According to the Gilder Lehrman website, "Award-winning historian Jean Strouse discusses her research into the life of J.P. Morgan, America's most influential banker. She looks at the reasons for his success and delves into his inscrutable personal life. Strouse's extensive scholarship offers many insights into her subject, whose name is in the financial news headlines once again."
Why were the Sons of Liberty not stopped by British troops as they boarded three ships in Boston Harbor on Dec. 16, 1773 (Boston Tea Party)? Were there no Redcoats patrolling the area? How long did the Boston Tea Party last? An hour, two hours? Why weren't they apprehended?
The tea was on three privately owned merchant ships. One hundred and fourteen chests were on board the Dartmouth, the first ship to arrive in port. The other two ships, the Eleanor and the brig Beaver carried 228 chests between them, along with other cargo. As the ships sailed into Boston Harbor, they each passed by Castle William to the south, which was under the command of a British officer and had upwards of a hundred cannon. When the ships came into the harbor, but before they docked, port officials boarded them. That meant that they had officially reached port and that their movements were now under the command of port officials instead of their captains.
Behind the tea-laden ships, British Admiral John Montagu brought a squadron of warships to prevent the colonists from forcing the ships back out to sea before they were unloaded. This put the captains (and the ships' owners) in a bind. If the tea wasn't unloaded, customs weren't paid. And if the ships tried to sail back out of port, Montagu would stop them and charge them with failing to pay customs on their cargo that was due, according to him, because they had already entered port.
After a few days, the colonists had the ships come in close to Griffin's Wharf. The Sons of Liberty organized a continuous watch of the vessels. Twenty-five men on each shift ensured that the ships were not unloaded under the cover of darkness, or at least to sound an alarm if there was an attempt. The ships' captains came ashore and left the mates on board. The situation remained the same for more than two weeks.
Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of colonial Massachusetts, clearly understood that the colonists were angry, but he did not anticipate that they would damage the cargo. He was counting on the fact that after 20 days without having paid customs, the customs authorities—with the assistance of British sailors and soldiers—could legally impound the tea from the ships, and then, from Castle William, disburse it in small amounts to a few merchants who could resell it. This would circumvent the colonists' effort to make sure that the tea did not enter Massachusetts. Hutchinson and the apprehensive merchants who were willing to receive the tea had holed up with the troops in Castle William.
Boston was not under martial law, so soldiers were not policing the city, although Hutchinson could have brought a detachment of soldiers in, had he known beforehand the particulars of a threat. He did not post a military guard at the wharf, however, perhaps to avoid provoking a confrontation with the crowds keeping watch there.
On December 14th, when the 20 days of waiting were almost up, Hutchinson wrote his brother Elisha about the excited Bostonians, "I hardly think they will attempt sending the tea back, but am more sure it will not go many leagues: it seems probable they will wait to hear from the southward, and much may depend on what is done there." (Hutchinson, 96) Yet Hutchinson also believed the colonists might take some form of direct action if an attempt was made to land the tea onto the wharf.
Just after six o'clock on the night of December 16, 1773, a group of about 60 men daubed their faces with burnt cork, coal dust, or donned other makeshift disguises, armed themselves with hatchets, and formed a raiding party. Some of them styled themselves "Indians."
They made their way to the wharf. The Sons of Liberty's watch was already there, and still others joined them, either to assist or simply to see what was happening. The raiding party formed three groups of 50 each, and boarded all of the nearly deserted ships at about the same time. They met no resistance.
Lendall Pitts, the commander of the group that boarded the brig Beaver, "sent a man to the mate, who was on board, in his cabin, with a message, politely requesting the use of a few lights, and the brig's keys—so that as little damage as possible might be done to the vessel;—and such was the case. The mate acted the part of a gentleman altogether. He handed over the keys without hesitation, and without saying a single word, and sent his cabin-boy for a bunch of candles, to be immediately put in use." (Thatcher, 1812).
The moon shone brightly too, so their work was well lit. The night was very quiet and neither the crowd on the wharf nor the raiding party spoke much. Onlookers at the wharf, as well as the men on some of the closer British ships, however, quite distinctly heard the sounds of the chests being staved in.
The party quickly brought the 342 chests of tea (a total of 90,000 lbs.) onto the deck. They split them open and threw the tea and the chests overboard into the harbor. The party took care that no other property on board the ships was harmed, and that none of the raiders took away any of the tea. They even swept the decks clean of loose tea when they were done. They worked quickly, apprehensive of a possible attack from Admiral Montagu's squadron, part of which was only a quarter of a mile away.
Montagu watched the affair from the fleet, but he took no action because of the cargo ships' position next to the wharf. "I could easily have prevented the Execution of this Plan," he wrote the following day in a report, "but must have endangered the Lives of many innocent People by firing upon the Town." (Labardee, 145) Instead, he rowed ashore and watched from a building nearby, even briefly exchanging taunts with the Indians.
