Columbia American History Online

The United States in Vietnam
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, a special congressional committee—the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Vietnam—will examine changes in U.S. foreign policy toward Vietnam from 1954 through 1975. The committee will investigate why the United States entered the war but failed to prevent the communist takeover of the Republic of South Vietnam. Students will impersonate historical characters who are called to testify before this fictitious Senate subcommittee. The historical characters will explain, from their perspective, why the United States entered the war, why it escalated its military involvement there, and then, despite the escalation, why it suffered defeat. Do the senators and journalists reporting on the investigation blame any one U.S. president? Or do they blame rather a wide range of circumstances both domestic and international? This simulation will expose students to a variety of conflicting interpretations of the U.S. role in Vietnam.

The Legacy of the Counterculture
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint

The New Left
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint

The U.S. Entry into Vietnam
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint

Primary Source Analysis: Nixon and Vietnam
Resource Type: Teaching Activity

Primary Source Analysis: Nixon and Vietnam
Resource Type: Teaching Activity

Democracy: Limitations and Possibilities
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
During the 1960s, a series of widely disparate protest movements emerged in the United States. While the antiwar movement directed against U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War appeared to be the most salient, many others as well expressed discontent with American government and society. In this question, students are asked to look at a variety of groups—including women, African Americans, and ethnic minorities—many of whose members felt marginalized or underrepresented, became politically active, and helped to establish social movements dedicated to the advancement of their communities. Students can use these documents to determine the degree to which different groups sought to redefine American democracy and make it more inclusive.

Sixties Radicalism and Conservatism
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Dissent and social protest characterize the 1960s. Enduring images of the decade recall its civil-rights marches, antiwar protests, and rallies of members of various social grouips—women, farmworkers, American Indians—calling for greater justice. The documents within the DBQ represent a variety of voices, illustrating the tensions between countercultural movements of the 1960s and conservative reactions against them. This DBQ contextualizes the debates of the 1960s within a longer-term analysis of the divisions between left and right in the United States since the beginning of the Cold War.

Review of Invisible Man
Resource Type: Primary Source
New York intellectual Irving Howe affirms Ralph Ellison's book Invisible Man as a "Negro novel."

Student Information Given to Federal Investigators
Resource Type: Primary Source
This article in the Columbia University student newspaper reports that the dean of students provided federal investigators with information about students who had attended the university.

DuBois on American Democracy
Resource Type: Primary Source
DuBois discusses American democracy and why he is frustrated with party politics in the United States.

Coming of Age in Mississippi
Resource Type: Primary Source
Moody reveals her experience of wandering into the white section of the local theater; she realizes, after the incident, that "whiteness" provided her friends with a different life.

Michigan Anti-communist Law
Resource Type: Primary Source
The state of Michigan passed this legislation in 1952.

Montgomery, Alabama, Code on Segregation
Resource Type: Primary Source
This piece of municipal legislation mandates the separation of races on city bus lines.

Brown v. Board of Education: Denial of Equal Protection
Resource Type: Primary Source
This is an excerpt of the 1954 Supreme Court decision rendered in Brown v. Board of Education, which declares separate facilities for blacks and whites as unequal.

Discovery and Settlement: New Amsterdam
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The present-day issues of tolerance and diversity are explored in colonial society. These primary sources provide contemporary perceptions of Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, and European settlers.

The American Revolution: Defeat and Victory in New York
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
New York City was a center of loyalist support and trans-Atlantic trade during the revolutionary era. The documents on the Battle of Brooklyn, the British occupation, and the end of the Revolutionary war demonstrate how these events were turned into victories for New York, establishing the city's path toward national and world prominence.

Petition to Have the Five Points Opened
Resource Type: Primary Source
Merchants owning property along the periphery of Five Points petitioned the municipal government in 1829 to demolish the heart of the slum by widening and extending Anthony and Cross Streets.

Cholera Outbreak
Resource Type: Primary Source
This article, written during the cholera epidemic of 1832, conveyed the opinion that only certain social types contracted the deadly disease.

The Cholera Epidemic
Resource Type: Primary Source
Many of New York's Protestant leaders interpreted the 1832 cholera epidemic as proof of God's displeasure with contemporary morality.

