America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation's history. In an atmosphere of hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. On March 18, 1942, Roosevelt authorized the establishment of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to govern these detention camps. He chose as its first head Milton Eisenhower, a New Deal bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture and brother of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a 1942 film entitled Japanese Relocation, produced by the Office of War Information, Eisenhower offered the U.S. government's rationale for the relocation of Japanese-American citizens. He claimed that the Japanese "cheerfully" participated in the relocation process, a statement belied by all contemporary and subsequent accounts of the 1942 events.

During the 1960s, Milwaukee’s African-American community waged protests, organized boycotts, and fought legislative battles against segregation and discriminatory practices in schools, housing, and social clubs. This exhibits provides highlights from the March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project (https://uwm.edu/marchonmilwaukee/), a digital collection that features primary sources including photographs, unedited news film footage, text documents, and oral history interviews from the Milwaukee Area Research Center at the UW-Milwaukee Libraries as well as a detailed timeline and bibliography.

Settlement houses first began appearing in the immigrant and working-class districts of American cities in the 1890s. Over the next four decades, immigrant men and women had a wide range of experiences with settlement house reformers. Some immigrants encountered the settlement houses as places of refuge and caring; at other times, they found reformers to be arrogant and patronizing. Born in Russian Poland around 1885, Anzia Yesierska came to America as a young girl in the 1890s. She rejected the traditional notions of womanhood and marriage dictated by her Jewish immigrant family. She toiled in sweatshops and laundries while she taught herself English and began writing. She married twice but both unions were brief. In her first story, "The Free Vacation House," published in 1915, Yesierska painted the middle-class reformers who tried to help the immigrant heroine as meddling busybodies who disregarded her right to dignity and privacy.

On the warm spring afternoon of March 25, 1911, a small fire broke out in a bin of rags at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on New York City's Lower East Side. In less than an hour, 146 people--most of them young immigrant women--died, trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes. One of the worst industrial fires in U.S. history, the Triangle fire galvanized working people and middle-class reformers alike, ultimately resulting in the passage of several laws designed to insure workplace safety. The fire received sensational and extensive coverage in all the New York City newspapers. William Gunn Shepherd, a young reporter for the New York World, happened to be at the scene of the fire when it began. From a phone across the street, he gave a minute-by-minute account of the unfolding events to his city editor. The World published them the following day.

In 1912 Woodrow Wilson probably received more black votes than any previous Democratic presidential candidate, but his administration proved to be a bitter disappointment to African Americans. Black voters had abandoned William Howard Taft, Wilson's Republican predecessor, in part because he had appointed or retained a mere thirty-one black officeholders. But Wilson made only nine black appointments, and eight of these were Republican carryovers. Worse still, Wilson extended and defended segregation in the federal civil service. Black workers were forced to use inferior and segregated washrooms, and screens were set up to separate black and white workers in the same government offices. African Americans protested Wilson's policies. One of the most famous protest delegations was led in 1914 by Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and Boston newspaper editor. Wilson found Trotter's manner "insulting" and dismissed the delegation. The encounter made front-page news, and subsequent rallies protested Wilson's poor treatment of Trotter. But the segregation of the federal service continued.

From the site:
Developed for use in middle and high school classrooms, Mission US engages students in the study of transformational moments in American history. Each mission consists of an interactive game and a set of curriculum materials that are aligned to national standards and feature document-based activities. The game immerses players in rich, historical settings and then empowers them to make choices that illuminate how ordinary people experienced the past. The Educator's Guide provides a wealth of resources and activities for both teachers and students, including primary source documents that show the broader social, political, and economic context of events and perspectives featured in the game.

In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools segregated according to race were "inherently unequal." State laws requiring school segregation therefore conflicted with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling challenged traditional attitudes and threatened a segregated way of life in the South validated in 1896 by the Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. The 1896 ruling permitted "separate but equal" public accommodations. In 1955, the Court ordained that desegregation of public schools should proceed "with all deliberate speed;" yet in many parts of the South, reactionary forces resisted. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus challenged efforts by the school board to institute a gradual school desegregation process and ordered state National Guard troops to defy Federal law and stop nine African-American students from attending an all-white high school. As television spread images of the subsequent mob violence around the world, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the following radio and television address on September 24, 1957, announced his reluctant response. Despite his disapproval of the Brown decision, Eisenhower, couching his address in the language of law and order, Cold War propaganda, and national pride, became the first president since Reconstruction to send Federal troops to protect the rights of African Americans. Although the nine students enrolled, resistance to desegregation continued as Faubus closed Little Rock high schools the following year and the number of desegregated schools in the South dropped precipitously in the ensuing years.

