98 items
After more than a century of activism, the temperance movement achieved its signal victory with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919. The amendment abolished "the manufacture, sale, or...
Lowell Mill Girls and the factory system, 1840
Lowell, Massachusetts, named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, was founded in the early 1820s as a planned town for the manufacture of textiles. It introduced a new system of integrated manufacturing to the United States and...
"Bleeding Kansas" and the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise, which stated that slavery would not be allowed north of latitude 36°30′. Instead, settlers would use the principle of popular sovereignty and vote to determine...
A report from Spanish California, 1776
Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, military commander of Alta California, wrote this letter from Mission San Gabriel. Rivera y Moncada was instrumental in the development of missions in California and was in a sometimes-contentious...
Receipt for land purchased from the Six Nations, 1769
This document records that the representatives of the Six Nations, who signed using totems to designate individuals and tribes, received $10,000 as payment from the Penns for land the tribes had ceded in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in...
"Reelect Roosevelt—Friend of Labor," 1936
This Democratic Party campaign poster from 1936 outlines some of the agencies and regulations Franklin Roosevelt put in place to try to solve the most urgent problems of the Great Depression. While it reminds laborers of how they have...
The Haymarket Affair, 1886
The Haymarket Affair is considered a watershed moment for American labor history, at a time when fears about the loyalties and activities of immigrants, anarchists, and laborers became linked in the minds of many Americans. On May 3,...
Phillis Wheatley’s poem on tyranny and slavery, 1772
Born in Africa, Phillis Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery as a child. She was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston in 1761. The Wheatleys soon recognized Phillis’s intelligence and taught her to read and write. She became...
Patriotic Postal Covers: "Lincoln & Davis in 5 Rounds," 1861
Patriotic postal covers are an important part of the material culture of the Civil War era. People often collected these covers in special keepsake albums. Such decorative envelopes were used as advertisements and to promote various...
Literacy and the immigration of "undesirables," 1903
During the Progressive era, tens of millions of immigrants came to the United States from Europe to fulfill their American dream. During this period most came from southern and eastern Europe, particularly from Italy, Russia, and the...
Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom, 1846
After he had escaped from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass became a well-known orator and abolitionist. He wrote an autobiography in 1845, but because he was a runaway slave, its publication increased the chances that he would be...
A political cartoon of Grant and Lee, 1864
During the first three years of the Civil War, a series of Union generals led the Army of the Potomac against Confederate General Robert E. Lee with little success. In March 1864, Abraham Lincoln appointed General Ulysses S. Grant...
Preventing labor discrimination during World War II, 1942
In early 1942, as men of working age enlisted in the military and war production accelerated, US industries experienced a labor shortage. President Roosevelt established the War Manpower Commission "to assure the most effective...
William H. Taft recalls dispute with Theodore Roosevelt, 1922
President Theodore Roosevelt mentored and groomed William Howard Taft to be his successor in the White House. However, once Taft was elected in 1908, he based his administration on a more business-centric and limited-government form...
Civilian defense on the home front, 1942
In the early days of World War II, air raids and other attacks on populated areas in Europe generated fears that similar attacks could happen in the United States. On May 20, 1941, more than six months before the United States entered...
Nominating an African American for vice president, 1880
Born a slave in 1841, Blanche Kelso Bruce was the first African American to be elected to a full term in the US Senate. During his term as a senator from Mississippi (1875–1881), he advocated the rights of African Americans and other...
The Battle of Horseshoe Bend and the end of the Creek War, 1814
On May 12, 1814, Tennessee settler Isaac Stephens wrote to his uncle Henry Mackey in Virginia about the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. In that battle on March 27, 1814, US Army and Tennessee militia troops under General Andrew...
Racism in the North: Frederick Douglass on "a vulgar and senseless prejudice," 1870
In 1870 Thomas Burnett Pugh, an ardent abolitionist prior to the Civil War, invited Frederick Douglass to participate in the "Star Course" lecture series he had organized at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. However, Douglass ...
The Brotherton Indians of New Jersey, 1780
During the French and Indian War, the Lenni-Lenape (or Delaware) Indians of New Jersey were among the tribes that signed the Treaty of Easton of 1758. The tribes agreed not to support the French in the colonial conflict and to leave...
The struggle for married women’s rights, circa 1880s
In the early nineteenth century, married women in the US were legally subordinate to their husbands. Wives could not own their own property, keep their own wages, or enter into contracts. Beginning in 1839, states slowly began to...
Energy conservation during WWII, 1943
World War II had a profound impact on life in the United States although no battles took place on the American mainland. Americans were asked to ration, recycle, and conserve materials that were essential to the war effort. This...
Temperance movement cartoon: The Drunkard’s Progress, 1826
Numerous reform movements to improve society sprang up in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. The temperance movement attracted reformers who identified excessive drinking as the principal cause of domestic...
A British view of rebellious Boston, 1774
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, both the British and the colonists used broadsides to influence public opinion. This broadside, “The Bostonian’s Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring & Feathering,” printed in...
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