Not all Progressive-era crusades involved the regulation of economic and political practices. One of the oddest early twentieth-century reform movements was the effort to simplify the way words were spelled. Seemingly peripheral, spelling reform, with its emphasis on "order" and "rationality," actually typified the Progressive era. The lack of standardization in American spelling was viewed as chaotic, inefficient, and irrational. This quest for order and efficiency helped foster a growing faith in the technical expert and the professional, while equally fostering a distrust of political parties. Like spelling reform, many Progressive reforms took place outside the traditional channels of the political party. In this 1907 article (titled "Simplified Language of Socialism") from the radical newspaper Appeal to Reason, author Jack London and fellow socialist Arthur George took aim at the "simplified spelling" movement--and at the inequalities of early twentieth-century industrial capitalism--with a humorous list of suggested deletions from the English language.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Jacksonian democracy. 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.

Jacob Riis--a journalist and photographer of industrial America and himself a Danish immigrant--exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. He also presented slide shows to reform-minded, middle-class audiences. Despite his own immigrant background, Riis' attitudes mirrored the prejudices of the dominant culture toward "foreigners," as revealed in this stereotyped description of an immigrant neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side. Riis' reports on immigrant life--and his equally famous photographs--were important documents of urban conditions in late nineteenth-century urban America. But they were equally revealing as documents that showed how outsiders often reacted in horror to the lives of "the other half."

A collection of resources supporting an author study of Jacqueline Woodson.  It includes interviews, lesson plans, book trailers, book readings and multiple TeachingBooks.net created meet-the-author videos.  It can be used for student research during an author study or as a resource for educators creating a lesson on the author or one of her works.

In the early 20th century suffragists employed many different tactics in their struggle to win the vote for women. Members of the militant National Woman's Party (NWP), for example, rejected the patient waiting espoused by much of the movement. Some NWP members even chained themselves to the White House gates--an action that led to sentences in the Occoquan Workhouse. In this 1973 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Ernestine Hara Kettler, a young woman of radical immigrant background, recalled her stint in the workhouse.

As the Civil Rights movement began to dismantle formal racial segregation, African-American union activists such as James Houghton sought to integrate the workplace by challenging racial segregation in industrial unions. Houghton was active in the Negro American Labor Council, founded in 1960, before Cold War fears of communist infiltration disbanded the organization. Frustrated by what he saw as a lack of militancy to combat discrimination within the labor movement, Houghton founded the Harlem Unemployment Center, which later became Harlem Fight Back, to challenge racial discrimination in the skilled building trades. The organization played an important role in creating equal employment opportunity programs, increasing minority hiring at construction sites, and forcing unions to open their membership rolls.

James Justen worked for 30 years as an autoworker in Kenosha, Wisconsin, first for American Motor Corporation and then for Chrysler, before becoming active in the struggle for equal rights and benefits for gay and lesbian employees. After paying out of pocket for his domestic partner's health insurance, Justen, who was an active member and shop steward for United Auto Workers Local 72, decided after his retirement to fight for health benefit coverage for the domestic partners of gay and lesbian workers. Although Justen, unlike many gay auto workers, did not face serious harassment while on the job, he found the struggle for equal health benefits an uphill battle. Chrysler denied his claim for equal rights, but Justen hoped to challenge their policy by encouraging another workers to challenge the unequal treatment.

This activity allows students to act as historians. The student will analyze various primary documents to determine the cause of "The Starving Time" in Jamestown, Virginia. Once the students have analyzed the sources, they will be asked to write a paragraph to explain their conclusion.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Japanese American internment during World War II. 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 surprise attack on December 7, 1941, on U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by the Japanese air force was quickly followed by a string of dazzling Japanese military forays. This Japanese "blitzkrieg" captured tens of thousands of Allied military personnel and civilians. Many were subjected to extraordinarily cruel treatment at the hands of the Japanese victors. One of the first and most important of these battles took place at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, which U.S. marines invaded in August 1942. The Japanese forces on Guadalcanal managed to hold on to the island for five months, despite savage battles with the marines and a withering U.S. naval bombardment and blockade. Finally, as a simple poem by noncommissioned officer Yoshida Kashichi expressed, the Japanese forces were starved into submission, retreating from Guadalcanal in disarray on December 31, 1942.

Union troops captured the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, in May 1865. Whether Davis, who had eluded arrest for over a month, was actually wearing his wife's dress when he was caught is open to question. Nonetheless, the depiction of the captured Davis in woman's clothes was featured in many illustrations and cartoons in the northern press. These images—like earlier pictures of southern women sending their men to war and rioting—questioned the South's claims of courage and chivalry by showing its men and women reversing traditional sex roles.

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 25, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. The victims had been trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes. One of the worst industrial fires in U.S. history, the Triangle fire became a galvanizing symbol of industrial capitalism's excesses and the pressing need for reform. In its aftermath, a coalition of middle-class reformers and working people secured passage of landmark occupational health and safety laws. The Triangle fire received sensational coverage in all the New York newspapers. This article from the Jewish Daily Forward, printed the day after the fire, emphasized the tragic loss to the Jewish community.

