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 Reply to Mexico, Standard Oil offered a vigorous response to the Mexican expropriation of its property in 1938.

John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers of America, was instrumental in the organizing drive that transformed the coal fields in 1933. He had planned his campaign before the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) became law and even before President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. (The National Industrial Recovery Act included a provision, section 7(a), that protected workers' right to organize.) In February 1933 (prior to the passage of the NRA), Lewis spoke passionately to the Senate Finance Committee about the need for action to protect workers. In his Senate testimony, Lewis called for emergency action, including allowing workers to unionize and replacing corporate autocracy with union democracy. He warned that if action was not forthcoming, the nation might face grave consequences and promoted unionization as the answer.

In the late 19th century, William Graham Sumner, an Episcopal minister turned academic sociologist, brought a distinctly conservative perspective to the new "science" of sociology. Some of his ideas about the economic survival of the fittest and opposition to government intervention in the economy were applications of Darwin's scientific ideas of evolution to the social sphere. He also drew upon the doctrines of laissez-faire British economists like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo to argue that government intervention would disturb the "natural" and self-regulating market. 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. Not surprisingly, his work had a broad influence beyond the academy. In this excerpt from his 1883 essay, "What the Social Classes Owe To Each Other," Sumner portrayed the wealthy elite as a put-upon class whose misunderstood ambitions and intentions would benefit everyone.

John L. Lewis' dramatic walkout from the October 1935 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention and the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) that soon followed marked a new stage in labor's drive to organize industrial unions in depression-era America. Here Alice Dodge Wolfson, who was working as a stenographer in 1935, recalled her own contribution to the Lewis walkout and the creation of the CIO. Attending the October 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City as a delegate from her stenographers local of the United Office and Professional Workers Union (a left-wing New York union aligned with the supporters of industrial unionism around Lewis), Wolfson played a small but decisive role in helping launch the CIO when she rose to challenge an AFL official from the convention floor.

Organized temperance movements have been part of the American political landscape since the early 19th century. Reform groups, dominated at various times by clergy, social elites, workingmen, and clubwomen, tried alternately to convince individuals to take a pledge against drinking alcohol, to promote drinking only in moderation, and to enact laws prohibiting the production and sale of liquor. Prior to the ratification in 1919 of the 18th Amendment banning liquor nationwide, two-thirds of the states had passed similar legislation. After rampant noncompliance with the Amendment led to its repeal in 1933, anti-liquor advocates focused protests against liquor advertising on the radio. While the Federal Communications Commission did not have the authority to ban liquor ads, their threats to hold license renewal hearings for offending stations induced broadcasters to self-impose a ban. Similarly, in 1948, the television industry voluntarily decided to restrict alcoholic beverage advertising to beer and wine commercials. Congress, nevertheless, proposed legislation in the 1950s to prohibit all liquor ads from radio, TV, and in interstate commerce. In the following testimony, an attorney for an advertising association argued that a proposed House bill would interfere with the "right to sell," while a police sergeant and member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union contended in a Senate hearing that children should be protected from televised liquor ads in their homes. No legislation was enacted, and in November 1996 due to a sharp decrease in sales of hard liquor, the Distilled Spirits Council voted to allow advertising of its products on TV. In December 2001, NBC became the first network since 1948 to broadcast hard liquor ads.

This DocsTeach page includes a variety of primary sources and teaching activities exploring the ways Americans, including African Americans and others, have fought for, attained, and protected their rights. Many documents at the National Archives illustrate how individuals and groups asserted their rights as Americans. Use this site to find teaching activities to explore the topics such as slavery, racism, citizenship, women’s independence, immigration, and more.

In a message to Congress in February 1948, President Harry S. Truman asked for Federal civil rights legislation, including antilynching laws. The last such bill to be signed into law, the 1875 Civil Rights Act, had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883, during a period in which the number of lynchings of African Americans in the South increased sharply. The history of failed attempts to pass Federal antilyching legislation goes back to 1894, when a House bill to create a committee to investigate lynchings failed. In 1922, the House passed a bill by a two-to-one margin to make lynching a Federal crime, but despite President Warren G. Harding's support, Southern senators filibustered and defeated it. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to support an antilynching bill proposed by the NAACP, fearing that key Southern lawmakers would retaliate and interfere with his New Deal agenda. In the following testimony to a House subcommittee in 1949, representatives of a Japanese American antidiscrimination league and the NAACP argued the need for Federal civil rights action. None of the bills under consideration by the subcommittee passed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction in 1957, but only the 1964 Civil Rights Act began to implement Federal laws and enforcement powers.

The New Deal Public Works Administration, created in 1933, built public institutions, but failed to ease the severe housing shortage by constructing homes. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure home mortgages and loans for home repairs at low-interest, long-term rates. While the FHA helped middle-income homeowners, it refused to insure mortgages in poorer inner-city areas where the risks of default were seen as greater than in the suburbs. FHA guidelines also by supporting racial covenants that prevented African Americans from moving into "white" neighborhoods. The following statement by a Newark, New Jersey, African-American newspaper to a joint Congressional committee on housing—created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall passage of a public housing bill—charged that policies of racial discrimination denied access to people of color for housing in both private and public facilities. The Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that restrictive covenants were not legally enforceable and FHA subsequently banned restrictive covenant clauses in contracts. Racial discrimination in housing continued, however, in sales of existing houses and through unwritten "gentlemen's agreements" between realtors and buyers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination in public accommodations, but de facto segregation continued in many parts of the U.S.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the rise of conservatism in the US in the 1980s. 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.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the events that led up to the American Revolutionary War. 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.

