Some may think of farmers as conservative, but that view ignores a long tradition of rural radicalism in the United States. In the early years of the Great Depression, that radicalism found powerful expression in the subverting of farm foreclosures and tax sales. The technique was simple--when a farm was foreclosed for overdue taxes or failure to meet mortgage payments, neighbors would show up at the auction and intimidate any potential buyers. Then the farm and equipment would be purchased at a token price and returned to the original owner. Nation magazine reporter Ferner Nuhn witnessed such an auction sale in Iowa and described this practice in March 1933. These efforts saved the livelihood of many South Dakota and Iowa farmers who were devastated by the depression, but they were not enough. Between 1930 and 1935, about 750,000 farms were lost through foreclosure and bankruptcy sales.

The rise of mass circulation magazines combined with the reform impulses of the early 20th century to create the form of investigative journalism known as "muckracking" (so named by President Theodore Roosevelt after the muckrake in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who could "look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands"). In the 1890s, changes in printing technology made possible inexpensive magazines that could appeal to a broader and increasingly more literate middle-class audience. In October 1902 McClure's Magazine published what many consider the first muckraking article, Lincoln Steffens' "Tweed Days in St. Louis." The "muckrakers" wrote on many subjects, including child labor, prisons, religion, corporations, and insurance companies. But urban political corruption remained a particularly popular target, perhaps because it was so blatant, and perhaps because the differences between the muckrakers (mostly middle class and of native Protestant stock) and the political bosses (mostly from Catholic and immigrant backgrounds) made the rule of the immigrant machine appear as an alien intrusion, a corruption of American citizenship.

This lesson provides background information and lessons (correlated to academic standards) that incorporate the use of textbooks, maps, and discussions based on primary documents such as the U.S. Constitution. In this lesson students will examine the declaration of war with Mexico and the protests of those who opposed this act. They will also explore protesters of conscience against wars other than the Mexican War.

This lesson plan displays records from the 1880 and 1990 census schedules showing that Laura Ingalls, Almanzo Wilder, and families of the popular Little House on the Prairie series were not mere characters but were real people. Teaching activities are included to help students learn more about the census.

When President Eisenhower authorized troops under federal authority to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, he became the first president since Reconstruction to use federal forces to help enforce equal rights for African Americans. Using the example of Executive Order 10730, students will explore how executive orders can be used to enforce the law and examine how Eisenhower justified his actions.

In response to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, the NAACP selected nine African American students to attempt to integrate the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. After the students were prevented from attending the school by the governor and mobs of segregationists, President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne to escort the students into campus. But what was school like for students once they arrived? In this lesson, students examine five documents to learn about the experiences of one student, Minnijean Brown, in desegregating Central High School.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 brought an enormous chunk of Mexico to the United States. This added to the territory obtained by the annexation of Texas in 1845, but more than just territory was added. More than 75,000 Spanish-speaking residents became U.S. citizens, but the struggle to achieve that citizenship was long and often unsuccessful. Mexican-Americans lost political power and civil liberties quickly in Texas. Justice was hard to secure and the ranching country of South Texas became a landless borderland for Anglo and Hispano alike. Cattle thieves were rampant. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans also had to endure a terror campaign by the Texas Rangers, the state's leading law enforcement officers. One of those Rangers, N. A. Jennys described a complex pattern of ethnic conflict along the border in 1875 in his A Texas Ranger. The Rangers were founded in 1835 to fight Indians, formed a special corps in the Mexican War, and were re-established after the Civil War.

The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of America 1789-1820: Living the Revolution. Primary source materials include autobiographies, plays, essays, orations, addresses, political documents, letters, poems, cartoons, and more. Resources are divided into the topics: Predicament, Religion, Politics, Expansion, and Equality.

In his essay "Wealth," published in the North American Review in 1889, industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were bound by duty to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. (The essay later became famous under the title "The Gospel of Wealth.") But not everyone agreed with Carnegie's perspective. As shown by this newspaper article from 1901, the philanthropic gestures of such captains of industry as Andrew Carnegie were not always greeted with enthusiasm by the workers whose low-paid toil effectively underwrote such extravagant "gifts."

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--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 the Index of American Design, which set out to discover what was "American" in decorative arts: several hundred artists produced illustrations of thousands of objects in museums and private collections, a source that remains invaluable for historians of American art, society, and culture. In essays written as part of the New Deal's documentation of its own efforts, two editors of the Index of American Design explained the exhaustive search for a distinctive American art in the artifacts of everyday use and decoration.

