Created in 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided hope and employment for millions of unemployed workers and studied the human toll of the depression. One such study--a series of WPA-conducted interviews with Dubuque, Iowa families--found that middle-class Americans particularly felt the sting and shame of unemployment caused by the depression. In this interview, the Donners discussed the closing of their family-owned printing business in Chicago during tough times. Returning to live with Mrs. Donner's family in Dubuque in 1934, Mr. Donner remained unemployed for over a year before landing a job as a timekeeper on a WPA project, earning less than one-third his previous income.

In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. "Modern Marriage," an excerpt from Floyd Dell's Outline of Marriage (1926), set out the ideal of companionship between husband and wife. In this mock dialogue, a savvy young wife instructed a professor in the ways of modern marriage. She frankly endorsed birth control, simplified housekeeping, shared housework, and paid work for childless wives. At the same time, Dell's dialogue affirmed a romantic view of fundamental sexual differences. Generically named "The Young Woman," the female character averred that she chose motherhood as "fulfillment of my nature." Circulated by the American Birth Control League, the tract sought to win support for contraception by portraying its place in respectable, if "modern," marriages.

A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the second quarter of the 19th century. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable,and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mills led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. The young female operatives organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Harriet Hanson Robinson was one of those factory operatives; she began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women's suffrage. In 1898 she published Loom and Spindle, a memoir of her Lowell experiences, where she recounted the strike of 1836.

Emmy award-winning poet, Lucille Clifton, introduces and reads her poem, 'Turning,' about trying to be your own person and taking responsibility for your life.

A look at the history of lumber, lumber camps and lumberjacks in Wisconsin.

Museum of Modern Art Learning Resources.    Tools and strategies for engaging with modern and cotemporary art.  Download and customize slideshows, worksheets and other resources for use in the classroom or for independent study.  
Has follow-up questions, hands- on activities and other opportunities for enrichment beyond the traditional classroom setting.  
Utilizes Video, pdf, blogs, E-News, Twitter, FB, Google+ Flickr
You can browse by Themes or by Artists.  they have an Advanced Placement Art History Exam, Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, Design, Investigating Identy, and much more.

In February and March 1913, the "International Exhibition of Modern Art" opened at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory. After a tour of the U.S., a half million people had seen the exhibit--one of the most influential in American art history. The self-consciously "modern" Armory show, organized by art patron Arthur B. Davies, challenged the artistic establishment. Two-thirds of the 1,600 works were by Americans, and the Europeans whose works were exhibited--Picasso, Matisse, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gaughin, and Duchamp among them--were far from the conservatives that Americans were used to. "We want this old show of ours," declared one of the organizers, "to mark the starting point of a new spirit in art, at least as far as America is concerned." The show raised the hackles of many critics (one newspaper offered a reward to any schoolchild who could find the nude in the show's most controversial painting, Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"). But art critic W.D. MacColl praised the Armory Show's avant-garde spirit in this Forum magazine review from July 1913.

Magna Carta (Latin for Great Charter) is an Angevin charter originally issued in Latin in June 1215. The
Magna Carta was the first document forced onto a King of England by a group of his subjects in an attempt to limit his powers by law and protect their rights.
The charter is widely known throughout the English speaking world as an important part of the protracted historical process that led to the rule of constitutional law in England and beyond. Read a translation into English here.

On February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the American battleship Maine , anchored in Havana harbor, sinking the ship and killing 260 sailors. Americans responded with outrage, assuming that Spain, which controlled Cuba as a colony, had sunk the ship. Two months later, the slogan "Remember the Maine " carried the U.S. into war with Spain. In the midst of the hysteria, few Americans paid much attention to the report issued two weeks before the U.S. entry into the war by a Court of Inquiry appointed by President McKinley. The report stated that the committee could not definitively assign blame to Spain for the sinking of the Maine . Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer used their many newspapers to stir public opinion over the sinking of the Maine into a frenzy, hastenening U.S. entry into the conflict. This February 17, 1898, front page story from Pulitzer's New York World suggested, on the basis of little evidence, the hand of the enemy in the destruction of the Maine.

Richard (Dick) Ira Bong, America’s Ace of Aces, was born on September 24, 1920 in Superior, Wisconsin to Carl and Dora Bong. This digital exhibit by Autumn Wolter, intern at the Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, Wisconsin, describes Major Bong's childhood and Army Air Corps service through images.

Television had become the nation's largest medium for advertising by the mid-1950s, when the Revlon cosmetics corporation agreed to sponsor The $64,000 Question, the first prime-time network quiz show to offer contestants fabulous sums of money. As Revlon's average net profit rose in the next four years from $1.2 million to $11 million, a plethora of quiz shows tried to replicate its success. At the height of their popularity, in 1958, 24 network quiz shows--relatively easy and inexpensive to produce--filled the prime-time schedule. Many took pains in their presentation to convey an aura of authenticity--contestants chosen from ordinary walks of life pondered fact-based questions inside sound-proof isolation booths that insured they received no outside assistance. To guarantee against tampering prior to airtime, bank executives and armed guards made on-air deliveries of sealed questions and answers said to be verified by authorities from respected encyclopedias or university professors. When the public learned in 1959 that a substantial number of shows had been rigged, a great many were offended. One survey, however, showed that quite a few viewers didn't care. Following the revelations, prime-time quiz shows went off the air, replaced in large part by series telefilms, many of which were Westerns. The industry successfully fended off calls for regulation, and by blaming sponsors and contracted producers, networks minimized damage and increased their control over programming decisions. In the following testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, one contestant offered proof that he had been coached, while a second refused to acknowledge "moral qualms" in perpetrating the fraud. A third, a teenager, related how she "goofed" and won a match that she was supposed to tie.

