Learn about the checks and balances system of the three branches of the U.S. government.

In 2016, a billionaire businessman and the first woman nominated by a major party ran against each other for president of the United States. In very different ways, both candidates approached the presidency as outsiders, reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of US presidential politics. As outsiders, the 2016 candidates are noteworthy, but not unique; indeed, the 2016 race resonates with the legacies of outsiders who have come before. This exhibition explores the rich history of select individuals, parties, events, and movements that have influenced US presidential elections from the outside—outside Washington politics, outside the two-party system, and outside the traditional conception of who can be an American president.

In this curriculum unit, students look at the role of President as defined in the Constitution and consider the precedent-setting accomplishments of George Washington.

It was approximately 40,000 years ago that mankind first donned a pair of shoes. During humanity’s long history of footwear, and an equally broad array of styles, the basic fundamentals of Western shoemaking remained mostly unchanged until the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1800s, the small state of Massachusetts revolutionized the shoemaking industry, cladding the feet of consumers nationwide in unprecedented numbers. One of America’s original colonies, Massachusetts found itself at the heart of the nation’s shoemaking industry by attracting and retaining skilled shoemakers and shoe machinery engineers. Only when the technology that Massachusetts' shoemakers invented became available beyond the state did the industry’s market expand throughout the country. Even with the spread of industrialization, Massachusetts remained the largest producer of shoes in the United States through World War I, responsible for nearly forty percent of America’s shoes and home to an equal percentage of its shoemakers. This exhibition was created as part of the DPLA’s Public Library Partnerships Project by collaborators from Digital Commonwealth. Exhibition organizer: Anna Fahey-Flynn.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Black Power Movement. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory—800,000 square miles of land in the interior of North America. Most of this land had not been previously explored or documented. President Thomas Jefferson chose Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead an ambitious military expedition, seeking a northwestern passage to the Pacific Ocean and to document their journey in this unknown territory. Starting in what is now Missouri, the expedition followed the Missouri River and passed through present-day Montana on its way to the Pacific. The explorers commented on the beauty of the landscape and the abundance of animals, and their descriptions attracted fur traders and others ready to take advantage of the region's abundant natural resources. The discovery of gold in 1862 brought in the first rush of people and subsequent mining forever changed the region. The mining industry demanded support in the form of towns, railroads, logging, ranching, and farming. These industries shaped Montana and the people who settled there. This exhibition explores the industries that brought settlers to Montana from the early days to the 1920s. Each industry had its own “boom and bust” cycle that impacted the residents and the future of the state. This exhibition was created as part of the DPLA’s Public Library Partnerships Project by collaborators from Montana Memory Project: Jennifer Birnel, Della Yeager, Cody Allen, Dale Alger, Caroline Campbell, Carly Delsigne, Pam Henley, Stef Johnson, Lisa Mecklenberg-Jackson, Laura Tretter, and Franky Abbott. Exhibition organizers: Jennifer Birnel and Franky Abbott.

This collection uses primary sources to explore twentieth-century mining in the Mojave Desert. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Boston Sports Temples celebrates the rich histories of Boston’s professional stadiums and arenas. Some, like Fenway Park, still welcome fans today. Others were demolished decades ago, leaving only hints of their former glory amid the urban landscape. This exhibition welcomes modern fans through the gates of venues both famous and forgotten: the various home fields—and courts and tracks and ice—of Boston’s most beloved franchises and hosts to a century of public events, concerts, and gatherings. Featuring historical photographs from the Boston Public Library’s extensive archives, Boston Sports Temples draws from thousands of negatives and prints dating from the early twentieth century through the 1960s. The images capture the unique character of Boston’s historic sports venues, memorable moments, and the communities of athletes, fans, and staff who have come together within their walls. Together, these vintage materials provide an invaluable window into the past and a nostalgic look back at our city, our deep sporting traditions, and generations of passionate fandom. Created by the Boston Public Library.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Boston Tea Party. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

By exploring historical accounts of events surrounding the Boston Tea Party, students learn about the sources and methods that historians use to reconstruct what happened in the past.

