In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education—most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act—and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states—three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, a representative of working women and members of the National Woman's Party, including founder Alice Paul (1885–1977), argued that protective legislation harmed, rather than helped, working women by restricting their opportunities to acquire higher-paying jobs.

Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. Preaching tradition and timeless value, American evangelicals adopted innovative techniques for spreading their message. Billy Sunday, the most famous preacher of the early 20th century, began his career as a professional baseball player. He emphasized a rugged, swaggering, masculine Christianity spoken in plain, slangy English. Widely regarded as the model for novelist Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, he combined the modern and the traditional in attacks on liquor, like this excerpt from one of Sunday's sermons. Sunday denounced the government's attempt to regulate and tax liquor as immoral. In his famously forceful and slangy style, he insisted that America needed God, not liquor.

In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt announced a "Good Neighbor Policy" that promised a more friendly and less interventionist policy toward Latin America. The policy was prompted as much by Latin American resistance to U.S. intervention as by the U.S. government's benevolence. In 1937, the policy was put to the test when Bolivia charged that Standard Oil of New Jersey had defrauded the Bolivian government; Bolivia canceled the company's oil drilling rights and confiscated its facilities. True to its new policy, the United States avoided military intervention and instead pressured Bolivia by withholding loans and technical assistance. The following year, a war of words erupted between the government of Mexico and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey over who owned the rights to exploit a portion of Mexico's oil reserves. After U.S. oil companies refused to accept the arbitration terms of the Mexican labor board, Mexican President Lzaro Crdenas expropriated oil company properties worth an estimated half billion dollars. In The True Facts about the Expropriation of the Oil Companies' Properties in Mexico, the Mexican government clarified its position to the American public and justified expropriation of Standard Oil's property.

The years following World War I in the United States saw devastating race riots around the nation, in cities small and large. But the 1921 Tulsa race riot, a 24-hour rampage by white Tulsans, was one of the most vicious and intense race riots in American history before or since, resulting in the death of anywhere from 75 to 250 people and the burning of more than 1,000 black homes and businesses. Although the city's white leaders assured the nation's press that restitution and reconciliation would be forthcoming, other whites denied any responsibility for the carnage. In an article in the magazine Survey, Amy Comstock, personal secretary to the editor of the Tulsa Tribune, attempted to deflect attention from Tulsa's white citizenry by fixing blame for the 1921 riot on an ostensibly impoverished and licentious black community. Comstock argued that the responsibility for improving conditions, and for enforcing law and order, in this bustling community rested with white officials.

This teaching guide from the OER Project outlines their courses, PD, and other resources.

The OER Project is a coalition of educators and historians committed to boosting student engagement and achievement through transformational social studies programs. By empowering classroom teachers with better curricula, content, and a vibrant community, we deliver more compelling, impactful, and usable histories. “OER” stands for open educational resources. When you grab a free worksheet off Pinterest for your tenth graders, that’s an OER resource. We recognize the value of OER resources, but want to go beyond the typical content repository approach—we aim to improve OER by providing coherency, support, and community.

Currently, the OER Project offers two courses—Big History Project (BHP) and World History Project (WHP)—both of which are completely free, online, and adaptable to different standards and classroom needs. Unlike textbooks, lesson websites, and other commercial products, everything has been purposely built to truly empower teachers and leave traditional history courses in—sorry for the pun—the past. We also offer short, standalone courses for those who want to try the OER Project approach, but aren’t yet ready to take on a full history course. Our current standalone options include Project X, a course that uses data to explore historical trends to help make predictions about the future; Project Score, a course that uses writing tools and the use of Score, a free, online essay-scoring service to help support student writing; and Climate Project, an evidence-based overview of the global carbon problem that culminates in students developing a plan of action they can implement locally

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people during World War II, the U.S. government viewed its popular performers--singers, dancers, and actors--as a crucial weapon. Although a number of stars directly joined the military, those who made movies probably contributed the most to the war effort. Even before Pearl Harbor, Treasury Department officials began making plans to raise money to finance the war by selling bonds to the public, which would be repaid with interest after the war was over. During the war, private citizens and organizations bought $190 billion worth of war bonds at the low interest rate of 1.8 percent. In addition to their work as bond sellers, movie stars also encouraged the populace to follow wartime policies, particularly exhorting them (or joking with them) to observe rationing and save scrap metals. One of the more unusual public service announcements was this 1942 song from Tony Pastor and His Orchestra: "Obey Your Air Raid Warden."

