To build broad public support for its New Deal relief programs, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged documentation of the human suffering caused by the Depression. From 1935 to 1943, photographers working for several federal government agencies, principally the Farm Security Administration (FSA), traveled the country and produced the most enduring images of the Great Depression. This Walker Evans picture of a poor rural family was part of that massive documentation effort. Wishing to convey both suffering and dignity, FSA photographers searingly presented conditions to the American public, selecting effective compositions and poses influenced by advertising and mass-market magazine formats. These photographic icons of the era were widely circulated in the popular press, including Time, Look, and Life magazines, and they appeared in major museum exhibits and best-selling books.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Fifteenth 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.

In 1870, two years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing freedpeople rights as U.S. citizens, Congress responded to racial violence in the South by providing additional constitutional protection for the black electorate. The Fifteenth Amendment declared that the right of U.S. citizens to vote could not be abridged or denied" by any state "on account of race

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 a letter to the Detroit Socialist in May 1878, B.E.G. Jewett argued that the slogan should not be that "the Chinese must go," but that "the oppressors, money-mongers, . . . must go." Though voices like Jewett 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.

This site provides a lesson that uses primary documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences. It also has cross-curricular connections with history, government, and language arts.

The South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895 completed the process of disenfranchising African-Americans (and many poor whites). The state's restrictive policies began with the election law of 1882 that used an intricate system of eight ballot boxes to discourage illiterate white and black residents from voting. The 1895 convention added a poll tax and literacy test, thereby ensuring that a coalition of remaining black voters and disaffected whites could not unite to challenge Democratic Party rule in South Carolina. A handful of black delegates to the convention raised their voices against this disenfranchisement. One of them was William J. Whipper, a Northern black lawyer who had moved to South Carolina during Reconstruction to become a rice planter as well as a Republican political leader. But when northern support for Reconstruction waned in 1875, so too did black political power in South Carolina. The Governor refused to sign a commission for the judgeship to which Whipper had been elected by the state legislature. In this speech to the Convention, Whipper argued for retaining African-American voting rights.

With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent--lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural order. From 1900-1930, as an influx of immigrants from Mexico came north to meet a growing demand for cheap labor in the developing commercial agriculture industries, Tejanos experienced continued discrimination in employment, housing, public facilities, the judicial system, and educational institutions. Many school districts segregated Tejano and Anglo children into separate facilities. The Mexican schools were grossly underfunded and often offered only a grade school education. In 1930, when 90% of the schools in South Texas were segregated, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Tejano advocacy group, supported a court challenge to school segregation. The Texas Court of Appeals, however, ruled that school districts could use such criteria as language and irregular attendance due to seasonal work to separate students. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In 1948, LULAC and the newly formed American G.I. Forum, an advocacy group of Mexican American veterans, assisted in a lawsuit that eventuated in a federal district court decision prohibiting school segregation based on Mexican ancestry. Localities evaded the ruling, however, and de facto segregation continued. In 1955, LULAC and the Forum initiated a suit protesting the practice of placing Tejano children into separate classes for the first two grades of school and requiring four years to compete these grades. Ed Idar of the Forum, in an interview below, discussed this practice, which was finally outlawed in 1957. Student protests in the late 1960s--supported and complemented by a new civil rights organization, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)--achieved an end to more discriminatory practices and the introduction of bilingual and bicultural programs into schools. In the second interview, Pete Tijerina, the founder of MALDEF, related a successful student protest against discrimination.

This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, including works from the early silent period, documentary and avant-garde films, European art cinema, and contemporary Hollywood fare. Through comparative reading of films from different eras and countries, students develop the skills to turn their in-depth analyses into interpretations and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship. Syllabus varies from term to term, but usually includes such directors as Coppola, Eisentein, Fellini, Godard, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarantino, Welles, Wiseman, and Zhang.

African Americans in the 1920's had a new attitude. In this video segment from A Walk Through Harlem, learn about the Harlem Renaissance.