After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and the right of self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to face intensified discrimination, segregation, and racial violence. Drawing on this frustration, Marcus Garvey attracted thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers to his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. As Garvey's influence in the black community grew, so too did the voices of his many critics. Integrationists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Robert Bagnall, both of the NAACP, worried that the UNIA leader was exploiting black disillusionment for personal gain. Moreover, they objected to the UNIA's call for racial separatism, and in this 1923 article Bagnall accused Garvey of "madness."

Even in the late nineteenth-century American West, a notably violent region, the violence directed against Chinese immigrants was shocking. The Union Pacific railroad employed 331 Chinese and 150 whites in their coal mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming. On September 2, 1885, Chinese and white miners, who were paid by the ton, had a dispute over who had the right to work in a particularly desirable area of the mine. White miners, members of the Knights of Labor, beat two Chinese miners and walked off their jobs. That evening the white miners, armed with rifles, rioted and burned down the Chinese quarter. No whites were prosecuted for the murder of twenty-eight Chinese and $150,000 in property damage, even though the identities of those responsible were widely known. Although U.S. Army troops had to provide protection before some of the Chinese could finally return to their burned-out homes in Rock Springs, some defiantly continued to work in the Union Pacific mines into the next century. This jingoistic editorial in the Rock Springs, Wyoming, Independent, mourned the return of Chinese workers to the mining town the day after the riot.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the early history of Rock and Roll music. 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 a total war like World War II, the question "Was everyone doing his or her 'part'?" inevitably arose. Equality of sacrifice took particularly sharp form in the debate over the no-strike pledge for labor unions. Communists, who had played key roles in the union organizing drives of the 1930s and were well represented among union leaders, were intensely patriotic during the war. Their commitment to defeat fascism and defend the Soviet Union, which was threatened by advancing German armies, made Communists among the strongest advocates of labor sacrifices to win the war. A vigorous expression of this point of view can be found in the ballad "UAW-CIO," composed by Baldwin "Butch" Hawes. Hawes was associated with the Almanac Singers--a group that was sympathetic to the Communist position and included such notable figures as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. Trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes, more than 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, perished in the flames or jumped ten stories to their deaths. 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. For Jewish and Italian immigrant communities of the Lower East Side, the fire was especially tragic. Poet Morris Rosenfeld, known as the "poet laureate of the slum and the sweatshop," penned this memorial to the victims four days after the fire. The Jewish Daily Forward printed the poem down the full length of its front page.

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, four spokespersons for housing reform--including social worker Mary K. Simkhovitch, a leading reform advocate since the 1920s--presented views and proposals.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. Folklorists first began collecting traditional southern music in the late-19th century. By the 1920s and 1930s, John and Alan Lomax were recording southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Run, Old Jeremiah," sung by Joe Washington Brown and Austin Coleman in Jennings, Louisiana, in 1934, was a ring-shout, a religious song using a West African dance pattern, where the performers shuffled single file, clapping out a complex counter-rhythm. The ring-shout was common during slavery and remained popular well into the 20th century as a means of emotional and physical release during religious worship. The lyrics of the ring-shout spoke of escape from the travails of the present.

The ideology of success--the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work--was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. An aggressive proponent of the success ideology was Russell Conwell, a former minister who helped found Temple University. His lecture "Acres of Diamonds," parts of which are excerpted here as text, was his own route to riches. He delivered this pep talk on the joys of instant material success on the national lecture circuit more than 6,000 times, most often during the 1890s. By the time of his death in 1925, this speech had reportedly earned him $8 million. (Click here for an audio version of a different portion of the speech.)

This is a .pdf of the accompanying slides that Chris Baker, Jenna Gilles, and Jamie Hein used in their "Video Game Collections in Libraries, Pt. #1: The 'Why', 'What', and 'How' of Selection & Acquisition" webinar that was originally offered on October 30, 2024, from 11:00 AM to 12:00 noon EDT (10:00-11:00 am CST).To watch the webinar, you can visit this link on WISELearn; alternatively, you can watch it directly on YouTube.Any questions? Please contact presentation lead Chris Baker at Chris.Baker@dpi.wi.gov. Thanks for watching -- and thank you for implementing video game collections in your library spaces!

A survey invite was emailed to approximately 13,000 U.S. school librarians and 10,000
U.S. public librarians on February 5, 2021, with a reminder to non-responders on
February 15. The survey was also advertised in SLJ newsletters and via social media. The
survey closed on March 6 with 784 U.S. responses.
Tabulation and analysis was done in-house by SLJ research. The data is unweighted.
The majority of survey questions were worded to apply to both school and public
libraries. Select questions were broken out by library type if the question wording
and/or answer choices warranted it. Tables in this report are segmented by type of
library for easy comparisons.