Indian people of the Eastern Woodlands (northeastern North America) followed a seasonal schedule of hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and the cultivation of crops. They relied upon cultivated crops such as corn, beans, and squash for much of their food. Men primarily provided the meat and fish, while women were responsible for supplying cultivated vegetables along with wild berries, nuts, and fruit. While men helped clear the fields, women did the planting, weeding, and harvesting in the warm months. Many European observers remarked upon what they saw as drudgery inflicted upon Indian women. However, Joseph-Franois Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary and writer, was also a keen ethnographic observer of the details of Iroquois life. In this account, he noted the similarities between farm women's work in Europe and among the Iroquois.

Municipal workers led a wave of strikes that made the 1960's and early 1970's a highpoint for organized labor militancy in New York City. Teachers, social workers, sanitation workers, and parks employees all fought to improve work conditions, low-paying wage scales, and to reform the city's social services. Lillian Roberts arrived in New York in 1965 to organize low-paid and often disrespected hospital workers for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). At the time, AFSCME was competing with the Teamsters to represent the health workers, and the struggle was intense enough for Roberts to carry a brick in her purse. An African-American woman who had grown up on welfare in Chicago, Roberts proved adept at organizing hospital workers, many of whom were African-American women. She and AFSCME prevailed, paving the way for their local D.C. 37 to become the dominant New York municipal union.

Students listen to a story written in rhyme about a bunny who has a lot of money in her piggy bank. Students distinguish between spending and saving and goods and services. They play a matching game to review the content of the story and to practice rhyming words.

Learn the very basics of managing money as well as strategies for saving, budgeting, retirement and more

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work nationally, but in some cities and some industries unemployment was well over 50 percent. Equally troubling were the bank panics. Between 1929 and 1931, 4,000 banks closed for good; by 1933 the number rose to more than 9,000, with $2.5 billion in lost deposits. Banks never have as much in their vaults as people have deposited, and if all depositors claim their money at once, the bank is ruined. Millions of Americans lost their money because they arrived at the bank too late to withdraw their savings. The panics raised troubling questions about credit, value, and the nature of capitalism itself. And they made clear the unpredictable relationship between public perception and general financial health--the extent to which the economy seemed to work as long as everyone believed that it would. To stop the run on banks, many states simply closed their banks the day before Roosevelt's inauguration. Roosevelt himself declared a four-day "bank holiday" almost immediately upon taking office and made a national radio address on Sunday, March 12, 1933, to explain the banking problem. This excerpt from Roosevelt's first "fireside chat" demonstrated the new president's remarkable capacity to project his personal warmth and charm into the nation's living rooms. Audio is an excerpt of the full address.

During the war with Mexico, United States troops seized power. Captain John C. Fremont, western explorer and engineer, led an uprising of American settlers and Californios (Spanish ranching families in Alta California) who supported American annexation. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was born into a prominent family and pursued a career in the military and politics. He, like many other Californios, believed that the American presence promoted economic prosperity and political stability. During the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846, Fremont captured Sonoma and raised the flag of an independent California. Vallejo, however, was taken prisoner by Fremont's forces and held for two months. Despite his treatment, Vallejo maintained his American sympathies and went on to serve in the first state legislative body. When he and many others attempted to validate their Mexican land grants, he found his way blocked and eventually lost a ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court. Stripped of much of his influence and fortune, he wrote his five-volume "true history" of Californias, while living on a mere portion of his once vast holdings. Vallejo donated this history to H. H. Bancroft, the famous Californian historian.

The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations 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. The demand to change the Constitution to grant women the vote (raised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as early as 1878) was contentious enough; but the pressure for woman suffrage advocates to address other issues often gave the debate over the vote for women a particularly divisive tone. In an 1887 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Democratic Senator George G. Vest of Missouri put forth traditional arguments that a woman's proper place was at home, not the ballot box.

In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest--both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick was consulting household editor for Ladies Home Journal from 1912 to 1919 and the author of numerous books and pamphlets on scientific management in the home. First published in 1913, Frederick's The New Housekeeping opened with her conversion to the "efficiency gospel" under the tutelage of her husband and a male efficiency expert. In chapter 12, Frederick exhorted middle-class women to escape the drudgery of housework by shedding their bad attitudes--and as she enumerated those, she revealed some of the pervasive discontents of women in the home.

Women who settled the West in the years after the Civil War often faced harsh and unremitting toil. Laboring from well before dawn until well after the sun had set, women helped plant and harvest crops, raised large families, and kept house with rudimentary equipment. Long periods of isolation from neighbors and kin were common; social occasions or visits by travelers and kin were rare and cherished events. Mary Ann Hafen immigrated from Switzerland to Utah with her Mormon family in 1860 at age six and her first husband died when she was barely twenty. In this account, she described her move from Utah to Nevada in 1891 with her second husband and their polygamous family, as well as their subsequent life there.

