The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: "To Bob or Not to Bob?" The short, sculpted hair of the "bob" marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as "America's Sweetheart"), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.

The human cost of World War I was enormous. The prolonged trench warfare ended the lives of 1.8 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, 1.4 million French, 1.2 million Austro-Hungarians, and over 900,000 British. 112,000 American troops also died, mostly from disease. Many of those who didn't die were left with horrible wounds. Here, plaster casts of the mutilated faces of soldiers wounded in battle are shown next to their reconstructions, carried out with the aid of new prosthetic devices. They represent one legacy of the First World War and the imperfect attempts to contend with its gruesome effects.

Newsela is an innovative way to build reading comprehension with nonfiction. Daily news articles are grouped by topics such as Arts, Sports, War and Peace. Teachers search by topic, grade level, standards, and available quizzes, and they can also create a class and assign articles to read. Each article has five available lexiles to help differentiate for students. Students can practice targeted reading skills through typed written responses.

During the 1980's and 1990's international free trade agreements encouraged by the United States government increased the power and global reach of multinational corporations. The most controversial of these agreements, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), made it easier for U.S. companies to buy low cost goods from Mexico, which were often produced by U.S. subsidiaries that migrated to take advantage of low-cost labor. Organized labor and most liberal Democrats opposed NAFTA because they feared the loss of American jobs and the increased bargaining power of corporations who could easily transfer production overseas. As Nikos Valence, head of the Fair Trade Campaign, explained, these agreements also stimulated international labor solidarity, as workers in different countries struggled against the free reign of capital and in many cases against the same corporations.

Though people had practiced methods of fertility control for hundreds of years, the 20th century saw the advent of more reliable technologies that allowed a sharper separation between sex and reproduction. Before World War I, birth control advocates confronted numerous and often hostile opponents. By the 1920s, though, changing sexual ideologies made such ideas more widely acceptable. The major figure in the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, began her crusade as a militant radical whose birth control agitation grew out of her nursing experience in working-class communities. In her short-lived journal, The Woman Rebel, Sanger proclaimed, "A woman's body belongs to herself alone" and openly defended unwed motherhood. In these excerpts from The Woman Rebel, Sanger announced the journal's feminist and radical commitments and reported on "The Post Office Ban," the U.S. Post Office's suppression of the journal under the Comstock laws (which prohibited the use of the U.S. mails to distribute information about contraception).

The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" laws when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that a Louisiana statute requiring "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black railroad passengers did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment clause guaranteeing all citizens equal protection of the laws. (Jim Crow, the colloquial term for segregation, referred to a blackface character popular on the minstrel stage.) Jim Crow legislation extended throughout the South to schools, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, buses, theaters, hospitals, parks, courthouses, and even cemeteries. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that a Virginia statute requiring segregated seating interfered with interstate commerce and was thus invalid, Jim Crow travel laws remained in effect in the South. The following letter submitted to a House committee holding hearings in 1954 on legislation to end segregated travel attested to the substandard condition of railroad cars for blacks. The bills under consideration never made it to the House floor for a vote. In 1956, following a boycott by the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, against the city's segregated bus system, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

In this excerpt from Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson told the story of black soldiers and canteen workers. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. Their account commemorated and celebrated African-American participation in the war, even as it noted segregation and discrimination within the effort to "save the world for democracy." The YMCA was one of a very few examples of interracial effort and cooperation during this period; nonetheless, Hunton and Johnson note that some workers of the organization failed to live up to its ideals. German propaganda directed to African-American soldiers used such examples of racism to decry the hypocrisy of the United States and to exhort black soldiers to surrender to the German army.

Early nineteenth-century workers followed traditional workshop practices with a limited pace and intensity to their labor. Breaks for drink and food punctuated the workday in these recollections of a ship's captain of a New York City shipyard from 1835 (published in George McNeill's late nineteenth-century history of the labor movement). However, employers challenged these customs with the goal of obtaining greater efficiency and profit. Mechanics and artisans responded collectively by organized strikes or "turnouts." Despite the obstacles of planning these early collective actions, the ship carpenters 'strike for a ten-hour day proved successful in the mid-1830s. Even as new manufacturing complexes rose in Lowell and other factory towns, work patterns remained irregular in many trades; some craftsmen faced a growing division of labor and accompanying loss of independence. Irregular hours and unemployment always loomed, while cold winters would thrust many of those working outdoors out of work for the harshest season.

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from a 1969 Senate hearing, Frank Pebeahsy, a Comanche Indian from Oklahoma, presented his experiences as a migrant farmworker. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

For early twentieth-century Progressive reformers committed to social justice, widespread child labor--especially in coal mines, textile mills, and department stores--was particularly disturbing. And as with other Progressive crusades, the expos was a favorite tool. Probably the most influential and certainly the most widely read of the Progressive-era exposs of child labor was John Spargo's The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906). Spargo was a British granite cutter who became a union organizer and socialist and gained his formal education through extension courses at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1901, he emigrated to the United States where he became a leader of the conservative wing of the American Socialist Party. In the following excerpt, Spargo described work at the coal breaker, the area outside the mine where coal was sorted and graded, mostly by young children.

