The massive strike of 1877 shook the very foundations of the political and economic order. Begun with a spontaneous railroad strike in West Virginia, the "Great Uprising" spread rapidly across the country, as the entire working populations of many cities went out on strike. Workers across the country along with sympathizers in their communities were galvanized by official violence, as state and federal troops fired on protesters in several cities. As this 1878 cartoon from the New York Daily Graphic indicated, in the aftermath of the strike Indians, trade unionists, immigrants, and tramps were increasingly grouped together in the press as symbols of disorder and opposition to the nation's progress.

California had a few thousand Chinese immigrants in 1850. By 1852, the number swelled to 20,000, constituting almost a quarter of California's work force. Chinese who toiled in mines and worked as shopkeepers were welcomed, even recruited, at first. But nativist sentiment to curtail Chinese immigration grew as the number of immigrants increased. John Bigler, the state's first Governor, called for immigration restriction in 1852, citing Chinese immigrants' inability to assimilate as European immigrants had. Norman Asing, a restaurant owner and leader in San Francisco's Chinese community, assailed the governor for his anti-Chinese stance and utilized the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution against Bigler's claims of the danger of Chinese immigration. But Asing's argument also embraced some of the era's racist assumptions about African Americans and Native Americans.

Nineteenth-century officials and businessmen eager for cheap labor for California's manufacturing, mining, and agricultural industries encouraged Chinese migrants to voyage to the United States. In the 1850s, however, as the Chinese population grew, an anti-Chinese movement mounted. The California legislature and courts restricted the rights of Chinese immigrants with the Foreign Miners Tax of 1852 and a California Supreme Court decision-- People v. Hall (1854) --that excluded Chinese testimony from the courts, further sanctioning violence against Chinese residents. Pun Chi, a young Chinese merchant, wrote this appeal to Congress, sometime between 1856 and 1868, seeking help against growing anti-Chinese sentiments in the West. Reminding Congress that Chinese migration had been encouraged and that migrants deserved legal protection once in the United States, he gave graphic accounts of the mining tax collectors' abuses and the murder of Chinese miners. William Speer, a Presbyterian minister and missionary in San Francisco's Chinatown, translated Pun Chi's appeal from Chinese and published it in 1870.

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, Clairton worker George Miller called the 1919 strike a quest for "a standard American living"--a phrase that was particularly meaningful to the Serbian-born Miller.

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, Youngstown steelworker John J. Martin expressed puzzlement over the grievances of the striking steelworkers and maintains that "the foreigners brought the strike on."

German Americans had a complex response to the attacks on their loyalty that emerged when the United States went to war against Germany in 1917. During and after the war, many German Americans began to conceal their ethnic identity--some changed their names; others stopped speaking German; still others quit German-American organizations. Many, like Frank Brocke, son of a German-American farmer, tried to keep a low profile. In this interview, Frank Brocke discussed his own assimilation (he later became the president of the local bank) which led him to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II--a stance that many Japanese Americans and others would disclaim.

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, Hungarian-born Frank Smith, a Clairton worker, used his support for the war effort as evidence of his Americanism. "This is the United States," he argued, "and we ought to have the right to belong to the union."

The advent of "talkies"in the early 20th century had an impact felt far from Hollywood. Immigrants made up a significant portion of the movie-going audience during the silent film era because the lack of (English) speech beckoned immigrants unable to comprehend the many facets of American life: a picture that didn't talk was particularly appealing to people who didn't speak or read English. In this oral history, recorded by Roy Rosenzweig in 1978, Italian immigrant Fred Fedeli recalled his experiences owning and operating a movie theater in an immigrant working-class neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals. 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. The case and executions were commemorated in an outpouring of literary expression. Dos Passos returned to the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti in his epic three-volume work of fiction, U.S.A. In this excerpt, cops beat up the fictional character Mary French outside the Charlestown jail where Sacco and Vanzetti awaited their executions. "Newsreel LXVI" followed with a collage of contemporary headlines. Finally, "The Camera Eye (50)," a stream-of-consciousness montage, was Dos Passos's impassioned personal response.

While some planters in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake began to build spacious mansions and rely on the labor of increasing numbers of white and black dependents, most white southerners lived in far humbler circumstances. In Maryland most small farmers were tenants, renting their land from larger landowners. Landless men and women worked as agricultural tenants, laborers, or domestic servants. Elizabeth Sprigs, a servant in a Maryland household, financed her passage from England in exchange for a term as an indentured servant (a frequent practice in the seventeenth century but more rare by the eighteenth). She wrote to her father in 1756 and complained bitterly of the brutal treatment by her master and the harsh privations of daily life, begging him to send clothing.

