General George Washington and the patriot leaders faced an enormous challenge in mounting a military campaign against the British forces during the revolutionary war. For soldiers, they drew upon existing state militias and also raised a Continental army. But no such source for a naval force existed. Instead, Washington's officers acquired the services of American captains and sailors by commissioning them as privateers, or private citizens authorized to attack a military enemy. Colonists had long experience serving as privateers for the British forces during numerous eighteenth-century wars against Spain, France, and the Netherlands. They now turned their skills against Great Britain. Andrew Sherburne's memoirs capture the youth's enthusiastic desire to participate in the military campaign against the British; many others were less enthusiastic about their military service due to its infrequent pay and poor living conditions.

Because most early-eighteenth century European colonization occurred in coastal areas, Native Americans living in interior regions maintained greater control over their lands and culture. In the lower Mississippi Valley (as in the Great Lakes region), the contest between European imperial rivals for control of North America strengthened the natives' hand. No group--European or Indian--held sovereign power, and diplomatic, military, trading, and social exchanges continued for much of the eighteenth century. But the treaties that concluded the Seven Year's War and ended French colonization of North America changed that situation. The lower Mississippi valley was partitioned between the British colony of West Florida and the Spanish colony of Louisiana. Native occupants perceived the dramatic consequences as Alibamon Mingo, elderly leader of the Choctaw nation, indicated in his meetings with the British in Mobile in 1765. Mingo remembered the French fondly and spoke of his expectations of fair trade and just treatment from the British.

This lesson uses a poster decrying the disruptive influence of railroads on local culture to launch a discussion on local differences and their effect on American politics. Explanatory text, materials for teachers, and links to further resources accompany the documents. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences. It also has cross-curricular connections with history, government, and art.

Prior to the introduction of "domestic science" in the late-19th century, housework --especially cooking--depended on skills passed down from mother to daughter or possessed by hired domestic labor. The domestic science (or as it later became more commonly called "home economics") movement wanted to standardize routines and recipes, thereby relieving housewives of the anxieties of inexact cooking and bringing the supposed benefits of efficiency into the home. The influence of domestic scientists on cooking can be seen dramatically by comparing an apple pie recipe from Catherine Beecher's Domestic Receipt Book (1846) with one from Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1905 ed.). Beecher, daughter of a prominent New England family, wrote on domestic topics (as well as on social issues, such as abolitionism, with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe). Farmer was a leader in the movement for scientific cooking, and her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book helped to entrench the notion of exact measures and procedures designed to produce a uniform product.

In 1893 the newspaperman Peter Finley Dunne began publishing a regular series in the Chicago Evening Post featuring dialogues between an Irish bartender named Martin Dooley, and his Irish friend and customer, Henessey. The local column quickly achieved national renown and syndication in newspapers across the country. Dunne's dialogues drew upon prevalent ethnic stereotypes that were a staple of late nineteenth-century American humor. Dooley regularly commented on both local and national events. Thus, it was not surprising that he would have something to say about the dramatic strike by the American Railway Union against Chicago's Pullman Palace Car Company that had shut down rail lines across the United States in 1894. In the July 7, 1894, column included here (read by an actress), Dunne poked fun at George Pullman's claims that the strike was a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Since at least the 1830s, New York working women endured low pay, long hours, and difficult working conditions. Concerned observers noted that some were even forced to turn to prostitution to supplement their meager incomes. During the Civil War, poor men flocked to the army (wealthier men could purchase substitutes for $300). The women left behind were now responsible for supporting families on their own. While wartime production created additional opportunities for women to work, it also led to even greater exploitation as factory owners pushed their workers to turn out more goods. Under these conditions, some women, such as this one, suggested that collective action might provide a solution.

New Deal arts projects were guided by two novel assumptions: artists were workers and art was cultural labor worthy of government support. That commitment was demonstrated most dramatically in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program for depression-era artists. Some painters and sculptors continued working in their studios with the assistance of relief checks and the occasional supervision of WPA administrators--their work was placed in libraries, schools, and other public buildings. FAP also sponsored hundreds of murals and sculptures designed for municipal buildings and public spaces. FAP's Community Art Centers worked to create new audiences for art by bringing art education and exhibitions to neighborhoods and communities with little access to galleries and museums. These essays by FAP employees Thaddeus Clapp and Lawrence A. Jones lauded programs that brought "art within reach" for people in Massachusetts and affirmed the democratic possibilities of a project that reached across class and racial lines in New Orleans.

In the late 17th-century, Spain's empire in the Americas extended north to New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California, where Spanish soldiers, settlers, and missionaries began to settle. The missionaries resettled the indigenous Pueblo people into peasant communities, building forts and missions to subdue and convert them to Catholicism. The New Mexico Pueblo people resisted Spanish conversion efforts and forced labor demands. Their sporadic resistance became a concerted rebellion in 1680 under the leadership of the charismatic El Pope. The revolt was the most successful of Native American efforts to turn back European colonists, and for over a decade the Pueblos were free from intrusion. But in 1690 the Pueblos were weakened by drought and Apache and Comanche raiders from the north. Spain retook territory and interrogated and punished the rebels in their "reconquest" of the Pueblo. A Keresan Pueblo man called Pedro Naranjo offered his view of the rebellion and its causes.

