With 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves, the forces of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the nation's standing army in the late-19th century. The Pinkertons provided services for management in labor disputes, including armed guards and secret operatives like Charles A. Siringo. A Texas native and former cowboy, Siringo moved to Chicago in 1886, where first-hand observation of the city's labor conflict (which he attributed to foreign anarchism) moved him to join the Pinkertons. Angry with the agency after it sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs, Siringo published Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism, a revealing chronicle of Pinkerton methods and deception. Guarding its reputation, the Pinkerton Agency succeeded in suppressing the book. Operatives bought up all copies available at newsstands and a court order confiscated the book's plates. In the following passage from Two Evil Isms, Siringo (who, even when alienated from the Pinkertons, never displayed any sympathy for the labor movement) described how he infiltrated and undermined miners' unions in northern Idaho during the 1892 Coeur d'Alene strike.

Homestead, Pennsylvania, was in many ways the prototypical early twentieth-century mill town. Located seven miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, the first steel mill was built in Homestead in 1881. In 1892, Homestead was the site of one of the most dramatic strikes in U.S. history. The Carnegie Steel Company's ultimate victory resulted in the destruction of a once-powerful union of skilled iron and steel workers. By 1907, almost 7,000 workers toiled at the Homestead plant for the U.S. Steel Corporation. In 1907-1908, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook an intensive study that attempted to understand the dramatic changes that had reshaped Homestead and other industrial communities. Written by progressive social reformers, the six-volume Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the devastating impact of industrial life on those who labored in the nation's factories. The following excerpt is from Margaret Byington's Pittsburgh Survey volume, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, first published in 1910. In the spirit of the Progressive-era effort to scientifically document conditions, the book also included photographs (by the famous documentary photographer Lewis Hine) and detailed family budgets.

By the mid-twentieth century, the movement of African Americans from farms to cities, along with their participation in World War II industries and union organizing, spawned the origins of the modern civil rights movement. Although conflict between white and black workers continued, many African Americans faced continued discrimination with a new sense of self-confidence and militancy, based on their identities as equal workers, soldiers, and citizens. This frame from Brotherhood of Man, an animated short produced by United Productions of America, a studio created by former Walt Disney animators, for the United Automobile Workers' 1946 interracial organizing drive.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Texas Revolution. 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.

Tensions among industrial workers of different ethnic backgrounds often proved a barrier to unionization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was, for example, a key factor in the defeat of the 1919 steel strike. In the 1930s, however, that began to change, particularly under the auspices of the CIO. In this 1974 interview done by historian Peter Gotlieb in 1974, Polish-American steelworker Joe Rudiak recalled how ethnic hostility declined in the "CIO days," particularly among the "young folks." This decrease in suspicion between people of different nationalities fostered unionization in the 1930s.

European observers generally commented critically upon the leading role of Indian women in work. Roger Williams proved an exception. The minister, once head of the Salem church, was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635 for questioning the Puritan leadership. He helped found the colony of Rhode Island around Narragansett Bay on land purchased from the Narragansett people to the south, with whom he and the colony maintained generally good relations. He spent much of his life trying to understand the Indians 'customs and language, and published some of his sympathetic observations in his 1643 book Key into the Language of America where he offered a glossary of Algonquian words that revealed much about Indian life. Williams also criticized certain colonial practices, such as the occupation of Indian lands by Europeans, and advocated the separation of church and state and individual freedom in other writings.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. 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 second quarter of the nineteenth century numerous reform movements emerged; some people even chose to withdraw from society and form ideal or utopian communities. The Shakers were the oldest of these utopian movements. Founded by Mother Ann Lee in 1774, they abandoned the traditional family in favor of a new fellowship of men and women living as celibate brothers and sisters. Many entered Shaker communities in the 1820s and 1830s, attracted by their equality and simple, but spiritual, lifestyle. This anonymous Lowell mill worker made two visits to a Shaker community in New York State and offered a glimpse into the isolated world within. Her opinions changed over time as she found some interesting similarities to factory life; the Shakers were as industrious as any factory worker, paying close attention to their bell schedule.

In this March 23, 1900, speech before the U.S. Senate, Senator Benjamin R. "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman of South Carolina defended the actions of his white constituents who had murdered several black citizens of his home state. Tillman blamed the violence on the "hot-headedness" of Southern blacks and on the misguided efforts of Republicans during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War to "put white necks under black heels." He also defended violence against black men, claiming that southern whites "will not submit to [the black man] gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him"--an evocation of the deeply sexualized racist fantasies of many Southern whites.

