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An African-American Socialist Lends His Support to Railroad Strikers
A nationwide rebellion brought the United States to a standstill in the summer of 1877. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked off the job, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the excesses of the railroad companies and the [...]
A Congressman Denounces Immigration Quotas as "Un-American" (short version, with text supports)
Restrictions on immigration, largely aimed at would-be migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, gained considerable popular support during the 1920s. Anti-immigrant sentiment culminated in the Quota Act of 1921, which effectively reduced [...]
A Congressman Denounces Immigration Quotas as "Un-American"
Restrictions on immigration, largely aimed at would-be migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, gained considerable popular support during the 1920s. Anti-immigrant sentiment culminated in the Quota Act of 1921, which effectively reduced [...]
Native Americans Describe Traditional Views of Land Ownership
The Dawes Act of 1887 sought to assimilate Native Americans by, among other things, transforming their traditional uses and attitudes about land and land ownership to more mainstream American values of private ownership and settled farming. Some [...]
A Labor Leader Rails Against Chinese Immigration (1878)
In this "Workingmen's Address," published in 1878, Dennis Kearney of the Workingman's Party of California appealed to racist arguments against Chinese immigrants. After excoriating the fraud, corruption, and monopolization of land by the "moneyed [...]
Reagan's Address about the Economy (1981)
After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan set his sights on the American economy, including issues like interest rates, inflation, unemployment, and wages. In his first address to the nation in February 1981, Reagan outlined his intentions [...]
Seneca Chiefs Address George Washington (1790)
In 1790, Cornplanter, the chief of the Seneca nation (a nation within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) and two other chiefs sought redress from the supreme executive council of Pennsylvania for wrongs committed by British colonists. The chiefs [...]
A Civil Rights Organizer Condemns "Jane Crow"
Pauli Murray entered law school in 1941 with the "single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow." Though on the frontlines of civil rights demonstrations and behind the scenes of many organizational meetings since the 1940s, Murray and other [...]
Native American Warriors Describe the Threats to their Way of Life
Native American warriors in the 19th century resisted the various people and institutions that threatened their way of life on the Great Plains. In these speeches to federal agents during the Indian Wars of the 1860s, Indigenous leaders attempt to [...]
Combahee River Collective Statement
The Black feminist organization, the Combahee River Collective, formed in Boston, Massachusetts in 1974. The group's name honors Harriet Tubman and a raid she organized during the Civil War that liberated more than 700 enslaved individuals along the [...]