Presidential historian Michael Beschloss discusses the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba are pointed at the United States, and JFK is faced with the prospect of nuclear war.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, at the outbreak of World War I, industries in the north opened employment to African Americans. They left the south in record numbers for jobs in the north.
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A 101-year-old former slave tells about the suffering he experienced as a boy.
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On the eve of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the intense deliberations that went into two historic Court decisions: Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Dred Scot decision of 1857.
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Visitors to the Museum can share in the journey of the Great Lakes Indian tribes who were forced to emigrate to Kansas in the 1800s, adapting their traditional Woodlands cultures to the rolling prairie landscape. At the Museum, once a Presbyterian mission built in 1845 to educate Iowa and Sac and Fox children, you will find quillwork, baskets, and other artwork of present-day descendants of emigrant tribes. Through the interactive exhibits, Native Americans tell stories in their own words.
The site offers exhibits, tours, and educational and recreational programs.
Following the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, "Jim Crow laws," which discriminated against African Americans, were justified as offering "separate but equal" accommodations. Overturned in 1954 by the case Brown v. Board of Education, segregation began long before Plessy. Answer these questions on the history of Jim Crow.
1. The term "Jim Crow" originally referred to:
b. A popular burlesque song and theatrical dance number
White actor, singer, and dancer, Thomas D. Rice, wrote and performed "Jim Crow" (sometimes called "Jump Jim Crow" because of the first line of the chorus) in 1829 or 1830. To perform the song, Rice dressed in tattered rags and frolicked comically to impersonate a very low caricature of a black man. His performances became an overnight sensation among white audiences, and he performed all over the country. He then took his act to Britain and France, where it became an even bigger hit.
One dismayed English drama critic in the London Satirist, however, wrote: "Talent is of no country, neither is folly; and were 'Jim Crow' of English creation, we should have assuredly dealt as severely with it as we have now done with the bantling of the new world--perhaps more so, for we would have strangled it in its birth to prevent it begetting any more of its own species to offend the world's eye with their repulsive deformities. The circumstance of its being an exotic, the production of the pestilential marshes of backwood ignorance, has had no effect with us in giving our opinion. There is no concealing the fact, that Jim Crow owes its temporary triumph in this country to one of those lapses of human nature which sometimes occurs, when the senses run riot, and a sort of mental saturnalia takes place." Quoted in "Jim Crowism," Spirit of the Times (New York), February 4, 1837.
2. "Jim Crow cars" were separate railway passenger cars in which blacks were forced to travel, instead of in the passenger cars in which whites took their seats. The term "Jim Crow cars" first came into use:
a. In the mid-1830s, in Massachusetts and Connecticut
Segregated public transportation began in the North before the Civil War. In many parts of the South, a black could not travel at all, unless he or she was accompanying (or accompanied by) a white, or carrying a pass from a white person.
The inconsistencies themselves bred conflict. One Massachusetts newspaper editor wrote, "South of the Potomac, slaves ride inside of stage-coaches with their masters and mistresses—north of the Potomac they must travel on foot, in their own hired vehicles, or in the 'Jim Crow' car. … What a black man is, depends on where he is. He has no nature of his own; that depends upon his location. Moreover the contradictions that appertain to him, produce corresponding contradictions in the white man. … Seriously, very seriously—do not the incongruities, the strange anomalies, in the condition of the coloured race, clearly show there is terrible wrong somewhere? … The confusion of tongues is terrible; the confusion of ideas is worse." From "Incongruities of Slavery," The Friend, March 26, 1842, quoting the [Worcester] Massachusetts Spy.
3. Among the very first deliberate African American challengers to Jim Crow practices in public transportation was:
b. Frederick Douglass, who refused, in 1841, to give up the first-class seat on the Eastern Railroad he took when he boarded the train at Newburyport, MA, and move to the train's Jim Crow car
Douglass may not have been the very first, but he appears to have been one of the first. African Americans in New England, beginning in late 1839, along with white abolitionists, with some successes, deliberately challenged extra-legal but fairly common Jim Crow accommodations on railroads, on stagecoaches, in churches ("Negro pews"), and in schools. The persistence of Jim Crow practices in the North, however, gave Southern slave-holding whites the opportunity to reproach even abolitionist Northern whites for "not treating their free blacks better."