Wealthy planters from the Caribbean island of Barbados settled in Carolina in the late seventeenth century and turned Carolina's farms into large plantations that concentrated on growing rice. This transformation was enabled by the many enslaved Africans in the colonies who had grown rice as free men and women in West Africa; scholars have traced the origins of Carolina and Georgia's rice culture back to those African rice fields. In this letter, Johann Martin Bolzius described rice cultivation's highly skilled but backbreaking labor, and the colonies' task system of work. Each slave was assigned a particular duty and, after completing the day's tasks, might have some time to him or herself. Bolzius had left Halle, Germany, in 1733 on route to the new colony of Georgia where he lived upriver from Savannah. He wrote this letter in the form of a questionnaire, providing a vivid description of agriculture and life in the new colony.

This assessment from the Stanford History Education Group gauges whether students can source and contextualize a document. Students must first examine an interview excerpt on a race riot in Nashville during the Civil Rights Movement, then determine which facts can help them evaluate the interview's reliability. Strong students will be able to explain how the the gap in time between the riot and the interview (Fact 2) and that Cleaver was not present for the riot (Fact 3) make the account less reliable.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Age it started. 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 collection uses primary sources to compare American responses to Pearl Harbor and September 11. 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 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." This anticommunist crusade climaxed during the "Palmer raids" of 1919-1921, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's men, striking without warning and without warrants, smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. Palmer believed that communism was "eating its way into the homes of the American workman." Palmer charged in this 1920 essay that communism was an imminent threat and explained why Bolsheviks had to be deported.

In this lesson, students analyze a daring challenge to the legal and social order of the time: Susan B. Anthony’s casting of an illegal ballot in the 1872 presidential election. Anthony was ultimately put on trial, convicted, and fined $100 for her “crime.” In this lesson, students close read an excerpt from Anthony’s speech Is It a Crime for Women to Vote? in which Anthony defended her actions. The speech, written prior to Anthony’s trial in 1873, contains many themes that resonate with contemporary debates about membership in American society. At a time when voter suppression, gerrymandering, and election interference dominate the headlines, this lesson prompts students to draw connections between the past and present, especially around acts of civil disobedience, the role of voting in a democracy, and the meaning of equality.

The struggle for women's suffrage, which culminated with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, involved many different kinds of women and many different tactics. Laura Ellsworth Seiler, interviewed by historian Sherna Gluck in 1973, came from a prosperous New York state family and started a suffrage club while a student at Cornell. In this excerpt from Gluck's interview, Seiler recalled campaigning for suffrage after college on an automobile tour, with her mother in tow as chaperon. In contrast to some historical accounts that emphasized the narrowing of the campaign in the 20th century, Seiler remembered arguing for the vote along with other reforms, and emphasizing the importance of suffrage as a way to improve social conditions.

The single most important product in the early twentieth-century culture of consumption was the automobile, and the number of cars produced more than tripled during the 1920s. Like many other products, however, marketing cars to consumers effectively became as important as manufacturing them efficiently. This 1927 advertisement for Paige-Jewett cars suggests how manufacturers and advertising firms used colors and new styles to differentiate their products from those of competitors. Buying became confused with self-expression as consumers were urged to purchase products as a way to display individual taste and distinction.

In 1916, Francisco Villa, leader of the peasant uprisings in northern Mexico, raided Columbus, New Mexico, in an attempt to expose Mexican government collaboration with the United States. President Woodrow Wilson responded by ordering an invasion of Mexico. Five years after the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, which was characterized by hope for social change as well as death, hunger, and violence, many Mexicans did not welcome further involvement by the U.S. In the following correspondence, Secretary of State Robert Lansing and President Wilson described the need to carefully frame the invasion as a defense of U.S. borders rather than interference in the Mexican Revolution. The resulting invasion, led by General John Pershing, was a total fiasco. It failed to locate Villa and increased anti-U.S. sentiment and Mexican nationalist resolve.

In 1892, owner Andrew Carnegie and his plant manager Henry Clay Frick decided to break the steelworkers union at the Carnegie Steel Company plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Frick locked out the steelworkers and hired 300 armed guards from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to protect non-union strikebreakers. When the Pinkertons arrived on barges, armed steelworkers defeated them in a bloody pitched battle. Later, however, the state militia supported Carnegie, and the strike along with the union was broken. The National Police Gazette portrayed the July 6, 1892, fight between striking workers and Pinkerton strike-breakers on the Monongahela River. A national weekly directed to male readers, many of whom were workers, the Police Gazette occasionally covered labor conflict, expressing sympathy toward strikers while also exploiting the more sensational aspects of the events.

The commitment of the Knights of Labor to equality for women was more than rhetorical, as seen in the career of Elizabeth Rodgers, the Master Workman, or head, of the organization's giant Chicago District No. 24. This 1889 portrait of Rodgers, offered by leading national anti-liquor activist Frances Willard, underscored the desire on the part of many Knights, both men and women, to connect the struggle for labor reform with a broader vision that included vehement opposition to liquor. It also showed the complex ways in which the Knights managed to simultaneously advocate equal rights for women at the same time they upheld the Victorian ideal of domesticity for women. Thus, although Rodgers presided over a Local Assembly with 50,000 male and female members, she was still listed as a "housewife" when she attended the 1886 Richmond convention.

Learn about the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s with this historical overview.