Cholera Epidemic Editorial
Resource Type: Primary Source
As far away as New Hampshire, editorials denounced the New York cholera epidemic of 1832 as divine retribution for decadence and sin.

Annual Report of the Interments
Resource Type: Primary Source
Dr. John Hoskins Griscom (1809–74), a Quaker physician, founded the New York Academy of Medicine and pioneered the field of public health. His advocacy for sanitation, medical care, and adequate housing led to the great reforms of the Progressive Era after the Civil War.

How the Other Half Lives
Resource Type: Primary Source
Newspaper reporters, such as Jacob Riis (1849–1914), played an instrumental role in exposing the destitution and misery of New York's immigrant and working-class neighborhoods.

Urban Society: Central Park and Social Reform
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This microhistory of Central Park in New York City provides students with a laboratory for learning how social reformers attempted to clean the city of its slums and promote the well-being of its residents. These tools can be applied to the study of any large city.

President Johnson's Commencement Address
Resource Type: Primary Source
President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) made this landmark speech in 1965 to students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black institution, to delineate the tenets of his Great Society program.

Modern Republicanism and the New Right
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The development of a Republican majority is the focus of this DBQ, which explores the larger issues of modern republicanism in postwar America and the emergence of the new right. Electoral maps provide in-depth analyses of presidential elections since the 1960s.

Eisenhower and the Politics of the 1950s
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This selection of primary sources gives students an opportunity to examine different layers of dissent during the Eisenhower presidency. Although President Eisenhower enjoyed great public support, his administration was challenged by problems at home and abroad.

Homogenized Society and Conformity
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This carefully crafted selection of primary sources will allow students to weigh the multiplicity of factors that influenced American culture in the 1950s, such as the Cold War, government policies, legislation, corporations, and television. Students can focus on the extent to which consensus and conformity dominated relations among or within various social groups.

The Civil-Rights Movement
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The civil-rights movement shifted from nonviolent civil disobedience to "black power." The rich selection of primary sources will help students explore the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the differences between the African American experience in the North and in the South, the role of government and political institutions, as well as global movements against imperialism.

Brown v. Board of Education: The Results of Segregation
Resource Type: Primary Source
This landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 declared the segregation of black and white children in American public schools to be unconstitutional.

From Protest to Politics
Resource Type: Primary Source
Bayard Rustin (1910–87), one of Martin Luther King's closest advisors, was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

To Fulfill These Rights
Resource Type: Primary Source
President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) made this landmark speech to students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black institution, to outline the Great Society program.

Power and Racism
Resource Type: Primary Source
Stokely Carmichael (1941–88), born in Trinidad, invented the rallying cry of "Black Power" in Mississippi, in 1966, as a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He left America in 1969 for Africa, where he helped found the All-African People's Revolutionary Party.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton
Resource Type: Primary Source
Bobby Seale (1936– ) and Huey Newton (1942–89), cofounders of the Marxist Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in 1966, advocated self-determination and self-rule for black Americans in contrast to the nonviolent, integrationist strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Black Panther Party Platform
Resource Type: Primary Source
Bobby Seale (1936– ) and Huey Newton (1942–89), cofounders of the Marxist Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in 1966, advocated self-determination and self-rule for black Americans in contrast to the nonviolent, integrationist strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Beyond Vietnam
Resource Type: Primary Source
This speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.

Schlesinger on Freedom
Resource Type: Primary Source
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted American historian, wrote this influential book to argue that a rejuvenated faith in democratic ideals and the continuation of New Deal liberalism would safeguard America from the twin threats of totalitarianism and fascism.

Joseph McCarthy's Speech
Resource Type: Primary Source
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, an unremarkable member of Congress from Wisconsin, burst onto the national political scene in 1950, after announcing to a West Virginia audience that he held in his hand a list of 205 American Communists who worked in the U.S. State Department.

Levittown, New York
Resource Type: Primary Source
As the first community of its kind, Levittown, New York, located 25 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island, heralded the postwar arrival of suburban America with its hundreds of acres of mass-produced housing.

The Affluent Soceiety: Public vs. Private Sectors
Resource Type: Primary Source
John Kenneth Galbraith, a prominent Harvard economist, outlined in this article the necessary balance that should exist between the private and public sectors of the American economy.

Woolworth Counter Strike
Resource Type: Primary Source
In 1960, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a historically black institution, defied segregation by sitting at the luncheon counter of the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro.

