This text set includes a variety of multimodal resources designed to help learners understand treaty rights as they apply to the state of Wisconsin, giving special emphasis to the court cases of LCO v. Voight and State v. Gurnoe.  Indian tribes were independent, sovereign nations, before the arrival of Europeans in North America. Despite ceding their lands in the northern part of Wisconsin to the U.S. government, Chippewa tribes reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather within the Ceded Territory. In the 1980’s, these court cases affirmed those rights. The year 2024 celebrates 50 years of the court decision. 

Research and development scientists at Bell Laboratories introduced a device in 1947 that heralded a technological revolution with widespread consequences for consumers, industry, and the armed forces: the tiny transistor. Replacing the vacuum tube as the basic component for a host of electronic products, this semi-conductor solid-state device and such later developments in electronics as the integrated circuit, lasers, fiber optics, and digitization techniques, allowed the miniaturization of conveniences as with radios and computers, and made possible many aspects of present-day life and work--from telecommunications to automated factory operations. The following Collier's article from 1954, by renowned World War II reporter and novelist Cornelius Ryan, dubbed the new science "Stereatronics" and predicted revolutionary changes in the offing. Though the name did not survive the times in which it was coined, the electronics industry it described would soon become the largest manufacturing industry in the United States.

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Rather than call for the creation of federal relief programs, this 1931 advertisement placed by the President's Organization on Unemployment Relief opts for local voluntary charity as a response to the Great Depression. President Herbert Hoover firmly believed that relief was a local responsibility, although even this step, which proved inadequate, went further than pre-World War I presidents, who stood by passively during financial panics. Few Americans expected the government to take drastic action when the Depression struck. Many turned instead to their employers, merchants, churches, landlords, and local banks, as well as to family networks, for assistance. As the Depression and unemployment deepened, however, it became clear that the moral capitalism" of marketplace institutions was drastically inadequate and aggressive government action was needed."

A video on devising theatre based on interviewing people suffering with life-threatening illnesses.  It walks through the idea that anything can inspire a creative work.

The emergence of the sharecropping system in the South in the last three decades of the 19th century rested on an uneasy compromise between black farming families and the white landowners on whose land they labored. Sharecropping was an oppressive system but the experience of sharecropping families varied. In this interview done by historian Charles Hardy in 1984, Minnie Whitney, born in 1902, described the determined efforts of more progressive farmers like her father, who along with her mother struggled to maintain some self-sufficiency in the face of white determination to enforce African-American dependence on the sharecropping system.

Starting in the mid-19th century, industrial methods of producing goods began to overtake the small-scale methods of artisans and apprentices. The artisanal ideal of independence was eroded by the replacement of craft work by machine work, strict new work rules, and the growth of child labor. For miners and some other workers, the prevalence of store pay (wages paid only as credit), scrip wages (money redeemable only by the company), and company stores intensified their dependence on employers. If company stores lacked the items that miners wanted, they had no alternative but to do without. In these three excerpts from the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics First Annual Report in 1878, miners complained about the stranglehold that company-owned stores, scrip wages, and store pay had on the welfare and independence of coal and iron ore workers in the Buckeye State.

This exhibit highlights a selection of advertisements from Wisconsin city directories published between 1857 and 1930. City directories are commercially-published compilations of the names, addresses, and professions of people in a particular town or city. The earliest formal city directories published in the United States document major urban areas on the East Coast and date to the 1780s. In Wisconsin, the earliest city directories date to the 1850s; by the 1920s, at least one directory was published for most of the large and mid-sized cities in the state.

To supply labor for the plantation economies of the Americas, Europeans forcibly removed roughly 12 million people from Africa between the 15th and the 19th centuries. These men, women, and children were marched from their homes to the coast and placed on "slavers" like the one pictured in this diagram from an 1808 report on the African slave trade. Designed to carry the largest number of people in the smallest possible space, these ships provided an indescribably horrible experience for the humans chained below decks. Roughly one in six slaves died at sea from disease, malnutrition, and suicide.

Although middle- and upper-class observers viewed the leisure habits of working-class women with condescension, few of them actually knew much about what working women did with their spare time. One exception was Dorothy Richardson, a woman from a middle-class Iowa family who had to work in a factory to support herself. In 1905, she published a fictionalized version of her experiences under the title, The Long Day . In this excerpt, she described a discussion among her fellow workers about their favorite novels and music. Despite her disdainful view of their interest in "ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal . . . cheap story books," her account demonstrated the importance of popular culture in the everyday lives of women factory workers. The novel that the women discussed, Little Rosebud's Lovers, was written in 1886 by Laura Jean Libbey, a bestselling author of popular fiction. Libbey was particularly known for placing working-girl heroines within sensational and melodramatic plots.