4. After the Civil War, the practice of formally segregating whites and blacks working in Federal Government offices was instituted during the administration of which U.S. President?
c. Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson, who had been born in Virginia, soon after he took office in 1913, began a government-wide segregation of blacks and whites in Federal workplaces, restrooms, and lunchrooms. The policy appears to have been instituted after Wilson's Georgia-born wife Ellen visited the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington and "saw white and negro women working side by side." Wilson's Secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo (also Georgia-born, and soon to be the Wilsons' son-in-law) took the hint. Shortly thereafter, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury John Skelton Williams issued an order segregating the races in the Bureau. A Washington-wide order, covering all Government offices, followed, and soon all Federal offices everywhere in the country were covered by the same order.
Looking for more on Jim Crow laws and the impact of segregation on African Americans' lives? Try American Public Media's Remembering Jim Crow, for excerpts of oral histories from those who lived through segregation. Their close-to-an-hour-long radio program, Radio Fights Jim Crow, also looks at segregation—this time, at World War II-era radio programs that challenged civil rights abuses and stereotypes of African Americans.
The History of Jim Crow, created to accompany the PBS documentary miniseries The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, goes beyond guides to the series' four parts, providing essays, interactive maps, and lesson plans.
Race and Place: An African-American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA, maintained by the University of Virginia, traces racism and segregation through the history of one city, with primary sources including oral histories, personal papers, newspapers, images, census data, maps, city records, and political materials.
For six lesson plans on segregation and education in a one-room Virginia schoolhouse, visit Teaching at Laurel Grove, from the Laurel Grove School Association.
Arriving in the U.S. by choice or against their will, minority groups sought ways to express their uniqueness and maintain a sense of community. How better to come together than as an audience—or as a group of performers? Answer the following questions on multicultural performing arts in the U.S.
1. During World War I, New York City audiences (if they knew the language of the performance) could attend patriotic musicals with titles like ____ War Brides and ____ Martyrs of America. What ethnic group fills in the blanks?
a. Jewish
From the late 1880s to around 1940, Yiddish-language theatre found a home in New York City—as did the wave of Jewish immigrants who brought the performance form to the U.S. Fleeing persecution in Russia, these immigrants, whether they chose to be performing artists or audience members, developed a unique theatre culture. Unlike the short variety acts of contemporary vaudeville, Yiddish theatre presented full-evening-length plays, accompanied by music or broken up with song-and-dance numbers. Plays adapted popular works by authors like Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov, drew from folklore and folk customs, and/or commented on recent events in the U.S. and abroad. Some addressed issues of assimilation, such as intermarriage and generational gaps, while others praised the virtues of the immigrants' adopted country—as did the musicals mentioned above.
2. In 1852, a 42-member opera troupe arrived in the U.S. After giving successful performances to immigrants from its country of origin, it traveled to New York City, where non-immigrants panned its performances. Where did the troupe come from?
d. China
In 1852, the Tong Hook Tong Dramatic Company arrived in California, following the stream of Chinese immigrants who had come to the state with the 1848 gold rush. Greeted warmly by immigrant audiences, they accepted a contract to perform in New York City. In New York, they discovered the contract was a scam, and secured their own theatre space, performing for New Yorkers independently. Chinese opera bears little resemblance to European opera, and even less to the "Oriental" image of China then popular on the mainstream stage. Confused by what they were seeing, New Yorkers rejected genuine Chinese theatre that did not match up with contemporary media stereotypes.