In the late 19th century, William Graham Sumner, an Episcopal minister turned academic sociologist, applied Darwin's scientific ideas of evolution to the social sphere to produce his theory of the economic survival of the fittest. Sumner's writings justified government inaction in the face of vast social dislocations caused by rapid industrialization and the periodic economic depressions that accompanied it. Critics of the new industrial order rejected the rigid "laws" propounded by Sumner and other conservative social scientists. They countered with their own laws of social development based on alternative readings of nature and science. Some labor thinkers proposed a sort of working-class social Darwinism, which challenged the ideas of conservatives. Other critics simply greeted the ideas of conservatives with derision. Phillips Thomson's 1878 poem, "The Political Economist and the Tramp," poked fun at the social Darwinism championed by conservatives who preferred to believe that the working class was fated to be perpetually bested by the "fitter" middle class.

Coal mining and railroad work were the two most dangerous trades in the United States in the early 20th century. Coal miners frequently died in spectacular explosions and cave-ins that could kill dozens or even hundreds at a time. Although most testimony about coal mining disasters came from survivors and observers, the men who suffocated to death in the Fraterville, Tennessee mines in May 1902 left behind their own grim account. Trapped in the mine after an explosion and with their air rapidly depleting, they wrote letters to their loved ones describing their final moments.

On the morning of October 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday"), billions of dollars in stock value were wiped out before lunch. Prices recovered somewhat that afternoon, but the Great Crash was underway. The next day President Herbert Hoover counseled reassurance, but as stock prices continued to plummet Hoover's reassurances rang increasingly hollow. The president's efforts to reassure the public did not stop, in part as he tried to convince voters that his policies were bringing recovery. In 1932, Edward Angly published a short book filled with optimistic forecasts about the economy offered by Hoover and his associates. The sarcastic title, Oh Yeah?, reflected his contempt for political leaders who did not seem to know what was happening to the country. These 17 quotations from or about Herbert Hoover proved that he was a poor prophet of the hard times ahead.

The most visible signs of industrialization in mid nineteenth-century America occurred in mushrooming factory towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, but changes in manufacturing also took place in metropolises like New York City. Waves of immigrants entered the port cities 'small workshops, sites of intense craft activity. Cabinetmaking resisted mechanization and unskilled labor because the trade required intricate work on complex pieces of furniture. In his unpublished memoir German immigrant Ernst Hagen recalled that many of the leading names in nineteenth-century furniture, well represented today in museum collections, presided over large shops of toiling workers. Some employed over two hundred hands. The post-Civil War rise of western factories disrupted this urban system; skilled workers either found other employment or were relegated to margins of the trade such as repair work.

Although historians often speak of a "Populist movement" in the 1880s, it wasn't until 1892 that the People's or Populist Party was formally organized. The Omaha Platform, adopted by the founding convention of the party on July 4, 1892, set out the basic tenets of the Populist movement. The movement had emerged out of the cooperative crusade organized by the Farmer's Alliance in the 1880s. The preamble was written by Minnesota lawyer, farmer, politician, and novelist Ignatius Donnelly. Delegates to the convention embraced the platform with great enthusiasm. Many of the specific proposals urged by the Omaha Platform--the graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the direct election of Senators, the eight-hour day--won enactment in the progressive and New Deal eras of the next century. Yet at least one historian has argued that the fundamental cooperative and democratic spirit of the agrarian radicals was lost along the way.

In the decades following the Civil War, many white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and journalists campaigned for the creation of a "New South" economy that would emphasize modern industrial development. With the plantation system no longer dominating the southern economy, the South could build its own factories to turn raw materials into finished products: cotton into cloth, tobacco into cigarettes, coal and iron ore into steel. White southern leaders were not the only ones who argued that industrialization was the key to future Southern progress. A small group of black businessmen and landowners, who had taken advantage of the opportunities open to African Americans during Reconstruction, also supported the ideal of a New South based on industrial growth. In the following 1896 statement, Warren C. Coleman, a black North Carolina businessman, called on his fellow black Southerners to support his plan to build a cotton mill that would be operated by black workers.

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. Frederick's pamphlet, You and Your Laundry (1922), instructed women in the daunting complexities of washing clothes--a process comprising fifteen different steps. You and Your Laundry also illustrated the close alliance between scientific housework and consumption. Written under the sponsorship of the Hurley Machine Company, Frederick's pamphlet frequently invoked its brand name and products. The pamphlet ended with a pitch for buying on installment, a payment plan that helped to spur consumption.

