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. Lynchings, often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. Lynching was especially prevalent in areas of low population density, recent increase in black population, and high rates of transiency, where strangers feared one another and whites judged legitimate law enforcement weak. As the following testimony by a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper reporter to a 1949 House subcommittee shows, acts of violence by vigilante groups in the South were directed not only toward blacks. The virulently anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-foreigner Ku Klux Klan of the 20th century violently attempted to impose its code of morality on men, women, and children who violated their beliefs of community norms.

In the early 20th century, German Americans were the nation's largest immigrant group. Although they were regarded as a model of successful assimilation, they faced vicious--and sometimes violent--attacks on their loyalty when the United States went to war against Germany in 1917. The most notorious incident was the lynching of German-born Robert Prager in Colinsville, Illinois, in April 1918. Other incidents stopped just short of murder. In a statement made on October 22, 1918, John Deml, a farmer in Outagamie County, a heavily German and Scandinavian area of Wisconsin, described the nativist mob that had visited him two days earlier. Suspected of not strongly enough supporting the war effort, he was narrowly saved from lynching.

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. Like white newspapers, the city's leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, helped foment the escalating racial violence that gripped the city. An August 2 Defender article recounted the unsubstantiated beating of an "unidentified [black] woman" and her baby. On a daily basis, the black press rivaled the mainstream white press in its efforts to offer the most gruesome and sensational accounts of the riot.

In the 1890s, Charles Dana Gibson's magazine illustrations of fashionable young women gained wide popularity. The physical type he portrayed became the standard of beauty, a romantic ideal that suggested a new female independence while also celebrating the privileges and glamour of elite society. Within a few years, women who viewed Gibson's illustrations in magazines were more likely to work for wages. Growing opportunities for white collar work in stores and offices attracted white women who spoke English, although they were paid roughly half of what their male counterparts received and were often subjected to discrimination and harassment.

On the morning of October 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday"), billions of dollars in stock value were wiped out before lunch. Prices recovered somewhat that afternoon, but the Great Crash was underway. The next day President Herbert Hoover counseled reassurance, but as stock prices continued to plummet Hoover's reassurances rang increasingly hollow. The president's efforts to reassure the public did not stop, in part for political reasons. To win reelection in 1932, he would have to convince voters that his policies were bringing recovery. In this excerpt from an October 22, 1932, campaign speech on "The Success of Recovery," Hoover told a partisan crowd of twenty-two thousand in Detroit's Olympia Arena that success would have come even sooner if not for Democratic obstruction. The Detroit faithful and radio audiences heard Hoover hail ten sure signs of "economic recovery." (Less enthusiastic were hundreds of unemployed men who greeted him at the train station with signs like "Hoover--Baloney and Apple Sauce.")

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History houses primary source documents and quality lesson plans. This link connects teachers to 31 pre-made lesson plans aimed at 9-12 grade students in relation to African American HIstory and the use of primary sources. You will need to create an account, but all resources are free.

The ideology of success--the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work--was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. One of its most famous proponents was the author Horatio Alger, whose novels showed how poor boys could move from "rags to respectability" through "pluck and luck." Between the late 1860s and his death in 1899, Alger published more than 100 of these formulaic stories about poor boys who made good more often because of fortunate accidents than because of hard work and denial. Not all Americans, however, bought into this ideology of success. Mark Twain's 1879 short story, "Poor Little Stephen Girard," took satirical aim at the poor-boy-done-good theme that permeated dozens of Alger stories.

The first great American conservation movement was born during the Progressive Era out of the concern that industrial growth and urban development threatened to extinguish America's wilderness. The era's most controversial environmental issue was the five-year struggle over federal approval for the flooding of a remote corner of federally-owned land in California's Yosemite National Park to build the Hetch Hetchy dam. The city of San Francisco, rebuilding after the devastating 1906 earthquake, believed the dam was necessary to meet its burgeoning needs for reliable supplies of water and electricity. In their 1913 testimony before the House Committee on Public Lands, former San Francisco Mayor James Phelan and Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief Forester of the United States and the most noted conservationist of his generation, put the utilitarian needs of San Francisco's citizens above the aesthetic and moral advantages of leaving Yosemite a pristine wilderness. In the end Congress chose management over aesthetics, voting 43-25 (with 29 abstentions) to allow the Hetch Hetchy dam on federal land.

