This collection uses primary sources to explore the introduction of electric power 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.

This site provides facsimile reproductions of the handwritten patent application and its accompanying drawing, together with explanatory text and lesson plans. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences

Through a range of political, social, and organizational venues, African-American women struggled to participate in the racial awareness and pride that characterized the "New Negro" movement of the 1920s. Alain Locke's important 1925 compilation of Harlem Renaissance writings, The New Negro, included an essay by Elise Johnson McDougald, a prominent black educator, social investigator, and journalist. McDougald's essay, originally published in the Survey, employed socioeconomic analysis to explore the particular problems, as well as contributions to society, of four groups of black women, from wealthy to working-class. Seeking to repudiate the monolithic way in which black women were perceived and represented by white America, McDougald not only focused on economics but also challenged stereotypical representations of blacks in the arts and advertising, as well as those surrounding black women's sexuality.

In 1849, New York's chief of police, George W. Matsell, chose to devote most of his semi-annual report to the problem of vagrant and delinquent children. By mid-century New York was crowded with immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Adult immigrants took jobs once occupied by child apprentices and, despite Matsell's reference to the city's public schools, schooling was not compulsory in New York State until 1874. The result was an excess of poor children on the streets earning money however they could, sometimes, Matsell suggests, in unsavory occupations. Matsell's anxiety about the city's street children cut two ways: he was concerned about the harm these children were doing to themselves, but he also worried that they would grow up to join a "dangerous class" of criminals that would terrorize the city. In these sentiments he was joined by Charles Loring Brace. In 1853 Brace formed the Children's Aid Society that initiated the "orphan trains." These trains transported poor children out of the city to farms in the west.

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height in the years between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of showy and well-publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. Writing in the Nation in March 1919, noted humorist Benchley described the climate of surveillance and sheeplike compliance that made the "Red Scare possible" and mocked the public's hunger for enemies.

In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood shared the romantic radicalism of Floyd Dell and other Greenwich Village bohemians in the early 20th century. They practiced open marriage, though not without pain and confusion. Written in 1916 for the Provincetown Players, an innovative theater group that operated between 1915 and 1922, Enemies was an autobiographical meditation on the emotional struggles of a couple in a non-monogamous marriage. The characters expressed considerable bitterness, yet in the end affirmed their partnership. In the first draft of the play the characters bore the names of their authors, clearly suggesting its autobiographical inspiration.

Wisconsin Republican Joseph R. McCarthy first won election to the Senate in 1946 during a campaign marked by much anticommunist Red-baiting. Partially in response to Republican Party victories, President Harry S. Truman tried to demonstrate his own concern about the threat of Communism by setting up a loyalty program for federal employees. He also asked the Justice Department to compile an official list of 78 subversive organizations. As the midterm election year got underway, former State Department official Alger Hiss, suspected of espionage, was convicted of perjury. McCarthy, in a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, mounted an attack on Truman's foreign policy agenda by charging that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. Although McCarthy displayed a list of names, he never made the list public. The President responded the following month in a news conference by charging that McCarthy's attacks were in effect sabotaging the nation's bipartisan foreign policy efforts and thus aiding the Soviet Union. The following texts--McCarthy's speech, a public letter from McCarthy to Truman two days later, and a transcript of the Truman press conference--reveal the paranoid atmosphere that prevailed in the political arena and affected public discourse and policy.

This course will explore how Americans have confronted energy challenges since the end of World War II. Beginning in the 1970s, Americans worried about the supply of energy. As American production of oil declined, would the US be able to secure enough fuel to sustain their high consumption lifestyles? At the same time, Americans also began to fear the environmental side affects of energy use. Even if the US had enough fossil fuel, would its consumption be detrimental to health and safety? This class examines how Americans thought about these questions in the last half-century. We will consider the political, diplomatic, economic, cultural, and technological aspects of the energy crisis. Topics include nuclear power, suburbanization and the new car culture, the environmental movement and the challenges of clean energy, the Middle East and supply of oil, the energy crisis of the 1970s, and global warming.

In small groups, students closely examine one sentence from the Gettysburg Address and create a multigenre project communicating what they have discovered about the meaning and significance of the text.

"Hidden Voices" explores the lives of enslaved women in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry and the wider US South, focusing on the early 1800s through the antebellum era, to emancipation in the 1860s. This exhibit draws on sometimes rare written testimonies and images both by and about enslaved women to highlight their often-overlooked everyday histories and perspectives. It explores varieties in women’s forced labor, whether working for enslavers or their families. It examines women’s community lives and life cycles. The specific violence women experienced is also covered here, as well as their resistance and cultural traditions in both urban and rural settings. It concludes by addressing changes and continuities in women’s lives in the Civil War through emancipation’s aftermath.
This exhibit explores enslaved women’s culture and labor in the Lowcountry and beyond, marking both continuities among all enslaved women and distinctive experiences that emerged from their lives in this particular region of the United States. It also considers the ways in which women experienced slavery differently from men because of their gender. From the plantation to urban spaces, bonded women’s labor, family relationships, violence, resistance, and culture were distinctive. Understanding these women’s roles and experiences provides a more complete picture of American slavery, and it illuminates the specific labor and cultural contributions of Lowcountry women during and after slavery.