The Other America
Resource Type: Primary Source
With this book, writer and social activist Michael Harrington helped launch the New Left movement of the 1960s and its concerns about American poverty and social injustice.

The American Revolution and Its Legacy
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
In exploring the radical and conservative aspects of the American Revolution, these documents introduce students to the principles of equality and republicanism and the arguments for independence from Great Britain (via the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine's Common Sense).

Freedom Petition of Massachusetts Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
Four slaves submitted this letter to the provincial legislature in Massachusetts on April 20, 1773.

First Continental Congress Declaration and Resolves
Resource Type: Primary Source
Representatives of twelve of the thirteen original colonies met in Philadelphia in September and October of 1774 to develop a common response to the Coercive (Intolerable) Acts.

Common Sense
Resource Type: Primary Source
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was born in England and emigrated to the colonies in 1774. In Common Sense, Paine articulates his argument for independence.

Abigail Adams to John Adams
Resource Type: Primary Source
In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John Adams, who was then attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Manumission of Slaves in North Carolina
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the wake of the Revolution, many Southern states liberalized their provisions for manumission. By 1790, slaveholders could manumit their slaves throughout the South, except in North Carolina.

The Declaration of Independence
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress asserted American independence from Britain and justified its decision to do so by citing a series of alleged violations of American rights.

Memoirs of Captain Alexander Graydon
Resource Type: Primary Source
Alexander Graydon (1752–1818), a captain in the Continental army, recounted the problems he encountered as he recruited men to fight the war, and he commented on the meaning of the Revolution.

A Whig Freeholder on Emancipation
Resource Type: Primary Source
Pennsylvania, like many of the Northern states, established gradual emancipation.

Rewards for Revolutionary War Veterans
Resource Type: Primary Source
North Carolina, like other states, rewarded veterans of the American Revolution with the granting of land and slaves.

The Constitution and Slavery
Resource Type: Primary Source
The Constitution's clauses relating to slavery did not mention the word "slavery.”

Benjamin Rush on the Confederation
Resource Type: Primary Source
Benjamin Rush (c. 1745–1813) was an American physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence. He served as a member of the Continental Congress (1776–77) and for a time in the Continental army; he was also a member of the Pennsylvania convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution.

Jefferson on Slavery
Resource Type: Primary Source
Jefferson questioned the effects of slavery and slaveholding, and foretold its end.

Otis on the Rights of the British Colonies
Resource Type: Primary Source
James Otis (1725–83) was a political activist during the period leading up to the American Revolution. In pamphlets, he articulated grievances against the British government.

Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death
Resource Type: Primary Source
At the second Virginia Convention, on March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry (1736–99) delivered this speech in which he argued that war with Great Britain was inevitable.

Lord Dunmore's Call to Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
In November 1775, Lord Dunmore called on slaves to desert their masters and join the British army.

Vermont's Constitution, 1777
Resource Type: Primary Source
The 1777 Vermont constitution included a clause that allowed for gradual emancipation.

Freedom Petition of New Hampshire Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
During the revolutionary era, many slaves petitioned colonial or state legislatures for their freedom and filed freedom suits, such as the one submitted by Nero Brewster, a slave, in Portsmouth on November 12, 1779.

An Act for Enfranchising Ned Griffin
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the wake of the Revolution, many Southern states liberalized their provisions for manumission. This came to an end between 1810 and 1820, as Southern lawmakers restricted, and in some cases barred, manumission.

Manumission of Slaves in Maryland
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the wake of the Revolution, many Southern states liberalized their provisions for manumission. This period of liberalized manumission came to an end between 1810 and 1820.

Jefferson on Emancipation
Resource Type: Primary Source
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), in this letter to Edward Coles (1786–1868), maintained that emancipation was a task for the younger generation.

Tenement Slum
Resource Type: Primary Source
Jacob Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun newspaper, helped raise awareness about the conditions of the urban poor with his 1890 publication, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. This book would later influence Theodore Roosevelt.

Southern Society: Religion and Slavery
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Using this DBQ, students will examine the paradoxical role of religion in the lives of slaves in the antebellum South. Different kinds of religion are explored as students confront the ways in which religion served to liberate or to oppress slaves.