3. In the 1960s and 1970s, a grassroots theatre movement, beginning in efforts to educate migrant farmers and encourage them to form unions, took off, spreading across the United States. Which minority group did this movement represent?
c. Chicanos
In 1965, Luis Valdez, the son of Chicano migrant farm workers, founded the theatrical company El Teatro Campesino. El Teatro Campesino took theatrical performances—often without props, sets, or written scripts—directly to the camps of migrant farm workers. In its performances, the company sought to inspire farm workers to form a farm workers' union, but it also performed pieces based on Mexican popular theatre: corridas (dramatized ballads), peladitos (comic skits with an underdog protagonist), and religious pageants.
El Teatro Campesino's success led to the growth of a national Chicano theatre movement, which peaked in the 1970s.
4. In the late 1910s and the 1920s, record companies including Okeh, Paramount, Vocalion, and Columbia began releasing records by performers from which minority group?
c. African Americans
Prior to the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when African Americans came north in search of a better life, major record companies released African American music, but only as performed by white performers. Sensing the potential for a new market, the companies began to record African American performers and release their music on special labels targeted at African American audiences. Called "race records," these records were later marketed to white audiences as well. African Americans also established their own companies to distribute records—the first African American owned label, Black Swan, was established in 1921. Many styles of music associated with race records would later be recategorized as "rhythm and blues."
The Library of Congress's American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920 includes a subsection just for Yiddish-language playscripts. It encompasses 77 unpublished manuscripts, as well as an essay on Yiddish theatre. Brown University Library has digitized a collection of sheet music covers, including many songs from Yiddish musicals.
Today, only one professional Yiddish theater remains in the U.S.—the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre, in New York City. Founded in 1915, the company now promotes the preservation of the Yiddish language and theatre traditions.
Also from the Library of Congress, The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 archives approximately 8,000 primary source images and documents on Chinese immigrant life in California from the gold rush years through the early 20th century. Try searching by keyword "theater" or "theatre" to find images of theatrical (though not operatic) productions. For other resources on Chinese immigrants, enter "Chinese" as a keyword in NHEC's History in Multimedia search for online lectures, podcasts, and other presentations or in the Website Reviews search for websites with valuable primary sources.
For more on the influx of Chicano migrant workers in the mid-20th century, refer to NHEC's blog post on teaching Mexican American history with the Bracero Program (the Bracero Program was the largest guest worker program in U.S. history). Also look at PBS' The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers' Struggle, made to accompany the documentary of the same name, for information on Cesar Chavez, Mexican American labor activist. Luis Valdez established El Teatro Campesino to support and further Chavez's goals.
PBS' Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, also designed to accompany a documentary, features an article on race records. NPR offers a short audio presentation on the first recorded blues song sung by an African American artist—"Crazy Blues," sung by Mamie Smith—one of the first steps in the establishment of the race records market.
Every four years, television programs break for ads for those most American of products—the U.S. president and the ideals of democracy. For more than half a century, presidential candidates have used television ads to communicate their platforms and criticize their opponents. Decide whether the following statements are true or false.
1. The advertising executive who planned the first candidate television ad campaign had previously created the Coca-Cola "Passport to refreshment" campaign.
False. Advertising executive Rosser Reeves had previously created the "melts in your mouth, not in your hands" campaign for M&Ms. The campaign he planned for Eisenhower—20-second spots designed to run before or after popular television shows like I Love Lucy—featured "normal Joe" citizens asking Eisenhower questions about taxes, foreign policy, and other issues. Eisenhower answered in a brief, blunt, homey fashion, with the format giving the campaign its name: "Eisenhower Answers America." Prior to this campaign, presidential candidates had brushed off the potential of television advertising; following it, ads became an accepted and increasingly central aspect of campaigning.
2. In 1960, John F. Kennedy's television ad campaign included non-English-language advertisements.
True. JFK's 1960 campaign for the presidency, run by two different advertising agencies, included a multitude of television advertisements and a dizzying array of techniques and appeals. Several of the ads spoke out to specific demographics—including a spot in which Jackie Kennedy, speaking in uneven Spanish, assured voters that, in the face of the danger of communism, "Mi esposo siempre vigilará los intereses de todos los sectores de nuestra sociedad que necesitan la protección de un gobierno humanitario" (or, "My husband will always watch over the interests of all sectors of our society who are in need of the protection of a humanitarian government"). Other ads spoke to the African American community, assuring the public that Kennedy's Catholicism would not compromise his presidential duties.
