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The first Chinese eateries in America sprang up in 1850s California and catered to Cantonese miners and railroad laborers. Known as "chow chows" (Chinese slang for anything edible), they were identified by yellow triangle signs. By the 1880s San Francisco's Chinatown community supported several upscale Chinese dining establishments. Reviews from…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 1889

Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote this proslavery tract, Liberty and Slavery, in 1856. Bledsoe defended the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, justified slavery as compatible with the Bible, and argued for the right of secession. In the excerpt below, he refutes a speech by Charles Sumner, a…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 1856

In this forward to Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South 1940-1980, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham sketches an outline of the contributions of African Americans from the Northeast, West Coast and Midwest in shaping the Civil Rights Movement. She questions many of the assumptions of previous scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement,…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 2003

In this chapter from Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement F. Arturo Rosales explains the environment from which this Chicano youth movement developed and the tactics used by this student movement to bring about educational reform during the 1960s and early 1970s.

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 1997

Lynne Olson's Freedom's Daughters shines light on the often-overlooked role that women played in the civil rights movement. In the preface to her book, Olson sketches some brief biographies of a few of the outstanding female civil rights leaders and activists, notes the intersection between the civil rights and women's movements, and sets out to…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 2002

From the 1860s to the 1880s, thousands of Chinese immigrants found work in railroad construction in the West, notably on the Central Pacific line of the First Transcontinental Railroad, which was built primarily by Chinese. The extreme danger of this work is suggested by this excerpt from Chinese American Voices, in which a railroad worker recalls…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 1926

In the following passage, historian Jill Lepore carefully considers an enslaved man's walk through 1740s Manhattan. The slave, who was known as Pedro, described a Sunday walk through Manhattan as part of a confession that he gave during the investigations into the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741. Lepore notes both the breadth of slave codes in New…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 2005

By 1740, almost twenty percent of New York's population was African American and roughly half of white households owned at least one slave. While slaves were forced to live and work alongside whites, they sought out the company of other African Americans. In narrow, bustling streets of the colonial city, enslaved people, especially men, walked…

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Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 2005

The following excerpts are from Valentine M'Clutchy, the Irish Agent (1845), a melodramatic novel by Irish writer William Carleton. Himself the son of a farmer whose family was evicted from their land, Carleton here offers a sympathetic description of several classes of Irish tenant farmers, from the relatively well-off, who were able to make ends…

Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 1845

The heroine of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie is a small-town girl thrust into the big-city life of a bustling late-nineteenth-century Chicago. In this passage Carrie, on the verge of poverty after losing a job in a garment factory and desperately seeking work, stumbles into "The Fair," one of the city's department stores. (Although Dreiser…

Item Type: Book (excerpt)
Date: 1900