179 items
Responding to fears of Japanese spies within the United States, President Roosevelt signed an order authorizing the forced relocation and confinement of more than 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans living in the West....
Official photograph from the "Golden Spike" Ceremony, 1869
This iconic photograph records the celebration marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad lines at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad,...
Photograph of a "Hooverville," 1936
"Hoovervilles" were temporary communities that America’s homeless created to provide shelter for themselves and their families during the Great Depression. They were so named as an insult to President Herbert Hoover, who seemed to be...
Photograph of an abandoned farm in the Dust Bowl, 1938
When a severe drought in the early 1930s left the crops of the Great Plains stunted, the relentless winds of the plains picked up the soil and brewed up horrific, roiling storms that gave this time its name: the Dust Bowl. Thousands...
San Francisco's Chinatown, 1880
The Workingmen’s Party of California pamphlet, which is representative of widespread anti-immigration sentiment, attacks President Ulysses S. Grant and calls San Francisco’s Chinatown "rampant with disease." On May 8, 1882, President...
William T. Sherman on the western railroads, 1878
After Ulysses S. Grant’s election as president, William Tecumseh Sherman, known for leading the "March to the Sea" in the closing months of the Civil War, was appointed commanding general of the United States Army. Headquartered in St...
Andrew Jackson to the Cherokee Tribe, 1835
Elected president in 1828, Andrew Jackson supported the removal of American Indians from their homelands, arguing that the American Indians’ survival depended on separation from whites. In this 1835 circular to the Cherokee people,...
An African American protests the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850
This 1850 letter written by Henry Weeden is a statement against slavery by a free African American. Weeden was one of Boston’s leading abolitionists. In the 1840s, he had been an activist for the integration of Boston’s schools. [1]...
George Wallace on segregation, 1964
In 1958, George Wallace ran against John Patterson in his first gubernatorial race. In that Alabama election, Wallace refused to make race an issue, and he declined the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. This move won Wallace the...
Enslaved Children of New Orleans, 1863
Photographs of emancipated children were sold to raise money for the education of freed slaves in New Orleans. The children featured in this photograph drew attention to the fact that slavery was not solely a matter of color. If a...
The Fifteenth Amendment, 1870
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments gave constitutional status to emancipation’s promise. The Fifteenth Amendment provided suffrage for black men, declaring that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote...
Disfranchisement of African American voters in Virginia, 1901
In February 1901, the Virginia General Assembly authorized a constitutional convention to draft election reforms. The convention, supported vehemently by Democrats, aimed to disfranchise African Americans without violating the...
Lynching in America, ca. 1926
The number of violent acts against African Americans accelerated during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began compiling lynching statistics in 1912,...
Birth of a Nation, 1915
This "Advice Sheet" flyer was distributed with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to theaters when the film was released in 1915. Significantly, the distributors are adamant that "NEGROES MUST NOT BE ADMITTED . . . under any...
Frederick Douglass on the disfranchisement of Black voters, 1888
Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved man and premier champion of civil rights for African Americans and women, was the nineteenth century’s most famous Black leader. In this letter, written in December 1888, he protests the...
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 1911
On March 25, 1911, a devastating fire started at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Workers had been locked in the factory to discourage theft and prevent labor organization, and they were unable to escape when the fire...
Recruiting posters for African American soldiers, 1918
These two World War I recruiting posters aim to encourage African Americans to enlist. In the first poster, “Colored Man Is No Slacker,” a black soldier takes his leave against a background of African American patriotism, self...
Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address, 2009
The inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2009 was a historic moment not only because Obama was the first African American ever sworn into executive office but also because he entered the presidency at a...
Immigration cartoon, 1916
This political cartoon appeared as the nation debated new restrictions on immigration. After 1917, immigrants entering the United States had to pass a literacy test. In the cartoon, the literacy test appears as an insurmountable...
Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective
Of the ten to sixteen million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, more than one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in...
Historical Context: "Birth of a Nation"
In 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, D. W. Griffith released his epic film Birth of a Nation . The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946. Based...
Historical Context: Black Soldiers in the Civil War
By early 1863, voluntary enlistments in the Union army had fallen so sharply that the federal government instituted an unpopular military draft and decided to enroll Black as well as White troops. Indeed, it seems likely that it was...
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