Content Provider: Many Pasts (CHNM/ASHP)
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Displaying 1-20 of 1003 results.
100,000,000 Guinea Pigs : The Dangers of Consumption
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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
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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 »
"80 Rounds in Our Pants Pockets": Orville Quick Remembers Pearl Harbor
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Abstract: 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 ... More »
"A Bill of Rights for the Indians": John Collier Envisions an Indian New Deal
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Abstract: 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 ... More »
"A Black Joke."
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Abstract: Free African Americans living in the North before the Civil War suffered enormous disadvantages and discriminations. Forced to sit in separate and inferior sections in theaters, public transit, and churches, free blacks were also barred from all but the most menial jobs and denied entrance to white trade ... More »
"A Bold Stroke for Freedom."
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Abstract: On Christmas Eve, 1855, patrollers finally caught up with a group of teenaged slaves who had escaped by wagon from Loudon County, Virginia. But the posse was driven off when Ann Wood, leader of the group, brandished weapons and dared the pursuers to fire. The fugitives continued on to Philadelphia. Although ... More »
A Call to Arms: McNeill's Unshakable Faith in Labor's Future
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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"
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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
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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 Christ-like Character: A Catholic Priest Champions Henry George
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Abstract: In the late 19th century, Irish-Catholic immigrants and their children were a bulwark of the New York Democratic Party and especially the machine politicians of Tammany Hall. In the mayoral election of 1886, Tammany fought hard to retain the support of these Irish-Catholic voters in the race between ... More »
A Clear and Present Danger: The Chinese Exclusion Act
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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 Clear Signal to Officials of the White South: 'Go Back to Your Old Ways'": Vernon Jordan Argues Against the Nixon Administration's Voting Rights Proposal
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Abstract: The Voting Rights Act of 1965--called "the most successful civil rights law in the nation's history" by Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights--was enacted in order to force Southern states and localities to allow all citizens of voting age to vote in public elections. ... More »
"A Complex Pattern of Past and Present Discrimination": Academics React to the Kerner Report
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Abstract: President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 to explain the riots that plagued cities each summer since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. The Commission's 1968 report, informally known as the Kerner Report, concluded that ... More »
"A condition we can ill afford": Debating the Equal Pay Act of 1963
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Abstract: Recommendations by the National War Labor Board during World War II to pay male and female workers equal wages yielded few changes in the gender wage gap. Women continued to receive less money for comparable work, and into the 1960s want ads characterized jobs as "male" or "female" with resulting salary ... More »
A Cowboy's Work is Never Done: George Martin
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Abstract: The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for ... More »
A Craft Unionist Rewrites the Ten Commandments
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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
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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 Damaging Impression of Hollywood Has Spread": Movie "Czar" Eric Johnston Testifies before HUAC
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Abstract: The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held hearings in October 1947 on Communist activity in Hollywood. In the following testimony, Eric Johnston, a successful businessman who in 1945 succeeded Will H. Hays as President of the Motion Picture Association of America--the industry's institution ... More »
"A Date Which Will Live in Infamy": FDR Asks for a Declaration of War
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Abstract: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the United States military. Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. President Franklin Roosevelt quickly addressed Congress to ask for a declaration of war as illustrated in ... More »
"A Decent Home . . . for Every American Family": Postwar Housing Shortage Victims Testify before Congress
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Abstract: New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in ... More »