Soon after passage of the Fugitive-Slave Law, Margaret Garner fled from her Kentucky master with her four children. Slave patrollers followed her to Ohio. Faced with capture, Garner killed two of her children rather than have them return to slavery. The surviving children were taken from her and, on the return trip to Kentucky, Garner drowned herself in the Ohio River. Her story inspired an acclaimed nineteenth-century painting by Thomas S. Noble (on which this engraving was based) and Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize novel, Beloved.

The National Humanities center presents this collection of essays by leading scholars on the topic ŇFreedomŐs Story: Teaching African American Literature and HistoryÓ. Topics include the affect of slavery on families, slave resistance, how to read slave narratives, Frederick Douglass, reconstruction, segregation, pigmentocracy, protest poetry, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and more.

Frenchman Louis Daguerre's improvements in photography reached America in the 1840s. Personal portraits were soon the craze, and daguerreotype' studios sprang up in every city, while traveling daguerreotypists served the countryside. This picture presents the controlled environment of the early studios. It took so long to properly expose a photographic plate that the subject needed a head brace to hold a pose.

Davis Waite, the Populist and pro-labor governor of Colorado, won national notoriety in the summer of 1893 after he declared that if change would not come peacefully, it was "better, infinitely better that blood should flow to the horses' bridles than our national liberties should be destroyed." A Republican-controlled lower house blocked many of Waite's initiatives, but he was nonetheless able to use his administrative powers to support workers. In the Cripple Creek strike of 1894, he brought in state troops on behalf of the striking miners--a rare use of state police power in an era when troops were routinely employed to break strikes. When opponents charged Waite's administration with partisanship, he replied defiantly: "Well, what if it is? Is it not the truth that for thirty years the two old parties have been legislating for the creditor class? It is true, and turn about is fair play."

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this autobiography, a twenty-year-old college "boy" from an immigrant Jewish family described his changing tastes in movies.

This 12-minute video is useful for any lesson that introduces students to the Watergate scandal, and any lesson focused on the constitutional and political challenges that complicate the regulation of campaign contributions. After clarifying the connection between the Watergate break-in and subsequent campaign finance scandal, the video documents how campaign finance regulations created in the wake of Watergate would eventually be manipulated by donors seeking to convert money into political influence. The video helps students make the connection between the history of Watergate and current controversies surrounding campaign finance, and to see how, after decades of attempted reforms, the United States is once again experiencing the same unregulated flow of campaign cash that helped give rise to the issues in the 1970s.

This seven-minute video and accompanying lesson plan looks at how throughout the 1960’s and 70’s the second wave feminism movement worked to address gender inequality across the United States. While the movement had several important victories, the Equal Rights Amendment was not passed. Was the second wave feminist movement a success nonetheless?

College education was rare in colonial America, mostly intended for young men entering the ministry. Artisans learned the skills and secrets of their trade through an apprenticeship to a master as Benjamin Franklin related in this excerpt about his education as a craftsman from his famous autobiography. After their service they became journeymen, hired for a time while they saved to open a workshop of their own. Franklin's father, with seventeen children, had to plan carefully in order to secure a niche for his youngest child, Benjamin. Printers stood near the top of the mechanical arts because the trade required literacy. Printers, clustered in the port cities, often formed a network of interrelated families; Benjamin's brother James was a master before him. Benjamin quickly learned the printing trade and ventured out into independent activities. Armed with his valuable training and a penchant for independence, he never finished his term of service and instead moved on to ply his trade in Philadelphia and London.

An unknown photographer captured this scene of men, women, and children picking cotton under the watchful eye of an overseer. Slaves on cotton plantations worked under harsh conditions. The working day began at dawn and often lasted well into the night. Work was done in gangs, where discipline and the unrelenting pace of work was enforced by a driver or overseer. Whipping was regularly used to enforce picking quotas or increase the pace of work. In what little time they had besides what they spent working for the master, slaves had to do all the chores of daily life: they prepared their own meals, washed and fed their children, cleaned their cabins, washed and mended their clothes, and, if they were especially fortunate, tended their own vegetable gardens.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this excerpt from Blumer's study, the sociologist collected together comments from young people describing how the movies led to dissatisfaction with their lives and conflicts with their parents.

This lesson encourages students to analyze historic documents related to two fugitive slave cases and determine the impact events of the period 1850 to 1860 had on them. The Henry Garnett and Moses Honner cases demonstrates the political crisis in the 1850s arising over the issue of slavery and the necessity for the enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the steam engine and transportation in the nineteenth century. 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.

