The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. In this 1891 speech to the National Council of Women, African-American abolitionist, lecturer, and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper answered the racist charges of white suffragists who saw the vote for (white) women as a way to maintain white supremacy. The vote for African-Americans, both men and women, Harper argued, was a matter of "justice, simple justice."

Huey Long first came to national attention as governor of Louisiana in 1928 and U.S. Senator in 1930. In 1934 Long organized his own, alternative political organization, the Share-Our-Wealth Society, through which he advocated a populist program for redistributing wealth through sharply graduated income and inheritance taxes. Long also garnered attention with his story-telling, his jokes, and his quick wit. He embraced the nickname "Kingfish" from a clownish character on the popular Amos and Andy radio show. He also adopted the slogan "Every Man a King, But No One Wears a Crown," from a speech by the great populist speaker William Jennings Bryan, then popularized it by writing a song, "Every Man a King," and singing it over the radio and on newsreels. Not everyone was captivated by Long's oratory, humor, or singing, however. Hodding Carter, the liberal editor of the Daily Courier in Hammond, Louisiana, repeatedly warned against Long's corruption and demagoguery.

Indian Community School, Inc has developed a process to select high quailty resources for K4-8th grade Science teaching and learning.  The plan will be used to implement new Science resources in the 2021-2022 school year.

During World War II, a number of states passed legislation to combat salary inequities suffered by women workers. Many unions also adopted standards to insure that women employees received the same salaries as males who performed similar jobs. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first Federal legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, prohibited firms engaged in interstate commerce from paying workers according to wage rates determined by sex. It did not, however, prevent companies from hiring only men for higher paying jobs. The following year, Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment, but did not include educational institutions. The following testimony to a Congressional hearing in 1970 emphasized the need to extend sex discrimination legislation to the academic world. In 1972, Congress passed the Higher Education Act. Title IX of this Act forbade federal financial assistance to educational institutions that practiced sex discrimination.

In 1870, the Boston firm of Louis Prang and Company published a chromolithograph (an inexpensive type of color print) portrait of the first African-American United States senator. One prominent admirer of the portrait was Frederick Douglass: "Whatever may be the prejudices of those who may look upon it," he wrote to Prang, "they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi senator is a man, and one who will easily pass for a man among men. We colored men so often see ourselves described and painted as monkeys, that we think it a great piece of good fortune to find an exception to this general rule."

In the aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket bombing Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly was desperate to distance his organization from the accused anarchists and maintain the order's respectability. The day after the bombing he stated that it was the duty of every organization of working men in America to condemn the outrage committed in Chicago in the name of labor. Though there were exceptions, most assemblies of the Knights followed Powderly's lead. Albert Parsons, a long-time member of the Knights and one of the Haymarket defendants, viewed Powderly's lack of support with bitterness and wrote the following letter from jail on his tenth anniversary of joining the Knights, July 4, 1886.

Even before the United States entered World War I, some young men signed up with the volunteer ambulance corps, which recruited college students and recent graduates to serve on the French and Italian fronts. Among them were such later famous writers as e. e. cummings, Dashiell Hammett, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway. Not surprisingly, many of these former ambulance drivers later wrote about their experiences in memoirs and novels. In this passage, from a book-length memoir, Robert Whitney Imbrie wrote in a humorous vein of the bond of affection and loyalty between an ambulance driver and his car.

Elections, in something close to their current form, have been taking place in Wisconsin since 1825. The first known state vote took place in Green Bay in 1825, when only white male citizens over the age of 21 were allowed to vote. After Wisconsin was made a territory in 1836, one of the legislature’s first acts was to set out rules for elections throughout the territory.

This online exhibit from Recollection Wisconsin provides a glimpse at the history of elections of all kinds across the state.

This site has just about everything you would need to teach anywhere from State history to the presidents of the United States.  This could be a great resource to use in whatever capacity of History you are teaching.

The Minnesota Governor's Council on Developmental Disabilities breaks down the history of developmental disabilities in two parts. Part one begin with the ancient era to the 1950s and part two begins with 1950 to today. Each era is presented with a vast amount of valuable information about people with disabilities along with video clips and quotes.

This lesson features the history of political polling in the United States going back to the 19th century and the development and use of polling since then.

Hmong Museum is the first museum dedicated to the preservation and education of Hmong culture, history, experiences, and arts. We do this through the creation and collaboration of programs that:

Document Hmong history & knowledge
Exhibit Hmong culture & art
Share Hmong experiences & stories

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted young people and local leaders to register and encourage southern African-Americans to vote during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. Because the young organizers faced tremendous risks by challenging segregation and encouraging people to vote, the group earned a reputation as the "shock troops" of the Civil Rights Movement. Hollis Watkins joined SNCC in the early 1960's and canvassed potential voters in the area of McComb, Mississippi. He also participated in direct actions, for which he served time in jail. Watkins remembered the risks SNCC organizers faced when working alone and in pairs, and the support they received from the African-American community.

This illustration from the widely-circulated 1950 book How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, which designated "appropriate" civil-defense jobs for men and women, reflected the contemporary labor market. While more women worked outside the home, they were largely confined to a female job ghetto, where wages were low, and prestige and opportunities for career advancement limited. Their subordination in the labor market coincided with a new postwar sexual ideology marked by rigidly defined gender roles that emphasized women's submissiveness and confinement to housework.

Many working people responded to industrial capitalism with strategies that were neither purely individualistic nor collective. On the one hand, the quest for home ownership, which absorbed so many working-class families, was an individual--or family-based--effort. On the other hand, working people often employed their own community-based institutions such as savings and loan associations to achieve the goal of owning their own homes. Outsiders, like the authors of this 1889 Pennsylvania government report on building and loans associations, might celebrate the ways that these associations served as an "antidote against anarchism." But for working people themselves, the building and loan associations were simply vehicles for attaining independence and security.

Images of women in the kitchen are a familiar scene in the history of home economics, but what these images don’t show is the important role that home economics played in getting women into higher education. From its inception, collegiate home economics was multidisciplinary and integrative with an emphasis on science applied to the real world of the home, family, and community. It was an academic science designed by women for women. In the first half of the 20th century, these programs prepared women for teaching but also for careers in extension services, state and federal government, industry, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals.

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle; mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand, blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely; pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. In the late 1930s writers employed by the Federal Writers Project in Texas interviewed more than 400 cowboys, providing some of the only firsthand sources about late 19th-century cowboys. In this interview, cowboy Richard Phillips offered a firsthand glimpse of the hard life that awaited the men who trailed cattle to market.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Homestead Acts. 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 collection uses primary sources to explore the Homestead Strike. 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 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. The tale of Frank Courtney's lucky break in The World Before Him (1880) was typical of these stories. In this selection, young Frank grabs the proverbial golden ring of success less by pluck than by sheer luck.