In the 1912 presidential election, Republican incumbent William Howard Taft faced not one but three opponents: moderate Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson, former President Theodore Roosevelt leading the breakaway Bull Moose party, and Socialist Party stalwart Eugene Debs, running for the fourth time. Voter interest, already piqued by the unusual campaign and the candidates' slashing attacks on one another, was further heightened by the availability of sound recordings of campaign addresses. Though his administration had adopted some anti-trust policies, Taft generally embraced a non-interventionist approach to the problems that plagued American society in 1912. When asked by reporters in 1912 how he would relieve the nation's severe unemployment, Taft replied, "God knows," a position not calculated to win over many working-class voters. Taft's attitudes were well captured in this recorded selection from one of his campaign speeches, entitled "On Popular Unrest" (which was recorded in a studio on wax cylinder). When the votes were tallied, Taft placed a distant third behind Wilson and Roosevelt.

The 1912 presidential election featured four candidates: Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson, former President Theodore Roosevelt representing the breakaway Bull Moose party, and Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs, who was making his fourth run for President. All four presidential candidates appealed directly to working-class voters, who proved pivotal to the outcome. Voter interest, already piqued by the unusual campaign and the candidates' slashing attacks on one another, was further heightened by the availability of sound recordings of campaign addresses and, for the first time, film footage of the candidates on the campaign trail. In this campaign speech, Wilson argued against a minimum wage for women workers and called for the end of business monopolies. Wilson was the eventual winner, with over six million popular and 435 electoral votes.

Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust (found in sand, quartz, and granite), became a national cause clbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. While silicosis was a crisis for the federal government, business, and insurance companies as well as labor organizations, its most devastating effects were on the workers who contracted the disease and the families and communities who watched previously healthy men waste away and die. The lasting impact that the silicosis "plague" had on individual workers' lives in the 1930s is evident here in Laurie Mercier's 1981 interview with Helen Raymond, who opened a tavern that catered to miners in Virginia City, Montana, in 1934.

In 1918 and 1919, the Spanish influenza killed 550,000 people in the United States and 20 to 40 million worldwide. In a 1982 interview with Laurie Mercier, Loretta Jarussi of Bearcreek, Montana, described how people would pass through that tiny town seemingly healthy, only to be reported dead two days later. Her father went undiagnosed for many weeks and had plans to go to a nearby hot springs to rest. She believed that her father's death was averted only because the son of the local doctor was an army doctor who recognized flu symptoms that others missed.

When the United Automobile Workers won a six week sit-down strike in 1937 against General Motors, the largest corporation in the United States, a fever of organization and a sense of empowerment spread throughout working-class communities in the Northeast and Midwest. That year, 5 million workers took part in some kind of industrial action, and nearly 3 million joined a union. Denys Wortman's cartoon in the March 25, 1937 New York World-Telegram captures the excitement and sense of power felt by many working men and working women when they participated in militant labor action.

During World War II, a dozen female broadcasters, collectively dubbed "Tokyo Rose" by U.S. troops, provided a diversion from the horrors of war. Set up by the Japanese military and using the powerful signal of Radio Tokyo, these Tokyo Roses were on the air nightly, broadcasting English-language shows designed to make American soldiers and sailors nostalgic and homesick. One such Tokyo Rose, U.S. citizen Iva Ikuki Toguri D'Aquino, described her August 14, 1944, broadcast as "sweet propaganda" and played tunes whose titles (for example, "My Resistance Is Low") were designed to demoralize her listeners. Although some soldiers and sailors may have felt the occasional twinge of homesickness while listening to Tokyo Rose's broadcasts, most simply ignored the propaganda and insults while hoping to hear their favorite popular songs.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the life and political impact of Henry Clay. 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 vision of a "New South" was heralded by southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors in the decades following the Confederacy's defeat in 1865 and the abolition of racial slavery across the South. These "New South" boosters argued that, with its plantation economy destroyed by the Civil War and Reconstruction, the South would develop a new economy more attuned to the industrial capitalism that defined the rest of the American economy. Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady was the leading exponent of a "New South" based on industrial development, giving speeches throughout the country and writing articles and editorials in his newspaper. Both of the following speeches by Grady--one given in Boston in 1889, the other in New York in 1886--conveyed not only the message of industrialization as a panacea, but also Grady's fierce regional pride and his general moderation on racial issues, which were becoming increasingly contentious in these years.

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.

The outline includes recommendations for both a one semester (18 week) course and a full-year (36 week) course. The full-year course suggests analyzing topics in greater depth and engaging in additional projects and simulations. Selection of appropriate textbooks is the responsibility of individual districts and schools. It is recommended that teachers begin with Unit 1, but after that, the units can be done in any order.

Each of the five units are organized around “driving questions.” These questions relate to the key concepts and core materials (largely primary sources) that help students engage with relevant material to answer the driving questions. Further, each unit contains connections to modern topics so that students can relate their historical understandings
to the world in which they live, and there are recommended assessment activities that utilize higher order thinking and inquiry skills. A significant number of recommended resources can be found on WISELearn, the DPI Open-Educational Resources (OER) platform, with materials specifically aligned to this scope and sequence. Each unit is also supported by associated standards building out detailed content recommendations related to the theme.

Finally, teachers should utilize the Wisconsin Recommended Civics Education Pedagogy and Practices in designing their course, to ensure that the course utilizes these research-based and standards-aligned approaches for teaching civics in an engaging and culturally responsive way.

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.

Too often, archival photos are not analyzed as historical sources. Instead, they are treated as windows into the past. This lesson introduces students to reasoning about photographs as historical evidence through 4 activities. Students are first given an opportunity to practice thinking historically with a familiar classroom scene, then examine different historical photographs of African Americans in Los Angeles.

This collection of essays includes the biographies of many different people from different backgrounds who made major contributions to Wisconsin History. Each grade-level essay below is designed for a single class period. When reading, students should consider the following questions:

Who (or what) are the main subjects and where did they live (or originate)?
How did they respond to the challenges they faced?
What role do each play in our shared story?
How have their actions or stories affected present-day Wisconsin? How have they affected your life?

This page discusses the importance of primary documents and uses them to illustrate historical concepts such as the subjective nature of written history, the intimate view of historical people's lives that primary documents can provide, and the importance of developing analytical skills when reconstructing history.

This course examines the history of MIT through the lens of the broader history of science and technology, and vice versa. The course covers the founding of MIT in 1861 and goes through the present, including such topics as William Barton Rogers, educational philosophy, biographies of MIT students and professors, intellectual and organizational development, the role of science, changing laboratories and practices, and MIT's relationship with Boston, the federal government, and industry. Assignments include short papers, presentations, and final paper. A number of classes are concurrent with the MIT150 Symposia.