Short reading describing the importance General Pulaski played the importance in the American Revolution and the importance of his legacy.

The Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission is commonly known by its acronym, GLIFWC. Formed in 1984, GLIFWC represents eleven Ojibwe tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan who reserved hunting, fishing and gathering rights in the 1836, 1837, 1842, and 1854 Treaties with the United States government.GLIFWC provides natural resource management expertise, conservation enforcement, legal and policy analysis, and public information services in support of the exercise of treaty rights during well-regulated, off-reservation seasons throughout the treaty ceded territories.

The end of World War II unleashed a new "war" at home--a war that pitted workers against employers. The year following V-J day saw more strikes than any other twelve-month period in American history: 4,630 work stoppages involving 5 million strikers and 120 million days of lost work. One of the most revealing of the postwar confrontations between labor and capital came in the November 1945 strike by 320,000 autoworkers against the nation's largest corporation, General Motors. UAW leader Walter Reuther took a new and radical negotiating stance, arguing that GM could afford to increase wages without increasing prices. In the process, Reuther challenged what had been a fundamental corporate prerogative to set its own prices. GM sharply rejected his demand that they "open the books" and show why they couldn't afford both lower prices and higher wages. That confrontation was captured in this transcript from one of the negotiating sessions.

Relatively few Americans directly experienced trench warfare and poison gas, innovations that rendered war newly terrible and fearsome. One such participant was William L. Langer, later a historian of the war, Harvard professor, and president of the American Historical Association. Langer served as an engineer in Company E of the 1st Gas Regiment, Chemical Warfare Service, of the U.S. Army. In this taut account, from Gas and Flame in World War I, he described a harrowing mission to move supplies and munitions near enemy lines, in preparation for a machine gun and gas attack. Langer noted that his story was probably the first published by an American unit after the war; four hundred copies were printed for the members of the 1st Gas Regiment.

This course introduces incoming students in the Master in City Planning (MCP) program to the theory and history of planning in the public interest. It relies primarily on challenging real-world cases to highlight persistent dilemmas, the power and limits of planning, the multiple roles in which planners find themselves in communities around the globe, and the political, ethical, and practical dilemmas that planners face as they try to be effective. As such, the course provides an introduction to the major ideas and debates that define what the field labels ‰ŰĎplanning theory,‰Ű as well as a (necessarily) condensed global history of modern planning. Courses in planning history, politics, and ethics--often several of them--are required in all accredited graduate programs in planning in the U.S. Gateway: Planning Action combines those contents, with a stronger focus on real-world cases than more conventional lecture-based planning theory and history courses at other schools. It also adds several opportunities to strengthen hands-on professional competencies, especially in communication.

Most people have a clear stereotype of the urban political boss of the early 20th century, and in many ways Murray Hall, a leader of New York City's notorious "Tammany Hall," was its embodiment. Hall was known as a poker-playing, cigar-chomping, whiskey-drinking, "man about town." But in one significant way, Hall departed from the stereotype: she was actually a woman (by the name of Mary Anderson) who "passed" as a man for more than a quarter century. Tragically, Hall died of untreated breast cancer and her deception was only discovered at her death in 1901. "Passing" was a strategy that some lesbians (a term that was not in use at that time) used both to avoid public condemnation and to increase their earnings so that they could live independently. It could also be an assertion of political independence--Hall managed to vote and serve as a political leader in an era when women were denied the franchise.

This subject explores the legal history of the United States as a gendered system. It examines how women have shaped the meanings of American citizenship through pursuit of political rights such as suffrage, jury duty, and military service, how those political struggles have varied for across race, religion, and class, as well as how the legal system has shaped gender relations for both women and men through regulation of such issues as marriage, divorce, work, reproduction, and the family. The course readings will draw from primary and secondary materials in American history, as well as some court cases. However, the focus of the class is on the broader relationship between law and society, and no technical legal knowledge is required or assumed.

The penetration of the railroads into the West in the late nineteenth century had a profound impact on local economies. For a period of ten years in the 1880s the Latah County, Idaho town of Genesee experienced this phenomenon. One town boomed while its neighbors languished in economic isolation, largely as a result of the rail station in Genesee. In this oral history interview, Kenneth Platt described the railroad's impact on Latah County.