With dreams of having a better life, thousands of Chinese risked their lives across the Pacific Ocean to join in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad from 1863 to 1869. These Chinese laborers worked under extreme and hazardous environments. Due to their ethnic appearance and language barriers, the Chinese were greatly taken advantage of by their employers. These Chinese laborers became pioneers in the collective labor actions of American labor history, while also contributing to the economies of the U.S. and China.

From the Asian American Education Project

The word "tramp" came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Fears of the "tramp menace" were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. In this 1893 letter to Kansas governor Lorenzo Dow Lewelling, out-of-work cook R. L. Robinson expressed dismay for the harsh treatment he and a traveling companion received while looking for work in Kewanee, Kansas. Lewelling was far more sympathetic to jobless travelers than other government officials, in part, from personal experience. He himself had wandered the roads in search of work in the 1870s depression.

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs provided work for a range of unemployed Americans, including creative artists. Visual artists working for the Federal Art Project created murals for the walls of federal and state buildings and established community art centers in remote areas. The murals often depicted ordinary Americans, at work or in struggle, rendered in heroic, larger than life style. Few of the post office murals commissioned by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Art displayed the humor of Orr C. Fisher's paean to corn. But the Iowa-born Fisher's work suggests the kind of regional boosterism and pride of place that characterized many murals painted by local artists.

The "Great Migration" of the second two decades of the 20th century (the teens and twenties) reshaped northern cities--roughly 70,000 southern blacks settled in Chicago alone. Many used the city only as a temporary destination, moving to other cities in the North and West. During these years New York's black population grew from 91,709 to 152,467; Detroit's from 5,741 to 40,878; and Philadelphia's from 84,459 to 134,229. Northern newspapers, word of mouth, and letters sent home by earlier migrants all contributed to the anticipation black southerners felt about opportunities for a new life in the North. Once they had settled in northern cities, however, many newcomers responded more ambivalently to their new surroundings in the face of northern-style racism, cold weather, high prices, crime, and loneliness. Some African-American blues musicians used their songs to describe the migrants' reactions to their new homes. Lizzie Miles's "Cotton Belt Blues," recorded in 1923, expressed yearning for a former southern home.

In 1792, recent college graduate Eli Whitney moved to Georgia to work as a tutor on a plantation. There, Whitney learned that southern planters were eager to make cotton a profitable crop. Once cotton was picked from the field, seeds had to be removed from the cotton fiber by hand before cotton could be sold. This process was labor-intensive and time-consuming, and it limited the amount of cotton that planters, relying on the work of enslaved people, could produce.

This lesson provides fliers and other documents related to the demonstration in Memphis on March 28, 1968. On that day, students near the end of the march broke windows of businesses. Looting ensued. The march was halted. King was deeply distressed by the violence. He and fellow leaders negotiated a commitment to nonviolence among disagreeing factions in Memphis, and another march was planned for April 8. On April 4, as he stepped out of his motel room to go to dinner, he was assassinated.

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle; mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand, blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely; pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. Reminiscing in the 1930s for an interviewer from the Federal Writers Project, cowboy George Martin recalled the tough work, rough conditions, and long days required to keep up with the demands of cattle raising in Texas.

The moral code of craft unionism was part of a larger system of late nineteenth-century working-class values that went well beyond behavior on the job. Moreover, those values drew upon other deeply held moral beliefs, particularly those growing out of religion. In "Labor's Decalogue," G. Edmonston, the first president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, offered a new twist on the biblical Ten Commandments. Edmonston's novel set of "rules" for workers found its way into a variety of labor publications, including an issue of the Florida Labor Journal on May 13, 1903. While this document revealed the indebtedness of craft culture to universalist religious ideas, it also reflected the exclusive nature of craft work (members of craft unions in this era were overwhelmingly white and male).

Crash Course U.S. History is exactly what it sounds like.  This youtube series is incredibly informative, fun, and relevant to the students.  I use Crash Course not as a lesson replacement, but as an intro to what I will be covering in more detail.  It could be used in many different ways, but I highly recommend it as a resource the students will enjoy.

