Faced with stiff business opposition, a conservative political climate, hostile courts, and declining membership, leaders of the American Federeration of Labor (AFL) grew increasingly cautious during the 1920s. Labor radicals viewed AFL leaders as overpaid, self-interested functionaries uninterested in organizing unorganized workers into unions. A cartoon by William Gropper published in the Communist Yiddish newspaper Freiheit (and reprinted in English in the New Masses ) caricatures delegates to a 1926 AFL convention in Atlantic City. Well

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government persecuted communists, Bolsheviks, and reds." Caught up in this "Red Scare

William Penn, a well placed English gentlemen and a Quaker, turned an old debt into a charter for the proprietary colony called "Pennsylvania," (all the land between New Jersey and Maryland) Penn took great pains in setting up his colony; twenty drafts survive of his First Frame of Government, the colony's 1682 constitution. Penn was determined to deal fairly and maintain friendly relations with the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. He laid out in great detail the city of Philadelphia as well as organized other settlements and established the Free Society of Traders to control commerce with England. He sent back glowing accounts of the colony to his English friends and patrons. This Letter to the Free Society of Traders, published in 1683, has been recognized as the most effective of his promotional tracts. And it proved successful; by 1700 Pennsylvania's population reached 21,000.

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. Many school districts segregated Tejano and Anglo children into separate facilities with the Mexican schools grossly underfunded and often offering only a grade school education. In 1930, when 90% of the schools in South Texas were segregated, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Tejano advocacy group organized the previous year, supported the first major court challenge in Texas to end school segregation. The Texas Court of Appeals, however, ruled that school districts could use such criteria as language and irregular attendance due to seasonal work to separate children in school. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In 1948, LULAC and the newly formed American G.I. Forum, an advocacy group of Mexican American veterans, assisted in a lawsuit. The federal district court ruling in that case prohibited school segregation based on Mexican ancestry. Localities devised ways to evade the ruling, however, and de facto segregation continued. Student protests in the late 1960s achieved an end to some discriminatory practices. In subsequent years a new civil rights organization, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), continued the fight in the courts, eventually concentrating on the introduction of bilingual and bicultural programs into schools. In the following interview, Ed Idar, associated with both the Forum and MALDEF, related a successful grassroots effort in the early 1950s to desegregate a school without a court ruling.

In 1893 the newspaperman Peter Finley Dunne began publishing a regular series in the Chicago Evening Post featuring dialogues between an Irish bartender named Martin Dooley, and his Irish friend and customer, Henessey. The local column quickly achieved national renown and syndication in newspapers across the country. Dunne's dialogues drew upon prevalent ethnic stereotypes that were a staple of late nineteenth-century American humor. Dooley regularly commented on both local and national events. Thus, it was not surprising that he would have something to say about the dramatic strike by the American Railway Union against Chicago's Pullman Palace Car Company that had shut down rail lines across the United States in 1894. In the July 7, 1894, column included here (read by an actress), Dunne poked fun at George Pullman's claims that the strike was a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1904, socialist writer Upton Sinclair spent two months in Chicago's "Packingtown" observing a bitter stockyard strike. He turned the wealth of material he found there into his best-selling 1905 novel, The Jungle. The book is best known for revealing the unsanitary process by which animals became meat products, and its revelations were an important factor in the 1906 passage of the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act. Yet Sinclair's primary concern was not with the goods that were produced but with the workers who produced them. He described, with great accuracy, the horrifying physical conditions under which immigrant packing plant workers and their families worked and lived, portraying the collapse of immigrant culture under the relentless pressure of industrial capitalism. Despite his sympathies, as a middle-class reformer Sinclair was oblivious to the vibrancy of immigrant communities beyond the reach of bosses, where immigrants found solidarity and hope. In the opening chapter of The Jungle, the immigrant hero and heroine, Juris and Ona Rudkus, celebrate their nuptials and the start of their new lives in Chicago.

On September 4, 1907, anti-immigrant backlash erupted into riots in the city of Bellingham, Washington. The resultant violence drove more than 100 South Asian immigrants from the city and, ultimately, the United States. The Sikh Coalition has created a lesson plan and teacher talking points to help you explore this historical event with your students.

Learn about the achievements and national problems of the African nation of Botswana in this video segment from Wide Angle.

When 30,000 largely immigrant workers walked out of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January 1912, they launched one of the epic confrontations between capital and labor. The strike began in part because of unsafe working conditions in the mills, which were described in graphic detail in the testimony that fourteen-year-old millworker Camella Teoli delivered before a U.S. Congressional hearing in March 1912. Her testimony (a portion of which was included here) about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating gained national headlines in 1912--in part because Helen Herron Taft, the wife of the president, was in the audience when Teoli testified. The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory.

In 1894, a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company spread across the nation as the American Railway Union organized a national boycott and strike against all trains hauling Pullman cars. Strikers were met with the full force of company and government might. Thirty-four people were killed in two weeks of clashes between troops and workers across the nation. An ardent admirer of the military, artist-reporter Frederic Remington displayed no sympathy for the Pullman strikers in his reports for Harper's Weekly. Endorsing suppression, Remington described the strikers as a "malodorous crowd of foreign trash" talking "Hungarian or Polack, or whatever the stuff is."

