In 1912, four candidates battled to become President of the United States. Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a moderate governor, represented the two major parties. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, angered over what he felt was a betrayal of his policies by Taft, his hand-picked successor, abandoned the Republican party and founded the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. While all four candidates appealed directly to working-class voters, whose votes would prove decisive, by far the most radical platform in the campaign was that of the Socialist Party nominee, Eugene V. Debs. Running for the fourth time, Debs called for the abolition of capitalism rather than for its reform. In this speech accepting the party's nomination he proclaimed the Socialist Party "the party of progress, the party of the future." Debs finished last in the contest, receiving 900,000 votes.

"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. The idea that experts could confidently assign a man to his proper place in the army--and by extension his place in life--suggested a kind of determinism that some found profoundly at odds with American democracy and its credo of upward mobility through hard work. Walter Lippmann, an influential political commentator and journalist, skewered the army intelligence tests in a series of six essays that appeared in the New Republic in 1922. He denounced as "nonsense" the claim that the average mental age of an American adult was fourteen years, and forcefully warned his readers of the danger of uncritical acceptance of IQ as destiny. He addressed the conditions of IQ testing, the possible biases of army intelligence tests, and the larger social problems raised by such classifications.

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee, including Frank L. Sundstrom, Representative of New Jersey, created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, New Jersey spokespersons for tenants quoted the proposed Taft-Ellender-Wagner legislation and described housing conditions, while a number of tenants related their own difficult living situations.

SHEG Lesson on the Declaration of Independence.
Central Historical Question:
Why did the Founders write the Declaration of Independence?

The Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies, then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. Instead they formed a union that would become a new nation—the United States of America. Read a transcription of the document here.

For the people of Vietnam, who were just beginning to recover from five years of ruthless economic exploitation by the Japanese, the end of World War II promised to bring eighty years of French control to a close. As the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), better known as the Viet Minh, Vietnamese nationalists had fought against the Japanese invaders as well as the defeated French colonial authorities. With the support of rich and poor peasants, workers, businessmen, landlords, students, and intellectuals, the Viet Minh (led by Ho Chi Minh) had expanded throughout northern Vietnam where it established new local governments, redistributed some lands, and opened granaries to alleviate the famine. On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi's Ba Dinh square. The first lines of his speech repeated verbatim the famous second paragraph of America's 1776 Declaration of Independence.

After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and the right of self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to face intensified discrimination, segregation, and racial violence. Drawing on this frustration, Marcus Garvey attracted thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers to his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. The Black Star Line, an all-black shipping company chartered by the UNIA, was the movement's boldest and most important project, and many African Americans bought shares of stock in the company. A 1920 Black Star Line business meeting in Harlem's Liberty Hall brought together 25,000 UNIA delegates from around the world, and produced an important statement of principles, the "Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World."

Started by Confederate veterans in 1866 and led by prominent planters, the Ku Klux Klan grew quickly during Radical Reconstruction. Hooded Klansmen terrorized individuals and freedpeoples organizations, breaking up meetings, shooting and lynching Union League leaders, and driving people away from the polls across the South. In its nighttime whippings, killings, and rapes, the Klan targeted freedpeople who showed signs of independence, such as those who bought or rented their own land, or community leaders, such as teachers. The criminal, terrorist nature of the organization was later glossed over. By the turn of the century, popular novels like Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s The Traitor, published in 1907, transformed the bloody record of the Ku Klux Klan (here softened by the euphemism Invisible Empire") into tales of gallantry

The post-World War I period in the United States saw devastating race riots around the nation: in small cities and in larger ones. But the Tulsa race riot in 1921 was perhaps the worst. Sparked by the supposed sexual assault of a white woman by a young black man, white Tulsa residents went on a twenty-four-hour rampage which resulted in the death of anywhere from 75 to 250 people and the burning of more than 1,000 black homes and businesses. Yet the African-Americans of Tulsa were not passive victims: when armed whites congregated at the Tulsa courthouse planning to lynch the young black imprisoned for the rape they were met by a crowd of equally angry blacks determined to prevent the lynching. In this interview with historian Scott Ellsworth, W. D. Williams proudly remembered the self-assertiveness of local black citizens, including his father, who took up arms to defend home and community.

