On March 25, 1911, a devastating fire started at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Workers had been locked in the factory to discourage theft and prevent labor organization, and they were unable to escape when the fire began. The fire killed 146 people, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the eighth- and ninth-floor workrooms. Most of the victims were immigrant women from eastern Europe. The worst industrial tragedy in the United States to that date led to an outcry over the factory’s conditions and to factory labor safety reforms. This sheet music features a song about…

In the late nineteenth century, Democrats and Republicans fought over whether the gold standard ought to be retained or if the United States should switch to a free silver system. In 1890, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was passed, increasing the amount of silver purchased by the government. In 1893, Democratic President Grover Cleveland successfully pushed for the act’s repeal. Cleveland’s anti-silver measures split the Democratic Party, however, as many Democrats were silver supporters. By the election year of 1896, the Democratic Party had been taken over by silverites. In July 1897…

Frederick Douglass tirelessly labored to end slavery but true equality remained out of reach. Despite the successful passage of several Constitutional amendments and federal laws after the Civil War, unwritten rules and Jim Crow laws continued to curtail the rights and freedoms of African Americans. Douglass concisely summarized the reality of Jim Crow in an 1887 letter that claimed the South’s "wrongs are not much now written in laws which all may see – but the hidden practices of people who have not yet, abandoned the idea of Mastery and dominion over their fellow man." Racism, violence, and…

It has none of the catch phrases or warnings of other, more famous presidential inaugural or farewell addresses, no cautions against permanent alliances or military-industrial complexes, no appeals to better angels or declarations about fear. What President Harry Truman’s farewell address of 1953 does have is an abiding sense of optimism that the United States is on the right track and is well positioned to win the Cold War, beliefs that were proven correct nearly forty years after he left office. His support for these beliefs—that the “fatal flaw in [communist] society” is that “theirs is a…

While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures from the 1800 census in New York. It offers a breakdown of the free population of each county in the state as well as three-fifths of the number of slaves present. The US Constitution permitted 60 percent, or three-fifths, of slaves to be counted toward the total population of each state in a compromise designed to provide the southern states with greater…

Historians estimate that approximately 472,000 Africans were kidnapped and brought to the North American mainland between 1619 and 1860. Of these, nearly 18 percent died during the transatlantic voyage from Africa to the New World. Known as the "middle passage," this sea voyage could range from one to six months, depending on the weather. On large ships, several hundred slaves could be packed below decks. Branded and chained together, they endured conditions of squalor, and disease and starvation claimed many lives. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, described the horrors of the middle passage…

By April 1775, reconciliation between England and the thirteen colonies had failed. Two months earlier, Parliament had declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion, and on April 14 General Thomas Gage received secret orders from England to suppress the rebels. On the night of April 18, Gage sent 700 British soldiers to Concord to seize patriot supplies there. At dawn the British reached the town of Lexington, just east of Concord, where they found seventy American militiamen waiting for them on the village green. Warned of the British troops’ movements, the Lexington patriots had…

On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana’s harbor in Cuba, killing nearly two-thirds of her crew. The tragedy occurred after years of escalating tensions between the United States and Spain, and the “yellow press” and public opinion were quick to blame Spain. While the sinking of the Maine was not a direct cause of the Spanish-American War, it did accelerate the breakdown in diplomatic relations between the US and Spain. “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” became a rallying cry. The Harper’s Weekly article featured here represents a more balanced view of the…

In 1895, Williams Jennings Bryan wrote to I. J. Dunn, an Omaha lawyer and president of the Jackson Club, to decline an invitation to speak at the local Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, an annual event held by the Democratic Party. Bryan, a politician from Nebraska, was already a national political figure who had served two terms in the House of Representatives (1890 and 1892) and would win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 1896. His letter expresses his political beliefs and draws upon the ideals of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. Bryan compared contemporary…

The Federalist Party evolved from the core of Federalists, like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, who wrote and defended the US Constitution in 1787–1788. The political party advocated a strong central government and supported a liberal construction of the Constitution. John Adams, elected in 1796, served as the only Federalist Party president, and the party held little power after 1801. In this letter, Thomas Jefferson responds to a letter from his old acquaintance from Congress and fellow Republican, David Howell of Rhode Island. Howell had requested Jefferson’s support for Rhode…