Consumer products came to the fore in the economy of the 1920s, putting new technologies like radios, toasters, and electric irons into even working-class homes. A quarter of a century separates these two model kitchens

In the early 20th century, an impressive array of intellectuals, social critics, and grassroots activists came together to launch a progressive education movement that sought broad-based change in American educational practice. At the heart of the progressive program lay a pedagogy that emphasized flexibility and critical thinking. This was coupled with the belief that schools should establish organic relationships with their communities, that curricula should confront broad social issues, and that public-school administrators should provide educational opportunities for all children. Thoroughly infused with the reformist sensibilities of Progressive-era politics, progressive education essentially looked to schools for the political and social regeneration of the nation. In this 1916 essay, Abraham Flexner proposed an experimental school based on these ideas. In 1917, he founded the Lincoln School in New York, which embraced many of these disparate elements and prospered for more than three decades, gaining respect and influence.

In the winter of 1876, testimony from a Pinkerton Detective Agency operative was used to destroy the Pennsylvania miners union, as 20 miners were accused of membership in a militant Irish organization called the Molly Maguires, convicted of murder, and hanged. The negative publicity from the trial effectively killed unionism in Pennsylvania mining for twenty years. This picture illustrated The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives, Allan Pinkerton's self-serving account of his detective agency's infiltration of the secret society of miners. Pinkerton's work in the service of the Reading Railroad typified the widespread use of private police and organized violence by railroads and other businesses to suppress unions.

Indian people of the Eastern Woodlands (northeastern North America) followed a seasonal schedule of hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and the cultivation of crops. They relied upon cultivated crops such as corn, beans, and squash for much of their food. Men primarily provided the meat and fish, while women were responsible for supplying cultivated vegetables along with wild berries, nuts, and fruit. While men helped clear the fields, women did the planting, weeding, and harvesting in the warm months. Many European observers remarked upon what they saw as drudgery inflicted upon Indian women. However, Joseph-Franois Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary and writer, was also a keen ethnographic observer of the details of Iroquois life. In this account, he noted the similarities between farm women's work in Europe and among the Iroquois.

Municipal workers led a wave of strikes that made the 1960's and early 1970's a highpoint for organized labor militancy in New York City. Teachers, social workers, sanitation workers, and parks employees all fought to improve work conditions, low-paying wage scales, and to reform the city's social services. Lillian Roberts arrived in New York in 1965 to organize low-paid and often disrespected hospital workers for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). At the time, AFSCME was competing with the Teamsters to represent the health workers, and the struggle was intense enough for Roberts to carry a brick in her purse. An African-American woman who had grown up on welfare in Chicago, Roberts proved adept at organizing hospital workers, many of whom were African-American women. She and AFSCME prevailed, paving the way for their local D.C. 37 to become the dominant New York municipal union.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work nationally, but in some cities and some industries unemployment was well over 50 percent. Equally troubling were the bank panics. Between 1929 and 1931, 4,000 banks closed for good; by 1933 the number rose to more than 9,000, with $2.5 billion in lost deposits. Banks never have as much in their vaults as people have deposited, and if all depositors claim their money at once, the bank is ruined. Millions of Americans lost their money because they arrived at the bank too late to withdraw their savings. The panics raised troubling questions about credit, value, and the nature of capitalism itself. And they made clear the unpredictable relationship between public perception and general financial health--the extent to which the economy seemed to work as long as everyone believed that it would. To stop the run on banks, many states simply closed their banks the day before Roosevelt's inauguration. Roosevelt himself declared a four-day "bank holiday" almost immediately upon taking office and made a national radio address on Sunday, March 12, 1933, to explain the banking problem. This excerpt from Roosevelt's first "fireside chat" demonstrated the new president's remarkable capacity to project his personal warmth and charm into the nation's living rooms. Audio is an excerpt of the full address.