While the exact origin of the loose-fitting "zoot suit," worn by Mexican-American and African-American youths in the 1940s, is obscure, its most important roots were among Mexican-American youths, or pachucos. In the context of World War II, this defiant gesture of group identity put the Mexican-American zoot suiters into direct conflict with another youth group--white servicemen stationed on the West Coast. Wartime rationing regulations effectively banned zoot suits because they ostensibly wasted fabric, so a combination of patriotism and racism impelled white soldiers to denounce Mexican-American wearers of the zoot suit as slackers and hoodlums. In June 1943, apparently provoked by stories that Mexican Americans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors, servicemen on leave began to attack Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. These anti-Mexican riots often featured the ritualistic stripping of the zoot suiters. Despite the brutality of these incidents, most press coverage was sympathetic to the servicemen. One exception was this description by Al Waxman, editor of the Eastside Journal, an East Los Angeles community newspaper.

Captain John Smith was a soldier and adventurer in Europe and Asia before he became involved in the Virginia Company's plan to establish a settlement in North America. He was aboard one of the three ships that reached Virginia in April 1607. The first settlers, ill prepared for life in the harsh environment, had few useful skills but great expectations of easy profits. They suffered from disease, malnutrition, and frequent attacks by Indians in the early years; over one half died the first winter. Smith took over Jamestown's government amid this chaos and death; he explored the region and traded for desperately needed supplies with the Indians. Smith recognized the need to establish peaceful relations with the powerful Powhatan Indians of the coastal region, and he traded English manufactured goods for much needed Indian corn. Smith recounted this exchange with the Indian leader Powhatan in his 1624 Historyie.

Racism remained potent in the 1920s, but ideas about race were changing, particularly among intellectuals. Almost without exception, social scientists and scholars in the 1890s assumed that race was one of the central ways of understanding human beings. But a profound change in American thinking occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century. A new philosophy, that today might be termed "cultural relativism," began to influence American intellectuals and their students. The emergence of this philosophy in the U.S. owes a great deal to Franz Boas, a German-Jewish anthropologist who taught at Columbia University from 1896 through the 1930s. In this essay, "The Instability of Human Types," delivered at an academic conference on race in 1911, Boas boldly argued against assumptions of innate racial inferiority; insisting that culture, not nature, explained differences among the people of the world. Boas's students included the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

Founded in 1915 and inspired by the Reconstruction-era organization of the same name, the second Ku Klux Klan shared with its nineteenth-century namesake a deep racism, a fascination with mystical regalia, and a willingness to use violence to silence its foes. It also professed anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism as strongly as it affirmed racism. The secret" society had 3 million members during its heyday in the early 1920s; roughly half its members lived in metropolitan areas

In response to growing public opinion against the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the years following World War I, Congress passed first the Quota Act of 1921 then the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act). Initially, the 1924 law imposed a total quota on immigration of 165,000--less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average. It based ceilings on the number of immigrants from any particular nation on the percentage of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census--a blatant effort to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which mostly occurred after that date. In the first decade of the 20th century, an average of 200,000 Italians had entered the United States each year. With the 1924 Act, the annual quota for Italians was set at less than 4,000. This table shows the annual immigration quotas under the 1924 Immigration Act.

Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713–1755) began life as a vivacious girl with a "wild and airy" temperament and ended it as a sober Quaker. Born in England, Ashbridge eloped at fourteen and was widowed five months later. After rejection by her family and a three-year sojourn with relatives in Ireland, she sailed for America as an indentured servant, arriving in New York in July, 1732. This selection from her autobiography begins as Ashbridge sets out from her home in Long Island to visit relatives in Philadelphia. By then she had undergone an intensely felt spiritual search and had married her second husband, a teacher with a penchant for violence and drink. Ashbridge's dispute with her second husband over her Quakerism ended only with his enlistment in the army and subsequent death. She married a third time, to a Quaker named Aaron Ashbridge, and died while visiting Quakers in England and Ireland.

This exhibit highlights multiple forms of memoirs written by Wisconsin residents. In viewing these accounts, we are doing more than merely reading a document – we are experiencing the life of another individual at a different time. For the people who wrote these letters, diaries, poems, and journals, the act of writing brought personal comfort, solidarity, relief and preservation of connections to friends and family. For readers, these memoirs provide historical evidence and insight into the Wisconsin experience.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. 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.

William Penn's colony of Pennsylvania, founded in 1681, attracted many poor European migrants. Many colonists financed their migration by arriving as indentured servants. Indentured servants were an important source of labor in the colonies; those arriving in the 17th century usually signed contracts (known as indentures) for a fixed term and upon completion received their freedom and a suit of clothes, a similar practice to apprenticeship. However, the Germans whom Gottlieb Mittelberger observed in the mid-18th century had no formal contracts; instead they were auctioned off to he highest bidder upon arrival, a practice that Mittleberger labeled as barbaric, and "a sale in human beings." Mittelberger, an organist and schoolmaster, found much in North America not to his taste, and returned to Germany in a few years where he wrote a book warning Germans of the dangers of emigration to the New World.

In this oral history interview conducted by historian Joan Morrison, Pauline Newman told of getting a job at the Triangle Company as a child, soon after arriving in the United States from Lithuania in 1901. Newman described her life as an immigrant and factory worker. Like many other young immigrant workers, she chafed at the strict regulations imposed by the garment manufacturers. One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 26, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Although she was not working in the factory at the time of the fire, many of her friends perished. Newman later became an organizer and leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union.