The day after Charles Lindbergh reached Paris in May 1927, the only headline on the front page of the New York Times that did not directly concern the young American aviator read "Levine Abandons Bellanca Flight." It chronicled the unsuccessful efforts of Charles Levine of the Columbia Aircraft Company to complete the first transatlantic flight. Later that year the thirty-year-old millionaire did fly to Berlin with Clarence Chamberlin, breaking Lindbergh's record. Yiddish vaudevillian Charles Cohen decided to commemorate the flight in song when President Calvin Coolidge outraged Jews by receiving Chamberlin but not Levine at the White House. The song, sung in Yiddish and English, reflected the ambivalence of American Jews who were still outsiders but also wanted to be part of the mainstream. Like the Americans who greeted Lindbergh's flight by looking forward and backward, Jews were also caught between the past and the future. [English translation follows Yiddish.]

In the spring of 2018, James Madison Memorial High School in Madison embarked on an all school read of Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from a Minneapolis High Schools. Over 2,000 students read immigration stories written by authors of their own age, and were introduced to the authentic and diverse stories of Minneapolis immigrants from thirteen countries. The book inspired a more empathetic understanding of immigrants, and showcased the need for a similar publication featuring student immigrants from Wisconsin. As Green Card Voices planned the production of a book featuring stories from a Madison high school, they were contacted by the College Possible Milwaukee team, who hoped to collaborate and highlight the stories of immigrant students at Milwaukee high schools. Through this connection, the idea of a book featuring student immigrants from both cities was developed.

This is an image of the retractable banners that were created that feature the stories of the Wisconsin immigrant students who shared their stories in the book Green Card Youth Voices - Madison and Milwaukee.

Four million workers—one fifth of the nation's workforce—went out on strike in 1919, seeking to consolidate and expand the gains they had achieved during World War I and to make real the war's rhetoric of democracy. The most important of these strikes began in September, when 350,000 steel workers walked off the job. Steel companies responded with a reign of terror, aided by local governments. Strikers were beaten, arrested, shot, and driven out of steel towns. Management brought in African-American and Mexican-American strikebreakers to split workers along racial and ethnic lines and tried to portray the conflict as an attempted revolution by foreign-born radicals. Eventually, the strike was broken. This strike ballot distributed by the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers—printed in English, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Polish—indicated the range of nationalities composing the industry's workforce in 1919.

The reasons immigrants had for leaving their homelands and coming to America were as diverse as the backgrounds of the immigrants themselves. Although most immigrants came to the United States for economic reasons some sought a new home because of persecution based on their politics, religious beliefs, or even their sexual orientation. In this 1882 letter sent to medical writer and sexologist Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a thirty-eight-year-old German-born merchant explained how a homosexual arrest in his homeland forced him to emigrate to the United States.

After World War I, a "red scare" gripped the United States. One reflection of this climate of hysteria was in the "Palmer raids" on radicals. Striking without warning and without warrants, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. They concentrated whenever possible on aliens rather than citizens, because aliens had fewer rights. In December 1919, in their most famous act, Palmer's agents seized 249 resident aliens. Those seized were placed on board a ship, the Buford, bound for the Soviet Union. Deportees included the feminist, anarchist, and writer Emma Goldman, who later recalled the deportation in her autobiography, Living My Life.

For Arab and Muslim Americans, especially those living in New York, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were particularly painful; they not only had to confront the sorrow of the attacks, but they also faced a tide of discrimination, harassment, and in some cases violence aimed at Arabs and Muslims. Emira Habiby-Browne, the director of the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn, spoke about the hostility many community members faced on the job, and the fear that spread as hundreds of Arab and Middle Eastern men were detained in secret by the federal government. Like other groups whose loyalty was questioned during wartime due to their ethnic background, Arab and Muslim Americans identify themselves closely with their country and were deeply saddened and frustrated by the suspicion targeted at them.

Libraries in the late 19th century were seen by their founders as instruments of social and cultural uplift, meant to raise the working class out their ignorance and teach them how to be middle class. But men like Oscar Ameringer, who immigrated to the United States from Germany when he was 15 and later became a socialist organizer, humorist, and editor, took away different lessons. In this selection from his 1940 autobiography, Ameringer described his discovery of American history books, translated into German, at the local public library.

