Social History for Every Classroom

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Social History for Every Classroom

menuAmerican Social History Project  ·    Center for Media and Learning

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In this activity students read letters from ordinary people to government leaders in the Roosevelt Administration. Then they interpret the range of attitudes about the changing role of the federal government during the New Deal. The letters for…

Many miners wrote letters home to family and friends describing their experiences in California. In this letter, Robert Pitkin describes the tensions between American-born and Chinese immigrant miners.

Luther C. Wandall, an African American from New York, recalls his time in the Civilian Conservation Corps in an account originally published in The Crisis in 1935.

Mary Ballou and her husband ran a boarding house in a California gold mining town. Ballou’s letter to her son, written in 1852, evokes the rough housing, violence, and high prices (from which the Ballous profited) in California during the gold…

In 1896 Congress passed a bill which would require all immigrants to be able to read at least 40 words in any language in order to enter the country. The bill was supported by the Immigration Restriction League. They worried that the increasing…

In this oral history Alvaro Hernandez describes how he entered the United States, first as an illegal worker and then as a bracero. Mr. Hernandez was born in Jilemes, Chihuahua, Mexico. His father was an agricultural worker and his mother was a…

Within months of statehood, the California legislature passed the Foreign Miner’s Tax, which required immigrant miners to pay $20 a month for the privilege of mining in the state. The unbearably high tax drove many Latin American miners back to…

San Francisco's first public school for Chinese immigrants, known first as the Chinese School and then as the Oriental School, began operating in 1859. The school was designed to segregate (separate) Chinese children from white children in the city's…

Since their arrival in the United States in the 1850s, Chinese immigrants confronted social, political, and economic discrimination. Many Americans believed that the Chinese posed a threat to white workers and should not be eligible for citizenship.…

This letter was written to Harry Hopkins, the head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Between 1933 and 1935, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration gave the states $3.1 billion to distribute directly to the poor in the form of food,…
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