Before the general public began to understand the health dangers of sunlight overexposure, a fair number of white Americans devoted much time and effort to acquiring a "perfect tan." The suntan craze began in the mid-1920s, as outdoor recreation became more popular among middle-class Americans. Marketers also promoted the practice--once convinced that suntanning was not just a fad--with products designed to assist the quest to be tan. The following 1949 editorial from the popular magazine Collier's offers a tongue-in-cheek critique of tanning, calling attention to peer group pressures of social conformity and competitiveness inherent in tanning rituals. Absent from the piece is any consideration of the racial aspects of such a practice, centered on darkening the color of one's skin, and performed, as it was, in a multiethnic, but white-dominated society.

Engraver Thomas Woodcock was born in Manchester, England in 1805 and emigrated to the United States in 1830. In 1836 he took a trip to Niagara Falls, traveling north from Manhattan up the Hudson river and west on the Erie Canal. Niagara Falls was a favorite destination for tourists in the 1830s, made possible in part by the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. The trip was popularized by authors like Basil Hall, whose 1829 Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and '28 Woodcock mentions several times here. Woodcock's narrative is noteworthy less for his appreciation of the natural wonders of the falls than for his shrewd appraisal of business practices in western New York. This selection from his private journal begins on the Erie Canal with his trip from Schenectady to Utica by packet boat.

The availability of rail connections often determined whether a western community would survive or die. The rails fostered prosperity by bringing both goods and people. This trade, and the local service industries that sprouted up to capitalize on the movement of people and goods, drove many local economies. Here, David Hickman talked about the boom years that followed the arrival of the railroad in the Latah County, Idaho town of Genesee in the 1880s.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act attempted to raise disastrously low commodity prices by authorizing the federal government to pay farmers to raise fewer crops. These crop reduction subsidies enabled landlords to dispossess so many African-American tenants and share-croppers that the bill was often referred to sardonically as the Negro Removal Act." Despite such unintended consequences and other exclusions from New Deal programs

During the Civil War, when Union forces occupied the South Carolina sea islands of St. Helena and Port Royal, white slaveowners fled but their slaves remained. It was here, in October 1862, that Charlotte Forten arrived under the auspices of the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Association to teach the newly liberated slaves. Forten (later Charlotte Forten Grimke) was born in Philadelphia in 1837 into a family of well-to-do, free blacks who were active in the abolitionist movement. Forten was a teacher and a writer, known today for her extensive diaries and her articles. An educated woman and a product of free black society, Forten hovered uneasily between the worlds of blacks and whites. In this article for a white audience she expressed her jubilation about the freedom her students were newly experiencing. She also revealed her ambivalence about these people who were similar to herself, yet at the same time so different.

In an atmosphere of World War II hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, dated February 19, 1942, gave the military broad powers to ban any citizen from a fifty- to sixty-mile-wide coastal area stretching from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona. The order also authorized transporting these citizens to assembly centers hastily set up and governed by the military in California, Arizona, Washington state, and Oregon. Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents--including some naturalized citizens--were arrested and more than 5000 were interned. Yet while these individuals (and others from those groups) suffered grievous violations of their civil liberties, the war-time measures applied to Japanese Americans were worse and more sweeping, uprooting entire communities and targeting citizens as well as resident aliens.

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed this executive order establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, committing the U.S. government to integrating the segregated military. Read and see the document here.

Experience Life is a Twin Cities-based magazine and was established in 2001. Now Experience Life is published 10 times a year by Life Time Fitness, a leading healthy-way-of life company and operator of 118 premier health and fitness clubs in the United States and Canada. Experience Life magazine is available both by subscription and on select newstands in 50 states. However, their website provides a plethora of useful resources for health and physical education teachers and their students.
The magazine gets regular praise from readers for being one of the best-researched, most reliable and most forward-thinking magazines of its time. It has great articles, videos, and resources providing viewers with a wide variety of information within the topic areas of nutrition, exercise, and mental/emotional health. Any educator would benefit from the use of this resource, as it contents span across multiple content areas.

This anonymous worker articulated common grievances of domestic workers in her 1912 article in Outlook magazine. A veteran of thirty-three years of household labor, she protested the unsystematic work and arbitrary supervision of domestic service, the most common category of female employment until World War II. She advised,"If the mistress of the house . . . would treat housework like a business, and treat their maids like the employees of a business, many of the problems of domestic service would be solved." Explicitly comparing domestic service and industrial work, this writer articulated the reasons that young women increasingly left household labor for the regular wages, fixed hours, and less intrusive supervision of factory jobs.

This collection uses primary sources to explore early exploration of the Americas. 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 this lesson, students will learn about what type of information we can learn from photographs. They will
draw conclusions about the past through exploration of photos and explain how people can learn more about their family history through the use of historical records.