During the war with Mexico, United States troops seized power. Captain John C. Fremont, western explorer and engineer, led an uprising of American settlers and Californios (Spanish ranching families in Alta California) who supported American annexation. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was born into a prominent family and pursued a career in the military and politics. He, like many other Californios, believed that the American presence promoted economic prosperity and political stability. During the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846, Fremont captured Sonoma and raised the flag of an independent California. Vallejo, however, was taken prisoner by Fremont's forces and held for two months. Despite his treatment, Vallejo maintained his American sympathies and went on to serve in the first state legislative body. When he and many others attempted to validate their Mexican land grants, he found his way blocked and eventually lost a ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court. Stripped of much of his influence and fortune, he wrote his five-volume "true history" of Californias, while living on a mere portion of his once vast holdings. Vallejo donated this history to H. H. Bancroft, the famous Californian historian.

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. The demand to change the Constitution to grant women the vote (raised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as early as 1878) was contentious enough; but the pressure for woman suffrage advocates to address other issues often gave the debate over the vote for women a particularly divisive tone. In an 1887 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Democratic Senator George G. Vest of Missouri put forth traditional arguments that a woman's proper place was at home, not the ballot box.

In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest--both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick was consulting household editor for Ladies Home Journal from 1912 to 1919 and the author of numerous books and pamphlets on scientific management in the home. First published in 1913, Frederick's The New Housekeeping opened with her conversion to the "efficiency gospel" under the tutelage of her husband and a male efficiency expert. In chapter 12, Frederick exhorted middle-class women to escape the drudgery of housework by shedding their bad attitudes--and as she enumerated those, she revealed some of the pervasive discontents of women in the home.

Women who settled the West in the years after the Civil War often faced harsh and unremitting toil. Laboring from well before dawn until well after the sun had set, women helped plant and harvest crops, raised large families, and kept house with rudimentary equipment. Long periods of isolation from neighbors and kin were common; social occasions or visits by travelers and kin were rare and cherished events. Mary Ann Hafen immigrated from Switzerland to Utah with her Mormon family in 1860 at age six and her first husband died when she was barely twenty. In this account, she described her move from Utah to Nevada in 1891 with her second husband and their polygamous family, as well as their subsequent life there.

When Boston native Benjamin Franklin entered Philadelphia in 1723, he had few coins in his pocket and scarce entrepreneurial skills. However, Franklin did have valuable training as a printer, and he came armed with some significant introductions to local printers. Printers and other craftsmen relied upon a network of masters, journeymen, and patrons to learn the craft and support themselves. Colonial printers needed expensive imported equipment, yet they had to make do with a limited market for their services--perhaps publishing a newspaper, an occasional pamphlet, or government publication. Franklin wrote his autobiography, from which this account is excerpted, many years after his career as an active printer had ended and his renown as a statesmen, scientist, and moral philosopher had spread.

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of showy and well-publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. The Red Scare reflected the same anxiety about free speech and obsession with consensus that had characterized the war years. The Nation, on April 17, 1920, recounted how a clothing salesman received six months in jail for saying that Vladimir Lenin was smart. Connecticut had established a Sedition Act that made it illegal to utter any speech deemed "injurious" to the United States.

The issue of protective legislation for women and mothers has divided reformers, labor unionists, legislators, courts, the military, and feminists since the end of the 19th century when a number of states passed statutes to limit women's work hours. At issue--equal treatment versus biological difference. During the Cold War era, this question informed the debate on the role of women in the military. Although the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 established a permanent presence for women in all branches of the armed forces, a new Army regulation in October 1949 required the discharge of female servicewomen with children under the age of 18. To guarantee passage of the Armed Forces Reserve Act of 1952, during the Korean War, a provision was dropped that would have reversed this regulation. Thus mothers of dependent children were ineligible to enlist in reserve units and were discharged after childbirth or adoption. In the following Congressional session, the Senate passed S. 1492, allowing the reinstatement of women with dependent children. The bill, however, died in the House Committee on Armed Services and failed to become law. The following testimony of Women's Army Corps Director Colonel Irene O. Galloway, to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, presented the Department of Defense position opposing the bill. Galloway argued that in the event of an emergency mobilization, such women could not and should not be counted on to leave their duties as mothers to join activated units. In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.