Starting in the 1820s, a group of business owners built textile mills in New England, where for the first time, people could use machines to weave cotton into cloth. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force.…

After World War I, Congress passed a bill promising each military veteran of that war a cash bonus that would be paid in 1945. In the summer of 1932, facing unemployment and poverty because of the Great Depression, veterans began demanding that the…

In this letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Works Progress Administration workers in Michigan ask him to continue the program, claiming that it makes them feel more American. This version includes tax supports.

Some suffrage activists were disappointed that the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not include women’s right to vote. Susan B. Anthony and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), based in Washington, D.C., to…

William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic party candidate for President in 1900. He opposed U.S. expansion into the Philippines and often criticized U.S. imperialism in his speeches during and after the 1900 campaign.

These words and phrases (some in Spanish) are used as part of the Farmworkers and the Struggle for Economic Justice activity, which includes portions of the documentary The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers' Struggle.

This is a basic vocabulary list to use with this book. There are other words and terms that your students may want to add in the space provided at the end.

The spirit of the American Revolution inspired some slaveholders to manumit, or free, their slaves. In 1782, Virginia passed a law that allowed slaveholders to set slaves free in their wills, where before manumission required a special act of the…

This worksheet helps students undertake a close reading of a timeline of New Deal programs and write a paragraph explaining one of them.

This Wall St. Journal article acknowledges some of the problems that accompanied early-twentieth-century immigration—urban overcrowding, the strain on local resources, threats posed by foreign anarchists—but argues that immigrants should…