On May 4, 1886, in Chicago's Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded during a labor demonstration protesting the police shootings of four striking workers. In response, the government and business groups nationwide strengthened the police and the military in an effort to curb labor militancy and public disorder. As part of its coverage of the Haymarket incident, one newspaper displayed this scene from Chicago's police headquarters, showing the construction of a criminal identification system based on photographs. The Rogues' Gallery" served as an archive to identify individual criminals (including political dissenters and labor activists) and to discern

Examines the history of the United States as a "nation of immigrants" within a broader global context. Considers migration from the mid-19th century to the present through case studies of such places as New York's Lower East Side, South Texas, Florida, and San Francisco's Chinatown. Examines the role of memory, media, and popular culture in shaping ideas about migration. Includes optional field trip to New York City.

Baseball's growing popularity in the 1920s can be measured by structural and cultural changes that helped transform the game, including the building of commodious new ballparks; the emergence of sports pages in daily urban newspapers; and the enormous popularity of radio broadcasts of baseball games. Baseball commentators and critics expended much ink during the 1920s discussing the exact nature and composition of this new and expanding fan population. Some derided the influx of new fans to urban ballparks, in part because of the growing visibility in the bleachers of the sons and daughters of working-class Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants, and in part because the game seemed to be straying from its origins in traditional rural and small-town America. Poet William Carlos Williams evoked the growing diversity of baseball's fans and their impact on the game in "The Crowd at the Ball Park," published in the Dial in 1923.

In 1887, Henry F. Bowers founded the nativist American Protective Association (APA) in Clinton, Iowa. Bowers was a Mason, and he drew from its fraternal ritual--elaborate regalia, initiation ceremonies, and a secret oath--in organizing the APA. He also drew many Masons, an organization that barred Catholics. The organization quickly acquired an anti-union cast. Among other things, the APA claimed that the Catholic leader of the Knights, Terence V. Powderly, was part of a larger conspiracy against American institutions. Even so, the APA successfully recruited significant numbers of disaffected trade unionists in an era of economic hard times and the collapse of the Knights of Labor. This secret oath taken by members of the American Protective Association in the 1890s revealed the depth of Protestant distrust and fear of Catholics holding public office.

In 1918, a U.S. Employment Service Bulletin estimated that 75,000 unemployed laborers in Puerto Rico were available for work in the United States. The War Department agreed to transport workers to labor camps in the United States where they would be housed and fed while working on government construction contracts at defense plants and military bases. Many of these work camps, however, subjected the new migrants to harsh conditions and even forced labor, which Rafael Marchn described in his 1918 deposition to the commissioner of Puerto Rico. Workers like Marchn appealed to the U.S. government to improve sanitary conditions, provide adequate food, and stop widespread beatings at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 1918 and 1919, almost one hundred Puerto Rican migrants died in Arkansas labor camps.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Puerto Rican migration to the US. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

This course provides an introduction to the issues of immigrants, planning, and race. It identifies the complexities and identities of immigrant populations emerging in the United States context and how different community groups negotiate that complexity. It explores the critical differences and commonalities between immigrant and non-immigrant communities, as well as how the planning profession does and should respond to those differences. Finally, the course explores the intersection of immigrant communities' formation and their interactions with African Americans and the idea of race in the United States.

The founders of the great libraries of the 19th century were often ambivalent about whether their goal was to disseminate or conserve knowledge. They were also uncertain about the intended audience. John Cotton Dana of the Newark Public Library was atypical in his populist stance that "it is a proper function of a library to amuse." He argued that a "shallow mind" was better than an "empty one." Other librarians preferred to see themselves as cultivators of public taste and their buildings as uplifting houses of culture. The stuffiness and remoteness of late nineteenth-century libraries provoked satires such as this imaginary dialogue between a bartender (Mr. Dooley) and customer (Mr. Hennessy) in an Irish pub. Humorist Peter Finley Dunne published the piece in Dissertations by Mr. Dooley in 1906. Dunne's famous dialogues drew upon prevalent ethnic stereotypes that were a staple of late nineteenth-century humor. Dunne set his exchanges in an Irish bar, but other humorists of this era drew on German, Jewish, and black caricatures.

Aims to develop a teaching knowledge of the field through extensive reading and discussion of major works. The reading covers a broad range of topics -- political, economic, social, and cultural -- and represents a variety of historical methods. Students make frequent oral presentations and prepare a 20-page review essay.

Even in the late nineteenth-century American West, a notably violent region, the violence directed against Chinese immigrants was shocking. The Union Pacific railroad employed 331 Chinese and 150 whites in their coal mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming. On September 2, 1885, Chinese and white miners, who were paid by the ton, had a dispute over who had the right to work in a particularly desirable area of the mine. White miners, members of the Knights of Labor, beat two Chinese miners and walked off their jobs. That evening the white miners, armed with rifles, rioted and burned down the Chinese quarter. No whites were prosecuted for the murder of twenty-eight Chinese and $150,000 in property damage, even though the identities of those responsible were widely known. Although U.S. Army troops had to provide protection before some of the Chinese could finally return to their burned-out homes in Rock Springs, some defiantly continued to work in the Union Pacific mines into the next century. This jingoistic editorial in the Rock Springs, Wyoming, Independent, mourned the return of Chinese workers to the mining town the day after the riot.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals in the early 20th century. The two Italian immigrants were accused in 1920 of murdering a paymaster in a holdup. Although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. Despite international protests, they were executed on August 23, 1927. Novelist John Dos Passos became deeply involved in the case after he visited Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts prisons. In the fall of 1920 he joined the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. Facing the Chair was the committee's official report. In it Dos Passos dissected the complicated legal case, countering the prosecution account and excoriating the miscarriage of justice. In addition to its rhetorical argument, Facing the Chair appealed to readers' humanity with poignant descriptions of the two men's long imprisonment. Dos Passos's bitterly ironic subtitle--"The Americanization of Two Foreign-born Workingmen"--pointed to the nativist sentiment that colored the prosecution.