This is a lesson plan used as an introductory activity to Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Bean Trees.  The lesson has students read and discuss (both in small groups and as a whole class) personal stories from survivors of child abuse focusing on what makes those stories powerful and how the abuse affected the survivors and continues to affect them today.  Furthermore, this lesson has students individually write and then discuss as a class about some of the other issues that are touched on in Kingsolver's novel (immigration, names, refugees, and teen pregnancy).

In this autobiographical sketch published in 1903 in the Independent magazine (which ran a series of about eighty short autobiographical "lifelets" of "undistinguished Americans" between 1902 and 1906), Chinese immigrant Lee Chew looked back on his passage to America, and his years as a launderer and merchant on both the East and West coasts.

In the late 19th century, Irish-Catholic immigrants and their children were a bulwark of the New York Democratic Party and especially the machine politicians of Tammany Hall. In the mayoral election of 1886, Tammany fought hard to retain the support of these Irish-Catholic voters in the race between Democrat Abram Hewitt and United Labor Party candidate Henry George. While Catholic Church leaders opposed George and actively worked to prevent his election, Father Edward McGlynn enthusiastically backed his candidacy and praised him in this 1886 interview. Several years earlier McGlynn had read George's Progress and Poverty and had become a committed supporter of his single-tax economic theories. McGlynn's persistent labor activism led to his excommunication in 1887. Although pressure from liberal Catholics brought about his reinstatement in 1892, his superior soon transferred him to upstate New York--thereby removing his voice from the local labor scene.

In 1890, two competing organizations working to gain the right to vote for women joined forces to form the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. Some white women suffrage leaders were willing to use class, ethnic, and racial arguments to bolster the case for granting white women the vote. In 1894 (a year of extraordinary class conflict that included the national Pullman and coal strikes), Carrie Chapman Catt addressed an Iowa suffrage gathering and maintained that women's suffrage was necessary to counter "the ignorant foreign vote" in American cities and protect the life and property of native-born Americans.

The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), organized in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence of Chinese (and, after 1900, Japanese and Korean immigrants as well) dragged down the living standards of white workers. The following excerpt is from a 1902 AFL pamphlet entitled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, which called for a second extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Despite the pamphlet's disclaimer that it was not prejudiced, arguments were riddled with racist statements about the employment history and "Social Habits" of "John Chinaman." The selections from the pamphlet reprinted here reflected the abiding beliefs of many white workers, especially skilled workers who belonged to the San Francisco BTC.

Francis Daniel Pastorius arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683, commissioned by the Frankfort Land Company and a group of German merchants to obtain 15,000 acres of land for a settlement in the new colony of Pennsylvania. Pastorius, well educated in European universities, reported back to his friends in Germany. This report was later published as Positive Information From America, concerning the Country of Pennsylvania by a German who Traveled There (1684), a promotional tract to encourage other Germans to immigrate. Pastorius found the journey to be difficult but the prospects attractive. He remarked notably upon the ethnic and religious complexity of the colony. Pennsylvania attracted many colonists seeking religious freedom and communal prosperity. Pastorius went on to lead settlement of Mennonites and Quakers at Germantown.

In 1912, four candidates battled to become President of the United States. Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a moderate governor, represented the two major parties. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, angered over what he felt was a betrayal of his policies by Taft, his hand-picked successor, abandoned the Republican party and founded the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. While all four candidates appealed directly to working-class voters, whose votes would prove decisive, by far the most radical platform in the campaign was that of the Socialist Party nominee, Eugene V. Debs. Running for the fourth time, Debs called for the abolition of capitalism rather than for its reform. In this speech accepting the party's nomination he proclaimed the Socialist Party "the party of progress, the party of the future." Debs finished last in the contest, receiving 900,000 votes.

Democracy in America is a unique 15-part course for high school teachers to provide a deeper understanding of the principles and workings of American democracy. By combining compelling video stories of individuals interacting with American government, theoretical discussions of the meaning of democracy, and problem-solving, hands-on exercises, the course gives life to the workings of American democracy.

John Dane, a tailor, was born in Berkhampstead, England, around 1612. In the late 1630s, which he recollects here as a period of "a great coming to New England," he and his family emigrated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. He died in Ipswich in 1684. Dane's parents, like many Puritan parents, raised their children to carry what historian Philip Greven calls an "inner disciplinarian" within their own consciences at all times. Dane's mother reminded him: "Go where you will, God will find you out." In this narrative, Dane, who always remembered her warning, related the temptations he faced over the course of his life--to steal, to accept the advances of women, to avoid church--and the prices he negotiated with an all-seeing God. (The spelling of this selection has been regularized to make it easier to read.)

In the dramatic 1919 steel strike, 350,000 workers walked off their jobs and crippled the industry. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor set out to investigate the strike while it was still in progress. In his testimony before the committee, Slavic steelworker Andrew Pido described the discrimination faced by some immigrant workers and how that discrimination - along with long pay and poor conditions--encouraged them to unionize and strike.