The American Red Cross (officially named The American National Red Cross) was founded in 1881 by Clara Barton, an American humanitarian and civil rights activist. Barton modeled the American Red Cross (ARC) after the International Red Cross, based in Geneva, Switzerland, which she encountered while volunteering in Europe during the late 1800s. She envisioned an organization that would provide humanitarian aid during wartime and in the event of national calamities.

At the close of the twentieth century, 93 percent of the U.S. population professed to believe in angels, 49 percent were sure that the federal government was hiding information about the existence of unidentified flying objects, and 25 percent thought they could communicate with the dead. Many Americans chose mystical options over the grimmer aspects of millennial life, but popular interest in the fantastic also signaled a love of creative fabrication dating back into U.S. history (linking, for example, the contemporary antics of the more outrageous tabloid press with the mid-nineteenth century showmanship of P. T. Barnum).

A cross-section of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, workforce as presented to the readers of Harper's Weekly in 1868. Winslow Homer sketched women, men, and children as they emerged from the city's textile factories at the end of a workday.

The All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League lasted from 1943 to 1954. During its peak attendance year, the League attracted close to a million fans--three of whom wrote letters, included below, to correct factual misrepresentations about the objects of their affection printed in the following Collier's article. The League inspired a hit motion picture of 1992 (A League of Their Own) and continues to hold interest for many, as demonstrated by numerous websites featuring leading players. Formed during World War II when major league owners feared that the military draft might lead to suspension of play, the All-American League thrived. In the early 1950s, however, it reproduced a pattern found elsewhere in American society: women encouraged to fill jobs (previously open only to men) during the war years faced restrictions as traditional norms were reestablished. The following look at the League from the perspective of its "harried" male managers, however, offers only minimal insight into the reasons for such high ticket sales and the devotion of fans cheering players who challenged the gender barriers of their day.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Toni Morrison's Beloved. 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.

The papers of statesman, publisher, scientist, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) consist of approximately 8,000 items spanning the years 1726 to 1907, with most dating from the 1770s and 1780s. The collection's principal strength is its documentation of Franklin's diplomatic roles as a colonial representative in London (1757-1762 and 1764-1775) and France (1776-1785), where he sought to win recognition and funding from European countries during the American Revolution, negotiated the treaty with Britain that ended the war, and served as the first United States minister to France. The papers also document Franklin's work as a scientist, inventor, and observer of the natural world, and his relations with family, friends, and scientific and political colleagues.

Notable correspondents include John Adams, Sarah Franklin Bache, Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy, Edmund Burke, Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, Cadwallader Colden, Peter Collinson, Thomas Cushing, Charles-Guillaume-Frédéric Dumas, Charles James Fox, Deborah Read Franklin, William Franklin, William Temple Franklin, Joseph Galloway, George III, King of Great Britain; Rodolphe-Ferdinand Grand, David Hartley, Mary Stevenson Hewson, Jan Ingenhousz, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, the Marquis de Lafayette; Henry Laurens, Antoine Lavoisier, Arthur Lee, Jane Franklin Mecom, Robert Morris, Richard Oswald, Joseph Priestley, William Strahan, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes; George Washington, Jonathan Williams, Jonathan Williams Jr., and more.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. Many newspapers presented Spanish culpability as fact, with headlines such as "The War Ship Maine was Split in Two by an Enemy's Secret Infernal Machine." Two months later, the slogan "Remember the Maine " carried the U.S. into war with Spain. In the midst of the hysteria, few Americans paid much attention to the report issued two weeks before the U.S. entry into the war by a Court of Inquiry appointed by President McKinley. The report stated that the committee could not definitively assign blame to Spain for the sinking of the Maine. In 1911, the Maine was raised in Havana harbor and a new board of inquiry again avoided a definite conclusion. In 1976, however, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Admiral Hyman Rickover conducted a new investigation. Rickover, something of a maverick in the Navy, came to the conclusion that the explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion in the ship's coal bins, a problem that afflicted other ships of the period. But controversy over the sinking of the Maine continues; some recent authors have, for example, rejected Rickover's account and argued that rogue, anti-American Spanish officers used primitive mines to destroy the ship.

In this autobiographical account of the life that awaited new nursing recruits in 1893, former nurse Mary Roberts Rinehart painted a vivid portrait of the daily obstacles that stood between nurses and the professional status they hoped to attain. Rinehart described the "simple, plain hell" faced by the young nurse, a description that challenged conventional expectations about professional work.

During the winter of 1869, the velocipede—the forerunner of today’s modern bicycle—first arrived in Wisconsin as a form of indoor entertainment for middle to upper class residents. This exhibit details the history of bicycles and bicyclists, and the related social issues raised, in Wisconsin.

"In Appleton, Wisconsin, the first sight of a woman wearing a bloomer suit on city streets created tremendous controversy, because the clothing questioned socially constructed gender roles."

On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike's most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as "War in San Francisco!" On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland (across the bay). Mike Quin, a self-described "rank-and-file journalist," offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath.

