The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century. The 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, initiated public discussion of votes for women, and serious campaigning began with the founding in 1869 of two original (and competing) suffrage organizations--the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The two groups joined forces in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Elizabeth Cady Stanton served for twenty years as the president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and as the first president of NAWSA. In 1892, she resigned at age 77. Her resignation speech, "The Solitude of Self," eloquently articulated the arguments for the equality of women that she had spent her adult life promoting.

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Father Charles Coughlin occupied both a strange and a familiar place in American politics in the 1930s. Politically radical, a passionate democrat, he nevertheless was a bigot who freely vented angry, irrational charges and assertions. A Catholic priest, he broadcast weekly radio sermons that by 1930 drew as many as forty-five million listeners. Strongly egalitarian, deeply suspicious of elites, a champion of what he saw as the ordinary person's rights, Coughlin frequently and vigorously attacked capitalism, communism, socialism, and dictatorship By the mid-1930s, his talks took on a nasty edge as he combined harsh attacks on Roosevelt as the tool of international Jewish bankers with praise for the fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. The "Radio Priest's" relentless anti-elitism pushed Roosevelt to sharpen his own critiques of elites, and in that sense Coughlin had a powerful impact on American politics beyond his immediate radio audience. This 1937 sermon, "Twenty Years Ago," reflected much of what made Coughlin popular.

The Truman Administration's Cold War policy of containment advocated confronting the Soviet Union, in the words of diplomat George F. Kennan, "with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world." In 1952, during the Korean War stalemate, John Foster Dulles authored the Republican Party platform's foreign policy plank condemning containment. Dulles instead supported the "liberation" of countries within the communist sphere using any means "short of war." When Republican nominee General Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency and Dulles became his secretary of state, however, containment remained the official U.S. policy. In 1954, as France was losing its battle to regain control of its prewar colony of Indochina--a war funded substantially with U.S. dollars--Congressional leaders refused to support an Eisenhower-Dulles resolution to intervene militarily. In the following opinion piece published just after the French defeat, correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for reporting on the rise of Hitler, offered a critique of containment and an analysis of U.S. options for fighting the Cold War. A great admirer of Dulles, Mowrer believed hopes for peaceful coexistence to be "the opium of the West."

Television had become the nation's largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money. As Revlon's average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows--relatively easy and inexpensive to produce--filled the prime-time schedule. Many took pains in their presentation to convey an aura of authenticity--contestants chosen from ordinary walks of life pondered fact-based questions inside sound-proof isolation booths that insured they received no outside assistance. To guarantee against tampering prior to airtime, bank executives and armed guards made on-air deliveries of sealed questions and answers said to be verified by authorities from respected encyclopedias or university professors. When the public learned in 1959 that a substantial number of shows had been rigged, a great many were offended; however, one survey showed that quite a few viewers didn't care. Following the revelations, prime-time quiz shows went off the air, replaced in large part by series telefilms, many of which were Westerns. The industry successfully fended off calls for regulation, and by blaming sponsors and contracted producers, networks minimized damage and increased their control over programming decisions. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, contestant Herbert Stempel described the process through which every detail of the seemingly spontaneous battle of wits was, in fact, scripted, rehearsed, and acted for dramatic effect.

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. A great deal of the American public's outrage was generated by media coverage--newspapers and the emerging film industry--of the incident. The Biograph Company renamed its film The Battleships "Iowa" and "Massachusetts" the Battleships "Maine" and "Iowa," and immediately released it to theaters. It played to cheering audiences. Newspapers, like those published by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, were even more influential in stirring American public opinion into a frenzy over the sinking of the Maine. In contrast to more sensational accounts of the Maine explosion, the staid New York Times cautiously reported on February 17, 1898, that there "was no evidence to prove or disprove treachery" as a factor in the sinking of the battleship.

Beginning in the late 1870s, white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors heralded a vision of a "New South" with a modern, industrial economic system. The defeat of the Confederacy, the abolition of racial slavery, and the demise of the plantation economy provided the South with opportunities to build factories and turn its raw materials into finished products: cotton into cloth, tobacco into cigarettes, coal and iron ore into steel. But mill workers, small farmers, and agricultural tenants and sharecroppers in the "New South" suffered decades of long hours, low pay, unsafe working conditions, and deplorable living situations. These anonymous comments made by cotton mill hands and farmers in 1887 and 1889 to agents of the North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics challenged the arguments of the "New South" boosters and illustrated the grim price workers paid for the region's embrace of the much-touted new industrial order.

