This website provides an elaborate overview of the Polar Regions; the Arctic and Antarctic.  Students can use this site to research polar animals, investigate the habitats-learn history, science, environment, and compare/contrast the two regions.  Teachers can use this site to provide information to their students.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 placed the full weight of the federal government behind the apprehension of runaway slaves. This fact was best illustrated by the arrest of Thomas Sims, who escaped slavery in Georgia. Sims was arrested in Boston in April 1851 and, under the Fugitive Slave Law, returned to his owner. The city's abolitionist movement agitated for his release and large crowds surrounded the courthouse in which Sims was incarcerated. But these efforts, which included plans to forcibly free the prisoner, did not succeed. This picture from a Boston illustrated weekly shows how Sims was conducted by three hundred armed police and marshals to a navy ship that carried him back to slavery. Upon his return south, Sims was sold to a new master in Mississippi. He escaped in 1863.

When women first voted in national elections following ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, participants in the women's movement and others predicted that women voters would be an important factor in a shift toward increased social legislation and anti-corruption in politics. An estimated one-third of the eligible female voters actually voted in 1920, compared to two-thirds of eligible male voters. Women's impact on national elections was not felt to a significant degree until the 1952 election, when the proportion of women voting for Dwight D. Eisenhower was six percent higher than the percentage the candidate pulled among men. Before the 1956 presidential election, the popular magazine Collier's sent writer Walter Davenport to bipartisan Marion Country, Indiana, to survey women's attitudes on candidates and issues. Many of the women whose views Davenport included in the resultant article refuted accepted beliefs of seasoned male politicians. Their paraphrased opinions, however, also employed essentialist gender stereotypes of the time--that "women are all house cleaners at heart" and that "a woman lacks the administrative qualities of a man"--to explain perceived voting tendencies. Davenport's findings ignored factors that social scientists have considered to be important in accounting for voting patterns, such as education, income level, age, and race. He did, however, report the opinion of two female teachers that the formation of women's groups during and since World War II--when more women joined the workforce--had resulted in increased political consciousness among women, an opinion that scholars have since found valid. Although by the 1964 election, more women were voting than men, a viable national female voting bloc has not surfaced in the U.S.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. In one of many parodies of "The White Man's Burden" from the time, labor editor George McNeill penned the satirical "Poor Man's Burden," published in March, 1899.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Populist Movement. 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.

Attorney-General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography was appointed during Ronald Reagan's second presidential term to appease conservative and fundamentalist supporters who felt the Reagan Revolution" had not sufficiently altered the nation's social agenda. During 1985 and 1986

The thirteen photographs in this slideshow depict farm laborers, factory employees, and other Wisconsin workers from the 1890s to the 1970s. Looking at these images, we wonder: what was on the minds of these now-anonymous men and women as they posed for the photographer? Were they proud of their work, their uniforms, their employers? Were they pleased to have a break or anxious to get back to the task at hand?

This collection uses primary sources to explore the postwar growth of the American suburbs. 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.

In 1607, a party of Englishmen landed in a place they called Virginia. They followed in the footsteps of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had visited Virginia (which, at the time, included North Carolina) with a party of settlers in 1585. The colony founded by Raleigh’s party failed, weakened by lack of supplies and irregular contact with England.

To the people who already lived in the area, this was the land of the Powhatan Confederacy, a vast regional network of allied communities living under the leadership of Wahunsenacah (also known as Powhatan). Contact between the English and the people of the Powhatan confederacy was fraught with misunderstanding and conflict. This owed a great deal to the fact that the English were in the Americas to form a colony and make money for the Virginia Company of London, the corporation that had launched them on their voyage west. The Powhatan, on the other hand, lived out their values of kinship, allyship, and reciprocity in a way that was at first incomprehensible to the English, and that later they firmly rejected.

Free lesson plans, games, videos, and additional information. User friendly for educators and students. Focused on financial literacy.

Edward Gould Buffum (1820-1867) went to California in 1846 as a soldier in a New York regiment during the Mexican War. There, Buffum and his regiment helped wrest California from Mexico. After his discharge from the army, Buffum remained to pan gold in the area around John Sutter's sawmills where it had just been discovered. A journalist by profession, Buffum recorded his experiences in a book, Six Months in the Gold Mines, from which this excerpt comes. He commented with wonder that men in the California gold mines earned one hundred dollars per day on average. To understand what a fortune this was, consider that women working as domestic servants in northeastern cities at this time earned between four and seven dollars per month.

By Around 1903, employers began to mount organized campaigns to break the power of labor unions, particularly in the metal trades. Employers had a broad array of weapons in their arsenal, including blacklists, strikebreakers, and court injunctions against strikers' use of boycotts and sympathy strikes. Although early twentieth-century employers had reliable allies in state police forces and tightly controlled local police, 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. This 1917 ad for the Cleveland-based Joy Detective Agency appeared in American Industries, the official publication of the National Association of Manufacturers.

President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 to explain the riots that plagued cities each summer since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. The Commission's 1968 report, informally known as the Kerner Report, concluded that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Unless conditions were remedied, the Commission warned, the country faced a "system of 'apartheid'" in its major cities. The Kerner report delivered an indictment of "white society" for isolating and neglecting African Americans and urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich slums--primarily through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing. President Johnson, however, rejected the recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In the following excerpts from the Kerner Report summary, the Commission predicted a grim future for American cities unless the nation undertook concerted actions leading to "a true union--a single society and a single American identity." In 1998, 30 years after the issuance of the Report, former Senator and Commission member Fred R. Harris co-authored a study that found the racial divide had grown in the ensuing years with inner-city unemployment at crisis levels. Opposing voices argued that the Commission's prediction of separate societies had failed to materialize due to a marked increase in the number of African Americans living in suburbs.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about airplanes in the United States.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about highways in the United States.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about railroads in the United States.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about trolleys and streetcars in American history.