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 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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Stephen Ambrose says that the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1868 was the great achievement of the 19th century.
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The Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science involves the public in an active exploration of science, the arts, and local history. Permanent collections include Central Vallery Native American baskets and cradleboards and 19th-through-20th-century California landscape paints; temporary exhibits may be relevant to U.S. history studies.
The museum offers exhibits, film screenings, lectures, children's camps and workshops, tours for school groups, in-class outreach art workshops (grades 1-3), Visual Thinking Strategies outreach presentations and professional development training, and Met on the Move after-school programs.
The debate over daylight saving time was almost as hot as the sun whose beams it aimed to save. Congressman Charles Rose said it was "Like cutting off one end of a blanket and sewing it to the other end to make the blanket longer." Are the following statements true or false?
1. Daylight Saving Time was created mainly to please farmers, who needed more daylight hours during the summer to finish their chores.
False. Farmers have almost universally opposed Daylight Saving Time. Its main proponents have historically been retail merchants, international financial traders, and industrialists. During World War I and World War II, Daylight Saving Time was temporarily adopted as a measure to conserve fuel and to increase industrial output. The first national scheme to implement Daylight Saving Time went into effect in 1917.
2. The adoption of Daylight Saving Time has been definitively shown to save the country fuel and energy.
False. The claim has often been made, but energy usage has been notoriously difficult to quantify. Savings in electrical energy during one part of the day, for example, can be offset by increased gasoline consumption, or increased use of coal or fuel oil at other times of day.
3. The move to create standard time zones across the U.S. was stimulated mostly by railroad companies, who needed to standardize their train schedules.
True. The simplification of long-distance transportation schedules was the driving force behind the establishment of standard time zones in the 19th century. The Railway General Time Convention of 1883 set standard time zones nationally.
4. The United States contains four time zones.
False. The U.S. crosses eight time zones: Atlantic (Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands), Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Yukon, Alaska-Hawaii, and Bering.
5. The Department of Transportation currently has responsibility for setting time zone boundaries in the U.S.
True. Previously, the responsibility for setting time zone boundaries lay with the Interstate Commerce Commission.
The Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA) offers an online exhibit that looks at the history of Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. and worldwide.
Search the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Online Catalog using the keywords "Daylight Saving Time" for more notices and political cartoons featuring Daylight Saving Time.
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.
When Europeans arrived in North American, they brought their own calendars and understanding of the passage of time. Native peoples, they found, related to time in ways both similar and very different. Decide whether the following statements on Native timekeeping practices are true or false.
1. Winter counts, kept by the Lakota people, mark each year in a Lakota band's history with a picture depicting an important event. For the year 1833, many Lakota winter counts show the same event: stars falling from the night sky.
True. In the winter of 1833, the Leonid meteor shower, 
visible each November, blazed with extraordinary strength. The falling stars caught the attention of people throughout North America, and many Lakota bands chose the shower as the event to stand for the year. Later in the 1800s, ethnologist Garrick Mallery (1831-1894) identified the pictures as standing for the meteor shower, allowing scholars to match the years of the winter counts with the European calendar.
2. Prior to introduction to European calendar systems, the Native peoples of Alaska used peg calendars, wooden calendars in which a peg was moved forward in a series of holes day by day to mark the passage of time.
False. Russian colonists and missionaries 
introduced peg calendars to the Native peoples of Alaska so that they could track the holy days of the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian contact with Alaskan cultures began in the 1700s, and settlement of the region, accompanied by cultural exchange, continued until 1867, when the U.S. purchased Alaska from the Russians. Peg calendars remained in use into the 20th century.
3. The Winnebago Native Americans recorded time using calendar sticks, in which notches were cut to signify important events, lunar cycles, years, and other units of distinction and division.
True. The Winnebago Native Americans did use sticks 
to record the passing of time in this manner. However, the use of calendar sticks was not limited to the Winnebago. Other Native American groups throughout North America used sticks, including the Pima, the Osage, and the Zuni. The markings on sticks and their daily and ceremonial use varied from region to region and people to people.
4. The Hopi calendar divides the year into four sections. Spirits known as katsinas (or kachinas) visit the Hopi people in two of these sections, alternating with the two sections free of the spirits.
False. The Hopi calendar divides the year into two halves, 
one beginning around the summer solstice (June 20th or 21st) and the other with the winter solstice (December 21st or 22nd). After the winter solstice, katsinam, benevolent spirits, visit the Hopi people, personated by Hopi men in masks and costumes. Following the summer solstice, the katsinam leave the Hopi again.
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's online exhibit Lakota Winter Counts displays the images from 10 winter counts. Annotations describe what each image represents, and the website offers a teaching guide and other resources. Check the entries for the winter of 1833-1834 to see the counts' depictions of the 1833 meteor shower.
The website Alaska's Digital Archives includes a collection of digital resources, including photographs and documents, on Alaskan Native history. A photograph of a 1900s peg calendar, decorated in Aleut or Alutiiq style, can be found here.
The National Watch and Clock Museum provides a travelling trunk program that includes a "Native American Timekeeping Travel Trunk." For a $50 fee plus shipping charges, you can check out the trunk, which contains background material on calendar sticks, winter counts, and the Aztec calendar, as well as samples of and directions for related crafts.
Rainmakers from the Gods: Hopi Katsinam, an online exhibit from Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, follows the ceremonies of the Hopi year and includes pictures of katsina dolls associated with each ceremony.
To find more resources on Native American history and culture, check out the History Content section of our website. Select the section that corresponds with the material type you'd like to find—Website Reviews points you toward quality websites, Online History Lectures catalogs online audiovisual presentations, and History in Multimedia collects field trip possibilities from across the country. In the search boxes, choose "American Indians" from the dropdown "Topic" menu, or enter the specific keywords you'd like to find resources on in the "Keywords" box and hit "Submit."
The Upsala Area Historical Society seeks to preserve and share the history of the farming community of Upsala, Minnesota. To this end, the society operates a museum located within the 1913 Axel Borgstrom House. Exhibits cover local and state history, as well as the area's Swedish heritage.
The society offers exhibits. The website offers historical photographs.
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.
