Charles Woodmason, a newly ordained Anglican minister, left the comforts of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1761 to travel for six years in the Carolina backcountry as an itinerant minister, seeking to bring the established church to areas where it had not taken hold. He also became a fierce partisan of the Regulator movement, a frontier rebellion attempting to obtain a greater voice and fairer claims for backcountry residents who resented the monopolization of power by the coastal leaders. Although Woodmason was hostile toward the colony's elite for their lack of concern over the political and especially religious life of the frontier, the British migrant held traditional beliefs about morality and social order. He was appalled by the immoral and irreligious behavior rampant on the frontier, as he made clear in this selection from his journal of 1768.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, President Bush, whose popularity at home was flagging, opted to respond with massive military force even though many Americans, including Congressional leaders, believed economic sanctions would be effective. Bush initiated a massive, deadly air assault on January 15, 1991, and a brief ground assault followed four weeks later. The Gulf War killed thousands of Iraqi civilians and devastated most of the country's infrastructure, including hospitals and water systems. Many Americans who had previously questioned military action supported the war effort once it began, but many did not. In a break with their stance during previous wars, including World War II and Vietnam, many unions opposed military action in Kuwait. The union members recorded here articulated their reasons for opposing the war at an anti-war protest.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. They first came to be valued by northern white audiences in the late-19th century. Later, folklorists began collecting (and eventually recording) traditional southern music. John and Alan Lomax recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. They recorded "Long John," a work song, sung by a man identified as "Lightning" and a group of his fellow black convicts at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas in 1934. Black prisoners working in gangs to break rocks and clear swamps relied on the repeated rhythms and chants of work songs (originating in the forced gang labor of slavery) to set the pace for their collective labor. "Long John" mixed religious and secular concerns, including the notion of successful escape from bondage, a deeply felt desire of both slaves and prisoners.

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 lesson offers primary documents illustrating how this groundbreaking African American baseball player advocated for civil rights. It incorporates the material into lessons on civil rights history, character education, and civic responsibility.

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."

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.

In this video interview, recorded for Eyes on the Prize, Freedom Ride organizer James Farmer describes the interracial bus rides through the South that tested desegregation and sparked white resistance.

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.

These resources regarding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II highlight the story of internment and redress through two collections at HSP - the Iwata Family Papers and the papers of Philadelphia activist Sumiko Kobayashi, that represent the experience of internees who were relocated, and those who led in the movement for redress.

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.

Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case is a tool for students to engage in critical thinking and historical inquiry. As the plot unfolds, players come across primary source materials. Players use the same skills as real historians: investigation, identification, corroboration and contextualizing evidence. To win each challenge, players must piece together the evidence to argue their case. The game was designed by WPT Education, Field Day Lab, and a cohort of 3rd-5th grade social studies teachers. The game was tested by students throughout the state of Wisconsin.