3. As the Vietnam War continued despite his promises to end it, Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential ad campaign depicted him as stern and focused entirely on withdrawing troops from Vietnam.
False. Nixon's 1972 campaign for reelection cast him as a man of "compassion, courage, and conscience," concerned about many issues, including environmentalism and international diplomacy, as well as withdrawing from Vietnam. President Nixon, one ad declared, was willing to press for change, because "without change there can be no progress." The ads crafted the argument that Nixon, far from being cold and unapproachable, was personable and personally interested in a global push for peace and wellbeing nationally and internationally. Nixon won the campaign against South Dakota Senator George McGovern by a landslide.
4. A 1984 ad for Ronald Reagan's reelection used the threat of a bear in the woods to suggest the need for better gun control laws.
False. Though most of Ronald Reagan's ads stressed the economic wellbeing of the U.S., using montages of small-town Americans engaged in rituals such as weddings and buying new homes, one stuck out. The unusual ad showed a bear lurking in the woods; the accompanying narration suggested that the bear might or might not exist and might or might not be dangerous, but "since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?" Though the ad never explicitly states what the bear stands for, the advertisement's creators intended it to symbolize the Soviet Union. The ad's watchers, however, took it as commenting on any number of issues, including gun control and the need for change in environmental laws. Despite its ambiguity, the ad gained attention and later served as inspiration for an ad in George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
To watch all of the ads mentioned in this quiz, check out the Museum of the Moving Image's website The Living Room Candidate. Featuring more than 250 ads from all presidential campaigns since 1952, the site also presents commentary on each ad campaign, as well as detailed critical commentary on 15 ads selected as exemplary by the collection's curators and eight lesson plans for high school teachers.
For suggestions on using advertisements in the classroom, refer to Making Sense of Advertisements, a guide to primary source analysis by historian, professor, and author Daniel Pope.
While women may often have been left out of historical accounts, they were never left out of history—and some women got themselves into the books in remarkable (and unusual) ways. Match the pictures of each of the following women with the descriptions of their accomplishments in the drop-down menu:
1. Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochran). Investigative undercover reporter for the New York World and globe traveler. Lived 1864-1922.
2. Annie Smith Peck. Amateur American archeologist of Greek antiquities, and world's most famous mountaineer. Scaled Mt. Shasta, the Matterhorn, Popocatépetl, Orizaba, and Huascarán, among others. Lived 1850-1935.
3. Marguerite Harrison. Reporter for the Baltimore Sun and spy in revolutionary Russia. First foreign woman to be held by Bolshevists in the Lubyanka prison. Explorer and cinematographer in China and among the Bakhtiari in Central Asia. Lived 1879-1957.
4. Annie Edson Taylor. Unemployed schoolteacher who, at age 63, was the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, on October 24, 1901. Lived 1838-1931.
5. Mabel Stark (Mary Haynie). Daughter of Kentucky farmers. Joined the circus and, during the 1920s, became the world's most famous and skilled tiger and lion trainer, working with up to 18 cats at once. Lived 1889-1968.
6. Sonora Webster Carver. As a teenager in 1923, the first woman performer to dive on horseback 40 feet down into a deep pool of water at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Regularly performed the stunt for two decades, even after being blinded in 1931 during a dive. Lived 1904-2003.
7. Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick. In 1908, at age 15, became the first woman to use a parachute (from a hot air balloon), then in 1913, the first woman to make a jump from an aircraft. Trial tested parachute designs for the U.S. Army, and in 1914 made the first free fall parachute jump. Made over 1,100 jumps. Lived 1893-1978.