In 1890, two competing organizations working to gain the right for women to vote joined forces to form the National American Women 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. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Florence Kelley, a Chicago-born labor reformer, socialist, and woman suffrage advocate, employed pragmatic arguments in support of women's right to vote. In this selection from a speech to the 1898 NAWSA convention, Kelly argued that working women, particularly factory workers, needed the ballot to protect themselves from exploitation at the hands of their powerful employers. She also argued that working men needed their feminine counterparts to vote in order to strengthen labor's presence at the polls.

This lesson will encourage students to investigate Supreme Court cases in conjunction with the Annenberg Classroom video “First Amendment: Student Freedom of Speech” to evaluate the decisions handed down by the Court in the effort to find the balance between a school’s need for order and a student’s right to expression. Students will explore five Supreme Court cases with the purpose of determining if the Court’s decisions helped or hindered defining “protected speech” for students in public school environments.
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Students examined the landmark legislation and amendments of the Radical Reconstruction era, and they learned about the unprecedented period of interracial democracy that resulted. In this lesson, students will learn about the debate that occurred within the women’s rights movement over the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They will also conduct a close reading of a speech from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an African-American woman who was a leading activist in the fight for Black freedom and women’s rights.
Students will acknowledge that progress in making a society more democratic is often slow and uneven. Rights provided to some groups often continue to be denied to others.
Students will understand that members of social movements often struggle to create inclusive movements and can fracture along lines of identity such as race, class, and gender.

This article describes how a high school teacher's approach to teaching "styles of writing" to her students. This lesson ties in reading and writing by taking what might be considered a difficult literary passage (ie: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitgerald) and teach students to write like the author and receive feedback in a "workshop" setting where students receive feedback from one another.

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.

The Wampanoag Indians of New England began Metacom's War (also known as King Philip's War) in 1675 in an attempt to expel the English from the region. Metacom, leader of the Wampanoag, fashioned an alliance of many different groups, but Christian Indians and Iroquois who allied with the English proved to be a significant factor in the eventual colonial victory. In August 1676 colonial troops captured and killed Metacom, ending hostilities in southern New England. However, other Indians continued their attacks for another two years along the northern New England coast. In particular, they targeted fishing ketches operated out of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Mariner Robert Roules narrated one such incident in July 1677 when his boat was captured by Indians, then recaptured by the settlers. When the settlers sailed Roules' boat into Marblehead harbor, the women of Marblehead took bloody revenge upon the Indian captives.

In the years after the Revolution many immigrants to the United States were political radicals, including John Doyle's father, who participated in the Irish Republican revolt against Great Britain in 1798 and later emigrated to Philadelphia. Like John Doyle, the author of this letter, many migrants brought craft skills and looked for work in the workshops and manufacturies of the new nation. When Doyle crossed the Atlantic in 1818 he quickly learned that small-scale entrepreneurship was more lucrative than sticking with his printing trade. Later immigration swelled as some two million Irish came to the United States between 1820 and 1860. The catastrophic Irish Potato Famine of 1845-49 sent hundreds of thousands (250,000 in 1851 alone) to disembark in cities where they faced economic hardships and ethnic discrimination.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Drawing on domestic traditions of parlor plays and dramatic tableaux, suffragists used brief plays and monologues to enliven their own meetings and to enlist new members through performances at women's clubs and community theaters. Marie Jenney Howe wrote this Antisuffrage Monologue for the drama group of the New York Woman's Suffrage Party and other suffrage organizations. In it, she parodied anti-suffragist arguments that relied on stereotypes of female dependence, irrationality, and delicacy even as they also warned that women voters would exert too much power. Howe, a Unitarian minister, later founded Heterodoxy, a group of women intellectuals and radicals in New York City's Greenwich Village.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. Suffragists also reached large audiences through newspapers. In Alice Duer Miller's "Unauthorized Interviews," originally published as newspaper columns in the New York Tribune, the pro-suffrage writer spoofed male legislators with clever reversals of gender stereotypes: the men were petulant and irrational, while the women suffragists remained cool and logical.

In 1909, the predominantly immigrant and female workers in New York City's garment industry staged a series of job walkouts that led to a massive general strike involving more than 20,000 workers. Fifteen-year-old shirtwaist worker Clara Lemlich, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, emerged as a key organizer and speaker. An unprovoked attack on Lemlich and her fellow female strikers by anti-union thugs was recorded by New York Sun correspondent McAlister Coleman. He retold the story years later in his article, "All of Which I Saw," published in the Progressive in 1950.