Union troops captured the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, in May 1865. Whether Davis, who had eluded arrest for over a month, was actually wearing his wife's dress when he was caught is open to question. Nonetheless, the depiction of the captured Davis in woman's clothes was featured in many illustrations and cartoons in the northern press. These images—like earlier pictures of southern women sending their men to war and rioting—questioned the South's claims of courage and chivalry by showing its men and women reversing traditional sex roles.

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 25, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. The victims had been trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes. One of the worst industrial fires in U.S. history, the Triangle fire became a galvanizing symbol of industrial capitalism's excesses and the pressing need for reform. In its aftermath, a coalition of middle-class reformers and working people secured passage of landmark occupational health and safety laws. The Triangle fire received sensational coverage in all the New York newspapers. This article from the Jewish Daily Forward, printed the day after the fire, emphasized the tragic loss to the Jewish community.

For young men like Jim Vacarella, the draft stood as the prime symbol of the war in Vietnam. Millions of young men tried to evade the draft: some fled to Canada; many feigned physical or mental illness, others used family connections to gain safe positions in the National Guard. For some, resisting the draft became an important way of protesting the war, and a few thousand men took public stands as draft resistors, burning their draft cards and challenging the government to imprison them. Jim Vacarella was one of those who burned his draft card, although he was lucky enough to avoid prison.

Between 1800 and 1840, improved transportation networks and larger markets altered the way goods were produced, as workshops and factories became larger and fewer goods were produced by household labor. Another effect of growing industrialization was social stratification, as some master craftsmen became businessmen while their journeymen lost their independence and became wage workers. This illustration from the 1841 novel The Career of Puffer Hopkins caricatured the growing distinction between masters and journeymen. The master tailor's prosperous outfit, stance, and fancy business address (New York's Broadway) sharply contrasted with the journeyman's wretched appearance and workshop-home.

The Underground Railroad was a network of free African Americans and sympathetic whites that concealed, clothed, and guided fugitive slaves to the North and freedom. The "railroad" comprised a series of stops often tended by local vigilance committees in northern communities. John P. Parker was born into slavery in Norfolk, Virginia, but became a freeman by 1845. He moved to Rowley, Ohio with its active abolitionist community and followed his trade as an iron master by day while rescuing fugitive slaves by night. Free blacks such as Parker supplied most of the needed labor and finances to help escaped slaves. Parker, it is believed, helped hundreds escape to freedom across the Ohio River from Kentucky along the busiest segment of the railroad. He then passed them on to another "conductor," braving significant dangers, as related in this excerpt from a recently published autobiography compiled from newspaper interviews with Parker in 1885.

The Mexican Revolution of 1911 was not well understood in the United States, but it found a place in numerous American novels, short stories, and silent films--albeit a clichéd and stereotypical one in which Mexicans often played the villains vanquished by heroic American cowboys. Such stereotypes of Mexicans dominated U.S. films about Mexico for much of the 20th century. Despite these negative stereotypes, Francisco Villa, leader of the peasant uprisings in northern Mexico, exploited American interest in the revolution for his own ends. A contract with a U.S. newsreel company--he agreed to fight his battles primarily during the day so they could be filmed--earned him money to buy weapons. He also granted interviews to prominent journalists, including the socialist John Reed. Reed's June 1914 article in the Masses, "What About Mexico?," opposed U.S. intervention and countered the negative images of Mexicans by portraying their struggle as brave and heroic.

Baseball's growing popularity in the 1920s can be measured by structural and cultural changes that helped transform the game, including the building of commodious new ballparks; the emergence of sports pages in daily urban newspapers; and the enormous popularity of radio broadcasts of baseball games. But baseball's grip on the American popular imagination also was fueled by the emergence in the 1920s of the game's most dominant player, George Herman "Babe" Ruth. Ruth's rise to stardom in these years was an essential part of an era when celebrities came to dominate the various forms of American popular culture: sports, especially baseball; radio; and the movies. In these short articles that appeared in the Literary Digest in 1921 and 1923, two baseball writers described the importance of the Ruthian home run and the majesty of Yankee Stadium, the new temple that Yankee management built in 1923 to accommodate the Babe.

At the Civil War's end, enslaved people responded in a variety of ways to take their freedom. One meaning of freedom can be glimpsed in the following report from Charleston, South Carolina, published in the New York Daily Tribune on April 4, 1865, just a few days before General Robert E. Lee's surrender in Virginia. Charleston boasted one of the largest and most important African-American communities in the antebellum South. Two months after the Confederate Army fled, the city's black men and women organized a parade to celebrate their emancipation. The parade numbered thousands of marchers and included dramatic tableaux, banners, and songs. African Americans used such public celebrations to symbolize their deeply held beliefs and feelings, in a manner that paralleled the public displays of their white working-class counterparts in the decades before the war.