The tea party lasted three hours, finishing around nine o'clock. The raiding party then formed in rank and file by the wharf, and, shouldering their hatchets, marched, accompanied by a fifer, back into town, dispersed, and went home.
The next morning a large, winding mound of loose tea still floated in the harbor, and a party of colonists rowed out in boats and sank it down into the waters with their oars. The British fleet witnessed this, too, but did not interfere.
The disguised men's identities were kept secret by their fellow Bostonians, and Governor Hutchinson was unable to charge the members of the raiding party, but Parliament responded five months later (news traveled back and forth across the ocean very slowly then) with a series of measures meant to force Boston to heel.
Benjamin Bussey Thatcher ("A Bostonian") et al, Traits of the Tea Party; being a memoir of George R. T. Hewes, one of the last of its survivors; with a history of that transaction; reminiscences of the massacre, and the siege, and other stories of old times (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835).
Peter Orlando Hutchinson, The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1884). Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
What taxes were the colonists required to pay by the British around the years 1760-1776?
After British victory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Parliament attempted to better organize the British Empire. Among other things, Parliament, led by the ministry of George Grenville, enacted the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, and so for the first time taxed the British North American colonies. The Sugar Act amended the Molasses Act of 1733 by lowering the duty on French West Indian molasses from 6d per gallon to 3d. Reducing the duty made purchase affordable and so encouraged what the higher duty had discouraged.
The colonists denounced the Sugar Act. They reasoned that British subjects had a sacrosanct right to have their property protected. The power to tax threatened property unless the taxing body was chosen by the tax payers and also had to pay the same taxes it required others to pay. The British House of Commons met neither requirement when it taxed the colonies, and so the colonists concluded that taxation without representation violated property rights.
The colonists made the same argument in response to the Stamp Act. But the Sugar Act was enforced primarily on the oceans and by the navy, meaning that the colonists could not physically prevent the tax from being assessed. The stamp tax required that to be legal most paper products—newspapers, court documents, marriage licenses, wills, even playing cards and dice—carry an official stamp. To work the tax depended on colonists within colonial communities selling the stamps, making suspected stamp distributors vulnerable to the pressure of their neighbors. The Grenville ministry announced the stamp tax in February 1765 to go into effect in November. In the intervening months the colonists protested, rioted, and intimidated anyone suspected of taking the office of stamp distributor. Led by the Sons of Liberty, the colonists made the Stamp Act unenforceable before it even began. In 1766 the new Rockingham ministry repealed the Stamp Act but only amended the Sugar Act lowering the duty to 1d per gallon. The experience showed that the colonists opposed all parliamentary taxation but that they could much more easily prevent internal taxes than external ones.
The Chatham ministry came to power in 1767 and enacted new taxes, the Townshend Acts, that year. These external taxes taxed lead, glass, paint, and especially tea. The Townshend Acts provoked the same ideological criticism and led colonists to have grave concerns that British liberty was not safe within the empire. Because the taxes were external they were much harder to prevent but by 1769 the colonists had organized a boycott movement. Growing tensions caused troops stationed on the western frontier to be reassigned to Boston, which led to the famous Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. The new first minister, Lord North, had already decided to repeal most of the Townshend Acts, which were threatening to tear apart the empire.
In 1770 North repealed all of the acts except for the tax on tea, the most lucrative of the taxes. The remaining tax kept relations tense and suspicious. Finally in 1773 North sought to resolve the impasse. He replaced the last Townshend Act with the Tea Act of 1773. The act was meant to bail out the East India Company, make clear Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies, and make the price of tea cheaper for colonists than it had been before. North reasoned that no colonists could fear an act that made them drink cheaper tea. He was wrong and the Boston Sons of Liberty threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. The Boston Tea Party destroyed tea worth £11,000 or about $1.5 million today. That was the last tax Parliament ever imposed in the colonies. The Tea Party caused the passage of the Coercive Acts of 1774, which were punitive laws meant to punish Massachusetts, but were not taxes. The Coercive Acts led to the first and second Continental Congresses and, ultimately, to the declaration of independence. So taxes did not cause the American Revolution, but taxation without representation did create a climate of suspicion and fear that provoked the events which did.
Carp, Benjamin. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, first edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Jensen, Merill. The Founding of a Nation, A History of the American Revolution 1763-1776 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Morgan, Helen and Edmund S. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Thomas, P.D.G. (Peter). Townshend Duties Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767-1773 Claredon Press, Oxford University Press, 1987.
You don't have to look far to see how important music is to modern American life. Young people (as well as adults) talk about music, listen to music, download music, remix music, share music, and define themselves by music. In classrooms across the country, MP3 players and pop-tune ringtones give students' musical tastes away (and get them in trouble). But has music always been this personal, portable, and repeatable?
Ask your students to think back. Do they remember a time when music wasn't something you could own? When they, someone in their family, or someone they knew didn't have an MP3 player—or a CD, tape, or record player?
Before the birth of the recording industry, you could buy sheet music and learn how to perform musical pieces for yourself—but that was it. An individual performance was ephemeral, literally once in a lifetime.
When the recording industry took off, music became an object. Now you could buy and trade moments in musical time, preserved forever. You could listen to artists who lived far away from you, whom you might never see live. You could listen to your favorite performances again and again. You could even sell music, without having to worry about arranging performances. One song sung once by one artist could earn money for months or years to come. Sound become solid, something that could be passed from hand to hand—and preserved.
On May 10, 2011, the Library of Congress launched its National Jukebox, an online archive of more than 10,000 recordings from 1901–1925. According to the website, Library of Congress staff worked throughout 2010 to digitize this massive collection of Victor Talking Machine Company recordings (Victor, now RCA, is one of the oldest record companies in existence, according to the Library of Congress's blog entry announcing the launch of the Jukebox).
You can browse the recordings by vocal artist, composer, lyricist, language, place or date of recording, target audience, label, category, or genre. And if you find some music you'd like to remember? Add it to your playlist in the site's pop-up player. Now you can listen to it while you browse other sites, email it to yourself to listen to later, or share it with others on social media sites or by embedding it in a blog or website.
While exploring the Jukebox is entertaining in its own right—I just spent two minutes listening to humorous singer Burt Shepard trying to lure a lost cat home—it also makes invaluable primary sources easily accessible.
Teaching about the rise of ragtime and jazz? Make a playlist of famous (and less famous) songs and artists and share it with your students.
How about the invention of the airplane? The Haydn Quartet's "Up in My Aeroplane" can give students an idea of the romance and novelty of flight six years after the Wright Brothers' first successful test run.
World War I? "Hooray, the war is over!" sings Harry Lauder in 1918; months earlier, baritone Reinald Werrenrath remembered the U.S.'s debt to Lafayette and to embattled France.
Pick a time period, a genre, an artist, a word—and go looking! There's something in this storehouse to accompany almost any topic from 1901–1925, if you look hard enough. Use the recordings to grab your students' attention—or ask them to analyze or compare music and lyrics. What do the words (if you choose a vocal piece) say? What emotions does the piece seem to seek to evoke? When was it recorded? Where? Who audience did the composer, artist, or publisher have in mind?
Finding music by topic can be difficult, as none of the pieces have transcriptions, but a little creative searching should leave you with at least a handful of catchy new sources to play with. Watch for more to come—the Library of Congress adds new content monthly, and it hopes to provide content from other Sony labels, such as Columbia and Okeh, in the future.
Looking for guidelines for music analysis? Professors Ronald J. Walters and John Spitzer introduce you to using popular song as a source in Using Primary Sources, and scholar Lawrence Levine demonstrates historical analysis of two blues songs.
Professor of social studies/history education Anthony Pellegrino's blog entries have ideas for exploring music in the classroom, too.
Nineteenth-century African American pamphlets and documents, most produced between 1875 and 1900, are presented on this website. These 350 works include sermons, organization reports, college catalogs, graduation orations, slave narratives, Congressional speeches, poetry, and play scripts.
Topics cover segregation, civil rights, violence against African Americans, and the African colonization movement. Authors include Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love. Publication information and short content descriptions accompany each pamphlet.
The site also offers a timeline of African American history from 1852 to 1925 and reproductions of original documents and illustrations. A special presentation "The Progress of a People," recreates a meeting of the National Afro-American Council in December 1898. This is a rich resource for studying 19th- and early 20th-century African American leaders and representatives of African American religious, civic, and social organizations.
Created as a companion to the PBS series of the same name, this well-produced site traces the history of Africans in America through Reconstruction in four chronological parts. The site provides 245 documents, images, and maps linked to a narrative essay.
"The Terrible Transformation" (14501750) deals with the beginning of the slave trade and slavery's growth. "Revolution" (17501805) discusses the justifications for slavery in the new nation. "Brotherly Love" (17911831) traces the development of the abolition movement. "Judgment Day" (18311865) describes debates over slavery, strengthening of sectionalism, and the Civil War. In addition to the documents, images, maps, and essay (approximately 1,500 words per section), the site presents 153 brief (150-word) descriptions by historians of specific aspects on the history of slavery, abolition, and war in America. The site provides a valuable introduction to the study of African-American history through the Civil War.
I am attempting to make a lesson plan for 4th graders about slave badges. I was wondering how I could make this lesson tangible for this age group, and how to make the information come across clearly. What types of activities could I use? I also intend to compare slavery and indentured servitude. I would be using SC Standard 4.2 and indicator 42.6.
