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

This site introduces students to one instance in which immigrants overcame the ramifications of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through the U.S. judicial system. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences. It also has cross-curricular connections with history, government, language arts, and math.

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.

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.

These classroom guides have been designed to help educators use the ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS series and companion web site in history, geography and social studies classes (grade levels 9-12). The lesson plans may also be adapted for use as stand-alone exercises.

The ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS companion Web site helps to round out the stories and ideas presented in this groundbreaking series. Visit the Asian American Timeline to learn about specific moments and events that shaped Asian American history. Join an online discussion to talk about the series or related topics regarding Asian Americans. Use the Resource section to further explore the Asian American experience.

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.

This Unit looks at the work of William Beveridge in reforming the field of social welfare after World War II. Particular attention is paid to the attitude towards women and immigrants to the United Kingdom.

This seminar provides a look at immigration from diverse perspectives, principally through a week-long immersion at the Annunciation House on the border of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

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

This is a multi-format ethnographic field collection project, undertaken during the New Deal, that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California.

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.

Roughly half the Muslims in the United States are African American and the other half are immigrants and their American–born children. This video from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly explores the relationship between these two communities.

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."

Starting with the Gold Rush, Chinese migrated to California and other regions of the United States in search of work. As several photographs show, many Chinese found work in the gold mines and on the railroads. They accepted $32.50 a month to work on the Union Pacific in Wyoming in 1870 for the same job that paid white workers $52 a month. This led to deep resentment by the whites, who felt the Chinese were competing unfairly for jobs. White labor unions blamed the Chinese for lower wages and lack of jobs, and anti-Chinese feelings grew. The cartoon "You Know How It Is Yourself" expresses this sentiment. Several political cartoons in this topic are graphic representations of racism and conflicts between whites and Chinese. "Won't They Remain Here in Spite of the New Constitution?" shows a demonized figure of political corruption protecting Chinese cheap labor, dirty politicians, capital, and financiers. "The Tables Turned" shows Denis Kearney (head of the Workingman's Party of California, a union that had criticized Chinese laborers) in jail, being taunted by Chinese men. In 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed the Chinese Exclusion Treaty, which placed strict limitations on the number of Chinese allowed to enter the United States and the number allowed to become naturalized citizens. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration from China (The Act was not repealed until 1943). The two-part cartoon from the July-December 1882 issue of The Wasp reflects how some citizens saw the situation. After the Act was passed, anti-Chinese violence increased. One illustration depicts the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, a Wyoming race riot in which 28 Chinese were killed by British and Swedish miners. The "Certificate of Residence" document illustrates that Chinese individuals were required to prove their residence in the United States prior to the passage of the Exclusion Act. The poster offering a reward for Wong Yuk, a Chinese man, makes it clear that the United States was actively deporting Chinese. Despite discrimination and prejudice, this first wave of immigrants established thriving communities. Photographs taken in San Francisco's Chinatown show prosperous businesses, such as the "Chinese Butcher and Grocery Shop." Wealthy merchants formed active business associations, represented by the image "Officers of the Chinese Six Companies." The Chinese celebrated their heritage by holding cultural festivals, as shown in the photograph from 1896. The photographs "Children of High Class," "Golden Gate Park," and "Chinese Passengers on Ferry" are evidence that some Chinese adopted Western-style clothing while others wore more traditional attire.

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.

This site presents 8,000 photos, paintings, letters, diary excerpts, pamphlets, and speeches that portray the experiences of Chinese immigrants in California during that time period. Contributions of Chinese immigrants to commerce and business, architecture and art, agriculture and other industries are described. Chinatown in San Francisco receives special treatment as the oldest and largest community of Chinese in the U.S.