The experiences of the half million Africans Americans from the South who headed North between 1916 and 1921 varied widely among individuals. Four letters by southern migrants who had settled in Philadelphia, Chicago, and East Chicago, Indiana, provided some insights into the diverse experiences migrants had in the North. Resettled southerners wrote to folks back home about "the true facts of the present condition of the north." These "facts" ranged from salaries, living conditions, and recent births and deaths, to the score of the latest Chicago White Sox baseball game. The letters, which were originally published in the Journal of Negro History, also described what it feels like to be out of the South: "don[']t have to mister every little white boy comes along."

Tobacco was promoted in Europe in the 17th century as a cure for a number of ailments, including toothache, fatigue, and joint pains, as well as a calming agent. Smoking for enjoyment, however, was mainly responsible for the growth of the tobacco industry. By the time the following Collier's article was published in 1950, a campaign to warn smokers--who by then made up more than half of the American population--of potential dangerous effects of smoking was underway. Opposed to these efforts, the author argued that scientific attempts to link tobacco products to lung cancer and heart disease had failed and that the antismoking crusade interfered with needed research into more likely cancer causes. In 1951, an important medical study in London concluded that smoking was "an important factor" contributing to lung cancer. Despite a growing antismoking movement, aided by a 1979 Surgeon-General's report linking smoking to heart disease and the classification of nicotine as an addictive drug by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, over five trillion cigarettes were sold that year. Threatened with state and local class-action lawsuits, the U.S. tobacco industry agreed in 1998 to a consent decree that settled 37 pending cases, quieted future claims, and ended certain types of tobacco advertising.

This resource introduces students to the value the use of historical objects to teach the Declaration of Independence.  Links and and a video present the Jefferson Desk while teaching primary source skills.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born around 1818 in Virginia, a slave of the Burwell family. At fourteen she was loaned to the Rev. Robert Burwell, her master's son, who lived in North Carolina. There she gave birth to her son George, the product of an unwanted encounter with a white man. After several unhappy years with Robert Burwell and his family, Keckley was sent to live in St. Louis with Anne Burwell Garland, a married daughter of the Burwells. In this selection from her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, Keckley describes how she bought her freedom from the Garland family, a process that was completed in November 1855. Her sincere efforts to live within slavery's rules are striking and indicate how deeply the slave system's practices and values permeated both the black and white cultures of the South. After her emancipation Keckley earned her living as a dressmaker in Washington, D.C.; she died there in poverty in 1907.

The sharecropping system that emerged in the South in the last three decades of the 19th century afforded southern black families a certain measure of control over their daily lives and labor. But the white landowners were able to use the legal mechanisms of sharecropping to assure control over the largely African-American workforce that toiled on the farms. Here Hughsey Childes, interviewed by historian Charles Hardy in 1984, described what seems like a matter of fact exchange in which the white landowner cheated the black sharecropper. But when the sharecropper got a little wise and withheld some of the crop from the landlord, the punishment was swift and final.

Socialist leader and four-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was known as one of the most gifted orators of his generation. One listener recalled his impact as "something more powerful, penetrating, and articulate than mere words." Although Debs apparently never entered a sound studio, a recording of a Debs speech was widely circulated in the first decade of the 20th century. For many years, the speech was believed to have been in Debs' voice, and it was catalogued as such in libraries and record collections. In fact, the speech was written by Debs but recorded by actor Leonard Spencer, who was famous for his recorded versions of comic and dramatic monologues. It was not uncommon in the early days of recording to have actors read the words of politicians. (This was before actors became politicians.) Even if this recording does not give us Debs' actual voice, its circulation indicates his popularity. Faithful socialists wanted to be able to listen at home to Debs' attacks on the rapacious nature of capitalism and his argument that socialism was the only answer to human problems.

Mid-nineteenth century immigrants inhabited a social world far removed from that of native born, middle class Americans, one often marked by economic hardship. With no government relief and only limited private efforts, poor New Yorkers often searched everywhere for means to survive. This engraving showed people scavenging on garbage barges, searching for coal, rags, and other discarded items that might be used or sold to junk dealers. The picture, according to a Harper's Weekly editor, showed how some people in New York were forced to live upon the refuse of respectable folk.""

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. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. Some white women suffrage leaders were willing to use class, ethnic, and racial arguments to bolster the case for granting white women the vote. Belle Kearney, a white Mississippi suffragist who addressed the 1903 NAWSA convention, raised the specter of black male political power to argue for the enfranchisement of white women.

Henry Hudson, employed by the Dutch India Company, anchored off of Manhattan in 1609 and traded with local Indians. Hudson then headed up the river (later named the Hudson River) seeking Northwest Passage to Asia. Other Dutch settlers soon followed. Delawares and Mahicans, who had been living along the coast of New Jersey and up the Hudson River when the Dutch arrived, were driven westward by expanding European settlements. The Reverend John Heckwelder, a Moravian missionary in the Ohio Valley, took down this particular narrative in the 1760s "as it was related to me by aged and respected" Delawares and Mahicans. Indian stories of the first encounters between Indians and Europeans often depicted the Europeans as "the great Mannitoo" or Supreme Being. This account went on to describe the trading and hospitality that followed the first encounter and the Europeans' eventual desire for land above all else.

