The vast majority of nineteenth-century Irish emigrants to the United States settled in cities in the Northeast.  A smaller percentage headed for the western territories.  Some Irishmen were encouraged to go South instead.   After the Civil War,…

In the 1500s, European powers raced to claim lands in North and South America and establish permanent settlements in the "New World." In 1584, a group of English explorers traveled the southeastern coast of North America to find a suitable location…

In Thomas Hariot's account A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), he describes the Algonquian village of Secota, accompanied by Theodor de Bry's engraving. After noting the village's impressive agriculture and observing its…

Thomas Hariot was an astronomer and mathematician who traveled to Roanoke Island on one of Sir Walter Raleigh's early expeditions to the New World. Encountering local Indian populations, Harriot learned the Algonquian language and later published an…

This text highlights the growth of political activism that took place in Harlem during the Great Depression. Discriminatory hiring practices and widespread unemployment triggered job campaigns focused on increasing black employment in the largely…

This phrase book was published in 1875 and distributed at Wells Fargo bank offices throughout the West, in cities and towns where Chinese immigrants lived and worked. Modeled on the traditional Chinese method of memorizing and reciting "sets" of…

During the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans were consciously changing the meaning of what it meant to be Black in America. Engaging in activism was often dangerous, and required immense sacrifice that took a lot of…

This short excerpt was part of a book-length conversation between Amalia Mesa-Bains and bell hooks, two writers who both explore issues of race, gender, and identity in their work. Home Grown takes the reader through that conversation as they talk…

Alexander Mackenzie was an English explorer in North America who discovered a Northwest Passage through Canada to the Pacific in 1793. Although praised for his efforts, the route he mapped out was too difficult to sustain real trade or further…

The Five Points Mission grew out of several Protestant missionary organizations that aimed to improve conditions in the Five Points. At first they attempted to convert residents from Catholicism; later the Mission obtained pledges from Five Pointers…