This description of a Washington D.C. Knights of Labor assembly hall in the late 1880s appeared in T. Fulton Gantt's novel, Breaking the Chains: A Story of the Present Industrial Struggle,. It was was first published in 1887, in serial form, in The Lance, a labor newspaper in Salem, Oregon. Many other novels from this period addressed the problems of labor conflict and inequality, but Gantt was one of the very few to see unionization as the answer to the problems of working people. Although the Knights officially prohibited lawyers ("non-producers") from membership, Gantt was both a member of the bar and the Knights. Gantt's description, which presumably drew from his own experience in District Assembly 66 in Washington, D.C., conveyed a sense of the diverse social, political, and intellectual functions that the meeting hall played for its members, as well as the issues that animated their debates.

On September 18, 1895 Booker T. Washington, the noted African-American educator who was born a slave in 1858, spoke before the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. His Atlanta Compromise address, as it came to be called, was one of the most important and influential speeches in American history. Acutely conscious of the narrow limitations whites placed on African Americans' economic aspirations, Washington stressed that blacks must accommodate white people's--and especially southern whites'--refusal to tolerate blacks as anything more than sophisticated menials. In this excerpt from his best-selling autobiography Up From Slavery (1901) Washington explained some of the circumstances surrounding the unprecedented invitation for him to speak before a biracial audience.

Making The Right Money Moves is used to teach young adults in a high school classroom basic money management skills, including how to access and manage credit responsibly.
What are the program components?
There are four curriculum components provided to each school, including:
The Student Workbook imprinted with your credit union's logoThe video, Check It Out!! Ã¢â‚¬â€œ checking account convenience, management and the 5 C's of creditThe CD exercise, You're On Your Own Ã¢â‚¬â€œ money managementThe Teacher's Guide
Teachers request the number of workbooks needed for their classes and a Teacher's Guide. The school media center receives and catalogs the CD. The video is available online. You receive the fifth component directly: The Credit Union Guide, which provides ideas and recommendations for maximizing your participation in the program.

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany in order that the world "be made safe for democracy." Four days later, Congress voted to declare war, with six senators and fifty congressmen dissenting. "It is a fearful thing," he told Congress in his speech, "to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance." Wilson did not exaggerate; in 1917 the war in Europe had already lasted two-and-a-half bloody years and had become one of the most murderous conflicts in human history. By the time the war ended a year and a half later, an entire generation was decimated--France alone lost half its men between the ages of twenty and thirty-two. The maimed bodies of millions of European men who survived bore mute testimony to the war's savagery.

When members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) decided to strike the "Little Steel" companies in May 1937, they could hardly have expected it to result in a massacre. On the afternoon of Memorial Day, a flag-waving, ethnically diverse group set out for the company's Republic Steel's main gate but were stopped by a large contingent of policemen. When one of the policemen suddenly and inexplicably fired his revolver into the front of the crowd the march turned into a massacre. In the end, Chicago's police killed ten fleeing workers, wounded thirty more and beat fifty-five so badly they required hospitalization. Lupe Marshall, a housewife and volunteer social worker in South Chicago was among those beaten. She gave this testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, known informally as the La Follette Committee for its chair, Senator Robert La Follette, and charged with investigating the incident.

Large factories such as the Lowell textile mills, with their thousands of employees and imposing structures, were the exception in the United States' early industrial development. More commonly, small manufactories sprang up throughout the northeastern United States wherever a fast moving stream was available to provide water power. N. B. Gordon was the general manager as well as the chief mechanic and mill agent at the Union Cotton and Woolen Manufactory, a small textile company in the southeastern Massachusetts town of Mansfield. His work diary chronicled the everyday difficulties he faced in keeping the mill operating, including such problems as broken machines and too little water to power the mill. Highly independent employees caused him headaches, too.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the idea of Manifest Destiny and its influence. 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 1899 Americans divided sharply over whether to annex the Philippines. Annexationists and anti-annexationists, despite their differences, generally agreed that the U.S. needed opportunities for commercial expansion but disagreed over how to achieve that goal. Few believed that the Philippines themselves offered a crucial commercial advantage to the U.S., but many saw them as a crucial way station to Asia. "Had we no interests in China," noted one advocate of annexation, "the possession of the Philippines would be meaningless." In the Paris Peace negotiations, President William McKinley demanded the Philippines to avoid giving them back to Spain or allowing a third power to take them. One explanation of his reasoning came from this report of a delegation of Methodist church leaders. The emphasis on McKinley's religious inspiration for his imperialist commitments may have been colored by the religious beliefs of General James Rusling. But Rusling's account of the islands, falling unbidden on the U.S., and the arguments for taking the islands reflect McKinley's official correspondence on the topic. McKinley disingenuously disavowed the U.S. military action that brought the Philippines under U.S. control, and acknowledged, directly and indirectly, the equally powerful forces of racism, nationalism, and especially commercialism, that shaped American actions.