The northern Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper presented an unflattering portrait of southern white womanhood in a May 1863 illustration. The depiction contrasted sharply with the view promoted by plantation elites of virtuous southern white mothers and wives who obeyed and deferred to men. The panel on the left showed southern women hounding their men on to Rebellion." The panel on the right depicted them "feeling the effects of Rebellion and creating Bread Riots." The latter panel referred to the Richmond bread riot

Explore the United States space race.  By exploring websites, videos and photos, students will learn about the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the history of Spanish missions in California. 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 Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, a brilliant orator and black nationalist leader, turned his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into the most important black organization in the United States in the early 1920s. Garvey's speeches often drew huge audiences, and stories of Garvey's stubborn resistance in the face of white hostility proliferated among his supporters. In an oral history interview, devotee Audley Moore remembered the Jamaican's defiant behavior at a rally in New Orleans caused "the [white] police [to] file out . . . like little puppy dogs with their tails behind them." She proudly recalled the crowd intimidating the police by raising their guns and chanting "speak, Garvey, speak."

This is an audio version of Susan B. Anthony's speech on her right to vote. This speech, recited before court in 1873 is one of the greatest statements ever made on behalf of women's suffrage. Anthony had previously been arrested in 1872 for casting an illegal vote in the presidential election of that year. After pleading her case in court, she was nevertheless found guilty and fined; a fee that went unpaid for the remainder of her life.
This speech is also an excellent example of effective public speaking.

By the early 1890s, the 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the standing army of the United States. In the 1880s, the Pinkertons provided services for management in 70 different labor disputes. The agency's success depended on both armed guards and the clandestine efforts of secret operatives like James McParlan, who had infiltrated Irish anthracite miners' organizations in the mid 1870s. McParlan's testimony (which historians have largely dismissed as fabricated) at the sensational "Molly Maguire" trial of 1876 helped send ten men to the gallows and broke the miners' union for a generation. This advertisement from the 1890s touted the prowess of the Pinkerton detective agency in maintaining law and order and played on corporate fears of "dissatisfaction among the laboring classes" to build business.

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To raise commodity prices during the Great Depression, some midwestern farmers enforced Farm Holidays

In a total war like World War II, the question "Was everyone doing his or her 'part'?" inevitably arose. Immediately following Pearl Harbor, the labor movement made an "unconditional no-strike pledge" to help win the war. In turn, labor won some important concessions from the federal government. Some who believed that labor had given up too much responded with "wildcat" (unauthorized) strikes. Others moved to reconsider the no-strike pledge. In 1942 members of the Michigan CIO endorsed the no-strike pledge, but employer attacks on wages the following year caused them to reevaluate. At the 1943 annual meeting, CIO delegates debated and passed a resolution recommending that "unless the assurances that were made to labor at the time we gave up our right to strike" were honored, the pledge should be nullified. This debate provided a sense of the varying positions that workers took on this difficult issue, including the intensity of feeling that the no-strike pledge aroused.

In addition to providing the public with an abundance of affordable consumer goods during the 20th century, the service sector of corporate America also began to invade and interfere with the private lives of many of its customers. Not content to advertise in print, radio, and television outlets, corporations and their investigative subsidiaries collected information in order to more efficiently target their products to interested buyers. (With the advent of the Internet, corporate consumer information gathering has grown even more sophisticated.) Just how much of an annoyance this could be to the average consumer was documented in the following article about maternity and baby products in the 1950s, the peak years of the "baby boom." During this period, the nation's birthrate rose substantially as economic security became more widespread and Americans on average got married earlier and had healthier children than before. The report described how friends, neighbors, delivery personnel, and laboratory technicians were all suspected of selling the names, addresses, and other vital statistics of prospective parents of "boomers" to marketers. By including men as advertising targets along with women, the author acknowledged a changing role for fathers in the "modern" family.

During the 1820s, large scale production of fabric centered in New England. Perhaps the best known of such cotton mill towns was Lowell, Massachusetts. The Lowell mills mechanized each stage of cloth production, and most mill workers were young, single women from rural New England families struggling to make ends meet. This illustration from T. S. Arthur's reform tract Illustrated Temperance Tales (1850) presented a young woman leaving her farm family to work in a cotton mill. This picture was accurate in showing that New England farm families often had to rely on income from factory labor. But reformers blamed economic hardship on personal weaknesses--in the case of Arthur's story, the father's alcoholism.

The organizers of the first English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 had visions of easy wealth and abundant plunder. The colonists, a group with little agricultural experience and weighted with gentry, instead found a swampy and disease-ridden site. The local Indians were unwilling to labor for them. Few survived the first difficult winters. Captain John Smith had been a soldier, explorer, and adventurer. With the colony in near chaos, he took over the government of the colony in 1608 and instituted a policy of rigid discipline and agricultural cultivation. When a gunpowder accident forced his return to England in 1608, the colonists faced a disastrous winter known as "starving time."

Members of the National Woman's Party (NWP) took some of the most militant actions in the struggle for suffrage in the early 20th century. NWP members who had been imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse went on a hunger strike to draw international attention to their cause. Prison authorities responded with brutal force feedings. The excerpt included here, from the clandestine prison diary of NWP member Rose Winslow, described the rigors of that experience. Born in Poland, Rose Winslow (her given name was Ruza Wenclawska) started working in a Pennsylvania textile mill at age eleven, quitting eight years later when she developed tuberculosis.