Most people assume that the pledge of allegiance is as old as the Republic. In fact, it was invented in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, director of youth activities for the magazine Youth's Companion. Bellamy drew up the "pledge to the flag" (as it was then called) and publicized it as part of the activities surrounding the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in America. On Columbus Day in 1892, ten million children recited Bellamy's pledge and it soon became a daily ritual in American schoolrooms. Its widespread adoption reflected both the anxieties about insuring an "American" identity in the midst of a renewed wave of European immigration and a growing nationalistic feeling that would soon help foster American expansionism overseas. The salute to the flag, described below, was dropped in 1942 because of its similarity to Hitler's fascist salute, and replaced with the "modern" salute (right hand over heart). In 1954--in the midst of another wave of American anxiety (this time about domestic and foreign Communism)--the words "under God" were added to the pledge in an effort to distinguish true Americans from "Godless Communists."

While experimental television broadcasts were first transmitted in the 1920s, mass production of television sets did not occur until after World War II. By 1960 the number of sets in the U.S. had surpassed the number of homes. With this relatively swift introduction of television into domestic American life, concern was voiced over the harmful influence that watching television might have on the nation's children. Although Congress held its first hearing on the subject in 1952, they chose not to take any action to interfere with the industry, in part because that year the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content. In 1954 and 1955, Congress conducted additional hearings to investigate whether television--along with other mass media products that appealed to children, such as comic books and motion pictures--had anything to do with the documented rise in incidents of juvenile crime. As the renowned media researcher Paul Lazarsfeld testified, studies showed that the hearings, which themselves were televised, only led to worry among viewers rather than to practical measures to correct any perceived problem. In the following testimony from the 1955 hearings, child psychologist Eleanor E. Maccoby discussed her research findings, while Lazarsfeld advocated the funding of long-term projects. Both stressed the limitations of research for providing reliable evidence that would definitively link juvenile delinquency to television viewing.

Around 1903, employers began to mount organized campaigns to break the power of labor unions. Employers had a broad array of tactics at their disposal, including blacklists, strikebreakers, and court injunctions against strikers' use of boycotts and sympathy strikes. Although employers had reliable allies in state and local police forces, they continued to hire their own private police--detective agencies that used secret operatives to disrupt unions and supplied thugs to protect strikebreakers during strikes. Most employers did not, however, need to resort to either spies or state police to break unions. The simplest expedient was to simply fire employees who were perceived as potential troublemakers. Former department store worker Sylvia Schulman testified in 1914 before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations about her experience being fired from her job at A. I. Mann & Sons in Brooklyn merely for joining the retail clerks' union.

Although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt neither came from the working and lower classes nor always acted in their interests, he did, at significant moments, speak for and to the "forgotten man." One of those key moments came in January 1937 when he was inaugurated for his second term--the first time that the presidential inauguration was held on January 20 rather than March 4 (a change brought about by the twentieth amendment). Roosevelt's stirring words help explain why that one-third of the nation went to the polls in November 1936 and reelected him in one of the great landslides in American political history.

Thomas Minor was born in England and came to New England in 1630. By 1668, when this selection from his journal was written, Minor, his wife Grace, and their children were living in what is now Stonington, a town on the Connecticut coast. Indians lived nearby, and the journal shows Minor and his family interacting with them. Minor was a farmer, and he also had a number of public responsibilities. These included town treasurer, leader of the militia, selectman, and brander of horses. He also participated in church and in town meetings. This selection records one year in Minor's life. He began the year in March, as people in England and New England did until the mid-eighteenth century. While his spelling is idiosyncratic and therefore difficult to read, the journal is a valuable record of how written English looked at that time--and probably also of how Minor pronounced his words.

Farming was not the only occupation in early nineteenth-century rural America. Many young entrepreneurs were able to take advantage of the countryside's increasing commercial activity and growing consumer desires by taking to the road to work. Chester Harding, born in Conway, Massachusetts, survived by working in a variety of country crafts as he related in his 1866 autobiography My Egotistigraphy. His early skill in painting signs led to his painting faces, and he grew more expert in portraiture as he practiced on his business patrons, providing them with a rare likeness to display in their homes. Initially far more artisan than artist, Harding, unlike most of his fellow itinerant and self-taught colleagues, ended up one of the most renowned academic artists in antebellum America.