Describe some of the feelings immigrants faced when deciding on a new settlement in the United States.
Contrast the benefits and drawbacks of living in a new location when determining a place to live and compare that to the choices immigrants make past and present.
Formulate several reasons why immigrants elected to live in selected areas.

On March 18, 1741, the first of a series of suspicious fires broke out in New York's Fort George. When a few weeks later a black man was seen running from the scene of one of these fires the cry went up: "The negroes are rising!" The extent of the plot, or even if there really was a plot, has never been absolutely proven. What is true is that the threat of a slave uprising was enough to send the city's white population into hysteria. Of the 181 people arrested during the "Great Negro Plot," 34 were sentenced to death and 72 were transported from New York. In this excerpt from the trials, several important witnesses provided evidence. Peggy was a white prostitute who lived in the home of John Hughson, a riverfront tavenkeeper and, like shoemaker John Romme, a receiver of stolen goods. Peggy's room was paid for by Caesar, a slave with whom she had a child. Today the trial transcripts are valuable for what they reveal about the shady, waterfront world shared by slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in 18th-century New York.

This collection uses primary sources to explore The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. 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.

World War II was a period of economic and social advance for African Americans, and many who served overseas in the military, worked in defense industries, and listened to wartime propaganda about freedom became more assertive in their demands for equal rights. In 1942, Bayard Rustin, a pacifist whose expertise in non-violent protest would have a deep impact on the Civil Rights movement, helped found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The group, dedicated to non-violent direct action, was one of many rights groups that came to life during and immediately after the war. In 1947 Rustin led a group of whites and blacks on a "Journey of Reconciliation" to challenge racial segregation on inter-state buses. The willingness of Rustin and his companions to undergo arrest – at one point serving 30 days on a North Carolina chaingang – provided an important example for the more famous Freedom Rides of 1960.

A list of video resources that bring visibility to First Nations and Indigenous populations in Wisconsin and across the globe, and the historical debts owed to original occupants of these lands. Native American, First Nations and American Indian are terms used interchangeably throughout the resource.

This African-American family was photographed in 1862 after Union forces captured the Sea Island coastal area of South Carolina. One of four photographs taken by Timothy O'Sullivan of the J. J. Smith plantation, this picture was subsequently exhibited at Alexander Gardner's Washington, D.C., photography gallery in September 1863. In contrast to this Beaufort, South Carolina, family the history of the slave family was usually characterized by constant efforts by enslaved African Americans to maintain continuity in the face of forced break-ups and sales (exemplified in the naming of children to mark lineage).

Students will create a timeline outlining various groups' struggles for equal opportunity and create a 30-second radio or video public service announcement (PSA).

Students will analyze shapes and patterns in a photograph, hear stories about people who were forced to move to internment camps because of their ethnicity, and create drawings that tell a story about a young girl's life in an internment camp.

Students will read primary source documents about the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and will examine various versions of a photograph by Dorothea Lange and explore how cropping can evoke different effects.

During World War I, wartime inflation severely taxed the limited budgets of working-class families. Although wages also rose during the war, they could not keep up with prices. On February 20, 1917, after confronting pushcart peddlers who were charging exorbitant rates for necessities, thousands of women marched to New York's City Hall to demand relief. The food riot" precipitated a boycott campaign that eventually forced pushcart prices down. Women in Boston and Philadelphia took similar action."

On June 15, 1846, the United States and Britain signed a treaty dividing the Oregon Territory--which at that time stretched into British Columbia--at the forty-ninth parallel. The acquisition of Oregon, like the acquisition of Texas, was part of President Polk's program of territorial expansion. In 1847 the Illinois Journal, a newspaper based in Springfield, Illinois, decided to publish letters from former Illinoisans who had been tempted by the promise of Oregon and emigrated there. Readers curious about what life was like in the wild, northern territory got a mixed bag of reviews. While all the settlers agreed that the region was healthy, they had different views regarding its climate, soil, water, timber--and its overall capacity to provide permanent happiness to restless Americans. The newspaper's selections from these letters are included here.