidence of death and mutilation in units actually fighting the enemy was extremely high, sometimes one in three. World War II was the first war in which combat deaths actually outnumbered fatalities from disease or accident. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime government carefully controlled what information reached the American public from the battle fronts. Until September, 1943, government censors blocked the publication of all photographs showing dead American soldiers. After that, censors continued to withhold many pictures such as this photograph taken on Leyte Island in the Philippines on October 31, 1944that did not, even in death, conform to the heroic image of the American fighting man.

You probably associate the so-called "War on Drugs" with the Reagans. Or maybe, more correctly, with the Nixon administration. But the government's anti-drug policies started decades before that.

And, as we discuss in this week's episode, those policies were often motivated by things other than public health and safety. Instead, they targeted - and continue to target - immigrants and communities of color.

This episode digs into the history of America's War on Drugs, featuring guests Jason Ruiz and Yasser Arafat Payne.

This lesson presents documents produced around and during the historic 1841 trial of 53 Africans, captured and sold as slaves, and subsequently accused of murder for commandeering the slave ship, Amistad, and killing its captain and cook. The site also contains a detailed lesson plan.

In July 1839, captive West Africans rebelled and took over the Spanish slaveship Amistad . They ordered the owners to Africa but, instead, the Amistad was taken on a meandering course, finally waylaid by a U.S. Navy brig. The Africans were charged with the murder of the captain and jailed in New Haven, Connecticut. Abolitionists came to their support; ex-President John Quincy Adams represented them in court. After a long legal battle, the Supreme Court freed the "mutineers" in 1841. The following year they returned to Africa.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on June 25, 1938, the last major piece of New Deal legislation. The act outlawed child labor and guaranteed a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum work week of 40 hours, benefiting more than 22 million workers. Although the law helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions, conservative forces in Congress effectively exempted many workers, such as waiters, cooks, janitors, farm workers, and domestics, from its coverage. In October 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949, raising the minimum wage to 75 cents hour and extending coverage, but still leaving many workers unprotected. In the following statement to the 1949 Senate subcommittee on FLSA amendments, members of the laundry workers' union detailed the working conditions of laundry workers, argued that fair wages would not bankrupt commercial laundries, and called upon Congress to extend protection to laundry workers. The questioner, Senator Claude Pepper (D-Florida), a key advocate for the 1938 legislation, chaired the 1949 hearings and pushed the amendments through Senate and conference committees.

The Bonus March was one of several grassroots movements of the unemployed during the Great Depression that galvanized thousands of men and women and helped focus attention on the role of the federal government in alleviating economic hardship. Twenty thousand World War I veterans marched to Washington to demand the immediate release of promised cash bonuses and set up camp until their demands were met. With President Herbert Hoover's authorization, federal troops, armed with tanks and cavalry, attacked the homeless veterans and burned their encampment. When images like this photograph, which shows the Bonus Marchers' shantytown burning down in sight of the Capitol on the afternoon of July 28, 1932, reached the public, Hoover's image was permanently tarnished.

Few terms have been surrounded with as much myth and misunderstanding as "anarchism." Part of the difficulty is that there are many kinds of anarchists. The high point of American anarchism surely came in the 1880s in the movement led by Chicago "Social Revolutionaries," such as Lucy and Albert Parsons. Contrary to the stereotype, anarchists like the Parsons did not object to order itself but to the oppressive forms of order imposed by the capitalist state. Albert Parsons also frankly acknowledged the belief shared by other anarchists in his circle that social transformation would only come through revolution, "through bloodshed and violence." What is perhaps less clear from the statement is Parsons's simultaneous commitment to trade unionism as the primary agency of social change. In this 1887 essay, "What Is Anarchism?" social revolutionary Parsons explained how his strain of anarchist socialism derived its name and purpose from the Greek words for "no" and "government."

Website Description:
This lesson gives an article-by-article overview of the structure and function of the U.S. Constitution. Students learn about the duties and powers of the three branches, the amendment process, and the role of the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. (Note: Anatomy of the Constitution now includes content previously covered by the lesson Directions for Democracy.)
Got a 1:1 classroom? Download fillable PDF versions of this lesson's materials!

Student Learning Objectives:
Students will be able to:
*Explain the structure, function, and powers of the U.S. government as established in the Constitution.
*Identify the roles of the three branches of government.
*Describe the constitutional amendment process.
*Interpret the intentions of the Preamble of the Constitution.

With his famously laconic style, President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." Coolidge's aphorism revealed the centrality of commerce to the nation and its culture in the 1920s, even while it concealed some of the wrenching cultural changes that were required to accommodate a commercial civilization. Coolidge, as a son of rural Vermont and small-town Massachusetts, played a key role in reassuring people that the new business order was compatible with traditional American values. In this 1925 address to the New York State Chamber of Commerce, Coolidge mixed new prescriptions for a pro-business government with traditional homilies about the contributions of American business "to the spiritual restoration of the world." He insisted that "traditional" values could fit comfortably into a business civilization.

