This lesson includes Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural address, in which he said, I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis [the Depression] broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

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.

Alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth have become common terms in the contemporary news industry. Today, social media platforms allow sensational news to “go viral,” crowdsourced news from ordinary people to compete with professional reporting, and public figures in offices as high as the US presidency to bypass established media outlets when sharing news. However, dramatic reporting in daily news coverage predates the smartphone and tablet by over a century. In the late nineteenth century, the news media war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal resulted in the rise of yellow journalism, as each newspaper used sensationalism and manipulated facts to increase sales and attract readers.

Website description: Learn how America's love-hate relationship with Great Britain's government showed up in the way the Founder's designed America's government. In this lesson, students take a close look at British influence on American government by examining representation, voting, checks and balances, and the concept of a bill of rights as they learn about Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the British monarchy.

Many immigrants to the United States wrote letters back home. At the time they were written, the missives shaped the expectations of those who would soon make the same journey; today, they gave historians invaluable first-hand testimony of the immigrants' own experiences. These seventeen letters involved the children of a retired Polish farmer named Raczkowski. Adam Raczkowski went to the United States in 1904 with the financial assistance of his sister Helena Brylska [later Dabrowskis] and his brother Franciszek, who had both previously immigrated. He settled with his brother in Wilmington, Delaware, and obtained factory work. The letters included here cover the years 1904 to 1912 and were written between both Adam and Helena and their sister Teofila, who remained in Poland.

Although they vehemently opposed slavery, few antislavery advocates believed blacks and whites could or should live together as equals. Some abolitionists viewed the potential for intimacy between whites and blacks as one of the demoralizing effects of the "peculiar institution." This unlikely domestic scene in a plantation household, with slave children joining their owners at the dinner table, was published in an 1834 antislavery tract as one indication of the scandalous relations fostered by slavery.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Fannie Lou Hamer and the civil rights movement in rural Mississippi. 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.

For workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in the 1890s, home was the company town of Pullman, Illinois, and rent was deducted from their wages. While owner George Pullman touted it as a model town, the men and women who labored there during the 1893 depression endured starvation wages, deplorable living and working conditions, and, worst of all, Pullman's paternalistic control over all aspects of their lives. Workers appealed to the American Railway Union (ARU), which organized a nationwide strike and boycott against Pullman. This statement from a Pullman striker, delivered at the June 1894 Chicago convention of the ARU, reflected the depth of the strikers' hatred of their employer and their commitment to the union.

Today we're opening our new series on famous trials in the Federal Courts. In this case, United States v Burr, the judge and jury had to decide whether to convict former VP Aaron Burr for the crime of treason.

Taking us on the journey are Christine Lamberson, Director of History at the Federal Judicial Center, and Nancy Isenberg, professor at LSU and author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr.

This trial has everything: Washington Irving, epaulets, a subpoenaed president, and a letter hidden in a shoe.

In 1968, a raucous Democratic nominating convention was overshadowed only by the shouts outside to end the war. This is the story of how eight different protestors from very different walks of life ended up before an increasingly indignant judge and walked away scot-free -- but not before putting on a good show.

Website Description:
In this federalism lesson plan, students learn where the federal government gets its power and that government power in the United States is split between states and the federal government. They learn about express and implied powers, distinguish between federal powers and those reserved to the states (as well as shared powers), and contrast the federalist system of government with other choices the Founders might have made. We suggest teaching our lesson "State Power: Got a Reservation? back-to-back with this lesson.

Student Learning objectives
Students will be able to...
*Define federalism and explain the division of power between states and the federal government.
*Identify expressed, implied, reserved, and concurrent powers.
*Explain the significance of the Supremacy Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause.
*Describe the ongoing tension between federal and state power.
*Compare and contrast federal, confederal, and unitary forms of government.
*Identify the strengths and weaknesses of federalism.

Website Description:
It’s easy to forget how much drama surrounded the Constitution before it became the law of the land. The ratification debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists gives us insight into the ideas behind both sides and a better understanding of how our government developed in its early years. Students will analyze parts of Federalist 84 and Anti-Federalist 46. We also provide a template so you can bring in additional excerpts as your state standards require.

Student Learning Objectives:
Students will be able to:
*Identify the arguments used by the Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the ratification debate
*Analyze excerpts from the Federalist Papers (#84) and Anti-Federalist Papers (#46)
*Describe the importance of the Bill of Rights in the ratification debate

Recommendations by the National War Labor Board during World War II to pay male and female workers equal wages yielded few changes in the gender wage gap. Women continued to receive less money for comparable work, and into the 1960s want ads characterized jobs as "male" or "female" with resulting salary differences based on gender. The Equal Pay Act (EPA) made it illegal to pay men and women differently for similar work. Although the EPA was passed in 1963, it was debated in workplaces and courtrooms for decades thereafter. In this statement submitted to the Senate hearing on the EPA, the National Retail Merchant Association (NRMA), an organization representing retail employers, claimed that the legislation was unnecessary, expensive, and impossible to enforce. While professing that equal pay for women was "an admirable principle," the NRMA also argued that high rates of absenteeism and protective legislation made women more expensive to employ than men.

This collection uses primary sources to the history of food stamp programs. 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 productive capacity of the United States during World War II surpassed all expectations. To boost that production and maintain supply levels for troops abroad, Americans at home were asked to conserve materials and to accept ration coupons or stamps that limited the purchase of certain products. Gasoline, rubber, sugar, butter, and some kinds of cloth were among the many items rationed. American responses to rationing varied from cheerful compliance to resigned grumbling to instances of black market subversion and profiteering. The drive to increase wartime production extended beyond rationing. Government-sponsored posters, ads, radio shows, and pamphlet campaigns urged Americans to contribute to scrap drives and accept rationing without complaint. A segment of the popular radio series Fibber McGee and Molly had Fibber shouldering his patriotic duty.