We generally think of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. mainland as largely a post-World War II phenomenon, since more than 800,000 Puerto Ricans came to the United States between 1940 and 1969. But immigration actually started much earlier in the century; between 1915 and 1930 more than 50,000 Puerto Rican migrants headed for the United States--especially New York City. The new immigrants faced a mixed reception, particularly from immigrants from other countries. In this interview for the radio program "Nosotros Trabajamos en la Costura"(We Work in the Garment Industry), garment worker Luisa Lopez told how she faced discrimination from European immigrant workers when she went to work in garment factories in the 1920s. Yet sometimes alliances crossed ethnic lines: Lopez found an ally in an Italian-American socialist.

Urban artisans experienced dramatic changes in the second quarter of the 19th century. New York and other cities were destinations of choice for many rural mechanics as well as those coming from overseas. Upon arrival they found workshops in great flux as traditional social relations among master, journeyman, and apprentice were being transformed into an employer-employee relationship. In some crafts, such as cabinetmaking, change came more slowly because of the complexities of fashioning large case furniture. In other trades, such as tailoring, tiny sweatshops started to dot the city streets. A new working class was coming into being, often with a variety of religions and backgrounds, and they organized to contest these and other changes in work conditions and compensation. This anonymous account from a British periodical in 1845 related the experience of a British cabinetmaker in New York in the 1830s; he eventually returned home.

Though the Great Steel Strike of 1919 failed in its immediate aims, it left a legacy in the steel regions of the United States that lasted for decades. In 1974 when historian Peter Gotlieb asked former steelworker Joe Rudiak, the son of Polish immigrants, about his participation in unionization struggles in the 1930s, he started by recalling his memories of the 1919 steel strike as a young boy. Here, Rudiak told how his father was blacklisted for acknowledging his support of the union. From such experiences, he explained, unionism got "embedded in you."

This WebQuest has students explore immigration and why people "came to America". It also has students look at what it means to be a citizen, what the requirements are, and the process of naturalization that new citizens take part it.

Instructor Notes: Teachers can assign this content to their students in iCivics account and then Clicking the Assign button on this activity. Teachers will then have the option to add a Class into iCivics OR Sync a roster from Google Classroom. This will allow teachers to see student's responses. There are also Downloadable Resources available to support this learning activity.

This collection uses primary sources to explore immigration to the US and immigrant Americanization between 1880 and 1930. 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 the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from 1969, two migrant farmworkers from Florida and a UFW organizer from Washington State discussed their experiences and proposed legislative remedies to a Senate subcommittee. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

This course provides an overview of Asian American history and its relevance for contemporary issues. It covers the first wave of Asian immigration in the 19th century, the rise of anti-Asian movements, the experiences of Asian Americans during WWII, the emergence of the Asian American movement in the 1960s, and the new wave of post–1965 Asian immigration. The class examines the role these experiences played in the formation of Asian American ethnicity. The course addresses key societal issues such as racial stereotyping, media racism, affirmative action, the glass ceiling, the "model minority" syndrome, and anti-Asian harassment or violence. The course is taught in English.

This packet provides an explanation of Ireland’s Great Hunger and provides ideas for primary source materials to use to describe the event A variety of discussion questions, writing activities, and other activities are provided that allow students to explore the facts and how different Irish artists used art and other media forms to depict the effects of the famine.

Thirty-eight year old Rebecca Burlend and her family left England in 1831 for a new life in Pike County, Illinois. Driven to emigrate by poverty, they hoped to own their own land in the United States and chose Pike County based on the letters of "Mr. B.," a settler who had gone before them. After more than two months at sea, the family landed in New Orleans, where Burlend observed the horrors of the slave trade firsthand. From there they traveled by steamboat up the Mississippi River to Illinois. Many immigrants--then and now--experience the kind of fear and confusion that the Burlends felt on arriving at what looked to them like a deserted wilderness. After the "many difficulties" of the book's title, the family settled successfully in Illinois. Rebecca Burlend wrote this book with the assistance of her son, the author and teacher Edward Burlend, during a return visit to England in 1846.

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, W. M. Mink, mill superintendent at the Homestead steelworks, testified that the cause of the strike was simple--the infection of "the Bolshevik spirit"among "the foreigners."

Jacob Riis--a journalist and photographer of industrial America and himself a Danish immigrant--exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. He also presented slide shows to reform-minded, middle-class audiences. Despite his own immigrant background, Riis' attitudes mirrored the prejudices of the dominant culture toward "foreigners," as revealed in this stereotyped description of an immigrant neighborhood on New York's Lower East Side. Riis' reports on immigrant life--and his equally famous photographs--were important documents of urban conditions in late nineteenth-century urban America. But they were equally revealing as documents that showed how outsiders often reacted in horror to the lives of "the other half."

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.