The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), which Patrick McCarthy helped organize in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence of Chinese (and, after 1900, Japanese and Korean immigrants as well) dragged down the living standards of white workers. This memorial from a 1901 Chinese exclusion convention in San Francisco devoted to strategies for preventing Chinese immigration, called on Congress to use its legislative powers to limit the arrival of Asian aliens to America. It was reprinted in a 1902 AFL pamphlet.

The labor struggles of the early 20th century, many of which ended in violence and death, engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations. The most important--the Commission on Industrial Relations--was appointed by newly elected Democratic president Woodrow Wilson early in 1913. The commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when a coal strike erupted in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado. One of the most famous accounts of what came to be called the "Ludlow massacre" was the statement of a young electrical engineer, Godfrey Irwin, who was traveling through southern Colorado and provided an eyewitness account to a New York World reporter, reproduced here.

Stocked with philosophical and economic conservatives, the U.S. Supreme Court proved to be the most consistent opponent to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs. In 1935 the Court struck down the National Recovery Administration (NRA) as an unconstitutional exercise of legislative authority by the executive branch. The NRA was supposed to work with labor and management to develop national wage, price, and production codes that would, theoretically, have systematized and rationalized prices and wages. The labor movement and large employers welcomed the NRA codes, but smaller companies resented the NRA's interference in their business, the domination of big business, and the administrative complexity required by adherence to the NRA's codes. In May 1935, the Supreme Court, in the case of Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, invalidated the NRA and the legislation that created it. The lengthy, unanimous opinion, excerpted here, demonstrated the U.S. Supreme Court's complete unwillingness to endorse FDR's argument that a national crisis demanded innovation.

Many young men and women coming of age in the early-nineteenth century began to think about possibilities beyond the farm economy. The founding of new institutions of higher education and the expansion of older ones in New England beyond the handful of colonial colleges provided opportunities to farm boys from a wider range of social backgrounds. One such man was Elias Nason, born into a large family and poor. He wrote to his parents about the prospects for his brothers and sisters in this 1835 letter, the year that he was graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Like many, he was going to school intermittently at the same time that he was teaching school to stay afloat. Nason expressed a common prejudice of the time against work in the mills or factory labor when he warned: "Factories are talked about as schools of vice in all circles here."

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, many Americans viciously attacked the loyalty of German Americans, attacks that were in some ways supported by the federal government. President Woodrow Wilson sponsored a campaign to reverse the German influence on American academia, and an effort to erase favorable depictions of Germany from the nation's textbooks resulted in the War Cyclopedia,written by a number of distinguished historians. In this 325-page reference handbook, "the attempt to portray propaganda as scholarship reached its fullest expression," writes historian Carol Gruber. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), the government's official propaganda agency during the first world war, printed more than eight hundred thousand copies for use in American schools.

"There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ," declared psychologist Lewis M. Terman in 1922. To the extent that this is true, it is in large measure because of Terman himself and the opportunity that World War I afforded for the first widespread use of intelligence testing. The army's use of intelligence tests lent new credibility to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it sparked public debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for American democracy. Psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard suggested that intelligence testing proved that socialist ideas were "absurd" and Americans too democratic. In Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (1922), Goddard argued that social and economic inequality were good and necessary because some people were smarter than others. He furthermore concluded that people were happiest in their proper social and economic places, as decreed by their differing mental endowments.

In the early 20th century, German Americans remained the largest immigrant group, as well as one of the most highly regarded. Thus the vicious nativist attack on the loyalty of German Americans that emerged before and during World War I was particularly remarkable. Germans had followed a successful assimilation strategy through which they sought to become "American" in politics while remaining "German" in culture. This relative acceptance, however, may have contributed to the problem. Because they saw themselves not as strangers but as full members of the American polity, German Americans responded to the war initially by lobbying strongly to influence American foreign policy in ways favorable to Germany. When the German government began submarine warfare, resulting in American deaths, even German Americans joined in questioning the behavior, if not the loyalty, of their fellow immigrants. In 1916, Reinhold Niebuhr, a German American and young theologian (who later became famous), wrote an article in Atlantic Monthly in which he argued that German Americans were themselves responsible for the "lack of esteem" in which they were currently held by other Americans.

Labor leaders like Denis Kearney and H. L. Knight of California's Workingmen's Party often resorted to popular racist arguments to justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. In an 1878 address, Kearney and Knight described the Chinese as a race of "cheap working slaves" who undercut American living standards and thus should be banished from America's shores. A few American labor leaders, mostly in the radical and socialist wing of the movement, were more sympathetic. In this 1878 editorial in the Labor Standard attacking demands for Chinese workers to be deported, Irish-born socialist Joseph McDonnell reminded readers that the arrival of virtually every ethnic group in America had been met with the same "intolerant, silly and shameful cry" of "Go home!" Though voices like McDonnell's were exceptional, they serve as reminders that some late nineteenth-century white Americans were able to pierce the veil of prejudice that men like Kearney and Knight erected against Asian immigrants.