The riots that broke out between 1898 and 1906 were part of a pattern of anti-black violence that included several hundred lynchings each year. One of the most savage race riots in these years erupted in Atlanta on September 22, 1906 after vague reports of African Americans harassing white women. Over five days at least ten black people were killed while Atlanta's police did nothing to protect black citizens, going so far as to confiscate guns from black Atlantans while allowing whites to remain armed. In this selection from his memoirs, Walter White, the future head of the NAACP recalled how, at age 13, he and his father defended their home from white rioters.

The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" laws when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that a Louisiana statute requiring "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black railroad passengers did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment clause guaranteeing all citizens equal protection of the laws. (Jim Crow, the colloquial term for segregation, referred to a blackface character popular on the minstrel stage.) Jim Crow legislation extended throughout the South to schools, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, buses, theaters, hospitals, parks, courthouses, and even cemeteries. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that a Virginia statute requiring segregated seating interfered with interstate commerce and was thus invalid, Jim Crow travel laws remained in effect in the South. In the follow 1954 testimony to a House committee hearing on proposed legislation to end segregated travel, an attorney for the National Council of Negro Women argued that discriminatory practices were contrary to foundational American principles and recounted the humiliating arrest of a member of the WACS for disobeying a bus driver's order to move from her seat. The bills under consideration never made it to the House floor for a vote. In 1956, following a boycott by the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, against the city's segregated bus system, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

The Federal Housing Administration, established in 1934, helped middle-income families buy new homes and improve existing ones. Federal loans for low-cost housing, however, became available only after passage of the Wagner-Steagle Housing Act of 1937, and then only in modest amounts. To address a growing crisis, President Harry S. Truman, as part of his "Fair Deal" initiative, called for new slum clearance and housing legislation. Despite accusations of "socialized housing" and opposition from the real estate and construction industries, on July 15, 1949, Truman signed into law a bill providing $1.5 billion in loans and grants.Available to localities, this money would, in the President's words, "open up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome surroundings for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums." In the following article published just prior to the bill's passage, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, a professor of economics and former New Deal supporter, argued for effective legislation. Despite the law's progressive intent, urban renewal programs ultimately destroyed formerly vibrant neighborhoods. These programs were also used throughout the South and in Northern cities to strengthen segregation by relocating African-Americans away from white school districts.

This cover of the December, 1942, issue of Collier''s magazine commemorated the first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The vampire-bat portrayal of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo indicates one way in which American popular media and war propaganda presented the Japanese. Unlike images of the European enemy, the Japanese were depicted as vicious animals, most often taking the form of apes or parasitic insects. The same racial stereotypes were also applied to Japanese living in America. Suspecting their loyalty, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese Americans living on the west coast citizens and non-citizens alike and transported them to detention centers in the West. Forced to abandon their homes, jobs, and businesses, Japanese Americans remained detained in camps for the duration of the war.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930's the Beuschers--he was a sixty-two-year-old railroad worker; she was the mother of their eleven children--had been fairly prosperous: they owned their home and had several life-insurance policies serving as savings. But by the time the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewed them in 1937, their lives had dramatically changed: the father had lost his railroad job and the mother was taking in sewing. This interview summary, published by the WPA, showed how they struggled to make ends meet during The Great Depression.

This article explains how having the students and teachers co-design the physical environment can foster student agency and provide students an introduction to design thinking. “Rethinking a learning space is about remaking not only the space, but also the learning that happens there.“

This interdisciplinary course is a real-world collaborative multi-year project that connects various departments, courses, and independent study projects on a college campus. Using the client/consultant model, students from several departments and a wide range of environmental backgrounds come together to explore the design of an efficient future student house on campus. Over a couple of years, students research and test building designs, energy for heating and power, natural flows of available energy, natural ecosystem processes including living machines, and possible materials to use in the eventual construction of the eco-house. This SERC Starting Point site includes learning goals, context for use, teaching tips and materials, assessment, and references.

From classroom organization to warm-up procedures, one physical education teacher provides a blueprint for a structured physical education program.

The purpose of this brief is to introduce a developmental framework for states working to systemically integrate evidence-based social and emotional learning (SEL) with career and workforce development efforts.