A Slave Funeral
Resource Type: Primary Source
Charles Ball was a slave in western Maryland. In the following excerpt, he describes a slave funeral.

Stringfellow's Biblical Justification for Slavery
Resource Type: Primary Source
In his 1860 book, Thornton Stringfellow explains what he sees as the biblical justification for slavery.

The Master-Slave Relationship
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The recent scholarship on slavery explores the complex relationship between master and slave and re-examines the historical agency of slaves. In reading the slave narratives provided in this DBQ, students can assess how slaves tried to retain their dignity in the worst of circumstances.

Slave–Sale Broadside
Resource Type: Primary Source
A slaveowner advertises his slaves as valuable commodities, identifying each slave.

Letter from a Fugitive Slave
Resource Type: Primary Source
In this letter, escaped slave Anthony Chase explains to his former master Jeremiah Hoffman why he has run away.

Letter from a Slaveowner
Resource Type: Primary Source
In this letter, Henry Tayloe, a slaveowner, reveals to his brother the interest of Southern slaveholders in the institution of slavery.

Account of a Former Slave
Resource Type: Primary Source
In his 1846 autobiographical account, Lewis Clarke, a former slave, answers questions about the manner in which he lived before he gained his freedom in 1841.

Ran Away
Resource Type: Primary Source
This broadside promised a reward for the return of a fugitive slave.

Shackles
Resource Type: Primary Source
These iron leg shackles are typical of those used on Southern plantations in the mid-1800s to restrain slaves when they were being moved from one location to another and to punish slaves who attempted escape.

Frederick Douglass on Slavery
Resource Type: Primary Source
Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who gained fame as an orator and a writer promoting the cause of abolition. He wrote the following testimonial to the demoralizing effects of slavery in his autobiography.

Dred Scott Decision
Resource Type: Primary Source
The following excerpt is from the majority decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, it addresses the question of African American citizenship and slavery in the territories.

Experiences of Female Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
The following excerpt is from the narrative of a former slave who lived on a small farm in Tennessee.

Masters and Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
Members of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project interviewed former slaves during 1936–38. The misspellings respect the speech and regional dialect of the ex-slaves. Mother Ann Clark, born June 1, 1825, was a slave in Louisiana. She describes the ruthlessness of her master.

Slaves Picking Cotton
Resource Type: Primary Source
In this illustration, slaves are shown picking cotton while overseers watch from horseback.

Economic Prosperity in the 1950s in the United States
Resource Type: Teaching Activity
The purpose of this classroom activity on economic prosperity in the 1950s is to analyze the forces that have paradoxically led to a cultural homogeneity, on the one hand, and to a contesting of cultural conformity, on the other. The role of television is closely examined in terms of how it helped to shape public perceptions—sometimes reinforcing a sense of unity, at other times sowing the seeds of discord.

Women and Social Reform
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, students will be assigned the role of a prominent, late-nineteenth-century, middle-class American woman. The goal is to understand the changing perceptions and roles of women in Progressive-era America, as they took on leadership roles in a variety of associational groups such as the YWCA and the Red Cross.

Social Darwinism
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
This simulation captures American society in 1900 and presents a fictional meeting of educators. In their respective roles, students will debate the ways in which educational reform can improve American society. Students will understand how different strands of social-Darwinist thought informed American life, culture, and politics, imposing a legacy which continues to affect American education as well as the larger society.

The American Revolution and Slavery
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The revolutionary era (1775–89) gave birth to contradictory definitions of freedom and equality. For some, freedom and equality entailed the right to property, including slave property. For others, freedom and equality implied universal entitlements that applied to all individuals, including slaves. This DBQ offers students the opportunity to debate these contradictory definitions by analyzing the definition of freedom each author uses in the provided documents.

Reclamation Act / Newlands Act of 1902
Resource Type: Primary Source
The Reclamation Act / Newlands Act of 1902 allowed the government to undertake irrigation projects to establish farms for relief of urban congestion. The bill was named for its author, Francis Griffith Newlands, Democratic Representative from Nevada. The Reclamation Service, created in July 1902, was established a month later and eventually became the Bureau of Reclamation.

Roosevelt on the Conservation Movement
Resource Type: Primary Source
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt explained in a speech to Congress the purpose of the Conservation Movement and how the government would seek to implement its goals.