Although Cold War-era fears often focused on Communism and atomic warfare, the following 1949 editorial in the popular magazine Collier's showed concern about a broader threat to core American values posed by extremism, terrorism, and indoctrination of the country's youth. The editorial appeared beneath a photograph of a group of hooded Ku Klux Klan members, including at least three women. One of the women carried a young girl shrouded in a hood. Formally known as the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the group, founded in Atlanta in October 1915, took its name and inspiration from the vigilante organization in the Reconstruction South that terrorized blacks and Republican political leaders in order to restore white supremacist governments and black economic and social subordination. While the Klan of the 19th century died out as white supremacists regained power, the virulently anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner, and anti-black 20th-century "Empire" flourished in the nativist atmosphere of the early and mid-1920s. Although the Klan declined drastically following scandals and internal battles, it revived intermittently in the following decades. As the Collier's editorialist feared, the Klan again became "a serious threat to our democracy" following successes of the modern civil rights movement, as they perpetrated acts of terrorism against African Americans and their white supporters, most notoriously in 1961 attacks on Freedom Riders in Alabama, the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, that killed four young girls, and the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during "Freedom Summer" in 1964. The editorial does not address cultural reasons for the Klans' persistence--historians have explored antielitism, fear of community domination by outside powers, and repugnance to modern, secularist morality as motivating factors in addition to white supremacy and nativism.

Malcolm X was a civil rights leader, a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, and a leading black nationalist during the early 1960's. Viewing integration as an illusory solution to the problems of black Americans, Malcolm X advocated self-reliance, black pride, and unity. Malcolm's message became popular among Northern blacks as the Civil Rights movement failed to alleviate problems such as poverty, joblessness, police brutality, and de facto segregation. Although many Northern whites felt uncomfortable confronting racial inequities close to home, conditions for African Americans living in Northern and Western cities rivaled those of the South. In 1962 the Los Angeles Police Department, notorious in the Watts section of L.A. for harassing and brutalizing black youth, targeted the Nation of Islam in an act of violence. Malcolm X spoke out about the incident on WBAI radio.

Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, by 1957 only 20 percent of eligible African Americans voted, due in part to intimidation and discriminatory state requirements such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Despite the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on race, religion, national origin, or sex, efforts to register African Americans as voters in the South were stymied. In 1965, following the murder of a voting rights activist by an Alabama sheriff's deputy and the subsequent attack by state troopers on a massive protest march in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson pressed Congress in the following speech to pass a voting rights bill with teeth. As Majority Leader of the Senate, Johnson had helped weaken the 1957 Civil Rights Act. When he assumed the presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, however, Johnson called on Americans "to eliminate from this nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color," and in the following speech adopted the "We Shall Overcome" slogan of civil rights activists. His rhetoric and subsequent efforts broke with past presidential precedents of opposition to or lukewarm support for strong civil rights legislation. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6.

Known best by his knack for moneymaking, turn-of-the-century steel magnate Andrew Carnegie nonetheless found a moment to pen a one-sided poetic tribute to the "eighth wonder" of the world--steel manufacturing in his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plant. This brief poem reflected how he (and other contemporaries) viewed the monumental process of steelmaking. The poem was notable for its use of passive voice and the absence of workers--miners, railroad men, or blast furnace crews--from the process by which "one pound of solid steel" came to be.

General George Washington and the patriot leaders faced an enormous challenge in mounting a military campaign against the British forces during the revolutionary war. For soldiers, they drew upon existing state militias and also raised a Continental army. But no such source for a naval force existed. Instead, Washington's officers acquired the services of American captains and sailors by commissioning them as privateers, or private citizens authorized to attack a military enemy. Colonists had long experience serving as privateers for the British forces during numerous eighteenth-century wars against Spain, France, and the Netherlands. They now turned their skills against Great Britain. Andrew Sherburne's memoirs capture the youth's enthusiastic desire to participate in the military campaign against the British; many others were less enthusiastic about their military service due to its infrequent pay and poor living conditions.

Because most early-eighteenth century European colonization occurred in coastal areas, Native Americans living in interior regions maintained greater control over their lands and culture. In the lower Mississippi Valley (as in the Great Lakes region), the contest between European imperial rivals for control of North America strengthened the natives' hand. No group--European or Indian--held sovereign power, and diplomatic, military, trading, and social exchanges continued for much of the eighteenth century. But the treaties that concluded the Seven Year's War and ended French colonization of North America changed that situation. The lower Mississippi valley was partitioned between the British colony of West Florida and the Spanish colony of Louisiana. Native occupants perceived the dramatic consequences as Alibamon Mingo, elderly leader of the Choctaw nation, indicated in his meetings with the British in Mobile in 1765. Mingo remembered the French fondly and spoke of his expectations of fair trade and just treatment from the British.