Special Collections

Possibilities and Problems in America's New Urban Centers

Discusses the problems faced in the cities during the Industrial Revoultion, including over-crowding, poor working conditions, and low wages.

Date Added: 10/17/2018

Oil, Steel, and Railroads

Examines the history of business in the United States during the 1800s, discussing the growth of railroads, and the innovations in the oil and steel industries.

Date Added: 10/17/2018

Labor Legislation

This book provides a look at the hardships of American labor and how immigrants working for low pay and in hazardous conditions reaped few benefits. The labor movement found a champion in President Roosevelt, who paved the way for significant government regulation of American industry. Through manageable text enhanced by period illustrations, Labor Legislation documents the moments that led to labor laws and the implementation of major reforms for workers.

Date Added: 09/18/2018

Ellis Island

An inspiring chronicle of the immigrant experience recounts the history of Ellis Island from 1892 to 1954, the period during which more than seventeen million immigrants passed through its doors in search of new lives in America.

Date Added: 09/13/2018

Political Reforms

America's industrial revolution revealed the close ties between big business and the government that allowed a select few to gain power and riches over those struggling to make a living. The progressives believed the only way to empower disenfranchised individuals was to reform the political process. Here Wingate describes the initiatives taken by the progressives to force local and state legislatures to allow more political power to the people rather than government and business.

Date Added: 09/11/2018

Prosecuting Trusts

Big business in the mid-1800s worked to eliminate competition by purchasing smaller businesses or undercutting their prices. They created trusts, or groups of businesses under one giant merging corporation, affecting both small businesses and farmers. As this book effectively addresses, there were calls for business reform by the 1890s. Laws like the Sherman Antitrust Act sought to redress the problems of big business, but it was through the efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt that the federal government went after these trusts; those actions earned Roosevelt the reputation as a trust buster.

Date Added: 09/11/2018

Reconstruction

This compelling anthology of primary sources describing the period of post-Civil War reconstruction focuses on problems facing the freed slaves, carpetbaggers, Presidential policy and Radical Republicans, social and economic problems in the South, Black Codes, the KKK, and the move to impeach President Andrew Johnson. Primary sources include President Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan, an account from a former slave owner, a journal of a teacher working for the Freedman's Bureau, a portion of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Congressional hearings about abuses by the KKK, historic illustrations, and more. Amendments to the Constitution regarding slavery and civil rights are also discussed.

Date Added: 09/10/2018

Immigration To America

The integration of narrative and various drills prompts students to learn about different points of view concerning immigration to America. This book discusses the earliest immigrants to America, how different people might have viewed certain documents and historical events differently, and why each immigrant group traveled to the United States to make it its new home.

Date Added: 09/10/2018

Critical Perspectives On The Industrial Revolution

As modern man's greatest growth spurt, the Industrial Revolution ushered in an era unsurpassed in the history of the modern world, from technology to industry to migration. Using an eclectic group of viewpoints including presidential addresses, anonymous testimony, and the perspectives of such figures as Jack London, H.G. Wells, and Henry Ford, this title seeks to understand the scope, origin, and effects of the Industrial Revolution. The reader is drawn into a time and place that is still affecting the world today.

Date Added: 09/10/2018

Progressive Leaders

Students will gain an understanding and appreciation of the most important people who defined the Progressive Era: the Great Commoner William Jennings Bryan, Senator Robert La Follete and his liberal politics, Theodore Roosevelt and his Square Deal Policy, and Woodrow Wilson and the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission. This title will reinforce one view that the progressive accomplishments left a positive impact on society, while the other view is that they gave too much power and responsibility to government.

Date Added: 09/04/2018

FDR's Alphabet Soup

FDR’S New Deal, which followed the 1929 stock market crash, was a hugely influential moment in the history of the United States, encompassing everything from the arts to finance, labor to legislation, and some think it helped bring the country out of the Great Depression. Here, Tonya Bolden, writing in her trademark accessible style, creates a portrait of a time that changed American history both then and now.

FDR’s First 100 Days and how the United States was changed by it then are closely examined, especially now. The 2009 financial situation is eerily mirrored by that of the late 1920s, and this is a perfect book to help teens understand history and its lasting impact on current events.

Date Added: 09/04/2018

The Sherman Antitrust Act

As big business trusts proliferated in the late 1800s, a number of state governments, especially those in the south and west, passed laws to regulate corporate behavior. Large corporations got around the regulations by established their businesses in states which did not have these laws. In an effort to put a stop to corporations circumventing the states laws, the federal government passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was the first federal antitrust law, and called for federal action against any restraint of trade.

Date Added: 09/04/2018

A Historical Atlas Of The Industrial Age And The Growth Of America's Cities

Here is an exquisite portrait of America and its people during the Industrial Revolution. Important events are discussed, including late developments in the American West, the abuse of power by big business, the changes in social attitudes, and the emergence of workers rights and a middle class.

Using maps and primary source images, the easy-to-understand text focuses on the principal activists of the Progressive movement and the reforms that were made between 1900 and 1920.

Date Added: 08/28/2018

Bright Ideas

Imagine that you couldn't turn on a light by flipping a switch, had no telephone on which to call your friends, and that there were no traffic lights on the roads! Seem impossible? Well it wasn't-none of these things existed before the Age of Invention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bright Ideas tells the story of these and other miraculous inventions that have shaped the world we know today. Learn how inventive minds work and how they overcame obstacles on the path to their great achievements.

Read about the building of a brighter America-one that learned how to make a telephone call from coast to coast and took to the road in Henry Ford's cars built on the first assembly lines. Even flying in the air became attainable! This age and the inventors who contributed to it paved the way for the future of America and revolutionized the way this country works, produces, and lives.

