In 1927, responding to the seemingly overpowering claims of advertisers and mass marketers, engineer Frederick Schlink and economist Stuart Chase published Your Money's Worth, which argued for an "extension of the principle of buying goods according to impartial scientific tests rather than according to the fanfare and triumphs of higher salesmanship." Your Money's Worth became an instant best-seller, and the authors organized Consumers' Research, a testing bureau that provided information and published product tests in a new magazine, Consumers' Research Bulletin. The 1929 stock market crash heightened suspicion of consumer capitalism, and the magazine had 42,000 subscribers by 1932. In 1933, Schlink and Arthur Kallet (executive secretary of Consumers' Research) published 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics. The book struck a responsive chord in depression-era America--it went through thirteen printings in its first six months and became one of the best-selling books of the decade. The book's first chapter ("The Great American Guinea Pig"), gave a flavor of their vigorous arguments.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, stunned virtually everyone in the U.S. military: Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. In this 1991 interview, conducted by John Terreo for the Montana Historical Society, serviceman Orville Quick, who was assigned to build airfields and was very near Pearl Harbor on December 6, 1941, remembers the attack. He also provided a vivid, and humorous, account of the chaos from a soldier's point of view.

This course is a survey of American History from the Age of Exploration and Discovery to the present. Emphasis is placed on critical and evaluative thinking skills, essay writing, interpretation of original documents, and historiography. This history curriculum is assembled from UC college preparatory courses and students will demonstrate comprehension of a broad body of historical knowledge; express ideas clearly in writing; work with classmates to research an historical issue; interpret and apply data from original documents; identify underrepresented historical viewpoints; write to persuade with evidence; compare and contrast alternate interpretations of an historical figure, event, or trend; explain how an historical event connects to or causes a larger trend or theme; develop essay responses that include a clear, defensible thesis statement and supporting evidence; effectively argue a position on an historical issue; critique and respond to arguments made by others; raise and explore questions about policies, institutions, beliefs, and actions in an historical context; evaluate primary materials, such as historical documents, political cartoons, and first-person narratives; evaluate secondary materials, such as scholarly works or statistical analyses; and assess the historical significance and cultural impact of key literary works (e.g. Common Sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin).

Encouraged by the government to back their men at the front

The interwar peace movement was arguably the largest mass movement of the 1920s and 1930s, a mobilization often overlooked in the wake of the broad popular consensus that ultimately supported the U.S. involvement in World War II. The destruction wrought in World War I (known in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Great War") and the cynical nationalist politics of the Versailles Treaty had left Americans disillusioned with the Wilsonian crusade to save the world for democracy. Senate investigations of war profiteering and shady dealings in the World War I munitions industry both expressed and deepened widespread skepticism about wars of ideals. Charles Lindbergh, popular hero of American aviation, had been speaking in support of American neutrality for some time, and allies of FDR's interventionist foreign policy sought to counter the arguments of the famous aviator. In a May 19, 1940, radio speech, Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina refuted Lindbergh's position, specifically rebutting a speech Lindbergh had given on military spending.

The productive capacity of the United States during World War II surpassed all expectations. To boost that production and maintain supply levels for troops abroad, Americans at home were asked to conserve materials and to accept ration coupons or stamps that limited the purchase of certain products. Gasoline, rubber, sugar, butter, and some kinds of cloth were among the many items rationed. American responses to rationing varied from cheerful compliance to resigned grumbling to instances of black market subversion and profiteering. Government-sponsored posters, ads, radio shows, and pamphlet campaigns urged Americans to contribute to scrap drives and accept rationing without complaint. "Aluminum for Defense," a comic program from New York's radio station WOR in 1941, conveyed some of the tone of these campaigns. This excerpt, complete with clashing pots and pans, moved from Times Square to Harlem to the tony Stork Club.

This site contains links to thousands of the most famous documentary photographs ever produced. The Farm Security Administrations's photographs cover the Great Depression, while the Office of War Administration's photographs look at the mobilization effort for World War II.

The Great Depression and World War II permanently changed American politics and society. Topics include: the Great Crash, the New Deal, Roosevelt, the home front, the Normandy Invasion, and the atomic bomb. Explores those events through film, novels, newspapers, and other historical documents.