In the 1920s, in part because of prohibition and the emergence of speakeasies, homosexuality became more open. At the same time, psychologists, physicians, and social reformers had been at work for several decades attempting to study, classify, categorize, and label human sexual behavior. Practices that had long been common, or at least tolerated, were now being viewed as problematic. In an excerpt from Ten Sex Talks to Girls, published in 1914, Dr. Irving Steinhardt of New York warned that any affection or intimacy--indeed, any sort of physical contact between women at all--carried the potential for disease, pauperism, and death. Steinhardt's book attempted to classify as dangerous forms of intimacy between women that previously had seemed completely "natural."

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 26, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. In this brief excerpt from their testimony before the Factory Investigation Commission, New York City Fire Chief Edward F. Croker and Fire Marshall William Beers commented on the safety lapses--the locking of an exit door, the inadequate fire escapes, and the overcrowded factory floor--that led to the deaths of the Triangle workers.

When the United States went to war against Germany in 1917, German Americans faced vicious and unfair attacks on their loyalty. Many anti-German incidents were not recorded, but they lived on powerfully in people's memories. In this 1976 interview, Lola Gamble Clyde, the daughter of an Irish-born Presbyterian minister and a teenager during World War I, described the "hysteria" that faced German Americans in rural Latah County, Idaho.

Many Americans blamed themselves for their troubles during the early years of the Great Depression. Middle-income workers, while financially better prepared for the economic hard times than were most workers, were psychologically vulnerable and often felt shame at even modest economic setbacks. With men out of work and deeply depressed, women also found it difficult to keep going. Mama

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

—The Constitution of the United States, Amendment I

Do you recognize freedom of speech when you see or hear it? As the United States apprehensively approached World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt listed four American freedoms in his State of the Union address to Congress in 1941. In order to make these abstract ideas more widely understood and appreciated, Norman Rockwell illustrated how these freedoms appear in everyday American life. In this lesson students learn to recognize freedom of speech within their community, state, country, and world. After examining Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech, they will report on a town meeting and create a collage featuring examples of free speech.
How does Norman Rockwell’s painting Freedom of Speech illustrate the American right of free speech?
How is the First Amendment evident in everyday local community life?
Explain how artist Norman Rockwell composed this painting to idealize the right of ordinary American citizens to speak their ideas without fear of censure
Identify the five freedoms in the First Amendment (religion, assembly, press, petition, and speech) and be able to give an example of each in daily/community life, state community, national community, and international community

The North Star has been an important symbol in the African American community. A beacon of hope and freedom for some, a symbol of knowledge and information for others and a celestial representation of purpose and reason. On this website, students will explore African American history through digital activities on the Smithsonian Learning Lab platform. The activities, or collections, have gathered objects, stories, videos and thinking questions all in one place. It allows students to work through a "Learning Lab" and analyze primary objects in the museum to learn how to practice Historical Thinking, Reading Silences, Change & Continuity & Historical Context.

This collection uses primary sources to explore northern draft riots that occurred during the Civil War. 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.

These are source data and an article from the Journal "Nature" to use with students for anchoring the effects of Global Climate change on ice durations of local lakes. The article describes ice conditions and methadologies of 6 Wisconsin Lakes. There are links to raw data that can be used to generate graphs and develop sensemaking for students.  

In its decision in the case of U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court deemed Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because U.S. law allowed only free whites to become naturalized citizens. The court conceded that Indians were "Caucasians" and that anthropologists considered them to be of the same race as white Americans, but argued that "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences." The Thind decision also led to successful efforts to denaturalize some who had previously become citizens. This represented a particular threat in California, where a 1913 law prohibited aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land. Only in 1946 did Congress, which was beginning to recognize that India would soon be independent and a major world power, pass a new law that allowed Indians to become citizens and also established a small immigration quota. But major immigration to the United States from South Asia did not begin until after immigration laws were sharply revised in 1965.

Anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph R. McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman's foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. McCarthy's apocalyptic rhetoric--he portrayed the Cold War conflict as "a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity"--made critics hesitate before challenging him, as his purported lists of Communist conspirators multiplied to include employees in government agencies, the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, the United Nations, and the military. Most of those accused by McCarthy were helpless to defend their ruined reputations and faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. The following editorial from the popular magazine Collier's sharply criticized McCarthy's tactic of trying to scare away advertisers from a magazine that had publicly criticized him. Collier's made sure, however, to announce to its readers--some of whom responded in letters included below--their own solemn concern about "Communist infiltration in government."