Petition for Reservoir Rights
Resource Type: Primary Source
San Francisco petitioned Congress for use of the Hetch Hetchy area of Yosemite National Park for reservoir rights. The petition was presented at the congressional hearing before the Committee on the Public Lands of the House of Representatives.

The New World: Origins of Slavery
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The following primary sources, focusing on Bacon's Rebellion, help students understand the condition of freemen and indentured servants on the eve of the revolt and how colonial legislation helped institutionalize slavery in the southern colonies.

Colonial Society and Economy
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Colonial society (Virginia in particular) changed from a society with slaves to a slave society, where slavery was the foundation of the economic and social order. This selection of primary sources allows students to understand how commerce and agricultural production caused slavery to replace indentured servitude in the southern colonies and to create new forms of wealth.

The American Revolution and the Meaning of Equality
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, which recreates the Revolutionary era, students are asked to probe and debate the contemporary meanings of freedom and equality. They will examine the defining principles of the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution, with a view toward understanding their impact on American political institutions and thought.

Middle-Class America and Its Discontents
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
This simulation asks students to place themselves in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse on the eve of the 1960s. Replicating a broad spectrum of American society, from conservatives to counterculture critics, students will understand how the fifties represented an era of consensus that paradoxically carried the seeds of protest that would fuel the rebellion of the sixties.

Civil-Rights Debate: Where Do We Go from Here?
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation students are asked to represent a variety of figures from American society in the 1960s. The goal is to understand the complex nature of race relations and power politics in the United States—especially how individuals and events at home and abroad influenced the civil-rights movement.

Mapping Early New York City
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this innovative simulation students learn the skills of mapping. Although focused here on the early history of New York City, these skills can be applied to any urban center in any time period.

Moot Court: Central Park on Trial
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
This simulation, a moot court, engages students in social and moral reform. By exploring how nineteeth-century social and political elites dispossessed various groups such as African Americans in order to build Central Park, students will understand how the present-day problems of gentrification and urban renewal have their roots in nineteeth-century reform.

Interpretations of the Red Scare: Party Competition
Resource Type: Primary Source

Interpretations of the Red Scare: Party Competition
Resource Type: Primary Source
Senator Joseph McCarthy's cause was received favorably by a number of Democrats, including Robert F. Kennedy (center) and Senator Henry Jackson of Washington (right).

Environmental Critique: Pollution and Health
Resource Type: Primary Source
Early ban-the-bomb protest outside the United Nations.

Segregation
Resource Type: Primary Source
Sympathy demonstration held in New York City in support of desegregation in the South (1960).

Segregation: Boycott
Resource Type: Primary Source
African American passengers sit at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, following a federal-court order desegregating buses.

Conclusion
Resource Type: Primary Source
Demonstrators protest the Vietnam War outside a Democratic Party reception attended by President Kennedy (1963).

Introduction
Resource Type: Primary Source
The March on Washington (August 28, 1963). Participants included, front row, left to right: Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League; Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP; and A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Greensboro
Resource Type: Primary Source
Sit-in at a Woolworth store's lunch counter, Greensboro, North Carolina (February 1960).

Selma: Malcolm X Appears
Resource Type: Primary Source
Malcolm X addresses civil-rights protesters in Selma (February 4, 1965).

Militancy
Resource Type: Primary Source
Broadside distributed at Columbia University by the Black Panther Party (1970).

Militancy: Black Power
Resource Type: Primary Source
Stokely Carmichael addresses a crowd (1966).

Militancy: Black Power
Resource Type: Primary Source
Malcolm X visits Barnard College (1965).

Militancy: The Black Panthers
Resource Type: Primary Source
Black Panther Party members at the California state capitol argue with a state policeman after he disarms them, Sacramento (May 2, 1967).

What Happened in White America?
Resource Type: Primary Source
Students at Columbia University protest the war in Vietnam (1967).

Disasters
Resource Type: Primary Source
Shrine to victims of the World Trade Center disaster, Union Square, New York City (2001).

Disasters
Resource Type: Primary Source
Frances Perkins (1882-1965), a leader in the factory-safety reform spawned by the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.



	Historical thinking Discovering primary sources (80) Interpreting and analysing (43) Narrating history (21) Resource types Video Transcripts (6) Text Excerpts (2)

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