Michael Yantsos contracted AIDS through intravenous drug use while in prison in 1983. Yantsos was one of thousands who became infected before information about the disease or adequate treatment was available. As a result, Yantsos, like most Americans, knew next to nothing about the disease when AIDS struck during the early 1980's. Many associated the disease with gay men, who were its first victims, but the epidemic soon spread to other populations – first to intravenous drug users, and then to heterosexuals. Reagan era cuts in drug treatment programs and the "war" on drugs that pushed thousands of addicts into prison also contributed to the disease's spread.

While the exact origin of the loose-fitting "zoot suit," worn by Mexican-American and African-American youths in the 1940s, is obscure, its most important roots were among Mexican-American youths, or pachucos. In the context of World War II, this defiant gesture of group identity put the Mexican-American zoot suiters into direct conflict with another youth group--white servicemen stationed on the West Coast. Wartime rationing regulations effectively banned zoot suits because they ostensibly wasted fabric, so a combination of patriotism and racism impelled white soldiers to denounce Mexican-American wearers of the zoot suit as slackers and hoodlums. In June 1943, apparently provoked by stories that Mexican Americans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors, servicemen on leave began to attack Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. These anti-Mexican riots often featured the ritualistic stripping of the zoot suiters. Despite the brutality of these incidents, most press coverage was sympathetic to the servicemen. In this article, published in Common Ground just a few months after the riots, George I. Sanchez examined the social context in which the pachuco movement developed and offered a detailed picture of the racism and discrimination faced by Mexican Americans in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many colonists arrived as indentured servants or bondsmen who served a term of service before receiving their freedom. This practice meant that impoverished Germans and other Europeans financed their passage across the Atlantic. Between 1749 and 1754 more than 30,000 Germans came to Pennsylvania, and by mid-century they constituted about one third of the colony's population. Gottlieb Mittelberger arrived in Philadelphia in late 1750 aboard the Osgood, along with 500 of his fellow countrymen. With fortunes better than most, he settled as an organist and schoolmaster in New Providence, a German farming community outside Philadelphia. He found much distasteful about his new home and returned in 1754 to write an expose warning Germans about fraudulent accounts of ideal conditions in America.

In 1913, silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike. Journalist John Reed--one of the artists and intellectuals who made New York City's Greenwich Village a center of bohemian culture--decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden, ending with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the "Internationale," the anthem of international socialism. Neither the pageant nor the strike were triumphant: the pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism. The pageant also focused media attention on the strike, as shown in these June 1913 articles from Current Opinion and Survey.

New Deal arts projects were guided by two novel assumptions: artists were workers and art was cultural labor worthy of government support. That commitment was demonstrated most dramatically in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program for depression-era artists. Some painters and sculptors continued working in their studios with the assistance of relief checks and the occasional supervision of WPA administrators--their work was placed in libraries, schools, and other public buildings. Others lent their talents to community art centers that made art training and appreciation accessible to wider audiences. FAP also sponsored hundreds of murals and sculptures designed for municipal buildings and public spaces. In essays written as part of the New Deal's documentation of its own efforts, artist Louis Guglielmi found the social consciousness of the 1930s and the support of the New Deal a spur to his artistic development. Artist Julius Bloch praised the FAP for bringing art to new audiences, including his African-American subjects.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the construction of the Panama Canal. 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.

On September 19, 1873 the nation plunged into the longest and most severe economic depression up to that time. Thousands of businesses, large and small, went bankrupt, and the human toll was immense: fully a million workers were unemployed by 1874, and in some cities, unemployment levels reached 25 percent. The depression delivered a fatal blow to Reconstruction, as northern businessmen shifted their attention away from the rights of African Americans. It also nearly destroyed the labor movement, as pre-depression wage gains were erased and union membership plummeted. Despite the ghastly appearance of the figure representing financial panic, this New York Daily Graphic cover cartoon of September 29, 1873, subscribed to the belief that such financial busts" cleansed the economy

This iTunes U course/lesson is an overview of how to write a MELCON paragraph. In order to access the course, one must first access iTunes U through the Apple iTunes store, and then search for Paragraph Writing within the Courses category. The course is free and accessible on PCs and iOS devices.

Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, by 1957 only 20 percent of eligible African Americans voted, due in part to intimidation and discriminatory state requirements such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such Act since 1875, ostensibly sought to remedy the situation, but in its final weakened form, the legislation served more as a symbol. For example, an amendment allowed officials charged with denying voting rights to be tried by juries, service on which was restricted in the South to whites only. The law, however, also created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent government agency of six commissioners formed to investigate charges of civil rights deprivations, collect information on discrimination, and advise the President and Congress on the topic. In the following 1958 hearing, a taxpaying African American related roadblocks he encountered when trying to register to vote.

The story of commercial canning in Wisconsin turns out to be the story of the pea! The history of canning in Wisconsin.

In 1913, John Reed (later famous for his firsthand account of the Russian Revolution) met Bill Haywood, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Reed ventured to Paterson, New Jersey, to learn about the Wobbly-led silk workers' strike then in progress and decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden and ended with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the "Internationale," the anthem of international socialism. Unfortunately, neither the pageant nor the strike ended on a triumphant note. The pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." In a campaign sponsored by the Food Administration, Good Housekeeping magazine published a December 1917 editorial seeking recruits for an army of "kitchen soldiers." The editorial portrayed women's domestic work as part of the U.S. military effort and solicited women's direct participation, asking readers to sign a pledge to conserve food.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the politics of the Gilded Age. 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 New York Herald, more than any other of the penny newspapers, published topical pictures. Most of the time, the pictures were simple maps or crude portraits of people in the news. Occasionally, special events received greater pictorial coverage. But when the Herald published five detailed pictures on its cover showing New York's 1845 funeral procession honoring Andrew Jacksonthe first full-page cover devoted to pictures ever to appear in a U.S. daily newspaperrival newspapers charged that the same engravings had been used to illustrate Queen Victoria's coronation, William Henry Harrison's funeral, and the celebration of the opening of the Croton reservoir. The Herald discontinued illustrating the news after 1850, leaving that task to the weekly illustrated press.

Labor conflicts in Pennsylvania's coal mines and steel mills during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were usually violent. In order to insure that they had the upper hand and to avoid relying on local police (who were sometimes sympathetic to strikers), mine and mill operators set up their own "Coal and Iron Police" as early as the 1870s. Public reaction against these private armies led the Pennsylvania legislature to create a Department of State Police as an ostensibly more neutral and highly-trained law enforcement body. But the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. In the 1910 strike at Bethlehem Steel, the state police proved to be as pro-management as the Coal and Iron Police and even more brutal. The following testimony from workers and labor leaders appearing before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915 underscored the anger and discontent of common laborers with the military mindset of the newly formed Pennsylvania State Police.

Largely at the behest of American bankers, U.S. marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. By 1919, Haitian Charlemagne Péralte had organized more than a thousand cacos, or armed guerrillas, to militarily oppose the marine occupation. The marines responded to the resistance with a counterinsurgency campaign that razed villages, killed thousands of Haitians, and destroyed the livelihoods of even more. The military atrocities and abuse of power during the Caco War of 1919–1920 led to a U.S. Senate investigation into the occupation. In these excerpts from the "Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti," the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo interviewed Haitians about marine conduct in the guerrilla war against the cacos.

Between 1910 and 1920, 500,000 African Americans left the South for northern cities, pulled by the promise of jobs in booming wartime industries and pushed by disfranchisement, poverty, racial violence, and lack of educational opportunities. The Great Migration" placed a strain on cities like Chicago

The best-known image of the Spanish-American War is that of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback charging with his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba. But not only was the role of the Rough Riders exaggerated, it also displaced attention from the black soldiers who made up almost 25 percent of the U. S. force in Cuba. Indeed, the Spanish troops, who called the black soldiers "smoked Yankees," were often more respectful of the black troops than were the white officers who commanded them. Here Sergeant-Major Frank W. Pullen, Jr. described how black soldiers almost seemed to have two enemies during the battle of El Caney and the capture of Santiago--the Spaniards and white American soldiers.

Many travelers made their way to Philadelphia and the Mid-Atlantic colonies in the eighteenth century in search of economic opportunity, but not all experienced the fabulous success of Benjamin Franklin. William Moraley, born in 1699 into a modest artisanal family, was more typical. Economic cycles were often critical in determining migration patterns; approximately 73,000 people left for the British colonies in the1730s, twice the average of earlier in the century (17,000 arrived in Philadelphia). Like half of all European emigrants to North America in the eighteenth-century, Moraley faced grim conditions at home. After the death of his father, a journeyman clockmaker, Moraley possessed scarce resources and was imprisoned for debt. The thirty-year-old Moraley bound himself for five years as a servant in the British North American colonies. He titled his picaresque account of life in Britain and America The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant.