The word "tramp" came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. Fears of the "tramp menace" that had been so strong in the seventies were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Most government officials and business leaders reacted with horror at the prospect of jobless men wandering the roads. A notable exception was the Populist governor of Kansas, Lorenzo Dow Lewelling. His executive proclamation of December 4, 1893, defended the rights of the homeless against arbitrary arrest by local police. His proclamation, published in the Topeka Daily Capital on December 5, 1893, became known as the "Tramp Circular." Lewelling's sympathy for the tramping unemployed may have come, in part, from personal experience; he himself had wandered the roads in search of work in the 1870s depression.

Between July 13 and 16, 1863, the largest riots the United States had yet seen shook New York City. In the so-called Civil War draft riots, the city's poor white working people, many of them Irish immigrants, bloodily protested the federally-imposed draft requiring all men to enlist in the Union Army. The rioters took out their rage on their perceived enemies: the Republicans whose wealth allowed them to purchase substitutes for military service, and the poor African Americans--their rivals in the city's labor market--for whom the war was being fought. On July 20, four days after federal troops put down the uprising, a group of Wall Street businessmen formed a committee to aid New York's devastated black community. The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots gathered and distributed funds, and collected the following testimony.

Hundreds of writers and artists lived in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and were part of a vibrant, creative community that found its voice in what came to be called the "Harlem Renaissance." Alain Locke's 1925 collection The New Negro --a compilation of literature by and essays about "New Negro" artists and black culture--became a "manifesto" of the movement. Some of black America's foremost writers contributed stories and poems to the volume. The work of these artists drew upon the African-American experience and expressed a new pride in black racial identity and heritage. Several factors accounted for the birth of the movement and propelled it forward. By 1920 the once white ethnic neighborhood of Harlem in upper Manhattan overflowed with recent African-American migrants from the South and the Caribbean. Black soldiers returning from World War I shared a new sense of pride, militancy, and entitlement, as expressed in Claude McKay's 1919 protest poem "If We Must Die."

Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey recognized that his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) would find its most enthusiastic audience in the United States, despite the organization's professed worldwide mission. After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to find intensified discrimination, segregation, racial violence, and hostile relations with white Americans. Sensing growing frustration, Garvey used his considerable charisma to attract thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers and became the most popular black leader in America in the early 1920s. The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. To this end, the movement offered in its "Back to Africa" campaign a powerful message of black pride and economic self-sufficiency. In Garvey's 1921 speech, "If You Believe the Negro Has a Soul," he emphasized the inevitability of racial antagonism and the hopelessness of interracial coexistence.

For centuries pirates, known as the Barbary pirates, operated out of the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. European states paid tribute to them to ensure their people's safe passage. Without British protection and with few financial or diplomatic resources, the new American nation's ships and citizens were vulnerable on the high seas. Between 1785 and 1820, more than 700 Americans were taken hostage and often enslaved. The American public was fascinated by these captives' stories; their tales of desert cities, caravans, and harems bridged the previously popular Puritan captivity narratives and emerging slave narratives. The most influential of all these American Barbary narratives was James Riley's Loss of the American Brig Commerce. A Connecticut sea captain, Riley ran aground in 1815 and was captured by wandering Arabs. He used his enslavement to call into question the enslavement of Africans and express a common humanity with the desert people he encountered.

Davy Crockett was a frontiersmen, soldier, and politician who used his autobiography to help create an image of himself as a larger-than-life American hero. The description of frontier politics presented here is based on his campaign for a seat in the Tennessee legislature in 1821. In the early decades of the 19th century, property qualifications for voting were lifted and more white men gained access to the vote. With this greater access came new and more democratic styles of political activity. To recruit support at elections, office seekers made public meetings and popular entertainments part of political life. Crockett's account reflected these changes, suggesting that humor, hunting skills, and male camaraderie were as important to electoral success as a clear stance on the issues of the day.

Field trips offer opportunities to explore our exhibitions that address the history of the Holocaust, genocide, human and civil rights, as well as local and global social justice issues.

Immigrants and African Americans decisively shaped a multiethnic urban popular culture in the late 19th century, built in large measure on the emergence of vaudeville. Vaudeville blended slapstick comedy, blackface minstrelsy, and sentimental songs into a rich and highly popular cultural stew. Among the most successful vaudeville practitioners were two Jewish singers and comics from the mean streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Joe Weber and Lew Fields. Weber and Fields' routines usually featured broad stereotypes of German immigrants: Fields played "Meyer," the shrewd German slickster who wanted to "put one over" on Weber's "Mike," the dumb "Dutch" newcomer. At the peak of their popularity in 1904, Weber and Fields recorded this popular routine, "The Hypnotist," for commercial sale. Ironically, just a few months after recording this routine, the Weber and Fields team broke up, ending nearly three decades of public performances, the longest of any team in American popular theater.

