National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Ellis Island, the Gilded and the Gritty: America, 1870 1912

A Thomas Edison film and an essay about the amusement park experience, a new leisure pastime made possible by urbanization and industrialization.

An article that describes the Utopian factory town George Pullman built for his workers, a statement of the grievances that led them to strike against the company, the Pullman Company's response, and an editorial speculating on the...

Photographs of Native Americans and an essay that notes just how assimilated Native Americans had become in Christian America.

A program from the Buffalo Bill Wild West show that depicts the thrills of the American West and illustrates how American influence was spreading beyond the nation's borders.

Two essays by Mark Twain that condemn American foreign expansion and the immorality of imperialism. Includes questions for discussion.

Four nineteenth-century landscape paintings that suggest the meaning of the West in American life.

A speech and an essay that alternately praise the acquisition of foreign territory by the U.S. and that raise questions about the costs and value of these imperialistic adventures.

A speech by Mary Church Terrell, a letter by Booker T. Washington, a letter by W.E.B. DuBois, and the Niagara Movement's Declaration of Principles describe African American civil rights strategies in the early-twentieth century.

Explore these primary source documents detailing the growth, peoples, economies, and ideas relating to the British American Colonies in the 18th century. Features notes and discussion questions.

Primary resource material on the growth of British colonies on the east coast of the New World between 1690 and 1763.