"Father Mathew" Teacup from Five Points

Uncovered during an archaeological dig of the former Five Points neighborhood, this teacup depicts the Irish temperance reformer Father Theobold Mathew, who during the late 1830s and 1840s convinced Irish on both sides of the Atlantic to embrace temperance through his Total Abstinence Movement. The teacup was found at the site of a former tenement building at 472 Pearl Street, along with other similar objects…[Read More]

Source: Rebecca Yamin, Tales of Five Points: Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York. 6 Vols. (West Chester, PA.: John Milner Associates, 2000). Volume III, B-32.

Child Cotton Pickers Haul Heavy Loads

Child cotton-pickers on a farm in Bells, Texas, documented by Lewis W. Hine, a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. Children had long been used as cotton-pickers and other agricultural workers in the South, where the tradition of sharecropping as well as sheer economic necessity made the practice widespread. In the caption to this photo, Hines notes, "All these children five years, six years,…[Read More]

Source: Lewis W. Hine, "All these children five years", 1913, black and white photograph, Library of Congress Online Prints and Photographs Collection, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/nclc.00199.

Women Workers Protest the Loss of Jobs at Ford Motor Co.

When World War II ended, Ford Motor Company's Highland Park plant, like industrial manufacturers across the country, laid off thousands of women workers and replaced them with inexperienced men. In Highland Park, women members of the United Auto Workers Local 400 organized active protests against the policy, including this picket by 150 women workers outside of the plant's employment office. Eventually, after the issue became…[Read More]

Source: From Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 136.

Josh Freeman: Teaching the New Deal

In this 45 minute talk, historian Josh Freeman describes how the New Deal expanded and fundamentally changed the role of government in American life. [Read More]

Peter H. Wood: Unpacking Winslow Homer’s Near Andersonville

In this fifty minute talk, Peter H. Wood does an in depth analysis of the little-known early Winslow Homer painting, Before Andersonville, which depicts an African-American woman foregrounding Union soldiers who are being marched off to the infamous Georgia prison during the Civil War. [Read More]

Civil War Monuments

In this forty-five minute talk, Cynthia Mills traces the arc of Civil War commemorative public sculptures, describes the similarities and differences between Northern and Southern monuments, and discusses the continued interest in and uses of these public monuments. [Read More]

Martha Sandweiss: Is There Anything More to See?

In this thirteen minute presentation, historian Martha Sandweiss challenges assumptions and some of the uses of Civil War photographs as historical documents. Although biased, unreliable, and unrepresentative, the images are mostly used as illustrations of events. . [Read More]