The Communist-led Unemployed Councils mobilized jobless men and women in hundreds of local communities to demand jobs and better treatment from relief authorities. In these excerpts from a recorded interview, Anna Taffler, a Communist activist and a Russian Jewish immigrant, described how her own experience of facing eviction pushed her into organizing the unemployed. She also talked about the focus of local councils on issues like fighting for more relief and stopping evictions.

On July 1, 1946, less than a year after dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, the U.S. embarked on its first postwar atomic weapons test at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. David Bradley, a physician and member of the Radiological Safety Unit at Bikini, voiced concern over dangers from radioactivity in his 1948 best-seller, No Place to Hide. In response to Bradley and other critics, the Atomic Energy Commission, the military, and other government agencies attempted to diffuse growing fears about radioactivity. The following Collier's article by a military officer--using the same eyewitness-account format as in Bradley's book--tried to persuade its readers that fears about "lingering radiation" were unfounded by documenting a test in the Nevada desert in which the military deliberately sent soldiers close to "ground zero" soon after an explosion. Some readers remained unconvinced; their published letters can be found following the article. In 1963, the U.S. and Soviet Union signed a treaty to halt atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. By that time, some 300,000 U.S. military personnel and an unknown number of civilians in areas downwind from the test sites had been exposed to radiation. In subsequent years, studies revealed higher rates of leukemia, cancer, respiratory ailments, and other health problems among these groups. Underground atomic weapons tests continued at the Nevada Test Site until a moratorium was declared in 1992, after 928 nuclear tests.

This lesson focuses on the American Revolution, which encouraged the founding fathers' desire to create a government that would, as stated in the Preamble, insure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences.

This collection uses primary sources to explore immigration to the US and immigrant Americanization between 1880 and 1930. 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.

Students analyze documents from the holdings of the National Archives to assess the impact of legalized racial segregation on the lives of Black Americans from 1944 – 1960. Students analyze historical documents and discuss how Jim Crow, a system of laws and practices set in place to maintain white supremacy, limited the freedom of African Americans. These documents from 1944 – 1960 express the words and actions of people or institutions working to either remove or reinforce race-based barriers to equality.

Guiding Question
How did Jim Crow laws and practices limit the freedom of Black Americans?

This collection uses primary sources to explore the impact of television on news media. 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.

Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In hundreds of speeches, she apparently never said the one phrase most often associated with her name--the injunction that farmers should "raise less corn and more hell." Regardless of who called explicitly for more hell-raising, Lease was a powerful voice of the agrarian crusade.

"There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ," declared psychologist Lewis M. Terman in 1922. To the extent that this is true, it is in large measure because of Terman himself and the opportunity that World War I afforded for the first widespread use of intelligence testing. The army's use of intelligence tests lent new credibility to the emerging profession of psychology, even as it sparked public debate about the validity of the tests and their implications for American democracy. The idea that experts could confidently assign a man to his proper place in the army--and by extension, his place in life--suggested a kind of determinism that some found profoundly at odds with American democracy and its credo of upward mobility through hard work. In "The Great Conspiracy," Lewis Terman replied with acid commentary to a series of articles by Walter Lippmann criticizing IQ tests. Terman portrayed Lippmann as a sentimental humanist whose democratic dogma prevented him from accepting plain facts. According to Terman, Americans clearly exhibited a range of different intellectual endowments and the new science of psychology made it possible to measure and classify those differences.

After Reconstruction, most African Americans remained in the South and worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. But the limited economic possibilities, as well as escalating racial repression that accompanied the end of Reconstruction and the rise of a "redeemed" South, led some to move West. Kansas was the most common destination for southern black "Exodusters" as they were called, and more than 26,000 African-Americans immigrated to Kansas during the l870s. The Exodusters hoped to create quasi-utopian colonies entirely free from white control. The best known of these black settlements was Nicodemus, named for an African-born slave who was said to have prophesied the black Exodus. In this 1877 circular, town founders expounded on the enticements of Nicodemus with the hope of attracting "colored citizens" as new settlers. By 1880, Nicodemus had 700 residents. The colony enjoyed its greatest prosperity in the mid-1880s, but after that it suffered from a lack of rain and good rail connections. Still, the population continued to increase gradually into the beginning of the next century.

Huey Long, a senator and former governor of Louisiana, while initially a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, became one of the most important critics of the New Deal during the Great Depression. To curb the power of the rich, Long proposed the Share Our Wealth Plan" that would redistribute wealth from large fortunes to the needy and enable the government to provide every family with "enough for a home

This site challenges visitors to test their knowledge about inaugurations and presidential history with a 10 question quiz.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. 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.