This course surveys art of America from the colonial era through the post-war 20th century. The student will consider broad stylistic tendencies in various regions and periods and examine specific artists and works of art in historical and social contexts, with emphasis on the congruent evolution of contemporary American multi-cultural identity. Overarching issues that have interested major scholars of American art and its purview include the landscape (wilderness, Manifest Destiny, rural settlement, and urban development); the family and gender roles; the founding rhetoric of freedom and antebellum slavery; and notions of artistic modernism through the 20th century. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: Understand the historical (geographic, political) formation of the present United States of America; Be familiar with renowned influential American artists from the 18th through the 20th century; Be conversant in common stylistic designations used in Western art of the 17th through 20th centuries; Recognize subjects and forms in American art through history that mark its distinction; Be able to engage specific images, objects, and structures from different critical perspectives to consider their functions and meanings. (Art History 210)

This site presents 2,900 life histories from 300 writers from 24 states. These histories describe individuals' families, incomes, occupations, political views, religions, diets, and observations.

Combatants in World War II possessed far greater firepower than ever before. Consequently, the incidence of death and mutilation in units actually fighting the enemy was extremely high, sometimes one in three. World War II was the first war in which combat deaths actually outnumbered fatalities from disease or accident. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime government carefully controlled what information reached the American public from the battle fronts. Until September, 1943, government censors blocked the publication of all photographs showing dead American soldiers. After that, censors continued to withhold many pictures such as this photograph taken on Leyte Island in the Philippines on October 31, 1944that did not, even in death, conform to the heroic image of the American fighting man.

This activity guide accompanies the exhibition America on the Move. It delivers a variety of historical primary-source materials from the exhibition directly to your classroom. Through these documents and activities, students can build a deeper understanding of how transportation shaped American commerce, communities, landscapes, and population migrations.

The Bonus March was one of several grassroots movements of the unemployed during the Great Depression that galvanized thousands of men and women and helped focus attention on the role of the federal government in alleviating economic hardship. Twenty thousand World War I veterans marched to Washington to demand the immediate release of promised cash bonuses and set up camp until their demands were met. With President Herbert Hoover's authorization, federal troops, armed with tanks and cavalry, attacked the homeless veterans and burned their encampment. When images like this photograph, which shows the Bonus Marchers' shantytown burning down in sight of the Capitol on the afternoon of July 28, 1932, reached the public, Hoover's image was permanently tarnished.

Students will analyze letters that children wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

New Deal arts projects were guided by two novel assumptions: artists were workers and art was cultural labor worthy of government support. That commitment was demonstrated most dramatically in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program for depression-era artists. Some painters and sculptors continued working in their studios with the assistance of relief checks and the occasional supervision of WPA administrators--their work was placed in libraries, schools, and other public buildings. FAP also sponsored hundreds of murals and sculptures designed for municipal buildings and public spaces. FAP's Community Art Centers worked to create new audiences for art by bringing art education and exhibitions to neighborhoods and communities with little access to galleries and museums. These essays by FAP employees Thaddeus Clapp and Lawrence A. Jones lauded programs that brought "art within reach" for people in Massachusetts and affirmed the democratic possibilities of a project that reached across class and racial lines in New Orleans.

To many ordinary citizens during the Great Depression, bank robbers were seen as victims of injustice driven to commit crimes, folk heroes wreaking vengeance on a callous economic system. The notoriety of the Barrow Gang ("Bonnie and Clyde") was bolstered by wild shootouts with police, spectacular car chases, and the romance of two lovers outside the law. In turn, they courted publicity and cultivated the image of misfit-heroes. Bonnie and Clyde's "aspirations" were low: they preferred raiding small, isolated banks and did not hesitate to prey on modest stores and marginal businesses. Bonnie Parker sent poems and photographs to newspapers, heralding the Barrow Gang's exploits and defending her honor. This poem, by Parker, depicted the pair as populist desperadoes, misunderstood and star-crossed lovers driven to a life of crime. Bonnie and Clyde remained at large until a Texas posse ambushed them on May 23, 1934. Dying together in a proverbial hail of bullets--the Texas lawmen pumped some 187 rounds into the couple--helped perpetuate the romance surrounding their short, desperate, and destructive lives.

On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike's most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as "War in San Francisco!" On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland (across the bay). Mike Quin, a self-described "rank-and-file journalist," offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath.

John Collier's appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 marked a radical reversal--in intention if not always in effect--in U.S. government policies toward American Indians that dated back to the 1887 Dawes Act. An idealistic social worker, Collier first encountered Indian culture when he visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and found among the Pueblos there what he called a "Red Atlantis"--a model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. Although Collier could not win congressional backing for his most radical proposals, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. Collier set out his vision for what became known as the "Indian New Deal" in this 1934 article from the Literary Digest. Although he was sympathetic to Indians, he depicted them in a stereotypical manner.

Is the first major exhibit of 70 prints (made from color transparencies taken between 1939 and 1943) showing the effects of the Depression on people in rural America and small towns, the nation's subsequent economic recovery, and the mobilization for World War II.