The American Railway Union's unsuccessful strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894 left many workers without jobs. Not only did the company take on hundreds of new workers in place of the strikers, but total employment in the shops dropped. On August 17, 1894, the desperate and destitute strikers appealed to Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld. The sympathetic governor wrote George Pullman a total of three times, asking him to do something about the "great distress" among his former workers. Typically, Pullman blamed the workers for their problems, arguing that if they had not struck they would not be suffering. He rejected the solutions proposed by Altgeld. The strikers' appeal to Altgeld and the governor's three letters to Pullman are included here. The public was more sympathetic with the plight of the Pullman workers. Contributions of food eased the distress and many Pullman residents eventually moved to find work elsewhere.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. Trade unionist William D. Mahon chastised organized religion for ignoring its "true mission" to "establish the brotherhood of man" in this 1899 speech espousing a strong church role in helping the labor movement.

This sampling of newspaper editorials from the mid-1950s reflects the range of public opinion and responses to the Brown decision.

This 1954 statement from Tom Brady, a founder of the White Citizens' Council movement, expresses opposition to the Brown decision.

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The issue was whether to endorse the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) After speeches on the subject by several U.S. Senators, Bryan rose to speak. The thirty-six-year-old former Congressman from Nebraska aspired to be the Democratic nominee for president, and he had been skillfully, but quietly, building support for himself among the delegates. His dramatic speaking style and rhetoric roused the crowd to a frenzy. The response, wrote one reporter, "came like one great burst of artillery." Men and women screamed and waved their hats and canes. "Some," wrote another reporter, "like demented things, divested themselves of their coats and flung them high in the air." The next day the convention nominated Bryan for President on the fifth ballot. The full text of William Jenning Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech appears below. The audio portion is an excerpt. [Note on the recording: In 1896 recording technology was in its infancy, and recording a political convention would have been impossible. But in the early 20th century, the fame of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech led him to repeat it numerous times on the Chautauqua lecture circuit where he was an enormously popular speaker. In 1921 (25 years after the original speech), he recorded portions of the speech for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana. Although the recording does not capture the power and drama of the original address, it does allow us to hear Bryan delivering this famous speech.]

Professional psychiatry was only in its infancy at the end of the 19th century and many physicians disputed its scientific basis. In 1892, the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane was reorganzied as the American Medico-Pyschological Association. Four years later, psychiatrists--or alienists as they were then called--hurled their opinions into the political arena in a controversy over the sanity of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was heartily disliked by many middle-class urban professionals, precisely the sort of people who became alienists. In this letter to the New York Times of September 27, 1896, a self-identified anonymous "Alienist" declared that Bryan was of a "mind not entirely sound." While it seems unlikely that this attack had much impact on the outcome of the election (the paper's readers were already unlikely to vote for Bryan), this would not be the last time that elites would seek to discredit radical opponents of the status quo by branding them "crazy."

Middle-class observers reacted to hoboes and tramps of the Great Depression with an array of responses, viewing them with suspicion, empathy, concern, fear, sometimes even a twinge of envy. For some, stolidly holding onto traditional values of work and success, the "bum" was suspect, potentially a con artist. Tom Kromer's "Pity the Poor Panhandler: $2 An Hour Is All He Gets" exemplified this stance, urging readers to resist the appeals of panhandlers and refer them to relief agencies, where professionals could help the deserving and get rid of the rest. Ironically, the young journalist who went undercover to write this piece would find himself unemployed and on the road within a year of the publication of his condescending article.

As an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Burke Marshall played a key role in the federal government's efforts to desegregate the South. Representing the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Marshall mediated conflicts between civil rights protesters and southern white officials. In this interview, Marshall recalls the 1961 Freedom Rides and the 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi.

In 1831 Rebecca Burlend, her husband John, and their five youngest surviving children left England for Pike County, Illinois. Resentful of the high rent they paid for their Yorkshire farm, the Burlends looked forward to owning their own farm in the United States. Once arrived, however, they learned that land ownership on the American frontier presented its own difficulties and dangers. In Illinois, government land offices either sold sections of land to settlers or provided them with certificates of preemption. "Preemption" was a process through which a settler could stake a claim to a piece of land for up to four years without paying for it as long as he (or she) cultivated it, built on it, or otherwise "improved" it. The government's goal was to encourage settlement of the wilderness. Settlers, however, sometimes illegally exploited the process, as Burlend describes here.

From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term "lynching" did not have any racial implications. Targets included Tories, horse thieves, gamblers, and abolitionists. But starting in the 1880s, mob violence was increasingly directed at African Americans. Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in U.S. history. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. In early 1893, a white reporter, writing in the New York Sun, offered a grisly account of the burning at the stake in Paris, Texas, of a black man accused of molesting a white girl.As press accounts like this make clear, to witness a lynching--or even just glimpse its aftermath--could be a searing experience for those who were the most likely victims of the lynch mob--young African-American males. That, indeed, was the intention--the threat of lynching was a powerful mechanism for keeping black Southerners in line. In response to the rising tide of lynchings of African-Americans across the South during the 1890s, Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper editor Ida Wells-Barnett launched a national anti-lynching crusade.