The quest for efficiency touched nearly every aspect of American life during World War I, including the nation's clocks. Daylight saving first appeared during the war years as an experiment to save fuel. Theoretically, people would use less artificial light in the evenings thanks to the extra hour of daylight. Urban dwellers generally delighted in the "extra hour," but protests by farmers and other rural citizens brought the experiment to an end after only one year. Farmers, rural Americans, and those whose jobs forced them to work very early hours disliked the measure intensely. They bombarded Congress with petitions, letters, and angry telegrams demanding the return to "God's time." According to farmers, city dwellers who wanted more leisure in the afternoon could just show up for work an hour earlier and leave an hour earlier.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the golden age of musical theatre on Broadway. 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 American West's history of radical unionism at the turn of the century reflects the breadth of nineteenth-century class struggle. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, for example, violent conflict broke out in 1903 between members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and corporate mining interests determined to crush the union. Before it was over, thirty men were dead and the union was defeated. Though hostile to the Socialist-leaning WFM, American Federal of Labor leader Samuel Gompers issued the following June 20, 1904, statement in support of the striking miners at Cripple Creek.

The relationship between African Americans and Franklin D. Roosevelt presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation; he accepted segregation and disenfranchisement; and he condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs. On the other hand, Roosevelt won the hearts and the votes of African Americans in unprecedented numbers. Many black Americans not only voted for Roosevelt; they made him into a hero. "Franklin," "Eleanor," "Delano," and even "Roosevelt" became popular first names for black children in the 1930s. And many African Americans hung the president's picture on their walls beside those of Christ and Lincoln. Another indication of the powerful impression that Roosevelt made in the black community was Big Joe Williams' recording of a blues tribute on the occasion of Roosevelt's death in 1945, "His Spirit Lives On."

The harmony of rural life is often romanticized, but differences among neighbors, whether ethnic, religious or political, could often lead to tension, especially as new groups emigrated west. Ezra and Dan Miller were born in a sod house in North Dakota but migrated with a group of Amish Mennonites to Montana. In this 1981 interview, conducted by Laurie Mercier for the Montana Historical Society, they described how local cowboys reacted to the influx of Amish farmers.

Religious leaders, civic groups, educators, the press, and government officials have voiced concern since the 19th century over supposed deleterious effects on children of popular culture, from dime novels and motion pictures to comic books, and television. Anxiety over comic books grew as the pulp fiction crime and horror genre developed at the end of World War II. In 1948, psychologist Fredric Wertham advocated the prohibition of comic books to children under the age of 16, claiming that all of the delinquent children he studied had read them. Although the industry's trade organization devised a Code that year to regulate content, only one-third of the publishers subscribed to it. During the next few years many states debated, but did not adopt, bills to ban or regulate comic books, in part because of a 1948 Supreme Court decision that overturned a state statute banning the sale or distribution of crime literature. In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency conducted hearings on comic books and warned the industry that if self-regulation did not prove to be effective, "other ways and means" would be found to protect children. The industry formed a new trade association and formulated a new Code to self-censor content. The Code symbol subsequently appeared on approved comic books, curtailing the crime and horror genre. The Code, refined in 1971 and 1989, remains a regulatory instrument for association members.

As United States foreign investments increased during the 1920s, so did the frequency of American military interventions. The 1928 Havana Pan-American Conference found President Calvin Coolidge defending U.S. intervention in Nicaraguawhich lasted from 1912 to 1933from attacks by Latin American delegates. U.S. press coverage largely ignored the controversy, preferring to herald trans-Atlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh's arrival in Havana with a message of goodwill." "How sweet it sounds in the ears of the Pan-American delegates

Google Apps 101 curriculum focuses on exposing students to the Chrome OS (using Chromebooks) and proper use of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms with business education appropriate supporting activities for students. This 21 day curriculum provides all related content and instruction for teachers to confidently teach the lessons.

In his essay "Wealth," published in North American Review in 1889, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were duty bound to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. Some labor activists sharply differed with Carnegie's point-of-view and responded with essays of their own, such as the Pennsylvania trade unionists who protested Carnegie's gift of a library to the city of New Castle by pointing out that it had been built with the "sweat and blood of thousands of workers." Carnegie's essay, below, later became famous under the title "The Gospel of Wealth." (Click here to hear an audio version of an excerpt from that speech.)

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What's the relationship between government and power? And how do the concepts of authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty influence that relationship? In this lesson, students are introduced to these key characteristics of government, consider how governments establish and maintain them, and analyze government forms to determine if and how each characteristic exists.

Student Learning Objectives:
*Explain how governments get their power, authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty
* Analyze governments for key characteristics
* Describe the relationships power, authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty share
* Consider a government’s legitimacy

This gallery offers a closer look at some of the state’s grandest hotels and resorts built between the 1870s and the 1940s. Some, like Oakton Springs in Pewaukee, have long since vanished; others, like the Northernaire of Three Lakes and Milwaukee’s Pfister, continue to serve visitors from around the country.