Keywords: 1890-1930
Loading...
Displaying 1-20 of 366 results.
100,000,000 Guinea Pigs : The Dangers of Consumption
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: 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 ... More »
"1500 Doomed": People's Press Reports on the Gauley Bridge Disaster
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The deadly lung disease silicosis is caused when miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers inhale fine particles of silica dust--a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite. In 1935, approximately 1,500 workers--largely African Americans who had come north to find work--were killed by exposure ... More »
A Call to Arms: McNeill's Unshakable Faith in Labor's Future
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: As the 19th century drew to a close, labor activists were forced to confront the implications of a long string of defeats suffered by their movement in recent years. One of the most venerable of labor editors, George McNeill, writing in the official journal of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in ... More »
A Case of Black and White: White Women Protest the Hiring of Black "Wage-Slaves"
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans labored in Southern textile mills, especially in the spinning and weaving rooms. But with the jump in the price of slaves in the 1850s, manufacturers decided that poor white farmers provided a cheaper labor force. After the Civil War, the textile ... More »
A Chinese Immigrant Makes His Home in Turn-of-the-Century America
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: 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 ... More »
A Clear and Present Danger: The Chinese Exclusion Act
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), organized in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence ... More »
A Craft Unionist Rewrites the Ten Commandments
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The moral code of craft unionism was part of a larger system of late nineteenth-century working-class values that went well beyond behavior on the job. Moreover, those values drew upon other deeply held moral beliefs, particularly those growing out of religion. In "Labor's Decalogue," G. Edmonston, the ... More »
"A Crowd of Howling Negroes": The Chicago Daily Tribune Reports the Chicago Race Riot, 1919
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full rights of citizenship that they had fought to defend ... More »
A. F. of L. Delegates.
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: 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 ... More »
A Family Corresponds: Polish Immigrants in the Early 20th century
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: Many immigrants to the United States wrote letters back home. At the time they were written, the missives shaped the expectations of those who would soon make the same journey; today, they gave historians invaluable first-hand testimony of the immigrants' own experiences. These seventeen letters involved ... More »
"A Foretaste of the Orient": John Murray Criticizes the AFL
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: Most historians who have written about the 1903 strike of Mexican and Japanese farm workers against the Oxnard, California, sugar beet growers have relied on John Murray's first-hand account of the strike and its aftermath. Murray, a socialist union organizer, went to Oxnard after learning of the strike ... More »
"A Heritage of Scorn": Harper Urges A Color-Blind Cause
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations campaigned ... More »
"A Less Reliable Form of Birth Control": Miriam Allen deFord Describes Her Introduction to Contraception in 1914
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: Despite major cultural, legal, and medical impediments the use of birth control, including abortion, by American women was widespread at the turn of the century. In their quest to control unwanted pregnancies, American women could be surprisingly resourceful in the methods they used. In this audio excerpt ... More »
"A Man's Thanksgiving": A Hymn to the God of Business
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." Coolidge's aphorism revealed the centrality of commerce to the nation and its culture in the 1920s, even ... More »
"A Message to Garca": Elbert Hubbard's Paean to Perseverance
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The best-known image of America's 1898 war with Spain is that of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback charging with his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba. While the Rough Riders fired the first shot in the war and were the first to raise the U.S. flag in Cuba, their exploits were greatly mythologized. Another ... More »
"A Modern School": Abraham Flexner Outlines Progressive Education
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: In the early 20th century, an impressive array of intellectuals, social critics, and grassroots activists came together to launch a progressive education movement that sought broad-based change in American educational practice. At the heart of the progressive program lay a pedagogy that emphasized flexibility ... More »
"A Perfect Hailstorm of Bullets": A Black Sergeant Remembers the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1899
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The best-known image of the Spanish-American War is that of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback charging with his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba. But not only was the role of the Rough Riders exaggerated, it also displaced attention from the black soldiers who made up almost 25 percent of the U. S. force ... More »
"A Rale Boost to Lithrachoor": A Humorist Lampoons Libraries
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The founders of the great libraries of the 19th century were often ambivalent about whether their goal was to disseminate or conserve knowledge. They were also uncertain about the intended audience. John Cotton Dana of the Newark Public Library was atypical in his populist stance that "it is a proper ... More »
A Royal Disaster: Cortissoz Critiques the Armory Show
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: In February and March 1913, thousands of New Yorkers poured into the 69th Regiment Armory for an "International Exhibition of Modern Art." By the time the so-called Armory Show had completed its tour of the U.S., a half million people had seen the exhibit--one of the most influential in American art ... More »
A Separate Peace: Alice Henry on Women and Unions
| Rating: | |
| Type: | Library or Collection |
Abstract: The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), established in 1903 by reformers seeking to combine the forces of trade unionism and feminism, faced particular obstacles when organizing women into unions. In this 1915 essay, published in The Trade Union Woman , WTUL leader Alice Henry discussed some of those ... More »