PBS' American Experience series of documentaries includes Around the World in 72 Days, on Nellie Bly and her 1889-1890 journey around the world. The full text of Bly's account of her experiences, Nellie Bly's Book: Around the World in 72 Days, can be found free to download or read online at Project Gutenberg. Her report on time spent undercover in an insane asylum, Ten Days in a Mad-house, can also be found at this site.
In 1902, Annie Edson Taylor published a 17-page booklet recording her experiences: The Internet Archive presents the full text of Over the Falls: Annie Edson Taylor's Story of Her Trip: How the Horseshoe Fall Was Conquered.
Sonora Webster Carver also wrote about her life, in her autobiography A Girl and Five Brave Horses. In 1992, Disney released a film, Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, based on Carver's life—though, as with most films, it presents a highly fictionalized version of a true story.
Try a search in NHEC's Website Reviews—Topic: Women—for websites featuring other remarkable women in American history. From Women in Journalism, archiving interviews with reporters who followed in the footsteps of women like Marguerite Harrison, to the Library of Congress's Votes for Women, preserving material from the fight for women's suffrage, NHEC highlights websites with primary sources suitable for use in the classroom.
The U.S. Supreme Court both looks to and sets precedents in handing down decisions that affect the fabric of American life and ideals—including the workings of U.S. schools. Match these descriptions of U.S. Supreme Court rulings on schools with the names of the cases.
1. Runyon v. McCrary, 1976: Private schools may not discriminate on the basis of race.
The Court decided that the 1871 Civil Rights Act gave the federal government power to override private as well as state-supported racial discrimination.
2. Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968: Prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools is unconstitutional.
The Court took on the case despite the fact that the state of Arkansas had never attempted to enforce its statute against teaching evolution.
3. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954: Racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.
State laws that had set up "separate but equal" schools for black students and white students were overturned, because such schools were "inherently unequal," and so violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
4. Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923: Prohibiting the teaching of foreign languages in grade schools is unconstitutional.
A Nebraska law had prohibited the teaching (before high school) of any subject to any child in any language other than English. The plaintiff was a parochial school teacher who had taught German to one of his students.
5. Abington School District v. Schempp, 1963: Requiring the reading of Bible verses in public school classrooms is unconstitutional.
A Pennsylvania State law had required public schools to open each day with a reading, without comment, of 10 Bible verses.
6. Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, 1925: Parents may send their children to private schools rather than public schools.
The State of Oregon had been on the verge of forcing all children to attend public schools in order to encourage immigrants' assimilation.
7. Engel v. Vitale, 1962: Requiring the recitation in public schools of an official school prayer is unconstitutional.
A Hyde Park, New York, school had opened each school day with a prayer addressed "Almighty God," which the Court held violated the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment (extended to the individual states by the 14th Amendment).
8. United States v. Virginia, 1996: Excluding either gender from any public school is unconstitutional.
The Court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute had not demonstrated a persuasive reason for excluding women, and so violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
9. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972: Parents may refuse to send their children to school after 8th grade if it violates their religious beliefs.
Amish parents had taken their children out of school after 8th grade, for religious reasons, and state authorities had attempted to force them to attend high school.
10. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 1969: Student protest is protected by 1st Amendment freedom of speech.
The protest in question was students' wearing of black armbands with peace symbols during the Vietnam War.
For more on major U.S. Supreme Court cases, try a search in our Website Reviews, using the topic "Legal History" or the keywords "Supreme Court." Search results will include websites like Oyez: U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia, which features audio files, abstracts, transcriptions of oral arguments, and written opinions covering more than 3,300 Supreme Court cases, and Landmark Supreme Court Cases, which looks at 17 major court cases from a teaching perspective.
Or search by individual court case. A search for keywords "Brown Board of Education" using our general search (see the top righthand corner of the screen) produces websites (such as the University of Michigan's Digital Archive: Brown v. Board of Education), online history lectures, museums and historic sites, and other related resources.
Also check out our blog's roundups of resources on the Supreme Court: Our Courts Especially for Middle School Students and The Supreme Court: Connections Between Past and Present.