In this lesson, students explore how Abraham Lincoln used the power of words in speeches, letters and other documents. In the Introductory Activity, students watch a segment from the PBS film Looking for Lincoln featuring Lincoln quotes and try to identify the origin of each quotation. In the first Learning Activity, students closely examine Lincoln’s use of words in the Gettysburg Address and learn that a short speech can be powerful. In the second Learning Activity, students discuss different reasons for writing letters and review some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters. In the Culminating Activity, students write their own speeches or letters and then present them to the class.

In this interdisciplinary lesson, students gather different facts about Lincoln through a variety of hands-on activities. In the Introductory Activity, students match vocabulary words with pictures to piece together a timeline of Abraham Lincoln’s life. In the Learning Activities, students gather various facts about the life of Lincoln. Students learn about Abraham Lincoln’s work as a lawyer on the prairie and also gain insight into Lincoln through objects and artifacts of his life. Students then select classroom objects that best tell a story about them and/or their class. In the Culminating Activity, students reflect upon the life of Lincoln, revisit the timeline of Lincoln’s life and create their own personal timelines.

AIDS emerged as a health crisis in the 1980's and early 1990's. While many Americans initially associated the disease with gay men, ignorance about AIDS contributed to its rapid spread, first to intravenous drug users and then to heterosexuals. The lack of information available to people at risk particularly affected health workers like Lorraine Theibaud, a registered nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. Theibaud and her colleagues, fearful about contracting or spreading the disease, were not given adequate information or training on how to protect themselves or their patients. When she discovered safety methods and technology that were not available at her hospital, Theibaud organized health workers to demand access to new safety techniques. Her campaign worked, winning workers new safety training and a permanent monitoring committee.

In October 1933 Chicana dressmakers in Los Angeles launched a citywide strike against the sweatshop conditions under which they toiled. An interview with Anita Andrade Castro, a young dressmaker who went on to become a longtime union activist, provided glimpses of the experience of the rank-and-file strikers. In two excerpts from a long interview done in 1972 by historian Sherna Gluck for the Feminist History Research Project, Castro described, first, her initiation into the union and, second, her arrest as a striker, her anxieties about the impact on her desire to become a citizen, and her encounter with a prostitute.

Created in 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided hope and employment for millions of unemployed workers and studied the human toll of the depression. One such study--a series of WPA-conducted interviews with Dubuque, Iowa families--found that middle-class Americans particularly felt the sting and shame of unemployment caused by the depression. In this interview, the Donners discussed the closing of their family-owned printing business in Chicago during tough times. Returning to live with Mrs. Donner's family in Dubuque in 1934, Mr. Donner remained unemployed for over a year before landing a job as a timekeeper on a WPA project, earning less than one-third his previous income.

Women's music is a genre for women, by women, and about women. Women's music formed and evolved from the second wave of the feminist movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s.The movement was started by lesbian performers such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, and Margie Adam, African-American musicians including Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, and Gwen Avery, and activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Peace activist Holly Near.
Women's music also refers to the wider industry of women's music that goes beyond the performing artists to include studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers who are also women.
Students will be able to investigate various songs, interpret their lyrics, and examine the perspectives behind the creation of the song.

In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. "Modern Marriage," an excerpt from Floyd Dell's Outline of Marriage (1926), set out the ideal of companionship between husband and wife. In this mock dialogue, a savvy young wife instructed a professor in the ways of modern marriage. She frankly endorsed birth control, simplified housekeeping, shared housework, and paid work for childless wives. At the same time, Dell's dialogue affirmed a romantic view of fundamental sexual differences. Generically named "The Young Woman," the female character averred that she chose motherhood as "fulfillment of my nature." Circulated by the American Birth Control League, the tract sought to win support for contraception by portraying its place in respectable, if "modern," marriages.

A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the second quarter of the 19th century. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable,and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mills led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. The young female operatives organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Harriet Hanson Robinson was one of those factory operatives; she began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women's suffrage. In 1898 she published Loom and Spindle, a memoir of her Lowell experiences, where she recounted the strike of 1836.

A look at the history of lumber, lumber camps and lumberjacks in Wisconsin.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is designated to provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation. Resource links through this website include: MIA/POW by war/conflict (including searchable databases) , profiles of unaccounted and accounted individuals, current identifications and searches, and video links to lab tours demonstrating how they do their work.