Items tagged Work (128 total)

Sort By | Title | Date | Recently Added
The United States acquired the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico in 1898 after its victory in the Spanish-American War. After a period of limited local autonomy, the U.S. granted Puerto Ricans American citizenship in 1917. The arrival of large, U.S.-backed sugar plantations of the island displaced many erstwhile subsistence farmers, creating a rural…

Tags: ,
Item Type: Government Document
Date: 1918

The steel strike of 1919 saw some 350,000 workers walk off the job, temporarily bringing the steel industry to a halt. The U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor investigated, interviewing striking steelworkers such as Slavic immigrant Andrew Pido. In his testimony to the committee, Pido tells of his abuse at the hands of local police, the…

Tags: ,
Item Type: Government Document
Date: 1919

While the original goal of the CCC was to put unemployed youths to work on natural resource projects, training and vocation in other areas eventually became an important function of the camps.

Tags: ,
Item Type: Government Document
Date: 1939

This labor contract between a Chinese worker, "Affon," and California businessman Jacob P. Leese, was made in Hong Kong on July 28, 1849, and witnessed by A. Shue, C. H. Brinley, and Henry Anthon, Jr., acting U.S. Vice Consul in Hong Kong. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 drew miners from around the world and filling other kinds of jobs…

Tags: , ,
Item Type: Government Document
Date: 1849

Henry David Thoreau is one of America's best-loved poets and authors, known especially for his work Walden, with its meditations on nature. In this 1850 poem, Thoreau turns his attentive eye to a "little Irish boy," destined for a life of manual labor, whose circumstances of extreme poverty are reminiscent of those faced by many early Irish…

Tags: ,
Item Type: Fiction/Poetry
Date: 1850

John Boyle O'Reilly was an Irish-born poet and novelist who escaped to America from Western Australia, where he had been imprisoned for being a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenians. One of his later poems, "Living" (1881) connotes a sense of world-weariness that seemingly reflects his experience among "the hurrying crowds" of his…

Tags:
Item Type: Fiction/Poetry
Date: 1881

This poem refers to the Statue of Liberty, and appears to be a response to Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus." The location mentioned by the author, "Sandy Hook," is on the coast of New Jersey, and signifies the border of the U.S. beyond which are the ocean and the countries that poor immigrants, those addressed in Lazarus's poem, were coming…

Tags: ,
Item Type: Fiction/Poetry
Date: 1898

Upton Sinclair's novel about immigrant workers in Chicago's meatpacking plants shocked readers when it was first published in 1906. Sinclair hoped the novel would awaken Americans to the evils of capitalism; the main character Jurgis ends the novel by attending a socialist meeting. However, the book was most noted for its gruesome depictions of…

Tags: ,
Item Type: Fiction/Poetry
Date: 1906

The poetry of Carl Sandburg often documented the lives of ordinary working people in his adopted city of Chicago. Here he contrasts the backbreaking work and simple lunch of a railroad laborer with the comfortable lives and fine food enjoyed by the passengers on a first-class dining car rushing by. Despite the use of the pejorative term "dago" (an…

Tags:
Item Type: Fiction/Poetry
Date: 1916

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

Tags: , ,
Item Type: Diary/Letter
Date: 1936