The Lawrence Textile Strike was a public protest mainly of immigrant workers from several countries, including Austria, Belgium, Cuba, Canada, France, England, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Syria, and Turkey. According to the 1910 census, 65% of mill workers (many of whom eventually struck) lived in the United States for less than 10 years; 47% for less than five years. Prompted by a wage cut, the walkout spread quickly from mill to mill across the city. Strikers defied the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically diverse workers could not be organized. The Lawrence strike is referred to as the “Bread and Roses” strike and “The Strike for Three Loaves." The first known source to do so was a 1916 labor anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest by Upton Sinclair. Prior to that, the slogan, used as the title of a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim, had been attributed to ‘Chicago Women Trade Unionists.’ It has also been attributed to socialist union organizer Rose Schneiderman. James Oppenheim claimed his seeing women strikers in Lawrence carrying a banner proclaiming “We Want Bread and Roses Too” inspired the poem, “Bread and Roses.” The poem, however, was written and published in 1911 prior to the strike. Later the poem was set to music by Caroline Kohlsaat and then by Mimi Farina. The song and slogan are now important parts of the labor movement and women’s movement worldwide. This exhibition was made in collaboration with the Lawrence History Center and the University of Massachusetts Lowell History Department.

As the United States began the most deadly conflict in its history, the American Civil War, it was also laying the groundwork for one of its greatest achievements in transportation. The First Transcontinental Railroad, approved by Congress in the midst of war, helped connect the country in ways never before possible. Americans could travel from coast to coast with speed, changing how Americans lived, traded, and communicated while disrupting ways of life practiced for centuries by Native American populations. The coast-to-coast railroad was the result of the work of thousands of Americans, many of whom were Chinese immigrant laborers who worked under discriminatory pressures and for lower wages than their Irish counterparts. These laborers braved incredibly harsh conditions to lay thousands of miles of track. That track—the work of two railroad companies competing to lay the most miles from opposite directions—came together with the famous Golden Spike at Promontory Summit in Utah on May 10, 1869. This exhibition explores the construction of the first Transcontinental Railroad and its impact on American westward expansion. This exhibition was created as part of the DPLA’s Digital Curation Program by the following students as part of Professor Krystyna Matusiak's course "Digital Libraries" in the Library and Information Science program at the University of Denver: Jenifer Fisher, Benjamin Hall, Nick Iwanicki, Cheyenne Jansdatter, Sarah McDonnell, Timothy Morris and Allan Van Hoye.

This collection uses primary sources to explore school desegregation in Boston. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In twenty-first century American society, childhood is popularly understood as a time of innocence, learning, and play. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, children made up part of the country’s workforce, and labored on farms and in factories. When they were not working, they enjoyed great independence in leisure activities—be it in a loud city street or a peaceful country lake. Often, children were far from adult supervision. Reformers during the Progressive Er—a period of social activism and political reform across the United States between the 1890s and 1920s —took a great interest in child welfare. Through organizations and legislation, they sought to define what a happy and healthy childhood should be in the modern age. Immersion in nature was central to what the Progressives prescribed, and children’s organizations and camps offered a suitable combination of supervision and open spaces. The formula for a healthy childhood was further refined in postwar America. Children were given a distinct place in the family and home, as well as within the consumer market with the emergence of teenage culture and buying power. This exhibition was created as part of the DPLA's Public Library Partnerships Project by collaborators from the Digital Library of Georgia and Georgia's public libraries.

This lesson provides students with tools to analyze primary source newspaper articles about the Great War (1914"“1917) in order to understand public opinion regarding the U.S. entry into the war from multiple perspectives.

This lesson brings together digital mapping and the Chronicling America newspaper database as part of an inquiry into how and where the women's suffrage movement took place in the United States. Primary source newspaper articles published between 1911-1920 and maps from 1918-1920 are used to prompt student research into how women organized, the type of elections that women could participate in, and the extent to which the 19th Amendment transformed voting rights in the U.S.

This lesson plan attempts to dissolve the artificial boundary between domestic and international affairs in the postwar period to show students how we choose to discuss history.

In this lesson, student groups create a short, simple play based on their study of broadsides written just before the American Revolution. By analyzing the attitudes and political positions are revealed in the broadsides, students learn about the sequence of events that led to the Revolution

Drawing on the resources of the Library of Congress's Printed Ephemera Collection, this lesson helps students experience the news as the colonists heard it: by means of broadsides, notices written on disposable, single sheets of paper that addressed virtually every aspect of the American Revolution.

This collection uses primary sources to explore religion during the Colonial period of US History. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.