Slave badges, which served as a kind of work license for slaves in the Charleston area, are unique historical artifacts. As such, beginning a lesson with an image of the artifact—something that can be found with relative ease online—is a great way to raise historical questions.
So, beginning with an image, ask your students what they see. There is much to observe here: a date, a number, a year, a job description. It is made of copper and is 1.5 inches square; there is a hole at the top.
Once students have listed all of their observations, ask them what questions they have. Even 4th graders will likely ask some fundamentally historical questions, like “what was this used for?” or “where was it placed?”
Once students have compiled a list of questions, provide them with the materials that they need to find answers. Whether this means sending them to their textbooks or to excerpts of articles like this from the Smithsonian magazine, students will be motivated to piece together the historical puzzle you have presented.
Bringing them back together as a class, you might ask them to present their findings. If they already know about indentured servitude, this might be a good time to discuss the two systems of bondage in comparison with each other. There are several comparisons of slavery and indentured servitude on the web, including one from the Library of Congress and one from History Now.
You might also ask new questions as a class—“who benefitted from the use of slave badges”—that require a bit more coaching from an adult.
Good luck!
According to its website, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is "the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design."
The museum offers exhibits, tours and workshops for school groups, and recreational and educational events.
How can I find out about the number of home sales per year during the Great Depression?
Plenty of information about the housing market during the Depression has been collected and is easily available. Some of it is online and some of it is contained in Depression-era government publications. Nevertheless, statistics on the number of U.S. home sales during that time are not easily available, at least in a comprehensive, aggregated form.
Nowadays, the housing market is primarily tracked through three reports:
These first two reports describe housing sales, which is a demand-side indicator of the market.
Some figures on housing construction and on numbers and values of mortgages are available as far back as the Depression, but not comprehensively (the Census Bureau, for example, did not start collecting data on single family housing starts until 1959). Walter Molony of the Public Affairs Office of the National Association of Realtors points out that NAR did not begin data collection on existing-home sales until 1968 and that collection of data on new-home sales by the U.S. Census Bureau did not begin until 1963. Consequently, national figures on housing sales, comparable to those available about today's housing market, do not exist for the period of the Great Depression. However, local real estate boards and chambers of commerce sometimes collected this information locally or regionally even as far back as the Depression, so, depending on your area of interest, you might check there.
The Census Bureau also makes available figures on housing vacancies and, from 1900, rates of homeownership (based on federal census figures) online. The homeownership rate declined from 1900 to 1920. During the 1920s, it increased, but then during the Depression it dropped again, and was at about 44 percent (percentage of heads of households who owned their homes) by 1940. After World War II, the rate increased dramatically, recently approaching 70 percent.
Economist Robert Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000), provides data on home prices since 1890 (in 10-year intervals), online and downloadable as an Excel file.
This data, however, was constructed, rather than collected, and, while valuable, is, as Walter Molony of NAR puts it, "academic speculation based on assumptions and modeling using sources such as the value of the dollar, or the average price of newspaper listings in Washington, D.C."
The housing market in the 1930s was fundamentally different than it is today. During the Depression, the federal government became a significant actor in the housing market (as it did in other sectors of the economy). The National Housing Act of 1934 encouraged buyer-friendly mortgages: Before this, mortgages were typically 10-year loans with 50 percent downpayments. The Federal Housing Administration and its FHA-insured loans also increased the availability of mortgages.
After World War II, the G.I. Bill (the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944) increased the availability of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. Realtors think of this as the beginning of the modern real estate era. The government began to act in the housing market through Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association, established in 1938 as part of the New Deal) and, since 1968, Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation). Their role in the housing market, to put it very briefly, has evolved over time.
During the Depression, the federal government also intervened in the housing market by eventually dominating home building itself, both public housing and then, in the defense build-up toward the end of the 1930s, "war housing" units in areas near military bases and industrial plants. Privately funded housing construction fell by 80 percent between 1929 and 1933, and the federal government expanded its role in housing construction.
Because of this role, the government collected data on the construction of housing units. It also tracked assumed mortgages because of its involvement in insuring loans. These figures can be found in the Housing Yearbook, published annually from 1935 to 1944 by the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, with sections written by the heads of the government housing agencies who described how they implemented government housing policies and the challenges they faced.
A good place to find statistics and tables on the U.S. housing market during the Depression, as well as a discussion of the underlying nature of that market and how it has changed over time, is the U.S. Commerce Department's five-volume Historical Statistics of the United States. The Millennial Edition is available online and is fully searchable and downloadable.
Harmony Hunter meets with Jay Gaynor the Director of Colonial Williamsburg's Historic Trades to discuss how Colonial Williamsburg attempts to preserve and reproduce 18th-century economic situations. Specifically, Gaynor explains how colonial-style craftsmanship and trade is present in Colonial Williamsburg.