Bright Ideas illuminates this exciting period in time for all its readers and may inspire even greater inventions or future inventors. Like the others in the series, ,Bright Ideas is illustrated with period photographs, paintings, and drawings. Also included are a glossary and an index.

Date Added: 08/28/2018

The Federal Reserve Act

The American banking system after the Civil War was not centralized but rather functioned independently in different geographical areas. Policies were not coordinated to insure that the money supply was sufficient to keep governments and businesses running properly. Through the efforts of the progressives, the Federal Reserve Act was passed to devise and implement a plan to stave off problems in currency, policies, and the money supply.

Date Added: 08/27/2018

Moving North

After the Civil War, the South went through a period of rebuilding, termed Recon-struction, but because many white people in the South were not ready to accept African Americans as equals, unfair laws were passed which restricted the rights of blacks. These Black Codes and Jim Crow laws left African Americans adrift in a segregated world.

Life was better in the North in many ways for African Americans. The 1920s brought jobs and money—until The Great Depression hit. The Depression left many homeless and jobless. Many blacks left the cities seeking jobs wherever they could find them. Despite the hard times that followed, living in the North continued to bring a renewed sense of freedom to many African Americans.

Date Added: 08/27/2018

The Great Migration

A series of paintings chronicles the journey of African Americans who, like the artist's family, left the rural South in the early twentieth century to find a better life in the industrial North.

Date Added: 07/06/2018

Immigrant Kids

Text and period photographs chronicle the life of immigrant children at home, school, work, and play during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Date Added: 07/06/2018

To Be A Slave

A compilation of reminiscences of slaves and ex-slaves about their lives, from those leaving Africa through the Civil War into the 20th century.

Newbery Medal Honor Book.

Date Added: 07/06/2018

The Grapes of Wrath

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized--and sometimes outraged--millions of readers.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.

The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book--which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

This edition contains an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Robert Demott.

Date Added: 07/06/2018

Reconstructing America

Covering a time of great hope and incredible change, Reconstruction and Reform is a dramatic look at life after the Civil War in the newly re-United States. Railroad tycoons were roaring across the country. New cities sprang up across the plains, and a new and different American West came into being: a land of farmers, ranchers, miners, and city dwellers. Back East, large scale immigration was also going on, but not all Americans wanted newcomers in the country. Technology moved forward: Thomas Edison lit up the world with his electric light. And social justice was on everyone's mind with Carry Nation wielding a hatchet in her battle against drunkenness and Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois counseling newly freed African Americans to behave in very different ways. Through it all, the reunited nation struggles to keep the promises of freedom in this exciting chapter in the A History of US. This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 4-5 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 07/06/2018

An Age of Extremes

For the captains of industry men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford, the Gilded Age was a time of big money. Technology boomed with the invention of trains, telephones, electric lights, harvesters, vacuum cleaners, and more. But for millions of immigrant workers, it was a time of big struggles, with adults and children alike working 12 to 14 hours a day under extreme, dangerous conditions. The disparity between the rich and the poor was dismaying, which prompted some people to action. In An Age of Extremes, you'll meet Mother Jones, Ida Tarbell, Big Bill Haywood, Sam Gompers, and other movers and shakers, and get swept up in the enthusiasm of Teddy Roosevelt. You'll also watch the United States take its greatest role on the world stage since the Revolution, as it enters the bloody battlefields of Europe in World War I. [This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 4-5 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 07/06/2018

War, Peace, and All That Jazz

From woman's suffrage to Babe Ruth's home runs, from Louis Armstrong's jazz to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's four presidential terms, from the finale of one world war to the dramatic close of the second, War, Peace, and All That Jazz presents the story of some of the most exciting years in U.S. history. With the end of World War I, many Americans decided to live it up, going to movies, driving cars, and cheering baseball games a plenty. But alongside this post WWI spree was high unemployment, hard times for farmers, ever present racism, and, finally, the Depression, the worst economic disaster in U.S. history, flip-flopping the nation from prosperity to scarcity. Along came one of our country's greatest leaders, F.D.R., who promised a New Deal, gave Americans hope, and then saw them through the horrors and victories of World War II. These three decades full of optimism and despair, progress and Depression, and, of course, War, Peace, and All That Jazz forever changed the United States. This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 4-5 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 07/06/2018

Cause

After the destruction of the Civil War, the United States faced the immense challenge of rebuilding a ravaged South and incorporating millions of freed slaves into the life of the nation. On April 11, 1865, President Lincoln introduced his plan for reconstruction, warning that the coming years would be "fraught with great difficulty." Three days later he was assassinated. The years to come witnessed a time of complex and controversial change.From the Hardcover edition.

Date Added: 07/06/2018

All the People

People call it "post-war," but All the People covers a period in U.S. history that features battles of another kind-- from Cold War combat overseas to struggles for equality at home to learning to live with the threat of terrorism on U.S. soil. During these years, the United States began to be a nation for all its people, outlawing school segregation, protesting war in Vietnam, and campaigning for equal rights for women. From Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to seamstress Rosa Parks, extraordinary individuals led us back to the ideals espoused by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. But mostly-- as it always has been in the United States-- it was ordinary citizens who marched and voted and hoped and dreamed and made things happen. All the People includes the events of September 11, 2001, and a discussion of how many aspects of the terrorist attacks have brought to the forefront the qualities that keep America strong: representative democracy, freedom of speech and press, and, especially in the face of religious totalitarianism, the basic freedom of religious tolerance. [This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 4-5 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 07/06/2018