This collection uses primary sources to environmental preservation in the Progressive Era. 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 its first constitutional challenge to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear a case brought by a Chinese immigrant, not an American citizen.

Yick Wo believed city ordinances had been unfairly applied to him, so he challenged their constitutionality under the equal protection clause, and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. Initiated by the Chinese in San Francisco, the precedent-setting case expanded the interpretation of the equal protection clause to include both citizens and noncitizens alike. It also established foundational principles of law.

In Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the Court ruled that “an administration of a municipal ordinance . . . violates the Constitution . . . if it makes arbitrary and unjust discriminations founded on differences of race . . . ” “The guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment extend to “all persons within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, without regard to differences of race, or color, or of nationality.” ” . . . the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws.”

In this lesson, based on the Annenberg Classroom video “Yick Wo and the Equal Protection Clause,” students explore the cause-and-effect relationships between historical events and the development of constitutional principles that protect the rights of all people in America today. The words inscribed on the U.S. Supreme Court building are a reminder of that protection: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

The War Labor Board (WLB) and its predecessor, the National Defense Mediation Board, had a profound impact on relations between employers and unions during World War II. The WLB--made up of representatives from government, labor, and management--provided protection for unions from hostile bosses, increased the wages of the lowest-paid workers, helped set industry-wide wage patterns, and established methods of resolving shop floor disputes. Although the WLB operated in routinized and bureaucratic ways, its decisions could also carry powerful ideological messages. That became clear in the following document, which insisted upon the policy of equal pay for equal work--a seemingly self-evident principle that was not standard practice in American industry. This board decision mandated equal pay for women.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Equal Rights Amendment. 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 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) stated, "Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex." This proposed amendment was passed by Congress in 1972 but failed to be ratified by three-fourth of the states. This lesson provides an overview of the proposed amendment, arguments for and against ratification and possible future steps toward ratification. Students will explore different arguments surrounding the ERA and determine if the ERA should be added in the Constitution. This lesson can be used in a traditional or flipped classroom.

Although Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, and sex, as of 2002, no Federal law prevents an employer from discrimination based on sexual orientation. With the advent of the gay liberation movement in 1969, grassroots and national groups fought for legal protection for gay men and lesbians in the workplace, educational institutions, and housing. In 1972, East Lansing, Michigan, became the first city to forbid discrimination in local government hiring based on sexual orientation. While more than 175 localities and 13 states have passed similar antidiscrimination legislation, opponents have successfully campaigned to stop or repeal such laws by arguing that they conferred "special rights" on gay men and lesbians. Colorado voters in a 1992 referendum adopted an amendment to their State Constitution to prohibit protection of persons based on their "homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships." Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that the Colorado amendment violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and President Bill Clinton issued an Executive Order in 1998 that explicitly prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation for Executive Branch civilian employment, gay and lesbian employees remain unprotected from discriminatory practices in many areas of the country. In the following testimony to a House subcommittee in 1994, five advocates for federal legislation presented arguments and personal accounts to demonstrate the need to establish, in the words of one of the witnesses, "the equal right to work in the U.S."

The Atlanta Compromise speech, which Booker T. Washington delivered before the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895, established Washington as the leading black spokesman in America. He came to control enormous amounts of northern white philanthropy directed at African Americans as well as much of the federal patronage dispensed to them by the Republican party. In this excerpt from his autobiography Up From Slavery, Washington described the reactions of both black and white Americans to his speech.

The years following World War I in the United States saw devastating race riots around the nation: in small cities like Elaine, Arkansas, and Knoxville, Tennessee as well as in larger ones such as Chicago, where a four-day riot in 1919 left two dozen African Americans dead and more than 300 injured. But the Tulsa race riot was perhaps the worst. In fact, white Tulsans' 24-hour rampage was one of the most vicious and intense race riots in American history before or since, resulting in the death of anywhere from 75 to 250 people and the burning of more than 1,000 black homes and businesses. Walter White, an official of the NAACP, traveled to Tulsa in disguise to survey the damage caused by the 1921 race riot. His report, one of many articles on the riot, was published in the Nation in the summer of 1921.

By mid-century, slavery had become the central, defining institution of southern cultural and economic life. As slavery became more entrenched in southern society, so too did the everyday resistance of African-Americans. Slaves resisted the regimen of work by feigning ignorance, breaking tools, or injuring animals. By forming communities and maintaining familial ties as best they could, slaves asserted their humanity in the face of the dehumanizing effects of bondage. Running away also remained an important form of resistance. This icon, or symbol, appeared on notices about fugitive slaves in the classified section of the Mobile, Alabama, Commercial Register in the 1830s.

This site offers geography and history activities showing how two years in history had an indelible impact on American politics and culture. Students interpret historical maps, identify territories acquired by the U.S., identify states later formed from these territories, examine the territorial status of Texas, and identify political, social, and economic issues related to the expansion of the U.S. in the 1840s.