When Boston native Benjamin Franklin entered Philadelphia in 1723, he had few coins in his pocket and scarce entrepreneurial skills. However, Franklin did have valuable training as a printer, and he came armed with some significant introductions to local printers. Printers and other craftsmen relied upon a network of masters, journeymen, and patrons to learn the craft and support themselves. Colonial printers needed expensive imported equipment, yet they had to make do with a limited market for their services--perhaps publishing a newspaper, an occasional pamphlet, or government publication. Franklin wrote his autobiography, from which this account is excerpted, many years after his career as an active printer had ended and his renown as a statesmen, scientist, and moral philosopher had spread.

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of showy and well-publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. The Red Scare reflected the same anxiety about free speech and obsession with consensus that had characterized the war years. The Nation, on April 17, 1920, recounted how a clothing salesman received six months in jail for saying that Vladimir Lenin was smart. Connecticut had established a Sedition Act that made it illegal to utter any speech deemed "injurious" to the United States.

The issue of protective legislation for women and mothers has divided reformers, labor unionists, legislators, courts, the military, and feminists since the end of the 19th century when a number of states passed statutes to limit women's work hours. At issue--equal treatment versus biological difference. During the Cold War era, this question informed the debate on the role of women in the military. Although the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 established a permanent presence for women in all branches of the armed forces, a new Army regulation in October 1949 required the discharge of female servicewomen with children under the age of 18. To guarantee passage of the Armed Forces Reserve Act of 1952, during the Korean War, a provision was dropped that would have reversed this regulation. Thus mothers of dependent children were ineligible to enlist in reserve units and were discharged after childbirth or adoption. In the following Congressional session, the Senate passed S. 1492, allowing the reinstatement of women with dependent children. The bill, however, died in the House Committee on Armed Services and failed to become law. The following testimony of Women's Army Corps Director Colonel Irene O. Galloway, to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, presented the Department of Defense position opposing the bill. Galloway argued that in the event of an emergency mobilization, such women could not and should not be counted on to leave their duties as mothers to join activated units. In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. This seventeen-year-old African American used his motion picture autobiography to describe how films not only led to dreams of fast cars but also made him "feel the injustice done the Negro race."

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, sought to organize all workers into one big union" to abolish the wage system

In 1960, following student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout the South, George E. McMillan, a reporter from Knoxville, Tennessee, traveled the region and analyzed its "current raw, ugly temper." Six years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and five years after the Court declared that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed," only a small percentage of Southern schools had been affected. African Americans faced disenfranchisement, severely limited economic opportunities, prejudicial treatment in the criminal justice system, and attacks from mobs and police. McMillan contrasted black outrage at the philosophy of "gradual" change with white insistence on retaining the status quo, and also looked at the role of the military and business communities in fostering change. The Raleigh, North Carolina, meeting McMillan mentioned in passing marked the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent activist group intent on achieving racial equality.

John Schumacher (aka Mr. Schu) is a blogger, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, and the Ambassador of School Libraries for Scholastic Book Fairs®. You could say every day is a giant book party for this teacher-librarian! In fact, Library Journal named him "The Xtreme Librarian" for the high level of exertion – along with some gears and stunts – he uses to get kids reading, and Instructor Magazinenamed him a Cool Teacher for redefining what it means to be a teacher-librarian.
This resource is a link to his Blog. The Blog hosts children's book trailers he has created. He explains "how" he created them.

As the principles of scientific management came to play a more significant role in the workplace, some reformers sought to apply these principles to any aspects of daily life that might be improved by standardization and routine. Perhaps no one applied the principles of scientific management to the home with as much passion as Christine Frederick, the household editor of Ladies Home Journal as well as the National Secretary of the Associated Clubs of Domestic Science. In 1912, she published a four-part series in the Ladies Home Journal that promised less housework. Each article opened with a box recounting Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management. "Taylorization" made it possible for (compelled, really) steelworkers to quadruple their usual output, and Frederick implied that Taylor's principles would also result in a four-fold increase in home productivity. Frederick's articles were enormously popular. Although Frederick posed as an impartial efficiency expert, she had very close ties to appliance and kitchen-equipment manufacturers and helped lend scientific legitimacy to new products. In this excerpt from the first article in this series, Frederick described how to wash dishes correctly and efficiently.

This blog was started in 2011 as a venue for book reviews and thematic booklists. Gradually, the focus began to shift to lesson ideas and managment tips for librarians and classroom teachers. According to Mrs. Readerpants,
"...there is a huge need for librarians to share ideas with one another. New librarians are especially "on their own" in their schools, and many new librarians look to websites like this one for ideas, direction, and a much-needed sense of community. I am honored to be a part of that community and encourage all librarians to reach out and help one another."
Areas users can explore include: New Releases, Reviews, Book Lists, Booktalks, Genre-Fication, Using Picture Books with Older Readers, Library Lessons and Printables, and Running the Library.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Much Ado About Nothing" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.