Using primary sources related to the official proclamation of Columbus Day as a holiday at the national level, this activity asks students to analyze the documents (official proclamation and a newspaper advertisement) to determine why President Harrison chose to declare it as a holiday. Accessing the lesson/document does require setting up free account.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the creation of the US Constitution. 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 Crisis was a monthly magazine put out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that advocated for African-American civil rights, and was edited by the black activist intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. Heralding the style and substance of the Harlem Renaissance, The Crisis reached from 60,000 to nearly 100,000 readers monthly during the 1920s. The flowering of black culture known as the Harlem Renaissance took inspiration from the emergence of pan-Africanism as an intellectual and political movement, and a growing sense of racial pride. In an era when white publications largely ignored African Americans, The Crisis presented a mix of news of African-American accomplishment; exposes of southern and northern racism; reports on efforts to improve the political, economic, and social circumstances of African Americans; and incisive editorials penned by Du Bois himself. The magazine also promoted African-American artistic production by publishing the work of and sponsoring contests for writers, composers, and visual artists.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem and sent it to his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed. Poet Ernest Crosby penned a parody of Kipling's work, "The Real White Man's Burden," and published it in his 1902 collection of poems Swords and Plowshares. Crosby also wrote a satirical, anti-imperialist novel, Captain Jinks, Hero, that parodied the career of General Frederick Funston, the man who had captured Philippine leader Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901.

This collection uses primary sources to explore cross-cultural conflicts during the Colonial period of US History. 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.

As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full rights of citizenship that they had fought to defend overseas. In the spring and summer of 1919, murderous race riots erupted in 22 American cities and towns. Chicago experienced the most severe of these riots. On Sunday, July 27, white bathers attacked several black youths swimming near one of Lake Michigan's white beaches, resulting in the death of an African-American boy. Five days of intense racial violence followed, claiming the lives of 23 black and 15 white Chicagoans, with more than 500 others wounded and thousands of black and white citizens burned out of their homes. A plethora of news reports and editorials offered instant analysis and helped shape local and national attitudes. The Chicago Daily Tribune, long considered the most antagonistic of all the city's papers toward African Americans, detailed the day's violence, the good deeds of white policemen who were sent to Chicago's South Side, and the injuries they sustained at the hands of black rioters.

At the end of a six-year armed conflict called the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement ousted Cuban President Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, and ushered in a new government. Within months, as Castro began to implement policies and align with the communist Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands fled Cuba for the United States. Most were educated members of the upper and middle classes. Many of these immigrants, termed “exiles” and “refugees,” believed their stay in the United States was temporary because Castro’s government would be short-lived. As Castro’s regime persisted, they realized their flight could be permanent. Pushed out by the consequences of the Revolution, the influx of refugees swelled the Cuban population of the United States from 79,000 in 1960 to 439,000 by 1970. Cubans settled across the country, with the most significant community in Miami, Florida, followed by Union City, New Jersey.

This lesson looks at how the cult of domesticity oppressed and empowered women in the Nineteenth Century United Staets. America in Class Lessons are tailored to meet the Common Core State Standards. The Lessons present challenging primary resources in a classroom-ready format, with background information and analytical strategies that enable teachers and students to subject texts and images to the close reading called for in the Standards.

The National Park Service has created a K-12 curriculum that focuses on scaffolded lessons that focus on Martin Luther King’s advocacy, the March on Washington and other leaders of the Civil Rights movement.

In World War II soldiers, sailors, nurses, and airmen often found themselves thrown together with fellow Americans whose experiences and backgrounds were drastically different from their own. Racial segregation was an official policy of the War Department, but gender discrimination was a subtler, if no less troublesome, social constraint. Doris Brander, who enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor in the navy's Women's Auxiliary Voluntary Expeditionary Service (WAVES), felt that she and her fellow WAVES were rebels, going against the tide of convention and pushing the limits on women's opportunity. In this 1992 interview with Rosetta Kamlowsky, Brander described how she and other women fought the sexism they experienced in the military and strove for gender equality.