The threat of lynching was a powerful mechanism for keeping black Southerners in line. Although this interview (conducted by historian Charles Hardy for a radio program) took place in 1985, "William Brown" (a pseudonym) could still vividly recall the smell of burning flesh that lingered after a 1902 lynching that he witnessed in Jacksonville, Florida, when he was five years old.

In 1897, Scribner's published a series of articles on "The Conduct of Great Business." This article by Philip Hubert on a New England textile mill conveyed some of the sense of wonder that Americans felt at the enormous new factories suddenly emerging in what had been primarily an agricultural nation. Although other contemporaries--both agrarian radicals and trade unionists--viewed the new industrial behemoths with skepticism or even horror, middle-class observers like Hubert celebrated the achievements of the capitalists who organized and managed these vast and complex enterprises. Hubert had little interest in or sympathy for the thousands of workers who toiled in the textile mill that he visited, echoing the view that the "character of the machinery" was more important than "the character of the hands." But his account, including a vivid description of the mill at quitting time, captured the sheer size and dehumanizing impact on workers of the new industrial enterprises.

With his famously laconic style, President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." Coolidge's aphorism revealed the centrality of commerce to the nation and its culture in the 1920s, even while it concealed some of the wrenching cultural changes that were required to accommodate a commercial civilization. An even more forceful publicist for the view that business and spirituality were compatible was Bruce Barton. The son of a Congregational minister, Barton co-founded one of the nation's largest and best-known advertising agencies. Barton's greatest fame, however, came from his 1925 best-selling book, The Man Nobody Knows, in which he crafted a new vision of Christ and Christianity that was not simply compatible with but organically connected to the business-oriented 1920s. Barton's aggressive efforts to merge business and Christianity may seem comical in the late 20th century, but his exertions were sincerely felt by him and sincerely received by many Americans. Edward E. Purinton's 1921 article, "Big Ideas for Big Business," from the magazine Independent similarly promoted business as "the salvation of the world."

This collection uses primary sources to explore school desegregation in Boston. 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 wake of recent acts of gun violence in America, both citizens and politicians continue the debate over gun control in the United States. Legislation addressing issues like background checks, concealed carry permits and bump stocks have been suggested to address this issue. This deliberation will allow students to explore the roots of gun control in the United States while also exploring varying viewpoints on how to address the problem of gun violence in the future.

In order to challenge the emphasis on extreme economic individualism espoused by Gilded Age industrialists and laissez-faire theorists, labor writers drew on diverse historical and religious traditions. Jose Gros, writing in The Carpenter in 1895, turned to religious traditions, specifically the biblical parable of Cain and Abel. Gros used the parable's central question--"Am I my brother's keeper?"--to criticize economic individualism and make the case for cooperation and brotherhood.

An officer of the Communications Workers of America Local 7704 in Salt Lake City and an out gay man, Cal Noyce began to raise issues of gay, lesbian, and bisexual equity within the union during the early 1990's. By forming an organization of gay trade unionists in Utah, as well as the national gay, lesbian, and bisexual group Pride at Work, Noyce joined a larger push to link the gay rights movement to the labor movement. Noyce and his associates won the support of Utah AFL-CIO president Ed Mayne, who, like many, recognized the organization as important way for organized labor to reach out to gay and lesbian communities and bring gay men and lesbians into the labor movement as motivated activists.

On January 24, 1848, carpenter James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, a sawmill on the American River in Coloma, California. This news quickly spread across the country and around the world, igniting the California Gold Rush. Between 1848 and 1855, 300,000 fortune-seekers came to California, transforming its population, landscape, and economy. The largest wave of migrants—about 90,000 people—arrived in 1849, earning them the nickname “forty-niners.”

As the 19th century drew to a close, labor activists were forced to confront the implications of a long string of defeats suffered by their movement in recent years. One of the most venerable of labor editors, George McNeill, writing in the official journal of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in December 1896, encouraged trade unionists to renew their commitment to a struggle that had not always been successful. At the same time, he accurately predicted an even more momentous battle in the next century between the trade unions and "the giant monopolies."

When 30,000 largely immigrant workers walked out of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January 1912, they launched one of the epic confrontations between capital and labor. The strike began in part because of unsafe working conditions in the mills, which were described in graphic detail in the testimony that fourteen-year-old millworker Camella Teoli delivered before a U.S. Congressional hearing in March 1912. Her testimony (a portion of which was included here) about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating gained national headlines in 1912--in part because Helen Herron Taft, the wife of the president, was in the audience when Teoli testified. The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory.