The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York history until 9/11. David Von Drehle, the author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, discusses the fire in this segment from the NBC Today Show.
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Most of the early films of the silent era were seen as less than respectable, says Josh Brown of the American Social History Project.
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This CNBC News Report describes how, in late 19th-century America, J.P Morgan helped build the modern industrial economy and saved the financial markets from a panic in 1907.
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This CNBC News Report describes how the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Standard Oil a monopoly when it controlled 90 percent of the world's oil refining. However, John D. Rockefeller maintained control of the oil companies that splintered off from the monopoly, securing his historic fortune.
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In addition to looking to the past to understand our society, we also look to the future. In 1900, newspapers and magazines printed predictions for the turn of the 21st century. Decide, true or false, whether each of the following was predicted in 1900.
1. [The American] will live 50 years instead of 35 as at present—for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.
True. In the 20th century, transportation and sanitation 
advances led to the rise of developments around cities. Streetcars, trains, and, later, highways made it possible for workers to commute to urban centers for work and to travel outside of the city for their home life. Suburb development grew exponentially after World War II with the rapid spread of mass-produced housing such as Levittown.
2. Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists, thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets. They will surprise foes below by hurling upon them deadly thunderbolts. These aerial war-ships will necessitate bomb-proof forts, protected by great steel plates over their tops as well as at their sides.
True. Several aspects of this prediction came true, including the move to aircraft as a central defensive and offensive weapon. Later in the 20th century, the U.S. government spent significant resources on the research and development of a national missile defense system under the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), established in 1984.
3. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient although they will not hear the crowds cheer or the guns of a distant battle as they boom.
False. In its actual form, this prediction foresaw the ability to see "live" events across the globe and also predicted the ability to hear events as they happened: "The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move".
4. The owner of a [flying] machine, or even the man who did not own one, by patronizing the express lines, could live 50 miles away and yet do business in the city day by day, going by air line to his home each night.
False. Theodore Waters of the New York Herald actually predicted that workers could easily commute 500 miles to work each day, flying home each night, a further visualization of transportation innovation as well as of the relationship between work and home as the notion of suburbs emerged.
5. Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth's hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300. Meanwhile both kinds of coal will have become more and more expensive. Man will have found electricity manufactured by waterpower to be much cheaper.
True. Well into the 1800s, 
Americans met their needs by harvesting energy and materials from plants, animals, rivers, and wind. By the 1830s, though, large-scale coal extraction had begun in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and beyond. By the 1910s, more than 750,000 coal miners dug and blasted upwards of 550 million tons of coal a year. Fossil fuels changed daily life in America, from travel to shopping, daily life to leisure. America's industrial ascendancy, however, caused problems for humans and the environment and in 2009, the threat of diminishing supplies is a serious concern.
6. Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed.
True. In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest—both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick published books, articles, and pamphlets on scientific management in the home with a focus on greater efficiency, from cooking to washing dishes. This plan, in some ways predictive of the late 20th-century shift to pre-cooked meals in stores and restaurants, likely drew on this emerging ideology.
7. The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent. Not only will it be possible for a physician to actually see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it.
True. X-rays were first identified in the late 19th century, but were not widely used for medical research and treatment in 1900 when this prediction was written. Since 2005, X-rays were listed as a carcinogenic by the U.S. government. The author likely would not have envisioned the 21st-century field of endoscopy that allows medical professionals to see and photograph many parts of the body through a small tube.
Contemporary understandings, issues, and conflicts lay behind the predictions of the past, as they do behind today's.
Learn about one of the first planned suburban communities—Levittown, NY—at Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb, or try the website of the Levittown Historical Society and Museum.
For more on the development and strife in the coal industry as it grew, try Thomas G. Andrews's Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, from Harvard University Press. Though it focuses on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, it looks at coal as a coming-together point for industry, class, nature, and the human manufactured world; for more on the Massacre, try the Colorado Coal Field War Project, which provides an overview, photographs, lesson plans, and other materials on the Massacre and the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913 through 1914.
Read a 1912 article by Ladies Home Journal editor Christine Frederick on the efficient, scientific method for washing dishes or an excerpt from her 1913 guide The New Housekeeping, at History Matters. Cornell University's Home Economics Archive also provides a collection of books and journals on the reimagining of domestic life between 1850 and 1950.
And do you have any eager readers in your classes? The young-adult-level memoir Cheaper by the Dozen lets students (and casual readers) into life growing up with Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868-1924), advocate of scientific household management and motion study in the same years as Christine Frederick. Warm, humorous, and personal, the book, written by two of Gilbreth's children, memorializes a time period and a very unique family.
With Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19th, students may be rolling their "Arrs." Popular media focuses on pirates pillaging at sea, but pirates didn't limit themselves to the open ocean. Consider these questions on oyster pirates, who made their living thieving shellfish in America's bays.
1. Oyster pirates were at the height of their trade during what years?
a. The 1700s, the Golden Age of piracy
b. The 1800s, prior to the Civil War
c. Approximately 1930 to 1940
d. Approximately 1870 to 1920
Oysters became a high-demand source of protein and nutrition following the Civil War. With the rise of industry and of shipping by rail, canneries and corporate oyster farming operations sprang up on both coasts, eager to supply the working class, and anyone else who wanted the tasty shellfish, with oysters shipped live or canned. In San Francisco, a center of oyster piracy, the boom years of the oyster industry corresponded, unsurprisingly, with those of the oyster industry—both took off in 1870, as the state began allowing major oyster farming operations to purchase the rights to underwater bay "land" (traditionally common property), and petered off in the 1920s, as silt and pollution disrupted the bay's ecosystem.
2. Which famous author spent time as an oyster pirate?
a. Jack London
b. Mark Twain
c. Ernest Hemingway
d. Upton Sinclair
At 15, Jack London bought a boat, the Razzle Dazzle, and joined the oyster pirates of San Francisco Bay to escape work as a child laborer. London wrote about his experiences in his semi-fictional autobiography, John Barleycorn, and used them in his early work, The Cruise of the Dazzler, and in his Tales of the Fish Patrol. The latter tells the story of oyster pirates from law enforcement's perspective—after sailing as an oyster pirate, London switched sides himself, to hunt his former compatriots.
3. What was popular working-class opinion on the oyster pirates?
a. Oyster pirates should be hunted down and captured, as they gave a bad name to common fishermen
b. Oyster pirates meant very little to the working class in bay areas; a few people admired or condemned them, but most people ignored them
c. Oyster pirates were heroes, fighting back against corporate ownership of underwater property
d. Oyster pirates pulled attention from more important issues, such as urban crime rates and public health
The working class romanticized oyster pirates as Robin-Hood-like heroes, fighting back against the new big businesses' private control of what had once been common land. Traditionally, underwater "real estate" was commonly owned—anyone with a boat or oyster tongs could fish or dredge without fear of trespassing. Following the Civil War, states began leasing maritime "land" out to private owners; and the public protested, by engaging in oyster piracy, supporting oyster pirates, scavenging in tidal flats and along the boundaries of maritime property, and, occasionally, engaging in armed uprisings.
4. On April 3, 1883, the comic opera Driven from the Seas; or the Pirate Dredger's Doom played to an appreciative audience at the Norfolk Academy of Music in Virginia. What Chesapeake Bay event did the opera satirize?
a. A successful raid against Chesapeake oyster pirates by Virginia governor William Evelyn Cameron, in 1882
b. The sinking of two dredgers' ships in February 1883, when the dredgers ran against rocks while being chased by overzealous patrol boats
c. The misadventures of a group of drunk oyster pirates arrested for causing a public disturbance in Norfolk in March 1883
d. An unsuccessful raid against Chesapeake oyster pirates by Virginia governor William Evelyn Cameron, in February 1883
The opera satirized Governor William Evelyn Cameron's second raid against oyster pirates in the Chesapeake Bay, on February 27, 1883. Cameron had conducted a very successful raid the previous February, capturing seven boats and 46 dredgers, later pardoning most of them to appease public opinion—which saw the pirates as remorseful, hard-working family men. His second raid, in 1883, went poorly. Almost all of the ships he and his crews chased escaped into Maryland waters, including the Dancing Molly, a sloop manned only by its captain's wife and two daughters (the men had been ashore when the governor started pursuit). The public hailed the pirates as heroes and ridiculed the governor in the popular media—the Lynchberg Advance, for instance, ran a poem comically saluting the failed raid.
Oyster piracy highlights the class tensions that sprang up during post-Civil War industrialization. Big business and private ownership began to drive the economy, shaping the lives of the working class and changing long-established institutions and daily patterns. Young people such as Jack London turned to oyster piracy as an escape from the new factory work—and the working class chaffed against the loss of traditional maritime common lands to business owners.
For more on oyster piracy, consider Jack London's fiction on the subject. Full-text versions of The Cruise of the Dazzler, John Barleycorn, and Tales of the Fish Patrol are available at Project Gutenberg, which provides the full text of hundreds of out-of-copyright works.
The Smithsonian's online exhibit On the Water includes a section on the Chesapeake oyster industry, with a mention of oyster pirates.
The oyster war!
The oyster war!
The biggest sight you ever saw;
The Armada sailing up the Bay,
The oyster pirates for to slay.
With cannon, brandy, cards aboard,
They steam from out of Hampton Road,
The Govnor wearing all the while
A Face lit up with many a "smile."
But when the pirates hove in view
Quick to his post each sailor flew!
The squadron, with "Dutch courage" bold,
Sweeps like the wolf upon the fold.
They to the Rappahannock turn
To fight like Bruce at Bannockburn,
And give the oyster-dredgers fits,
Like Bonaparte at Austerlitz.
As the work of another school year begins, Labor Day reminds us to honor the nation's workers. Since the rise of industry, workers have used strikes and other forms of protest to demand change and recognition. Select the correct answer for each of the labor-related questions below.
1. What U.S. census data does this map portray?
a. The 1930 relative concentration of "totally unemployed persons registered" in each state.
b. The 1870 relative amount of "total capital invested (in dollars) in manufacturing" in each state.
c. The 1920 relative concentration of "manufacturing establishments" in each state.
d. The 1950 relative concentration of "employed females" in each state.
By 1920, industry had established itself as a fixture of the American economy and way of life, though its hubs remained in the Mid-Atlantic. New York continued to be a center of industry, and Illinois, with the continuing rise of Chicago as an urban industrial center, had become one, as well.
2. On May 4, 1886, a peaceful workers' rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square ended in death and confusion when a dynamite bomb was thrown into a line of approaching police officers. The Haymarket Affair received nationwide media attention and the trials of the alleged guilty parties went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Four of the accused were hung and a fifth committed suicide.
What reform was the rally supporting?
a. The removal of hazardous parts-manufacturing machinery from a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant.
b. The passing of a minimum-wage law in the state of Illinois.
c. The paying of compensation to workers who suffered debilitating injuries from repetitive factory work.
d. The institution of the eight-hour workday.
The speakers at the Haymarket Affair supported strikers who had engaged in a May 1 nationwide walkout to support an eight-hour workday. On May 3, the first workday after the walkout, police killed two workers outside a McCormick plant during a confrontation between scabs (temporary workers hired to replace strikers) and strikers. This event provided an impetus for the Haymarket rally.
3. On February 6, 1919, more than 60,000 Seattle workers refused to work, marking the high point of a series of strikes and unrest that started in January 1919. The first labor action to effectively shut down an entire city, this strike hoped to secure what result?
a. The reinstatement of workers ousted by returning soldiers.
b. A pay raise for the city's shipyard workers.
c. The cessation of all U.S. hostilities against the Bolshevik Red Army in Russia and of any support for forces opposing the Red Army.
d. A stop to the installation of new machinery that would reduce the work force necessary in the shipyards.
During World War I, the government imposed wage controls, keeping the wages of Seattle shipyard workers down even as the shipyards expanded through war production contracts. Following the war, the workers expected a raise in their wages; when denied, approximately 25,000 members of the Metal Trades Council union alliance went on strike. A general citywide strike followed, with about 35,000 other workers striking in support of the shipyard protest. The strike officially ended on February 11—though not before touching off a widespread "Red Scare."
4. On December 30, 1936, the workers at Flint, Michigan's General Motors automobile plant began a six-week long strike to press for better working conditions. Organized by the United Auto Workers, the strike used what relatively unusual technique to make its point?
a. Strikers not only stopped working during the strike, but left town entirely, taking their families with them.
b. Strikers remained entirely silent during the strike.
c. Strikers, instead of picketing outside of the factory, occupied the factory, preventing upper management and law enforcement from entering.
d. Strikers sabotaged the factory's power supply, re-sabotaging it whenever plant management repaired it.
Known as the Flint Sit-down Strike, this strike used techniques later adapted by the civil rights movement. On December 30, workers sat down at their places and refused to leave the factory for six weeks. Provided food and supplies by supporters, the workers repelled attempts by the police to drive them out and even initiated the surprise takeover of another plant in the last two weeks of the strike.
The map of the 1920 concentration of manufacturing establishments was generated by the University of Virginia Library's Historical Census Browser. The browser provides searchable census data for 1790 through 1960, with the option to visualize any data selections in maps such as the one above; all of the categories mentioned in Question One are categories available on the website. For Teachinghistory.org's review of the Historical Census Browser, go here.
Teachinghistory.org's reviews the Library of Congress's American Memory collection Chicago Anarchists on Trial: Evidence from the Haymarket Affair, 1886-1887 here.
The Seattle General Strike Project looks at the 1919 general strike through primary sources, including photographs, video clips, newspaper articles, and oral histories. The website is part of the University of Washington's larger Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, collecting primary sources on civil rights and labor movements throughout the city's history. NHEC reviews the Project here.
Historical Voices provides a website on the Flint Sit-down Strike: Remembering the Flint Sit-down Strike: 1936-1937. The website provides close to 100 oral history interviews with strikers, as well as essays on the events of the strike. NHEC's review of the website can be found here.
In March 2010, the 23rd U.S. census went out—220 years after the first census, in 1790. What do census questions tell us about American society and values? Look at the categories of census data below and select the year in which the information was collected.
1. 1790
families with 11 or more members
families holding 2-4 slaves
avg. slaves per slaveholding family
free colored slaveholding families
persons of Scotch nationality
persons of Hebrew nationality
2. 1840
white persons 20 years of age and over who cannot read and write
scholars in primary and common schools
female slaves 55-99 years of age
free colored females under 10 years of age
men employed in newspaper production
persons employed in navigation of canals
3. 1870
male citizens 21 years of age and over
persons born in Africa
persons 10 and over who cannot read
total state taxation
public debt of the county
youths employed in manufacturing
4. 1880
persons born in China
Indians
colored persons
farms 500-999 acres rented for fixed money rental
average hours labor per week in iron and steel manufacturing
average youths and children employed in manufacturing
5. 1900
other colored females 5-20 years of age
illiterate foreign-born alien males 21 years of age and over
native white illiterates 10 years of age and over of native parentage
farms of colored owners and tenants
capital invested in buildings used in manufacturing
salaries of salaried officials, clerks, etc. in manufacturing
6. 1910
rural population
white persons born in asian turkey
native white males of voting age of mixed parentage
Indian, Chinese, Japanese and male of all other races of voting age
persons 15-17 years of age attending school
farms of foreign-born whites
In 1790, federal marshals collected data for the first census, knocking by hand on each and every door. As directed by the U.S. Constitution, they counted the population based on specific criteria, including "males under 16 years, free White females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves." There was no pre-printed form, however, so marshals submitted their returns, sometimes with additional information, in a variety of formats.
In 1810 and 1820, additional categories appeared, collecting information on "free White males and females under 10 years of age," as well as those "10 and under 16," "16 and under 26," "26 and under 45," and "45 years and upward." "Free colored persons" and slaves were now counted separately as were "all other persons, except Indians not taxed" and "foreigners not naturalized." Through the decades, the census continued to expand, including a growing number of questions on agriculture, manufacturing, living conditions, education, crime, mortality, and increasingly, race and ancestry.
The census has always had political implications, informing conscription, Congressional representation, and the collection and allocation of taxes. It has also always both reflected and shaped social divisions. Before 1960, census enumerators interviewed families in person and without consulting the individuals, selected which box to check for "race." Starting in 1960, largely for financial reasons, the Census Bureau mailed forms directly to households, thereby allowing individuals to select their own boxes. This led to a fundamental change in the way race was categorized and measured. In 2000, for the first time, individuals could select more than one box and about 6.8 million Americans did so, reflecting the complex nature of racial and ethnic categories today.
The 2010 census is designed to count all residents and will ask a small number of questions, such as name, sex, age, date of birth, race, ethnicity, relationship and housing tenure. The longer American Community Survey will collect socioeconomic data annually from a representative sample of the population.
For searchable (and map-able) databases of historical census data from 1790 to 1960, refer to the University of Virginia's United States Historical Census Data Browser. For more current information, try the official website of the U.S. Census Bureau..
What year did each of these fashion advertisements appear in the newspaper?
1.
1915
2.
1925
3.
1917 (Note the military accents.)
4.
1905.
5.
1935.
6.
1910.
7.
1940.
8.
1895.
9.
1955.
10.
1960.
Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph on November 21, 1877, and gave his first public demonstration of it about a week later, recording and then playing back his voice reciting the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb." The invention created an immediate and profound nationwide sensation. "The phonograph is a queer animal," wrote one commentator in The Chicago Tribune. "Your voice comes back to you very much as if it were visible and you were looking at it through the large lenses of a lorgnette. [1] The existence of the phonograph stimulated much speculation about its possible uses. Edison himself gave his predictions in an 1878 article in the North American Review. [2]
Answer the questions by choosing from the following options:
A. Permanently recording telephone messages.
B. Distributing recorded music.
C. Dictating business communications, which could be typed later, revolutionizing letter writing.
D. Distributing the recorded lectures of noted public speakers, and in the classroom, replacing live lectures with recorded ones.