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act (also known as the Immigration Act of 1924), which restricted immigration from many European nations and denied even a token quota to most Asians. The law barred all immigrants who were ineligible for citizenship, and all south and east Asians (including Indians, Japanese, and Chinese) had been deemed ineligible on racial grounds by a 1922 Supreme Court decision. Japan reacted particularly strongly to what it regarded as the insulting treatment of the Japanese under the new law. The Japanese organized consumer boycotts against American goods and demonstrated against American cultural practices like dancing. This Japan Times & Mail editorial, entitled "The Senate's Declaration of War," denounced the 1924 immigration law and speculated on the reasons for the decision. The paper suggested that the Senate "deliberately" sought to "insult" the Japanese.

This collection uses primary sources to explore settlement houses during the Progressive Era. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In the decade preceding the American Revolution, settlers spilling into new inland settlements created increased social conflict along with economic opportunity. Those living in the backcountry demanded better political representation in the colonial government, as well as government action to remove Indians from those inland areas. The North Carolina Regulator movement of farmers, tenants, and laborers challenged the government in the 1760s; they accused the coastal elite of corruption and monopolization of government offices. Often settlers found land speculators had already claimed the best lands. Herman Husband, the author of this tract, was the most prominent agitator in the regulator movement. A man of great contradictions, he held land grants of over 8000 acres yet also advanced new democratic ideas in his writings. In this pamphlet he challenged the undemocratic basis of Carolina's government and urged his fellow backcountry residents to vote out their corrupt representatives.

At the turn of the 20th century, unprecedented levels of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States aroused public support for restrictive immigration laws. After World War I, which temporarily slowed immigration levels, anti-immigration sentiment rose again. Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921, limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality's presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the 1910 census. As a result, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe dropped to less than one-quarter of pre-World War I levels. Even more restrictive was the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) that shaped American immigration policy until the 1960s. During congressional debate over the 1924 Act, Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina drew on the racist theories of Madison Grant to argue that immigration restriction was the only way to preserve existing American resources. Although blatant racists like Smith were in the minority in the Senate, almost all senators supported restriction, and the Johnson-Reed bill passed with only six dissenting votes.

While the numbers of free blacks remained small in the South through the mid-nineteenth century, their presence aroused great anxiety among whites. Legislatures passed laws limiting African-American political and social rights. Non-slaveholding whites often viewed free black labor as competition, especially in urban areas where tensions between the two groups sometimes ran high. In 1838, J. J. Flournoy, a white Georgian artisan, wrote this letter to the Athens Southern Banner complaining about the competition posed by black workers. While he noted in passing that the white majority of the poor should band together to elect representatives to ensure laws that would privilege white labor over black, he more forcefully appealed to a common "whiteness" among contractors and carpenters, proprietors and workers.

Designed for students of Hispanic descent and raised in the US. Expands oral and written grammar study and increases contact with standard Spanish. Studies recent fiction and poetry as well as specific historical, social, economic, and political aspects of Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban cultures. Many of the nonliterary readings are in English; class discussions in Spanish. Taught in Spanish. Fron the course home page: Course Description Spanish for Bilingual Students is an intermediate course designed principally for heritage learners, but which includes other students interested in specific content areas, such as US Latino immigration, identity, ethnicity, education and representation in the media. Linguistic goals include vocabulary acquisition, improvement in writing, and enhancement of formal communicative skills.

This resource is a template that was used at the September 18, 20219, Using Storytelling as a Tool to Educate, Empower, and Build Empathy event hosted at Madison Technical College,  to think about next steps for supporting immigrant and migrant students. 

This resource is the agenda for the September 18, 20219, Using Storytelling as a Tool to Educate, Empower, and Build Empathy event, hosted at Madison Technical College. 

In 1917 the United States declared the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, a U.S. possession since 1898, to be citizens of the United States--a "gift" that many Puerto Ricans resented. Seeing an untapped source of inexpensive labor, the U.S. Labor Department worked with industry to facilitate the migration of Puerto Rican workers to America. During the First World War the War Department agreed to transport Puerto Rican workers to labor camps in the United States where they would be housed and fed while working on government construction contracts at defense plants and military bases, many of which subjected the new migrants to harsh conditions and even forced labor. Rafael Marchn was one of a group of Puerto Rican workers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina who protested to the commissioner of Puerto Rico over the intolerable conditions in the work camp. He gave this deposition in Washington, D.C., in October 1918.