With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos—Texans of Mexican descent—lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural order. From 1900–1930, as an influx of immigrants from Mexico came north to meet a growing demand for cheap labor in the developing commercial agriculture industries, Tejanos experienced continued discrimination in employment, housing, public facilities, the judicial system, and educational institutions. In addition, many were disenfranchised, due to poll tax requirements and all-white primaries, and excluded from jury duty. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end such discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In the early 1950s, attorneys for two Mexican-American civil rights groups, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American G.I. Forum, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Hernandez v. Texas that exclusion from jury duty based on class constituted discrimination. The state of Texas acknowledged that in the previous 25 years no person with a Spanish surname had served on any juries. The Warren Court ruled unanimously that persons of Mexican American ancestry did constitute a class within the community in which the original trial was held, and that exclusion of Mexican Americans from juries resulted in a denial of the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment for Mexican American defendants. In the following interview, Pete Tijerina, a member of LULAC and the first executive director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), discussed all-Anglo juries and other discriminatory conditions in Texas society in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Julius Caesar" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

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 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. George F. Lumb, deputy superintendent of the newly minted State Police, appeared before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915 to defend the force's reputation against accusations that they tended to side automatically with management in labor disputes.

After long accepting low pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions, Polish oil refinery workers in Bayonne, New Jersey, walked off the job in 1915. Virtually the entire Polish immigrant community supported them, and only police violence and hired thugs succeeded in breaking the strike. In this photograph, striking workers confront company guards outside the Standard Oil Works moments before the private police opened fire. Five strikers were killed by gunfire, but workers elected to strike again the next year.

In her autobiographical essay, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," which was first published in Socialist Woman in October 1908, Socialist Party organizer Kate Richards O'Hare credited her career as a "Socialist agitator" to her youthful exposure to poverty and "sordid suffering." As she explained in this essay, her disillusionment with the church and a talk by labor organizer "Mother"Jones further pushed her toward socialism.

Although Coxey's Army was only one of more than forty different armies of the unemployed that headed for Washington, D.C., in 1894 to seek relief from their plight, it was by far the best known. Its leader was the colorful Jacob S. Coxey, a wealthy Populist who owned a sand quarry, bred horses, and wore hand-tailored suits. The publicity that preceded the arrival of the "armies" apparently frightened authorities. Fifteen hundred soldiers were stationed in Washington to meet the army; thousands more were available in Baltimore, Annapolis, and Philadelphia in anticipation of further trouble. But the army that arrived on May 1, 1894, numbered only 500. When Coxey tried to speak at the U.S. Capitol, police arrested him for walking on the grass. Fifty years to the day later, in 1944, Coxey finally delivered this speech from the steps of the U.S. Congress.

In this transcript of an interview for Eyes on the Prize, psychologist Kenneth Clark describes his research that illustrated the impact of racism on African American children.

As eighteenth-century colonists eyed the lands across the Appalachian Mountains for further settlement, they needed explorers and promoters. Daniel Boone was both. Born in Pennsylvania in 1734, he settled his family along the Yadkin River in North Carolina in 1757. A decade later he traveled across the Appalachians to explore and hunt in the rich area around the Kentucky River. Boone and his hunting partners actually shared many values with the local Indians, but the goals of natives and newcomers diverged when permanent settlement occurred. By 1775, Boone was leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap along the Wilderness Road to the stockaded settlement of Boonesborough. He described his most significant trip, which took place between 1769 and 1771, in this selection from his 1784 "autobiography." John Filson, a land speculator and author of Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, created Boone's legend as a frontier hero by appending a ghostwritten first person narrative by Boone to his promotional tract. Soon after, Boone abandoned Kentucky because of disputed land claims; he eventually died in Missouri in 1820.

The Kids Health website has been around since 1995, but the content is frequently updated.  Articles are provided on student level about many safety topics that are important to kids.  The three main categories covered are around the house, outdoors, and first aid.  Students are then able to personalize their learning with topics that are relevent and of interest to them.

The rising tide of lynchings of African Americans across the South launched a national anti-lynching crusade, led by Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper editor Ida Wells-Barnett, an outspoken advocate for the area's African-American citizens. As the leader of the national anti-lynching movement, Wells-Barnett joined a group of Illinois congressmen who visited the White House in March, 1898, to protest the murder of the newly-appointed Lake City, South Carolina Postmaster Baker, who was black. Wells-Barnett penned this petition to President William McKinley to urge punishment of those responsible for shooting.

Beginning in 1887, the federal government attempted to "Americanize" Native Americans, largely through the education of Native youth. By 1900 thousands of Native Americans were studying at almost 150 boarding schools around the United States. The U.S. Training and Industrial School founded in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, was the model for most of these schools. Boarding schools like Carlisle provided vocational and manual training and sought to systematically strip away tribal culture. They insisted that students drop their Indian names, forbade the speaking of native languages, and cut off their long hair. Not surprisingly, such schools often met fierce resistance from Native American parents and youth. But some Indian young people responded positively, or at least ambivalently, to the boarding schools, and the schools also fostered a sense of shared Indian identity that transcended tribal boundaries. The following excerpt (from a paper read by Carlisle founder Capt. Richard C. Pratt at an 1892 convention) spotlights Pratt's pragmatic and frequently brutal methods for "civilizing" the "savages," including his analogies to the education and "civilizing" of African Americans.