This is an anti-racism institution that uses objects to inform, to teach, and to create dialogues about race relations. They use primary sources to document and learn from the past. The mission of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery is to teach tolerance using objects of deeply rooted intolerance.

Resources promote personal and community awareness, social justice, and racial healing. The museum understands that all individuals have varying comfort levels when speaking about race and confronting racism. The Educational Resources include a virtual tour of the museum, curriculum guide, resource guide, media literacy unit and a unit that addresses racial disparity in Covid-19.

For young men like Jim Vacarella, the draft stood as the prime symbol of the war in Vietnam. Millions of young men tried to evade the draft: some fled to Canada; many feigned physical or mental illness, others used family connections to gain safe positions in the National Guard. For some, resisting the draft became an important way of protesting the war, and a few thousand men took public stands as draft resistors, burning their draft cards and challenging the government to imprison them. Jim Vacarella was one of those who burned his draft card, although he was lucky enough to avoid prison.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the cultural impact of swing dancing. 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.

Between 1800 and 1840, improved transportation networks and larger markets altered the way goods were produced, as workshops and factories became larger and fewer goods were produced by household labor. Another effect of growing industrialization was social stratification, as some master craftsmen became businessmen while their journeymen lost their independence and became wage workers. This illustration from the 1841 novel The Career of Puffer Hopkins caricatured the growing distinction between masters and journeymen. The master tailor's prosperous outfit, stance, and fancy business address (New York's Broadway) sharply contrasted with the journeyman's wretched appearance and workshop-home.

The Underground Railroad was a network of free African Americans and sympathetic whites that concealed, clothed, and guided fugitive slaves to the North and freedom. The "railroad" comprised a series of stops often tended by local vigilance committees in northern communities. John P. Parker was born into slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, but became a freeman by 1845. He moved to Rowley, Ohio with its active abolitionist community and followed his trade as an iron master by day while rescuing fugitive slaves by night. Free blacks such as Parker supplied most of the needed labor and finances to help escaped slaves. Parker, it is believed, helped hundreds escape to freedom across the Ohio River from Kentucky along the busiest segment of the railroad. He then passed them on to another "conductor," braving significant dangers, as related in this excerpt from a recently published autobiography compiled from newspaper interviews with Parker in 1885.

The Mexican Revolution of 1911 was not well understood in the United States, but it found a place in numerous American novels, short stories, and silent films--albeit a clichéd and stereotypical one in which Mexicans often played the villains vanquished by heroic American cowboys. Such stereotypes of Mexicans dominated U.S. films about Mexico for much of the 20th century. Despite these negative stereotypes, Francisco Villa, leader of the peasant uprisings in northern Mexico, exploited American interest in the revolution for his own ends. A contract with a U.S. newsreel company--he agreed to fight his battles primarily during the day so they could be filmed--earned him money to buy weapons. He also granted interviews to prominent journalists, including the socialist John Reed. Reed's June 1914 article in the Masses, "What About Mexico?," opposed U.S. intervention and countered the negative images of Mexicans by portraying their struggle as brave and heroic.

Baseball's growing popularity in the 1920s can be measured by structural and cultural changes that helped transform the game, including the building of commodious new ballparks; the emergence of sports pages in daily urban newspapers; and the enormous popularity of radio broadcasts of baseball games. But baseball's grip on the American popular imagination also was fueled by the emergence in the 1920s of the game's most dominant player, George Herman "Babe" Ruth. Ruth's rise to stardom in these years was an essential part of an era when celebrities came to dominate the various forms of American popular culture: sports, especially baseball; radio; and the movies. In these short articles that appeared in the Literary Digest in 1921 and 1923, two baseball writers described the importance of the Ruthian home run and the majesty of Yankee Stadium, the new temple that Yankee management built in 1923 to accommodate the Babe.

Collaboration between teachers and teacher librarians (TLs) faces fundamental challenges in the high school setting. Studies of professional library organizations have suggested that collaborations between teachers and TLs are effective in improving student learning, encouraging personal reading, and raising digital citizenship awareness. The conceptual framework and structure of the teacher and librarian collaboration model (TLC-III) is based on the notion that robust collaboration efforts involving groups of teachers have positive effects on students. Researchers have validated the TLC-III model in studies with various groups of teachers and TLs as instructional partners, but have not done so at the high school level. The aim of this study was accordingly to validate the TLC-III model at this level with various high school teachers across disciplines and to determine why some choose to collaborate with TLs while others do not and the factors that influence the formation of a collaborative environment at a large, comprehensive high school. This mixed-method study relied on 62 anonymous surveys and 22 face-to-face interviews to assess what is needed to improve collaboration as part of the learning environment at this school.