E. Keeping a permanent record of historically important political speeches, and of courtroom proceedings.
F. Distributing "self-reading" books for schools, work places, and sick rooms.
G. Providing classroom models of correct English elocution and of correct pronunciation of foreign languages.
H. Manufacturing toys: dolls that would speak, sing, cry, or laugh; toy animals that would make true-to-life sounds; and music boxes.
I. Manufacturing automated "speaking clocks" that would pronounce the time as well as desired pre-recorded messages.
J. Recording the voices of ordinary people so that, after they died, their descendents would be able to hear their family members speaking.
1. Which application did Edison not envision at the beginning as an important use for the phonograph?
B - Distributing recorded music.
2. At that time, Edison also devoted a substantial portion of his manufacturing facilities to meet which of the uses of the phonograph that he had mentioned in his 1878 article?
H - Manufacturing toys
3. Which of the uses of the phonograph, as listed by Edison in his early article, did he most ardently pursue in the last decade of his life?
J - Recording the voices of ordinary people so that, after they died, their descendents would be able to hear their family members speaking.
[Question 1] Oddly, Edison did not at first envision the phonograph as being used in the mass distribution of music. Playing prerecorded music rapidly became the most important use of the phonograph. In his article, Edison did envision a "vast field" for phonographic reproduction and the "multiplication of original matrices," but he connected this to spoken words, not to music. He mentioned the recording of music, but only in a narrow way: "A morning visitor," he wrote, "may sing and record a song that can be heard by later visitors."
When the phonograph's huge potential in the mass distribution of music to the public became clear to Edison, he had his company begin recording and selling cylinders of musical performances. These cylinders, at the beginning, were not made with the intention to be sold to the public, but rather to be played on commercial phonographic machines, like jukeboxes. Even after he began pursuing a mass market for prerecorded music, however, his vision of the true potential of the phonograph seems to have faltered: he oversaw his company's selection of performers, and his library of musical choices was notoriously conservative and uninspired, and he later resisted using the technical innovation of electric recording via a microphone, continuing to use the process of acoustic recording, which required performers to play and sing into a wooden horn that mechanically focused the sound onto the needle that cut the groove in the master cylinder. He also resisted switching from cylinders to discs until 1913, well after other manufacturers had made the switch.
Edison had nearly beat Alexander Graham Bell in the race to invent the telephone. Edison had seen the telephone as a natural development of the telegraph, the technical improvements for which he had many patents. In the beginning, Edison thought of his phonograph as a device for making the telephone work like the telegraph, in that it would allow a telephonic message to be recorded and then delivered to its appropriate recipient, just like a telegram.[3] Perhaps this predisposed him to think of the phonograph primarily as a tool for capturing and recording sounds, rather than as a tool for the mass distribution of sounds already recorded. In addition, the fidelity of the sound recorded by the phonograph was, at first, not very high, and its potential for reproducing the subtleties of complex musical pieces was perhaps not obviously apparent to him.
[Question 2] Edison pursued one of the more seemingly trivial applications of the phonograph that he mentioned in his article—the manufacturing of talking dolls. An 1890 article in Scientific American describes a trip to the Edison Company's plant in Orange, New Jersey.[4]
Half of the factory was devoted to manufacturing phonographs, but the other half was devoted to manufacturing phonographic dolls. These were shaped like ordinary girl dolls, but with a body made of tin. This enclosed a simple mechanism, turned by crank, that played a pre-recorded version of a nursery rhyme.
The article described a scene in the factory, which must strike a modern reader as strange: This engraving shows the manner of preparing the wax-like records for the phonographic dolls. They are placed upon an instrument very much like an ordinary phonograph, and in the mouth of which a girl speaks the words to be repeated by the doll. A large number of these girls are continually doing this work. Each one has a stall to herself, and the jangle produced by a number of girls simultaneously repeating, "Mary had a little lamb," "Jack and Jill," "Little Bo-peep," and other interesting stories is beyond description. These sounds united with the sounds of the phonographs themselves when reproducing the stories make a veritable pandemonium.
[Question 3] The recording of the voices of one generation for that generation's posterity. Edison began by making a collection of the voices of famous people, sampling them when they visited his workshop. However, he eventually shifted his focus somewhat from the goal as he originally stated it. At least as early as 1920, he began to turn his attention to the problem of capturing and recording people's voices after they had died. He thought it possible that their voices were subtly transmitted across the boundary between this life and the afterlife.[5]
By 1928, he may have been trying to actually construct a device to detect, amplify, and record such communications, although no plans of such a machine have been found. He briefly described his efforts in his diary and in interviews with journalists. He died in 1931.