This is another free digital course for students to use through EVERFI. Once assigned by the teacher, students can work through the modules at their own pace, or only be assigned some of them. It is a follow-up to the 306: Digital African American History Curriculum, and focuses on more modern day issues:

1. Introduction- Counter Storytelling, Black History Before Slavery, Definition of Systemic Racism
2. Untold Stories- Juneteenth, Affirmative Action, LA Riots, Ferguson Protests, Million Man March, 2020 March on Washington, Black Lives Matter Movement
3. Black Business Titans-Golden Age of Black Business, Influential Black Business people, O.W.Gurley, Black Wall Street, Tulsa Race Massacre
4. Black Contributions to Medicine- Racial Inequities in Healthcare, Black Medical Trailblazers, Historical & Modern Racial Discrimination of Black People in Medical Practice

EVERFI is a free online learning platform that provides free digital mini-courses to K-12 teachers. You will need to create an account, but then all access is free! This course can be assigned to students to work on individually, and will score assessments. It divides African American History into 4 periods, followed by a summative capstone essay:

1. Slavery Period: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Phyllis Wheatley, Underground Railroad
2. Emancipation & Reconstruction Period: Frederick Douglass, Hiram Revels
3. Jim Crow Period: Tuskegee Institute, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harlem Renaissance
4. Civil Rights Period & Beyond: Brown v. Board of Education, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Freedom Rides,
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Mae Jemison
5. Capstone Essay

This collection uses primary sources to explore early Chinese immigration to the United States. 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 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fraternal organizations were ubiquitous. Their structure and rituals influenced a wide range of other groups, from the Knights of Labor to the Grange, from the American Protective Association to the Ku Klux Klan. In the last two decades of the 19th century, Americans created almost 500 national beneficiary orders and thousands of local lodges. The enormous membership of fraternal organizations attracted the attention of early sociologists. In this excerpt from an article published in the March 1901 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, B. H. Meyer surveyed "Fraternal Beneficiary Societies in the United States." Although fraternal organizations like the Masons sometimes crossed class, ethnic, and religious (but almost never racial) lines, they more often reinforced those divisions. African Americans, immigrants, and the working class thus created their own complex of social and fraternal orders.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on June 25, 1938, the last major piece of New Deal legislation. The act outlawed child labor and guaranteed a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum work week of 40 hours, benefiting more than 22 million workers. Although the law helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions, conservative forces in Congress effectively exempted many workers, such as waiters, cooks, janitors, farm workers, and domestics, from its coverage. In October 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949, raising the minimum wage to 75 cents hour and extending coverage, but still leaving many workers unprotected. In the following statement to the 1949 Senate subcommittee on FLSA amendments, the chairman of a small advocacy organization appealed to Congress to extend the minimum wage and child labor provisions to cover agricultural workers.

Department stores not only became a major source of employment for young urban white women beginning in the late 19th century; they also offered a new focus for stories and novels about life in America's burgeoning cities. Writers as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, and O. Henry often used the world of department stores and the shop girls who worked there to create a modern fiction (including a brand new form--the short story) that allowed readers to feel the texture of urban life. Ferber's shop-girl heroines were strong-willed, and though they expressed vulnerability and desire for male companionship, they valued their careers. In this 1912 Ferber short story, titled "One of the Old Girls," the head of the corset department in Spiegel's department store is faced with a hard decision when her longtime swain "pops the question."

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, Slavic steelworker Andrew Pido described the discrimination faced by some immigrant workers and how that discrimination - along with long pay and poor conditions--encouraged them to unionize and strike.

Farmers in the years before World War I faced thoroughly modern economic stresses and labor conflicts as the scale of their enterprises increased. By World War I, Midwestern and Great Plains farmers had come to rely on large pools of seasonal migrant labor, mostly unemployed urban workers from Chicago and other Midwestern cities, to harvest wheat or corn. Workers faced long hours and low wages, isolated in temporary camps without permanent homes or meeting places. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union attempted to organize these "harvest stiffs." The radical "Wobblies" argued that wheat farmers were businessmen in a protected industry who, thanks to wartime government price supports, reaped large profits and returned none of that wealth to those who actually harvested their crop. E. F. Doree, an IWW organizer, described in detail the difficult conditions migrants faced and mocked the idea of rural work as wholesome and benevolent with the famous joke that in the wheat states, the "eight-hour work day" prevailed--"eight hours in the forenoon, eight hours in the afternoon."

The Eighth Avenue trolley, New York City, sharing the street with horse-drawn produce wagon and an open automobile. Downtown, looking north (1904)