"Then and Now," helps students to visualize the affects of human development on wildlife. How do human settlements (parking lots, apartment buildings, etc.) influence wildlife habitat and populations? What are the effects of man-made structures on native and non-native species? These questions are explored by interpreting aerial photographs and related information sources in an attempt to uncover some of the correlations between changes in habitat and types of wildlife.

Although the 1970's saw an increase of women entering non-traditional and unionized jobs, many skilled and building trades remained effectively closed to women. As a result, in many cities throughout the 1970's and 1980's, private and city bus companies provided important opportunities for women interested in non-traditional jobs. Boasting large numbers of women and lesbians and an atmosphere of social tolerance, these jobs were seen as gay-friendly and provided female workers with a strong voice in union politics and a sense of community and solidarity. Shelley Ettinger took a bus job in the midst of a bus strike in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1977. Encouraged to join by other lesbians, Ettinger remembered an atmosphere of female and lesbian camaraderie that expanded beyond the bus yard into social gatherings and soft-ball games.

The country store was an important crossroads in nineteenth-century rural communities. In the decades after the War for Independence, commercial activity increased in the hinterlands as rural residents brought their farm produce to local storekeepers to exchange for commodities (such as rum) that were not produced locally. With cash scarce, much of the trade was conducted by barter and recorded in the merchant's account books or "daybooks," and traveling peddlers extended market activity beyond the reach of village stores. It was in this commercializing environment that Phineas Taylor Barnum honed his entrepreneurial skills. Barnum, born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810, eventually took his skills to New York City where he achieved fame as a cultural impresario and museum owner. He wrote several autobiographies that became key documents in the substantial nineteenth-century advice literature on how to achieve fame and fortune; this excerpt is drawn from The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written By Himself (1855) where he described his early days in greatest detail.

As slavery collapsed at the close of the Civil War, former slaves quickly explored freedom's possibilities by establishing churches that were independent of white control, seeking education in Freedmen's Bureau schools, and even building and maintaining their own schools. Many took to the roads as they sought opportunities to work and to reconstitute their families. Securing their liberty meant finding the means of support to obtain land or otherwise benefit from their own labor, as Jourdon Anderson made clear in this letter to his former owner. He addressed Major Anderson from Ohio, where he had secured good wages for himself and schooling for his children. Many freedpeople argued that they were entitled to land in return for their years of unpaid labor and looked to the federal government to help achieve economic self-sufficiency. Black southerners understood the value of their own labor and looked for economic independence and a free labor market in their battle over the meaning of emancipation in post-Civil War America.

In 1918 the Spanish influenza hit the United States and then the rest of the world with such swiftness that it sometimes went unnoticed until it had already passed. By mid-1919 it had killed more people than any other disease in a similar period in the history of the world. Kentucky coal miner Teamus Bartley was interviewed at ninety-five years of age and vividly recalled the impact of the flu pandemic on his community. With a dearth of healthy laborers, the mines shut down for six weeks in 1918 and miners went from digging coal to digging graves.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the polio epidemic and vaccine. 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 1915 cartoon by William Ireland in the Columbus Dispatch relies on racist suppositions to make an ironic antiwar statement. Like their European counterparts, many Americans justified imperial expansion by arguing that it would spread the benefits of Western Civilization" to un-civilized

As the federal government drastically reduced funding for low-income housing during the 1980's and 1990's, homelessness emerged as a new and serious issue in many urban areas. Between one and three million Americans became homeless during the 1980's as the minimum wage fell in value and the creation of affordable housing came to a virtual standstill. By the end of the decade one-third of homeless Americans were children. As the homeless population grew, so did the number of organizations created to serve and organize the men, women, and families living in the streets or in over-crowded shelters. Ted Houghton was an organizer for Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group founded in 1981 and dedicated to the principle that decent shelter, sufficient food, affordable housing, and the chance to work for a living wage are fundamental rights in a civilized society.

A lesson plan which takes students through the process of writing a good thesis statement. The lesson plan is based on a short essay and a set of primary sources based on one historical event, Hay Market Square.

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. The case and execution were commemorated in an outpouring of literary expression. John Dos Passos's "They Are Dead Now-- - " appeared in the New Masses, October 1927. A stark poem that repudiated its own form as inadequate to the subject, it opened "This isn't a poem." In the poem, the executions ended the dreams not only of Sacco and Vanzetti, but those of many others who had followed the trials with disbelief and outrage.

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Homestead, Pennsylvania, steelworker Joseph Fish described conditions in the steel mills as good and maintained that only "one or two" Americans have joined the strike.