Student radicalism and the New Left contributed to the rise of a "counterculture" during the 1960's, as millions of Americans questioned traditional forms of monogamy and family, suburban life, materialism, and scientific rationality and emotional repression. Outwardly, this cultural shift was marked by the rise of rock music, the growing use of marijuana and other drugs, and the end of many sexual taboos. For some, like SDS organizer Cathy Wilkerson, drugs represented a distraction from more serious cultural and political questioning and activism. Wilkerson edited the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes, and opened a regional SDS office in Washington, DC in 1968. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]

John Collier's appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 marked a radical reversal--in intention if not always in effect--in U.S. government policies toward American Indians that dated back to the 1887 Dawes Act. An idealistic social worker, Collier first encountered Indian culture when he visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and found among the Pueblos there what he called a "Red Atlantis"--a model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. Although Collier could not win congressional backing for his most radical proposals, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. Collier set out his vision for what became known as the "Indian New Deal" in this 1934 article from the Literary Digest. Although he was sympathetic to Indians, he depicted them in a stereotypical manner.

This lesson asks students to interrogate six historical documents that show differing opinions about the conflict in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Students are then asked to draw connections to modern day movements.

Objectives: At the end of the lesson, students will be able to:
1. Analyze written documents for position of writer and content
2. Synthesize a historical position based upon document analysis
3. Connect historical struggles for equality with current movements

Essential Questions:
1. What effect did the media have on public perception during the Birmingham protest of racial segregation in 1963?2
2. What equality struggles have the media brought into the national spotlight in recent times?

In 1898, the United States took control of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, intending to use it as a base for strategic naval operations. Most of the island's 900,000 inhabitants welcomed the end of Spanish rule. But they were divided about the U.S. presence. Some hoped links with the United States would lead to increased trade and prosperity; others wanted total independence. Some who initially welcomed the United States quickly became disillusioned. Severo Tulier, a small farmer from Vega Baja, had to sell his farm in 1899; he worked first as a field laborer, and then moved to San Juan to learn a trade. He described the conditions of life among farm workers to Henry K. Carroll, the special commissioner for the United States to Puerto Rico, who interviewed hundreds of Puerto Ricans as part of his effort to formulate U.S. policy for governing the island.

The annual convention of the Knights of Labor convened in Richmond, Virginia, a region divided by racial and political conflict, on October 4, 1886. In the 1880s, Southern politics was split between southern Democrats who sought to "redeem" the old order and a progressive (and in some places interracial) political movement that sought to extend the gains won by ordinary black and white southerners during the Reconstruction era. As more than one thousand delegates gathered from across the country in the former capital of the Confederacy, the labor and political reform movements hoped the convention would be a launching pad for their message of racial peace and political reform. But the convention and the Knights of Labor were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization's attitude toward the question of social equality between the races. The white citizens of Richmond and elsewhere in the country were fascinated and horrified by repeated reports of "race mixing" in press accounts about the Knights of Labor convention, typified by these three items from the Richmond Dispatch of October 6, 1886.

Black Hawk or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, was born at Saukenuk, a Sauk village at the junction of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers. When the United States took over the area in 1804 after the Louisiana Purchase, several Sauk and other tribal leaders signed a treaty that ceded Indian lands east of the Mississippi River, but allowed the Indians to stay as long as the territory remained the property of the federal government. Fearful of the land hungry Americans, Black Hawk and others joined the British in the War of 1812. Encroaching settlers pushed the Sauks into a confrontation with the American government, and Black Hawk's refusal to abandon his homelands led to the Black Hawk War in 1832. Defeated, the chief was taken East upon orders of President Andrew Jackson. He dictated his life story the following year to a government interpreter. Edited by a local newspaperman, it was the first Indian autobiography published in the United States.

Free African Americans living in the North before the Civil War suffered enormous disadvantages and discriminations. Forced to sit in separate and inferior sections in theaters, public transit, and churches, free blacks were also barred from all but the most menial jobs and denied entrance to white trade unions. This racist cartoon in an 1854 edition of the humor magazine Yankee Notions inadvertently illustrated the everyday harassment and cruelty to which northern African Americans were subjected. At a performance of a play based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, some white members altered a seat reservation card and, to the derisive laughter of the rest of the audience, pinned it on a black woman's shawl.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. African Americans, among many others, objected to the notion of the "white man's burden." Among the dozens of replies to Kipling's poem was "The Black Man's Burden," written by African-American clergyman and editor H. T. Johnson and published in April 1899. A "Black Man's Burden Association" was even organized with the goal of demonstrating that mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines was an extension of the mistreatment of black Americans at home.

The BlackPast has an interactive African American history timeline that can be used to contextualize the history being studied. BlackPast has an extensive database to search within. The website is in encyclopedia format and has both written and primary visual sources available. A narrative written by professional historians accompanies each source.By clicking the "African-American History" link at the top of the page you can see a drop down menu with multiple types of primary sources, timeline, documents and speeches, and links to other museums and records.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Black Power Movement. 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.